Moderates United

Feelings are always rational.  They are responses to what I might call “your sense of self” to environmental stimuli.  They can be altered with cognitive patterns, but when you feel them, they are real, and there is no use pretending otherwise.  That is the path of reason.

What is often called the path of reason is the SUPPRESSION of emotion, purportedly in the name of logic and dispassion.  You cannot be dispassionate: you can merely be passionate consciously, or unconsciously.

To be clear, when you look at someone like Ayn Rand, she was PASSIONATE, but she also had a large quantity of emotions in the background which were completely invisible to her, and made so by her cognitive and emotional habits.

Posted here: http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/16/george-will-fed-on-its-way-to-becoming-the-fourth-branch-of-government/ 


The issue of monetary policy is the missing arrow in the traditional conservative quiver, which otherwise assumes are markets ARE free.  They are not, and it is plain that the malfunctions that leftists blame on “capitalism” are in fact brought on by the part of our system which is a relic of the age when Kings granted monopolies to the connected.  That is all the Fed is: a monopoly on the power to control the trade in and creation of money.

Will is of course right in recognizing the power of the Fed.  What he
apparently has not YET realized is that the Fed initiated the Great
Depression through conscious inflation and deflation of the currentcy. 
Friedman showed this conclusively back in 1960.  Further, though, it
seems to have caused the inflation of the 1970’s, which was related but
not ultimately caused by gas price increases.  And in 2008, it
effectively declared all limits on its power to create and gift money to
whomever it wanted gone.  It granted trillions to FOREIGN banks, which
we only know due to the miniscule auditing capability we do have.

Obama
can’t fire Bernanke, and Congress can’t tell him to quit printing
money.  This is not a branch of government, but a monetary cartel run by
and for bankers, which pretends as needed to be good for the economy as
a whole, but which actually represents the REAL 1%, which is those able
to print and spend money first.

Inflation is theft.  I deal with this topic at length here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

What room is there in a Scientistic culture for sadness?  Is sadness not a flaw in the system, a problem to be corrected with medication or pseudo-scientific “psychotherapy”?  Given, as I suppose, that the way out of sadness is THROUGH sadness, do we not magnify the effects of normal life events over time by suppression?  By pretending that we live in a perfect magic world where sadness and delusion slowly drop away in the service of a superior, and unemotional reason?  That we need not process them?

What would you rather feel, sadness or fear?  It seems to me that, today, in a world where no one can stand to watch Old Yeller anymore (although I will grant “Me and Marley” apparently did well), that fear is easier for most.  And for the “rational” fear is perhaps easier to rationalize.  It is a relic of the fight or flight response; it is an evolutionary adaptation.

I believe, increasingly (and obviously I assert many things on this blog, but in dealing with deep emotion it is hard to be confident in large scale generalizations; this does not mean one should not attempt them in the pursuit of deeper understandings) that fear in our culture increasingly substitutes for sadness.

Take “50 Shades of Gray”,  I hear it is now called “mommy porn”, and can attest to at least one mother of three who appears psychologically normal enjoying reading it at the pool.  I think it was an act of rebellion in an endless process of getting kids from here to there, feeding them, dealing with their crap of all sorts, dealing with the husband, and the thousand things that home makers do.

Such women become sad, not infrequently.  There are often assumed, not appreciated.  How tempting it must be to feel fear–and S and M is sex plus fear of the unknown–in place of that ambient sadness.  Hence that book has set new sales records, and I think has sold the most the quickest of any single book in UK history (as I hear anecdotally on the radio; certainly it has sold many, many millions of copies, and is according to one account has even been sold on large tables in supermarkets; I know I’ve seen it displayed prominently at Target, which is otherwise a bland middle class store not in the business of selling sadomasochistic literature).

The converse of this is that it is hard to justify irrational joy, exultation.  We all feel pride at accomplishment, at the accomplishments of our children.  We feel happy when something WORKS, especially after long labor.  But do we come even close to approaching the amount of happiness we COULD feel?  Do we truly allow our hearts to fill to overflowing?  No: I think most are emotionally timid.  In America at least, as adults, we have a relatively narrow bandwidth of permissable emotions.  I think this is true, but I may be wrong.

Then I get the sense of the scientistic that their worldview enables a profound esthetic appreciation of the universe, of order, of the brilliance of the blind watchmaker, of natural “law”.  Yet, I would contend that what they are feeling is a sense of superiority to matter, through their “understanding”.  They stand apart, gazing, “knowing”, as they feel.  But their own presuppositions prevent this from being a tenable view, finally.  Examined carefully, they are not apart from the universe in any way.  Everything they think, and that they feel, is of a piece with matter.  They are no more free than ants laboring to feed their colony.  They are no more free than pieces of rock duly traversing the sun in their obedience to gravity.

I have no objections to Empiricism.  I want MORE of it, not less.  The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the propositions that we survive death, that we can communicate telepathically, can foresee the future, can see things psychically at a distance from us, and much more.  The problem is not that the data is lacking, but that it cannot find its way into the research arms of “mainstream” universities, and thus get added in what would UNQUESTIONABLY be a useful way to our national and global dialogues.

My short question is this: why invest so much energy in the pursuit of death, when life is an obvious alternative?

Posted here: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/romney-stands-comments-video-says-were-not-elegantly-032830339–election.html

I will add that it was AMAZING how quickly HuffPo dropped the riots in the Middle East once it become undeniable that the Obama/Clinton policy will turn out to have been an effing DISASTER.

You really have to grant that the left, having lost the capacity for rational policy making, has not lost a talent for purposive misdirection and name calling.  We KNOW now that Obama’s support for the so-called Arab Spring is going to be a complete disaster.  It is going to put terrorists in charge of nations across the middle east. 

We know that his economic policies have led to the worst recovery in 60 years, at least.  We know that he has racked up more debt in 4 years than Bush did in 8, and that Bush’s spending was ALREADY excessive.  We know he has no plan to save Medicare, and that his plans to radically expand Medicaid and overall healthcare related handouts CANNOT BE PAID for if we took 100% of the annual income of the top 10% of income earners.

We also know that about 47% of Americans pay NO income taxes–many in fact get refunds on money they didn’t put in to begin with–and that they therefore don’t care if taxes get lowered or raised.  It doesn’t affect them.

Romney is right.  And if the Left had any brains they would admit that four more years of the past four years will lead to disaster.  But they don’t CARE about the poor.  That is a rhetorical propaganda device used to trick people.

The more you study what we “know” of Obama, the more it seems to me like this ENTIRE life may have been fabricated out of whole cloth.  We know Barry Sr., the anti-colonial Marxist to whom his book (which he more or may not have written) met his mother, as we have pictures of them together.  We know they married. We know she returned to Washington state to study, and that his “father” stayed in Hawaii.  We know he attended school in Indonesia, where he was listed as both a Muslim and an Indonesian national.  We know he went to  rich kids school in Honolulu, which would have been the same place Mitt Romney would have gone if he had grown up there.  We know he was a pot smoker.  On his own account–and there is no good reason to lie about this–he spent a lot of time with Frank Marshall Davis, and looked to him as a confidant.

Then, the next known data point is his community organizing days in Chicago, after he allegedly went to Columbia, which is roughly 5-6 years after he left Hawaii. Somewhere in there a Pakistani friend funded a trip to Pakistan, apparently.

Then he was at Harvard.  We don’t know if he deserved to be there, or how he paid for it.  We know there were racial tensions when he was there, which likely made electing the first black to the position of editor in the Law Review a very easy political decision.

We know he was offered a contract to write his book/memoir, which was revoked when he failed after 18 months or so.  We know that he tried again, was failing again, and according to at least one biographer finally went to Bill Ayers to help him write it.  This time, the book was written, sold well, and set the stage for his political career.

But there are several large gaps in there, including all the time from when he left Hawaii to when he hit Chicago as an Alinskyite practitioner of Agitation Propaganda.

This reminds me of the moment in “The Usual Suspects” when Chaz Palmintieri realizes that all the names he’s just been given came from pictures behind his desk, his coffee cup, and elsewhere, and that virtually every important detail he has just been given may have been completely fabricated.

As I ponder it, it actually makes sense that Frank Marshall Davis is Obama’s real father.  If there were some way to verify those pornographic images that look like his mother actually ARE his mother, I would say it would be a virtual certainty.  Girls do not let men take pictures like that, then stop short of intercourse, not with a man like Davis, who seems to have had a talent for seduction–due, no doubt, to a lack of conscience and frequent practice, both desirable traits if the goal is getting in a girl’s pants.

It would have made sense for Dunham to have more or less dumped him on his real father when she returned to Indonesia.  And it would make it possible both for the Registrar–or whatever her title is–of Hawaiian public records to say she had viewed Obama’s birth certificate without lying, AND for it to make sense for him to forge a false one, if Davis was listed as his father.

In the era when he was born, having a father who was a KNOWN, card-carrying, unapologetic Communist dedicated to overthrowing the rule of law in the United States would have been devastating to virtually any career he could have chosen.  It may be in part because of that that his mother chose to move him to Indonesia.  When things loosened up in the late 60’s, it might then have encouraged her to return him, so he could grow up with the unique advantages that attend growing up in the United States.

I have said before and will say again that if we survive this era with our freedoms intact, some set of future historians–probably not even that far in the future, perhaps 5 years–will wonder HOW IN HELL did this guy slip through: unqualified as far as what we know, unvetted with regard to what we don’t know, and having had far left associates ON HIS OWN ACCOUNT far back into his childhood.

Tragedy: intact social order, fear, sadness, relief, greater social cohesion

Comedy: intact social order, laughter, relief, greater social cohesion

Horror: broken social order, fear (alleviated in the short term, aggravated in the long term), decreased social cohesion (I will note, too, that tragedies were meant to be watched by groups of rough peers; most modern media consumption is solo or in small groups).

Sadism: broken social order, broken personal order.  Can generate social cohesion only among those equally broken.

I take things for granted sometimes that perhaps I shouldn’t.  If it was not obvious, I was building a continuum starting with Tragedy–which was the dominant form of theater in what we might call the Golden Age of Greece, which arguably is the form of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, and which modern Opera in part tried to revive–and leading to what we might term the theatrical elements of clinical sadism, with comedy and horror as stops in the middle.

In tragedy, the protagonists, with whom we are clearly meant to identify, struggle and fail due to flaws–hamartias–in their characters.  They are excessive proud, in most cases, but the flaw can be something else.  What the audience is meant to do is sympathize with the main character, and feel the horror they feel when their world collapses, and to SEE what they might not, which is WHY their world fell apart, and to learn from it.  “Pride precedes a fall” might be a lesson taken to heart, and emphasized through negative emotive operant conditioning.

Further, by teaching people that they can feel deep sorrow and recover, you teach mourning.  Hank Williams wrote a lot of sad songs, but he was not a sad person, on balance: he loved life.  He drank too much, of course, but his short life was filled with a lot of good emotions, and even now his songs make me happy.

And for the Greeks, tragedy was a sort of ritual, something to be gone through periodically, but not something to LIVE in.  The great tragic playwrights were not likely morose men; nor were the Greeks who went to see the plays. On the  contrary, I suspect they were vivacious and fun.  They laughed a lot, playfully, simply.  They just understood that sadness, failure, and futility have a PLACE in life: they must be acknowledged and accepted. Once you do that, you can live more fully, more joyfully.  It is perhaps counterintuitive, but that is my view too.  You get stronger through catharsis, which amounts to a type of emotional exercise.

There have been times Hank Williams songs made me cry: that is OK too.

What is NOT OK is being unable to experience what might be termed primary emotions any more.  Our society tells us that pain is aberrational, so we don’t, as a culture, know how to MANAGE it; we don’t practice it; we don’t have good, effective rituals for it.  Part of the reason we are so infantile as a nation is that we don’t have a means of processing the necessity of adulthood, the pain of adulthood, which is to say the capacity to live a rational life as chosen. So we pretend that our decisions have no consequences, when of course they do.

In tragedy you feel the horror and fear of the protagonist, and know why it happened.  It is intended both to teach moral virtues, and to teach people to process complex emotions, which include the ability to accept the pain and suffering in this world.

In comedy you feel much more muted discomfort at the unexpected and the socially “deviant” (I intend simply deviations from social norms), for which the cathartic response is laughter.  It is still useful because it teaches a means of dealing with the chaos, the ebb and flow, of ordinary human life.  It has a place in my taxonomy of tasks.

In horror, you feel the fear of the protagonists, but there is no meaning, no escape, and no catharsis.  What there is, in my view, is a homeopathic release of tension. I think most people in this and many other countries are chronically anxious, chronically afraid, and I think by INCREASING that anxiety, it can actually be made to fade, for a time.  However, the medicine is the poison, in that watching violence clearly also increases anxiety, not least by implanting images in your head that are prone to pop out whenever dealing with any other human, and which pop out in those few unguarded moments when you spontaneously relax deeply.  It leaves a question in your mind as to “who is this person REALLY?”  Horror movies are filled to overflowing with apparently benign people who slip something in the drink of their victims, who wake up in a terrible place, and die painful deaths.

Imagine clear, relaxing water.  Imagine a deep relaxation forming in you, and connecting with that water.  How long before some terrible image pops out?  Not long, for me, and I don’t even watch violent movies in general. 

Faith: that is the root of hope, and the Horror genre damages faith.

The final stage is when you sympathize not with the victims, but the attackers, when Jigsaw is your hero, or Jason, or the Elite Hunting Club.  This is the point when you no longer feel your own feelings at all.  You feel nothing but excitement when someone is hurt, tortured or killed.  You have outsourced your capacity to process the real terrors of this world to a sacrificial victim.  This, in my view, is the sociological basis of ritual sacrifice of all sorts.

Catharsis has become a thing which is experienced as pain in the victim.  You need to inflict pain to release that terrible burden of anxiety and meaninglessness.

I could say more, but will leave that be for now.

I posted in the last week or so that both Tragedy and Comedy depend upon character flaws/weaknesses.  What makes you laugh is an incongruity between what you expect to happen and what actually happens.  As an example, this video, “how to piss off a frog” makes me laugh.  If you have not seen it, watch it before reading the next paragraph.  Actually, watch this one, too: it’s a baby that is first terrified then amused by his mother sneezing.

I think all of us interact with the world with a mixture of fear and avarice.  There are things we hope for and things we fear.  The frog video is funny because first we feel superior to the frog, who has been tricked.  It appeals to your sense of superiority.  Then you realize that is kind of mean to the frog, then the person doing the trick gets attacked, which is poetic justice which is completely unexpected.  Surprise is a key element in humor; it disrupts a pattern. If we posit that the information content of a message is an inverse of its predictability–the more predictable, the less information–then humor almost by definition contains information, which is to say new pattern arrangements.

Now tragedy, too, involves the descent into murder and chaos from existing orders.  It alters the big picture.  Someone dies, or takes their eyes out.  Comedy happens within an intact field.  Cheers would not have been funny if Sam had been murdered by a cuckolded husband, or Norm died of cirrhosis.

You CAN  use humor to form new patterns.  This is true.  Cops and ER doctors and paramedics are notorious for gallows humor.  I remember one case where a motorcyclist lost his leg in an accident.  The cops I knew cleared the scene, then fifteen minutes were wondering how “Pegleg Pete” was doing.  That’s how you cope: you take what is in some respects an actually tragic image and convert it to one amenable to humor.  In my view, this is healthy, even necessary, even if the public would be scandalized to hear what goes on behind the scenes.

But contemplating this morning, it occurred to me that the Horror genre is tragedy without redemption–without the possibility of learning, where even when the “protagonist” (were Freddy Krueger’s victims really protagonists?  Hannibal Lector? Jigsaw?) somehow through great courage survives, it means nothing, the violence happened for nothing; and overt sadism is comedy without pattern formation.  Sadists laugh at their victims, or at least they can.  What are they laughing at?  Nothing.

Power creates one thing: a relationship without other content between oppressor and oppressed.  All meaning inheres in this relationship, and for the oppressor at least, life is empty without that relationship, although they often enough find masochistic counterparts.

Why the laughter though?  Examples come easily to mind, but simply imagine the evil cackle that Mike Myers made fun of with the Dr. Evil character.

Logically, I suppose, and I am thinking as I type, if the point of humor is altered patterns within the mind of the perceiver, then a power relation is “funny” to the extent that it represents a fall from “sobriety” on the part of the victim, of a stable world with social norms which are about to be broken.  This break is a quantitative one, in that it represents not an alteration in a cognitive gestalt, but an outright break in conditions of life.

I think the foregoing is correct.  I will say in concluding here simply that I cannot see in the Horror genre anything but a de facto giving up on finding a deeper meaning in life than living a dull life punctuated by the occasional excitement of the sort watching other people suffer occasions. Add to that regular pornography, the possibility of good sex, and maybe a lottery win, and that’s it.

Our culture, presently, is a very weak one.  And to make a final final point, walking backwards is not a possibility.  We cannot return to anything.  We must move forward to something new.  That is the underlying thesis of the Goodness Movement website.  One day soon I am going to try to form a “church”, but one not quite like anything I’ve ever heard of.  I need to get my own shit straight first, and am making progress on that score.

Posted in response to this article, which is somehow hawking the fantastic notion that the disaster in the Middle East is anything other than an obvious result of idiotic foreign policy decisions on the part of the Obama Administration. It is ASTONISHING to me on an on-going basis how indifferent leftists are to issues of basic principle, human dignity, and human suffering.  They just don’t care, and they cloak this fact by accusing conservatives of it.  It is anti-enlightenment, anti-human rights, and anti-rationalism.  They will be accusing the right of this tomorrow, with no capacity to back it up, since I am RIGHT.

It is astonishing the extent to which partisan hacks will TWIST the truth.  Libya was “freed” from Gaddafi in part by conscious policy of the Obama administration.  So were Tunisia, Egypt, and other places where we are under attack.  The salient question is: “how can ANY human being rationalize this outcome as other than a foreign policy disaster?”

The Muslim Brotherhood and kindred organizations are taking over these countries, who previously were more or less allies, and will be in a position soon to wage these types of attacks consistently.  This does not have ANYTHING to do with Romney, and EVERYTHING to do with horrifically misguided and AMATEUR foreign policy decision by BARACK OBAMA.  Crisis?  This could be worth 5-10 points for ROMNEY.

As I often do, I will repeat that all you have to do to read leftist minds is see what they accuse others of and apply it to them.  There is no “out there” in the leftist mind, so they have to project realities.

It seems to me the root of narcissism is self loathing, which exists like a bubble–or abcess–in an ocean of water and apparent freedom, and which colors everything.

Obama is a narcissist who was abandoned relatively early by his mother, and by at least his Kenyan father (we are not sure if Frank Marshall Davis was not the actual father; a credible case for it can be made).  This must have made him angry, particularly at his mother, who seems to have been herself very self absorbed.

Mother hatred makes for self loathing, as I don’t think you can hate your mother and not somehow redirect that at yourself, in ways not immediately apparent to your surface consciousness.  This anger would not but be intensified if she was a frivolous woman who allowed pornographic pictures to be taken of herself.  That home would not have been happy.  That woman would not have been interested in being a good mother.

And self loathing leads easily, through projection, to Other loathing, which has been the principle project of our President since before he entered his teens, in my view.

Leftism is the perfect philosophy for narcissists: its lust for power leads, over time, to never needing to apologize, and in the interim to a fully “justified” outlet for your grief/anger.