Moderates United

 1. Liberalism is about the power of ideas and knowledge, deployed widely.

All alternatives—Fascism and Communism and Monarchism and Theocracy—are about the power of people, of individuals, who need not have ideas more complicated than that the world should bow to them.

2. Good people protect and honor personal integrity because without it they have no sense of self, and become permanently lost. They do this first and foremost through honesty, through loyalty to, and respect for, the truth.

Bad people, having lost their core selves, lie to protect themselves from awareness of this loss.

These are approximate. It sounded better in my mind than written here, but I share anyway, with mild hesitation.

 Trump needs these folks to understand that people who threaten them will be arrested and tried and in most cases convicted in Federal Courts.  He needs people tracking social media and arresting people trying to organize violence.  At a minimum they need visits from Federal agents.

Everywhere across the country Americans are being exposed to actual and threatened violence.  We are not that sort of nation, or we never have been.

I don’t know if William Barr is corrupt, cowardly, or incompetent, but he has been a huge disappointment thus far.

All of our problems can be fixed.  Human history need not end in tyranny, deprivation and misery.  But just as we needed courageous people to found our Republic, we need courageous people to hold their spot in the line, to do what the person to the left and right of them needs, to care as much about principle and the future as they do their present needy, perhaps malnourished selves.

No one who is sane ever feels perfectly brave.  This is a fiction, told by and to people who are afraid.  What matters is doing the job, as faithfully and as wisely as possible, despite everything, despite feelings, and despite objective and social dangers.

 Replication is the act of the machine.  And machines are and always will be much better at it than us.

And if “information”, understood formally, is the presence of the unexpected and new, then the goal and output of machines is the removal of all information, all novelty, all innovation, because all are understood as defects.

And the goal of a conformist machine, of a left wing cult–or for that matter any cult, with the left wing cult merely being the most relevant right now–is perfect replication also.  They want replicated behavior, and replicated words, which are understood tacitly to represent ideas, even if this is in most cases not in fact true.

Replication morality is based on the fight, flight, shame response.  It depends on continual tension, that you may miss some cue, make some mistake, and be judged, shamed, and expelled.  This is the latent if nearly always irrational fear.

This form of morality is not only unwise, it is a formal rejection of wisdom, which is to say of the ability to learn.

Spiritual growth consists in the gradual, slow accumulation of something, of an energy that is hard to define.  Of light, perhaps, if we define light as the unexpected and uncontingent.

Nearly everything going on in America is turning us into reflexive machines.  We are taught obedience through social media.  We are taught stress through relentless work.  Our educational systems fail to teach basic history and philosophy.  What they do teach is emotionality denuded of context.

It is not too late to turn around, I don’t think, although perhaps I am blind myself.  I can and will continue to pursue my own path, and can and will continue to hope against hope that at least some among the lunatics trying to throw us over a cliff wake up before it is too late.

And I will continue to pray that our system succeeds in repelling the fraudulent Presidency of Joe Biden.  If he is willing to commit a crime that large to get into office, what would he not be capable of once he is handed the power he sought?  Could our elections not be fully Venezuelan in two years?  Is there any reason to hope we will ever have an honest election again?  

Over and over and over we see our leaders fail us.  Donald Trump was not the first choice of nearly anyone, but unless all hope is truly lost, he continues to do his best–his imperfect but still enthusiastic best–to protect America from the many enemies it has within it, who at this moment are vastly vastly more dangerous than any other nations on Earth.  This alone makes him great in my view.

We will see soon if we have Nazi courts, or Liberal ones.

 I think perfect honesty is a tiny bit dishonest.  I think all the moral virtues are like that.

I have described perfect moral judgements as imperfect, necessary, and local, and would describe the virtues attached to them the same way.

Morality is a means to an end.  It is a means to the end of living in an optimal way, of reconciling oneself with the universe as it actually works.  It is a means of generating an order we all crave and need, a consistency of sorts, but not a perfect, rhythmic, mechanical consistency.  Perfection is foreign to human nature, and seeking it is one of the reasons so many people seem to find comfort in the possibility of merging with machines.

If we reject the conception of perfection, then we can evaluate our heroes more honestly.  We can look both at their accomplishments and virtues, as well as their shortcomings, the ways in which they were blind or egotistical.

The moral system, as it exists in the public sphere today, consists in either belonging to the left wing mafia, which issues daily updates as to what is permissible and what not, and which amounts to a cult of conformity as I have often argued; or it consists in belonging to something “old” that is really not understood by the Left–which largely controls the media and thus the public perception of itself–and which is assumed to be reactionary because different.  That is really all the “white supremacy” argument is: they are not like us, so we are free to label them using the worst words we know, while failing to remember that NONE of these words mean anything any more, since the power of ideas has been eradicated.

I like the Slow Watch metaphor.  The slow watch is just a dumbed down regular watch, with one hand for 24 hours.  It is marketing genius, like the Swatch.  Marketing is really just applied manipulation of human vanity and greed.  And it worked on me.  I own one.

With these things, though, I know pretty close what time it is.  I will not mistake 1pm for 1am.  Nor will I mistake noon and 1pm.  I’m pretty close.  I’m just not down to the second.

In the pre-colonial Tibet–before the Chinese invaded and annexed that mountain nation–robbery was on Alexandra David-Neel’s account, a more or less national sport.  Morally, they had little objection to it, unless it led to the sin they recognized of killing.  You were dumb if someone got away with it, with respect to you.  They were not wicked for trying.

And yet this same nation has some of the most amazingly developed spiritual teachings of any place on the planet.  The two coexisted.

And as I pointed out a while back, the traditional way of saying good bye, rendered into colloquial English, would be “take it easy”.  

I am consciously cultivating this looseness.  It suits me.  I believe it is my personal path forward.

 Wisdom is understanding the consequences of your decisions as you make them.  Morality is nothing more then elevated understanding, based on a greater knowledge of true self interest.

And all of us fail.  We need to understand this.  We might fail daily across a lifetime.  This is no reason to quit trying.

Evil begins when we call failure other than what it is, when you rationalize it, and then routinize it.

Without honesty, there is no self to protect.  Or perhaps I should say the gate closes and remains shut. You turn into a machine, operating at the behest of invisible mechanisms, whirring seamlessly and uninterrupted in the background.

 It would be invisible to the Left, because they only recognize power, not the power of ideas.  They only recognize platforms, and audience sizes.

They do not understand that ideas are the basis of self organization, of complexity, of the Extended Order.

They do not understand the moral and social aspects of the Invisible Hand.

They do not understand that–educated properly–humankind would be fine, and all would–and perhaps still will–work out.

They do not understand that the answers to the questions of human life are freedom and knowledge; true openness, not the insidious perversion of it planned by awful, wicked human beings like George Soros.

 Joe Biden will be President for four years if he is in the end declared the winner.  It is not unreasonable to take four or five weeks to determine if  it only appears he “won” the election because he was a successful criminal.

And at that, we KNOW he is a criminal.  No previous generation would have been remotely reckless enough to put a known crook in the White House.  You pull those people out, at least in theory.  You don’t put them in.

 It occurs to me that one of the practical benefits to being a leftist is immunity from judgement, and a rational expectation that all crimes but those of political incorrectness will be not just forgiven, but silenced and hidden for you.

Harvey Weinstein was only outed in an effort to get at Trump.  Harvey was in the way of the Party.

 Not initially, in any event. This ain’t over.

Ishmael Scott Herron.

 It seems to me blindness is not so much what people cannot see as what they “see” that isnt there. There is not an absence but a positive and undoubted presence.

It also seems to me that the more formal schooling people have the gullible they become.

Perhaps clear sight benefits from an impaired or undeveloped ability to rationalize.