Moderates United

Round about now, silly ideas are floating around.  One is impeaching President (that is still hard to say) Obama.  The fact remains that the Senate is controlled by Democrats, and they will NEVER vote to remove him.

What I have never thought about, though, is that the President is formally a U.S. citizen, and subject to the laws of our land.  The Impeachment and removal process was put in there for gross incompetence.  But if the President breaks laws–for example through perjury–could he not be arrested and put in jail?

This is where I think the voting machine errors are important.  I think we need to investigate what happened carefully, for a number of reasons.  The first and most obvious is that if voting fraud happened once, it not only can but WILL happen again.  I don’t think the result will change, but we need to know what happened and how.  Secondly, though, what if it could be shown that Obama or an Obama agent played a direct role in it?  That is a criminal offense.  Perhaps a plea deal could be cut with an accomplice to implicate him or Valerie Jarrett directly.

It seems likely this could EASILY have been funded with “Stimulus” money.  Speaking of which: Congress, are you ever going to demand a serious accounting?

It is ASTONISHING that our Congress allowed this.  If you don’t know what happened, not only did Congress authorize the indefinite detention of American citizens suspected of terrorism, or being an accomplice in terrorism, but tried to allow it even AFTER acquittal in a jury trial.  This subverts both the letter of and intent of our Constitution.  I could be accused of something vague tomorrow–an accusation never made public, and made to disappear. This is the law on the books in America TODAY.  If this doesn’t frighten you, you are stupid.

What John “fucking imbecile” McCain and somebody else wanted was to make it the law that if I were charged with something, underwent a formal trial, was found not innocent, I could STILL be made to disappear.  In this country.  That proposal was just made in the last week or two.

The ONLY reason they didn’t get it is Sen. Rand Paul used his power as a member of the body to demand that the vote be recorded.  Apparently our lawmakers, the highest power in the land, can play the part of weasels when they want to and voter for things without accepting accountability for them.

We are fortunate to have Sen. Paul there.  We need honest men.

What we have to ask is why Congress is populated with such craven and unprincipled men.  Romney did not oppose this act.  Why?  We need to be clear: we have TRIALS for people accused of crimes.  No one is proposing the guilty go free.  But we are not a banana republic.  We don’t have “desaparecidos”. 

Why the FUCK are these jackasses so stupid?  Even suspected nuclear terrorists, or biological agent terrorists, need to undergo trial.  This is otherwise a short trip to full blown Fascism, and I use that word clinically.

Imagine being as worked up about the election as you are, but sleeping in a tent, in the winter, with insufficient food and clothing, and already having seen some of your comrades killed in combat.

I’m thinking of George Washington, in that long period of partial victories and fighting retreats.  How must he have felt?  If he lost–which must have seemed certain, often–he would be hung, as would some or all of his men.  He had no ability to feed them effectively.  He had no promises he knew he could keep.

He kept Joseph Addison’s Cato by his bed, along with the Bible.  I have Cato on my shelf, and would recommend everyone read it.  The very prose evokes a much more heroic, much more serious era.  “Give me liberty or give me death” was a quote Patrick Henry stole from it.

Cato kills himself, rather than submit to Caesar.  He does in fact choose death. I suspect Washington had a similar intent, and that fact may well have kept him going in what were no doubt some EXTREMELY gloomy hours.

We remain, all of us, comfortable physically.  We are anxious about what MAY happen, but my god if life were certain what would be the point of living it?  The VERY BEST may happen too.

I have morning courage and afternoon anxiety.  This is plainly true.  It is hard to be positive when you are tired.  But my physical state does not in any way affect the reality.  The reality is that we still have a Congress–the ascent of Caesar meant, of course, the functional end of the Roman Senate and thus Republic–many honest judges, and a military that WILL NOT support Obama in a coup.  Historically, you need an Army, and he doesn’t have one.  Lenin had one.  Mao had one.

What Obama is going to do to us is simply a slow drip, drip, drip of decline.  Nothing big.  Unemployment lines will get longer, paperwork will get more complicated, taxes will go up, businesses will shut down, access to healthcare will diminish, etc.

But if you think about what many of us took for granted as kids–for example, no central air, and virtually NEVER eating out–then a return to that might be of benefit to the young of today, who feel so entitled.

When I am analytical, I must admit there is ample reason for hope.  We fear the worst–and the worst may be what happens–but the likelihood is that determined work and organizing will have predictable effects.

Go to it.

I’m taking an Adult Education class with this woman who grew up on a dairy farm, who is home schooling her 12 year old daughter, who is helping her.  I can’t help but look at these two, and go back to my own youth, when things really were much simpler.  You had less TV, more time outside, and just a lot more innocence; or so my middle aged memory paints it.  The Dirty Harry movies scared me.

They have Hostel 1 and 2 (2 apparently includes scenes in which a naked women hanging upside down from a chain has her throat slit, and another where kids play soccer with the head of someone they apparently had called friend at some point) in the checkout line at my local grocery store.  They are likely not even bothering to try to prevent young kids from buying them.  I was in a  Big Lots, and they had Wolf Creek, again next to some romantic comedy and a cartoon DVD.

In our society, children are watching these movies when they are 12-13-14.  They are watching the free and unregulated porn on the internet, possibly from even earlier ages.  All of these things have an effect, on empathy, on emotional intelligence, on their “sense of life”.

Could you imagine someone producing and selling a movie in grocery stores in the 1970’s that consisted almost entirely in graphic depictions of torture and murder, with NO redeeming values at all? Which to the extent it took a side, took the side of the torturers, the Elite Hunting Club, I think it is called?  It would have been a national outrage. A Congressional committee would have been formed.  All the politicians would have felt the need to denounce it.

My take, virtually from the first, was that Amanda Knox was effectively feted and defended by the left not because she was innocent, but out of morbid curiosity, out of sympathy, out of recognition of the fact that she DID IT.

It is hard to feel much optimism for the future, but as I say often, I don’t run on hope.  I have plans, and will executive them as well as I can, within the limits of my emotional and physical stamina.

Meaning: an emergent property of a system in motion–the relative shape and boundaries of which are defined by chosen beliefs–which acts to facilitate emotional well being, competent work, and felicitous social interactions.

Like most “things” which are qualitative, it is not correct either to say “it exists”, or that “it” doesn’t exist.

Speaking of de Bono, I will mention that I flew down to Texas and got certified in his Six Thinking Hats method some years back.  The teaching was competent if uninspired, as was the curriculum, but certain elements got me to thinking about thinking, which was IMMENSELY useful.  I recommend to this day everyone read several of his books, such as “Practical Thinking”, “The Six Thinking Hats”, and I think he has a Course on Thinking. Something like that.  Some of his later books, from what I understand, might as well have been entitled, “I need more money”, but his basic ideas, like po, and lateral thinking, are very useful.

My own system I call the Telearchic Cross, and discuss in my essay on Goodness.  Basically, our perception of reality can in my view be manipulated in three principle ways: laterally, as on a continuum; vertically, as in the movement from abstraction to concrete perception through the senses, which includes emotion, and back again, in what I call Perceptual Breathing; and temporally, as in systemic interactions which can only be seen historically.

What I wanted to say is that I foolishly thought, once I got the certification, that Universities–as places filled with thinkers–would be excited to learn about this method.  I contacted the offices of many University Presidents with some persistence.  I learned, slowly, that they have close to ZERO interest in learning how to think.  Their self evaluation is that if they have Ph.D’s, they already KNOW how to think, and have nothing to learn from me or anyone else that is outside their field.

In the Engineering Dept. they know they have a good idea when something works–an engine runs, a light comes on.  In the Philosophy Dept., they don’t.  They could literally jabber utter nonsense and be as RELEVANT.  I think of the “Killing Joke” from Monty Python.  What if there were an Exceptional Idea, that when conveyed, suddenly caused a burst of understanding from everyone? 

Does anyone expect this to happen?  The closest we can hope for is a renewed commitment to reason.

In my considered view, there should be no discipline called “philosophy”.  There ought to be a discipline called something like Psychophilosophy which works empirically to determine what ideas work best to facilitate happiness.  They ought to work in tandem with a new academic discipline called Spiritualist Sciences, which investigates, academically, how the world of the spirit works, how best to communicate with spirits, and how best to optimize our lives, knowing we exist within a larger reality.

I am really pushing the envelope now as far as getting my work done today, but wanted to ramble just a bit more.  

From this article. My record of getting posts on–and keeping posts on–the Guardian is not good, as one would expect from a left wing rag.  I have not read Derrida, other than samplings of 5-10 paragraphs here and there.  He is incoherent, and smells of incense and Greek liturgy.  Whatever cognitively altered states he is able to induce in others do not interest me.

Derrida was an intellectual aesthete.  It is a common malady, particularly in France.  He was fashionable because different.  Fashion plays a large role in post-rational societies, because what else is there, but naked conformity–waves of this and that that sweep in and over everyone?  You cannot be alone too long: that is why the tides of style come and go, to keep you preoccupied, to help you remember to forget what must be forgotten.  But in the end what good did Derrida do?  No doubt he was very clever, but what life burden did he lighten?  What struggling soul did he free?

You, Terry Eagleton, are obviously a supporter for a simple reason: the habit Derrida helped build of rejecting logical analysis has made your own “Marxist” project easier.

Plainly things do not fit in boxes.  But if we grant that this is simply an HEURISTIC, and recognize the bounds, then logic remains not only a valuable tool, but the one that has generated the most human well being of any creed in human history.  We are only plummeting back into chaos as a result of its rejection.  And PLEASE, don’t try and argue that our choices are either/or’s or gobbledy gook.  That, itself, is symptom of the cognitive maladies that go with Marxist habits of creating false oppositions.

Things can be placed on continuums.  It is not necessary to indulge in post-rational idiocies to see this.  You want an actually useful thinker?  Try Edward de Bono.

I take the time to type the things, and they have a habit of disappearing on leftwing sites, although that is not an invariant result (other than the Daily Cause, since ideological nonconformity induces panic attacks in them, and that much hyperventilating would somehow be bad for the atmosphere), so I repost them, as here.  From this link, on people I won’t defend, other than to say political incorrectness is always in style for me:

Here is Emerson’s full quote:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great
soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his
shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and
to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it
contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to
be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras
was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus,
and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took
flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. 

I will admit to having that last line on my wall in my room.  I had thought Wilde said that, but apparently he was quoting Emerson.  I don’t know that I am great, but I am certainly misunderstood.  Without exaggeration, I can say not one person on Earth fully understands me.

Looking this up, though, I found some more excellent quotes:

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Alduous Huxley

Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not.
Stephen Vizinczey

You see, THAT is why I don’t get up at 4:30 like I planned to!!!

Actually, I am so inconsistent, that I came up with “Consistency means that change is growth.” 

It would be illogical not to contradict myself on this post.

I read Christopher Lasch’s book several decades ago, but was thinking of it yesterday.  The narcissists he described in the 1970’s parented the children of today.  And this is significant when we see statistics like what I posted a week or two ago that the levels of empathy among young adults have dropped 40% in the last 30 years.  I will quote more extensively this time:

. . .in a survey that has so far tested 14,000 volunteers, Sara Konrath
and her team at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social
Research has found that college students’ self-reported empathy levels
(as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a standardized
questionnaire containing such items as “I often have tender, concerned
feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I try to look at
everybody’s side of a disagreement before I make a decision”) have been
in steady decline over the past three decades—since the inauguration of
the scale, in fact, back in 1979. A particularly pronounced slump has
been observed over the past 10 years. “College kids today are about 40
percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago,”
Konrath reports.

More worrisome still, according to Jean Twenge, a professor of
psychology at San Diego State University, is that, during this same
period, students’ self-reported narcissism levels have shot through the
roof. “Many people see the current group of college students, sometimes
called ‘Generation Me,’ ” Konrath continues, “as one of the most
self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident, and individualistic
in recent history.

Now read this review.

What I will submit is that the essence of what we call Individualism is the capacity for individuals to make moral progress, to become, on the inside, better human beings. This stipulation is essential for the concept of personal responsibility to make any sense; it is essential for individuals to feel a sense of SELF that endures when they are alone.

Narcissism, paradoxically, is a fixation with self that arises from NOT feeling a sense of self.  You seek what you don’t have.  You think about yourself constantly because you have to reassure yourself that you have not in fact vanished.  You seek the admiration of others, but when they offer it there is no you to return it.  There is never a connection that is stable.  The world is always in flux.

I look at things like Twitter, and I see vanity.  What can you say worth saying in 100 characters, or whatever it is?  When it first came out, I was told by a younger friend that I couldn’t use it, since I would run out of characters before I got to my second comma, which no doubt was and is true.

But I have commented before on this obsessive need for today’s young people to be in CONSTANT contact with their friends, as if they would disappear if they had to go twenty minutes without a text or Facebook post.

I remember listening to a series of lectures on Existentialism, and when he got to Dostoevsky, a point he made about “Notes from an Underground Man” is that Dostoevsky, in that piece, was rejecting the notion of moral progress.  This was, to me, a profound notion: what happens when you no longer believe that personal growth is possible?  What is the meaning of life for such a person?  What CAN be the meaning of life?

I want to be clear: if there is no up or down, there is no way of labeling even sensations.  You cannot say pain is worse than pleasure, and if memory serves the narrator of that piece was in many respects a masochist.

A culture of narcissism is the inevitable product of moral pessimism, which itself is the result of both scientism–the curse of our age–and incompetent philosophizing.  In turn, as I posted a couple posts ago, radical politics can play the role of ersatz conscience for those otherwise lacking a coherent moral identity.

We are animals, in many respects.  This is indisputable.  But we are also spiritual beings, which is something that can be SCIENTIFICALLY investigated.  It simply hasn’t been by the mainstream.  What they do is spend enormous amounts of time criticizing the experiments of others, but ZERO in serious, sincere efforts at duplication.

In an actually scientific world, in an actually rational society, LARGE amounts of money would be spent on projects like that of Gary Schwarz and the Windbridge Institute (among many others).  We don’t live in a scientific, rational society.  We know this because our thought leaders relentlessly proclaim their rationality and dedication to science.  No one is fully rational.  Only rational people realize this, though, by adding their emotions to the mix consciously.

In a world characterized by competent philosophy, we would reject any and all need for a SINGLE answer, and accept that many correct answers are both possible and DESIRABLE.  That is what I intended with my own essay on Goodness.  I have absolute principles, but accept countless iterations of them, countless deployments, countless individual answers, all of which can be discussed and negotiated.

But we have little of this.  We have people who cling to traditions like Christianity that really cannot survive in this critical age; and we have people who reject the very notion of individual moral improvement and who, in so doing, condemn us to the pervasive mediocrity on display in front of us, a nation of selfish fools.