Moderates United

I read my own posts sometimes, and wonder: What the hell is he talking about? Where did that come from? Non sequitur, ambiguity, randomness: all found here.

I type out loud. I let the words flow. I’m not trying to build structure, so much as watch what happens when I let my mind wander. Sometimes it gets caught in eddies, but the words keep flowing, and eventually it moves on.

Here is a nice song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSfrIvE0nAc

I’m big on self referential irony. I count seven uses of the word I as well. Make that eight. Ah: can you start anywhere else? Not as far as I can tell.

It is hard for me not to see a sharp divide between Mozart/Haydn and Beethoven, in the sense that a film should show “and here it broke: the dogs were let loose and destroyed everything”.

In Clockwork Orange, why are the hooligans so obsessed with Beethoven? Because it MAKES SENSE. Gone is order and proportion. Yes, some of his work is beautiful, but it
is broken. He has built a machine condemned to missing the cogs that make it affirm life.

Highly subjective view, but I just finished the Viennese Classical period in my music course, and am now being assaulted by the Romantics. Oi.

I am not exaggerating when I say I see little difference between Beethoven and the Ramones. That comparison might well have made him happy.

Now, I have nothing per se against songs about Teenage Lobotomy, but is that culture? Is it the culture of sensible people, making rational, measured decisions?

Do I want to blame the Sex Pistols or the New York Dolls for our national debt? Sure, why not? I would be willing to take that position in a debate.

It seems to me that there are more people hurting in this world than helping. There is a negative emotional cash flow. If you hurt, but are not giving, then you are either taking, or wanting.

The logic of Christianity, of love, is simple: if you want the world to attain a positive emotional balance, then you have to give rather than receive. You have to take the hatred you are offered and at least not make it worse, and ideally soften and even end it.

Looking at the world around him, the solution of Christ was eminently logical. He never ended Mosaic Law, but rather completed it, by pointing out the important parts. If thou shalt not kill, then thou shalt not kill ANY part of a person. Thou shalt not attack them, hurt them. Thou shalt honor that which is sublime in this world. Thou shalt honor those who made you who you are, and in so doing honor yourself and those who will follow you. Thou shalt not be envious and resentful.

As I see it, victory over another person consists not in attaining their submission, but rather in helping them untangle knots in their own lives that prevent their full creative expressive potential from manifesting, and thereby infecting the world with the new, the joyous, the beautiful. That is victory. That is winning. That is the goal. Everything else is failure in pursuit of success.

Coda:

Tonight I sat next to a woman at a bar wrestling with addiction to crack cocaine. I found this out because I am good at finding things out. She in any event wanted me to know that she was moving in with a man who did not do drugs, because she was going to conquer her habit.

I watched her, at once hopelessly furious with herself, helpless, lonely, longing, confident, sure, antagonistic, supplicating, earnest and disingenuous. Back and forth, in furious circles. I said the things one says, but I don’t think it will do any good. She is consuming herself, like a star in the grip of a black hole. She knows what she is doing, but the reasons she has to live for aren’t enough to keep her off drugs.

Did Elvis Presley commit suicide? Yes, in my view. So did Michael Jackson. The details don’t matter. If you are doing things to yourself that you know will shorten your life, you have chosen to shorten your life, no? A=A?

Christ came that we might have more life, which means more meaning, more love, more purpose, more “place”. We are not all that different.

She was on my left. To my right were two Indians with very thick accents who insisted they were born in America. Bring up the Middle East or Pakistan, though, and you got some fierce words and looks. Kashmir: “why don’t they just man up and bring it on?”

Circles–life is circles. Here is an example. I’m not drunk, either: this is how I am. It does collate from time to time, though, which is when I’m perhaps more worth reading. I feel deeply, but how does one blog that? You don’t, of course.

Would it not be INTERESTING to think this world was interactive? Interactive, not on a crass physical level, but to our thoughts, and feelings?

Synchronicity is one of these horribly unscientific ideas, if we define “science” as “if Siberian Snow Tigers really exist, then you should be able to show one walking out of those woods tomorrow at 11am on the dot”. No tiger, oh sorry, it must not be “science”. Ergo, snow tigers do not exist, and only stupid people insist on looking for them.

Interestingly, Michael Farraday was supposed to attend a seance of the then famous Daniel Home, to describe whom the word “psychic” was invented. Many, many times, he made tables rise up into the air in normal light, in front of many witnesses, when there was plainly no physical force capable of doing it. He was tested, and was able to make a violin play in a cage, and to change the weight on a scale without touching it. Farraday insisted that he be told in advance EXACTLY what would happen, and when informed that it changed often, refused to come. This is anti-scientific. If something can be seen once, then over some period of time, it can be seen again, even if it is irregular in its appearance.

Of course, I read psychology and know about the confirmation bias. Of course this effect exists. To deny it would be stupid. And yet, and yet: Jung came up with the term when a patient was describing an exotic, rare beatle, which just happened along as she was doing so. Not unreasonably, he attached significance to it.

Today I posted something in German on my Facebook, I believe for the first time. Tonight I ran into some Germans in a bar, for the first time in 3-4 years and got to practice my German. Apparently I still have a Swiss and not American accent.

Random coincidence? Somebody wins the lottery, right? I choose not to think so. That is my choice.

Exercise: watch for this sort of thing over the next month, and see if you are not surprised. I have every reason to believe the world we live in is magical in ways we cannot even imagine.

I indulge my vanity a bit by looking at the site stats. I’m certainly no superstar, or star, or even bright light. I’m a lamppost in the shady part of town: useful for some, but hardly front row center. Still, I enjoy seeing all the countries checking in, and the number of Americans who are clicking on some my posts.

My intent, however, is not to feed my vanity, but to share what I hope are good, useful ideas, and to that end I will point out that you can follow me on RSS, which basically means you get all the posts without clicking on anything; or you can subscribe by email. If you do that, you get a daily email in the middle of the night with my last edit of whatever I posted. I don’t get notified of your email address, and frankly have no way of knowing how many people–if any–are subscribed via RSS or email. It’s totally private, at least to me.

Are we not all to some extent unwillingly made invisible? We fear discovery of our innermost secrets, but we still resent sometimes the failure of others to see them, who we “really” are. I dare people to understand me, and they fail. They don’t even hear the question. This is stupidity, but very human, as I see it. It is vanity, my craving to be understood and recognized. We all have this flaw, to some lesser or greater extent.

Life is work, love and death. Work is an extension of love, done properly. Love is building form in the world. Emotional love, the recognition we crave, is building individual selves. Abstract love is building a better, richer, more interesting world.

It is no tragedy to lack people who understand you: the tragedy is lacking the capacity to care about others, and to work to build them. That is useful love. The rest is vanity, and as much as we like to have our vanity stroked, it is an unessential element, like carbohydrates.

Yes, I’m tired and complaining in my very abstract, analytical way. That is part of who I am. I have failed, in a way, and am working on soothing my ego, and doing so publicly in the hope my scribblings may be useful to someone else.

This morning, walking the dogs, I was watching the clouds scoot across the sky, pushed by steady winds. It felt like change. “Good change or bad change?”, I wondered. Then it hit me: Change. That is the word. The ridiculousness of my question made me laugh out loud.

We spend so much time defending our five feet of earth, don’t we? Our own skies, our own views, our own interests, our own, our own. Yet we will all be swept away like clouds one day too, won’t we? Flow is the only reality, and there are those who accept this, and those who lie to themselves.

Everything that Socialists claim to want–decreased work weeks, better retirements, increased access to healthcare, an end to poverty, a more “humane” world–could have already been achieved, had we not granted 90% or more of our national wealth production to the banks, some of which they kept, and some of which they simply wasted.

The Federal Reserve, and fractional reserve banking system it enables and parts of which it represents, is the reason we have such high divorce rates. It is the reason poor fathers cannot provide for their children; the reason stressed out fathers and mothers cheat on one another and become emotionally unavailable because exhausted. The Federal Reserve is the reason we consign our parents to “homes” that are nothing of the sort, where they are fed horrible food, and in too many cases treated like profitable cattle.

The Federal Reserve is the reason so many children grow up in single parent homes, and never see their (usually) mother who is working all the time, and not very helpful when she is home, as she lacks the energy.

One could argue the Federal Reserve is the reason we so fear terrorism: it has enabled a fundamentally unstable financial system, that can be attacked reasonably easily, causing widespread, rather than local, damage.

The Federal Reserve is the reason for the empty eyes and shattered hopes one sees in some parts of town, and the reason so many of them wind up in jail, or dependent on Democrats very happy to make them so.

This is not a small, tangential problem. It is at the HEART of substantially every economic, political, and social problem we face.

These bastards have to be reigned in. I see Ron Paul has the support of the military, and unlike Rick Perry is not doing himself in–he of course has the help of the complicit media in making sure his message is not heard. It will be interesting to see if the organizing skills of the Left can be brought to bear to get Paul elected. The media are only polling active Republicans right now as to their preference.

The sheer extent of the LIES one sees in the media can be discouraging. I take comfort from a precommitment I have made to never quit, no matter what.

Mixed bag below. Topics change.

I have a LOT of stuff on the internet. I use the term “Cultural Sadeism” from time to time, and this essay here is where I developed it.

Cultural Sadeism is what I referred to in the previous post as the yes/yes operator. It is the reason Apollinaire referred to Sade as “the freest man who ever lived.”

It is the rejection of rejection. It is the rejection of form, and instead consists in relationships of power only.

No sadist can exist without a target. They are a pool of water without a container, endlessly flowing until the moment of contact when they can EITHER be abused or abuse.

Plainly, some serial killers/rapists/Communist leaders always want to be in control. Yet who are they in the interstices? They are nothing. They are less than human. This is where their energy comes from; they must push back from their void, their black hole, sucking them into nothingness.

This is my view. Sade himself, clinically, was BOTH a “Sad-ist” and a masochist. He was fine with being whipped himself. And one has to sense a certain masochism in behaving in such a way that he KNEW he would be locked up.

I will add as a footnote, as it were, that while I have never seen any reason to read Foucault, it is very interesting that he obsessed in his work about power relations, and in his personal life enjoyed homosexual bondage.

It would not be unwarranted, I think, to look to the lives of self declared “philosophers” first, and see if there is anything worth imitating, if they live happily and actually free. Only then might it warrant examining their work. Read the biography, then the theory. If the two do not connect, then you are dealing with someone who can and should be ignored.

Philosophy is about life. It is about building structures in which you can live. It is an artisanal trade no different than baking bread, pouring concrete, or fixing television sets. If it is not useful, then it should be ignored, no matter how pretty it might seem to be. It will not feed you, and instead will likely lead you both to hunger and an inability to feed yourself.

No amount of blood can ever bring a vampire to life. They cling: they do not live.

I play a lot, although my play probably would be between inscrutable and mind-numbingly tedious for most.

Anyway, I was playing with this yes/no operator. It seems to me that three basic cultural statements can be made: no/no, yes/no/yes/no, and yes/yes.

In a no/no system you are defined not by what you ARE, but by what you are not. This is a very strange place to be, but I would submit that it is the lot of most leftists. They are not imperialists, sexists, racists, bigots, homophobes, Islamophobes, etc. But what ARE they? What do they believe on principle? As it turns out, nothing. An act which will draw no comment at all when done by a Democrat becomes horrific when done by a conservative. Does anyone seriously think Bill Clinton never made unwanted sexual advances to anyone? Kennedy, Ted, John or Robert?

Or take the example I cite in my definitions of terms: Cuba. On Cuba are different types of prisons. The regime itself runs political prisons where “soft” torture was practiced–and may well still be practiced–for many years on persons whose sole crime was to question the regime’s good intentions. They lock people in what amount to small doghouses and leave them there for months. Sometimes they block the air holes, so they can barely get enough to breathe. This elicits no comment from the Left.

Yet Guantanomo Bay, which houses the worst of the worst, generally people who have committed or tried to commit mass murder against civilians, and who are housed better than most Americans are for much lesser crimes, is somehow horrible

Wait, it’s not horrible. Obama inherited it, he hasn’t closed it, so now it is OK. It will become bad again if a Republican is elected and does not close it.

No, you are not a Republican, or conservative, or bible pounder, or “truther”, or “birther”, or idiot, or Fox News whore, or any member of the long lists of things it is undesirable to be. But who are you? You don’t know. This causes anxiety.

An intact culture contains both markers for what you ARE and what you are NOT. If you want to say Americans value freedom, and that we are not barbarians, then you have included both. In the flow of events, both markers have to be present for FORM to exist.

The Yes/yes marker inverts the No/no marker by saying that there ARE no rules. You define yourself by what you do, and you do whatever you want.

Psychologically, as discussed in the book “Willpower”, humans tend to lose all restraint once they pass certain “bright lines” of rules they have. As long as you don’t cross a line, you control your behavior. Once you cross that line, though, behavior does not become SLIGHTLY less controlled, but the control evaporates entirely. The You who made those lines is gone, and you are now someone else.

As Voltaire said in Candide, the perfect connoisseur is not the person who rejects everything. And self evidently they are not the people who accept everything. They are characterized by standards that they hold to diligently. This is the task of culture.

Imagine a culture in which we all hold to our own chosen lines, and stray no farther. This would be wonderful. We need freedom, but we also need restraint. Yes, and no.