Friday, September 29, 2017

The Globalist-Barbarian Axis

Back to who we are. Or were, rather; I'm afraid that train has left the station, and that now we're just dealing with the consequences of national we-lessness, AKA tribalism.

In the foreword, Huntington outlines the American Creed, that "crucial defining element" of our identity, our national We. However, each of its constituents is disputed if not under systematic attack from within:

Key elements of that culture include: the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to create a heaven on earth, a "city on a hill."

That last one needs to be qualified, because I don't think our Puritan forbears conflated the C on an H with heaven. Ironically, this is the left's project; ironically², this makes them more Puritan than the Puritans they ridicule. Which in turn lines up with Polanyi's principle that the left combines unhinged moral passion with an absence of religious constraints. They specialize in creating moral monsters over which they inevitably lose control, as did Dr. Frankenstein.

Example. Okay, the dimwitted football players protesting the Anthem (a formerly uncontroversial symbol of unity, which is to say, our transcendent We-ness).

Where do these idiots get their ideas? Not from themselves, because they don't have any. Rather, from the white liberal elites responsible for the Narrative (AKA ideology for dummies).

Not only is the Narrative 180˚ from the truth, it is murderously hostile to the interests of blacks and other majorities. Thousands of blacks have already died as a result of the Narrative, and more will die as a result of the protesters (although it is intrinsically impossible to quantify how many):

While poorly educated athletes, egged on by leftist commentators, indulge in Black Lives Matter based protests against their country, evidence pours in that black-on-black crime is the real threat to black lives and that attacks on policing are causing an increase in such crime.

[Heather McDonald] points out that nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881.... The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.

Who is killing these blacks? Not whites.... among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243.

Does it not go without saying that black lives matter? No Christian would ever suggest or even imagine otherwise. But leftists are not Christians. Or, to paraphrase the Aphorist, mixing leftism with Christianity turns the idiot into a perfect idiot. Any idiots who support BLM are perfect idiots indeed:

In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed,” [which in turn] masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest.

Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers -- committed vastly and disproportionately by black males.

Out of, say, 10,000 white liberals who are informed of the truth, how many will say, "Oh. Sorry. Didn't know that." Who knows? One? I was one of them. Was I really that stupid? I can't be sure, because liberals weren't as crazy back then. Today, for example, Bill Clinton would be a mainstream Republican and JFK would be an out-and-out Reaganesque conservative.

Huntington mentions that after September 11, 2001, companies that manufacture American flags had to step up production to as much as five times normal. A note to myself in the margin says "autoimmune response."

What is the immune system -- I mean on a more abstract level? Clearly it is a function of identity: of self and not-self. And whether fortunately or unfortunately, collective identity in particular is often forged in war. We know who we are because we know who we aren't.

Indeed, what is the anthem but a call to, or vertical recollection of, unity in the face of danger? -- our blood-spattered banner illuminated by the glorious spectacle of bombs blasting and rockets reaming the defeated enemy.

Huntington suggests that "the proportion of people in America" who are loyal to and identify with other countries is "quite possibly higher than at any time since the American Revolution." Back then it was roughly one third for independence, one third neutral, and one third as pro-American as is our Media-Tenure industrial complex today.

Our contemporary situation is complicated by multiculturalism below and transnationalism above. Ironically, the left consists of an alliance between trans- and multiculturalists, even though these are polar opposites.

This is another example of leftist elites creating a monster -- multiculturalism -- that they cannot control. What does a transnational corporation such as Google have in common with, say, a racist organization such as La Raza, or a hate group such as the Southern Poverty Law Center? The only thing that unifies them is their mutual enemy: America.

Trump and the Americanism he champions are rejected by both wealthy globalists and multicultural barbarians. Antifa and BLM are merely tools of the elite, just as the guillotine was merely a tool of the Revolution.

To be continued....

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

God Has No Baby Mamas

Well. There was no time for a proper post. But I thought there might be time to lay a foundation and get some preluminaries out of the way. However, I didn't get very far before timelessness ran out. (By the way, this is the second post written while donning the sacred dude sweater. I think it's helping.)

In one of those strange but typical cosmic coincidences, I've been reading a book that perfectly complements Who Are We?, called The Immortal in You: How Human Nature Is More Than Science Can Say. The former goes to our collective identity --- the We -- while the latter goes to the deepest source of our personal identity -- the I.

We all have an I, hopefully no more than one. But all I's also belong to a We. In fact, more than one We. For example, my We may refer to my marriage, my family, my occupation, my country, my species, my nonlocal brothers-under-the-pelt, and more.

There are any number of potential disturbances in our personal and collective identities. Some -- well, many -- people, for example, do not develop a stable identity, such that there is more than one center of subjectivity in the psyche. I call them Mind Parasites, because it is very much as if these yousurpers live off our own subjectivity in order to maintain themselves. They are like hungry (or greedy, or envious, or angry, etc.) ghosts made out of our own mindstuff.

Now that I think about it, there are also positive mind parasites, analogous to the healthy bacteria that live inside our gut. Indeed, some people even take parasite pills (probiotics) in order to cultivate these friendly invaders.

So there are propsychotics as well. Like what? I don't want to get completely sidetracked into developmental psychology and attachment theory, but human maturity is very much a function of internalization, and we mainly internalize what are called "object relations."

For example, assuming what is called "good enough mothering," the infant internalizes what amounts to Mom, such that he is gradually able to sooth himself without her actual presence, or by using symbols of her presence, which are called transitional objects (like a favorite stuffed animal, or, later in life, a cigarette or government program).

Professor Wiki has an adequate description of how Bion explains it:

Bion took for granted that the infant requires a mind to help it tolerate and organize experience. For Bion, thoughts exist prior to the development of an apparatus for thinking. The apparatus for thinking, the capacity to have thoughts "has to be called into existence to cope with thoughts." Thoughts exist prior to their realization. Thinking, the capacity to think the thoughts which already exist, develops through another mind providing alpha-function -- through the "container" role of maternal reverie.

As to "reverie," this is a term of art referring to "the capacity to sense (and make sense of) what is going on inside the infant," equivalent to maternal attunement and preoccupation.

Yesterday, for example, my son reminded me that his mother always knew what he was talking about when he was blabbering on in his own language, which we called Tristonian. To me he sounded like a stroke victim, but Mom was bilingual and able to understand what he was going on about.

There are other ways of looking at the same phenomenon. For example, Jung would say we come into the world with a maternal archetype that is like an "empty form" waiting to be actualized by experience. Think of it as a universal pre-conception. What we call "human nature" consists of various archetypes that are filled in by particular experiences that correspond to them.

For example, there is clearly a God archetype. If there weren't, then we wouldn't have this in-built readiness to experience him. God is in the particular experience, but the particular experience is not God -- similar to how I am in my big toe, but my big toe is not me.

We're getting too far afield. The point is, I Am not myself allone. Or rather, in order to be ourselves, we need help from others. There is always an I-We complementarity.

This apparently applies all the way up into the Godhead, where God too is an irreducible I-We complementarity. There are hints of this all through the Bible -- for example, "Let Us make make man in Our image, according to Our likeness." Even -- or especially -- in God, I and We coarise. There the relationship is of Father and Son instead of Mother and Child, but still.

Why Father instead of Mother? That is by no means a stupid or irrelevant question. In fact, I just read something about that. But where? Ah yes, here, in an appendix to Edward Feser's Five Proofs of God that asks Is God Male? No, not exactly. "Nevertheless, the traditional practice has been to characterize God in masculine terms." Yeah, but why?

"God's relationship to the world is much more like a paternal relationship than it is like a maternal relationship." For example, "there is no change to a father's physiology as a consequence of impregnation, whereas there is a radical change in the mother's physiology."

Analogously, God cranks out worlds with no apparent change to himself. Similarly, there is "a literal physiological connection between the child and its mother," but not between child and father.

One wonders how many NFL crybullies have no relationship with the children of their baby mamas, which will in turn help create the next generation of fatherless victims with daddy issues projected into police, "white privilege," and authority more generally.

I'm not sure what the title of the post means, but there it is.

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

What Is We?

That is the implicit question in the title of Samuel Huntington's last book, Who Are We?: The Challenges to American's National Identity. It could scarcely be more timely, being that we are living in a civil war with two absolutely irreconcilable ideas of Who We Are. The controversy over our dimwitted athletes Disrespecting the Flag for Some Reason is just a microchasm.

Before asking who We are, one must first define what We is. Analogously, the question "who am I?" is different from the question of exactly what the human person is. A materialist who asks the question will likely arrive at a very different answer than the transmaterialist.

Ultimately, the former will "discover" an object that has the meaningless side effect of thought, the latter a meaningful soul with the side effect of embodiment. For the materialist, word is reduced to flesh; for the Christian, word is instantiated in flesh, such that the soul is the form of the body.

Indeed, to a large extent the conclusion one reaches will be a consequence of the premise with which one begins. Recall Kruschev's remark that when a Soviet cosmonaut was up in outer space, he didn't see any God there. Likewise, I've seen human brains before, and I've never see any souls in there.

Is there something fundamentally different in the way left and right go about defining the We? Oh yeah. The I too, since I and We are irreducibly complementary. Not only is threeness built into the nature of things, but this nature goes to the very essence of the differences with our spiritually blind com(un)patriots.

It has been many years since I've been in a flame war with the opposition, but I stupidly got into one on Sunday, over at the MLB website. I mentioned that I had been a Dodgers fan since 1965, but that if any player tried any stupid s*** during the anthem, I was done. Things deteriorated from there.

Some of the left-wing comments were unbelievable to me, but it's been a while since I visited the dark precincts of the internet. The media try to put a sane face on the left, or just ignore things that will expose the insanity for all to see. For example, they reframe fascist Antifa rioters as "protesters," so their insanity looks like Courage in the Face of Oppression or something.

There are hundreds to choose from. Here are a few of the more thoughtful ones:

BEING IN THE MILITARY DOESN'T GIVE YOU THE RIGHT TO BE WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE. OUR MILITARY IS PROFIT-MACHINE FOR THE BANKERS, AND THE POOR PEOPLE THAT JOIN THE U.S. MILITARY ARE MERELY LOOKING FOR JOBS. THEY ARE THE WEAKEST AND MOST VULNERABLE, JUST LIKE THE THIRD WORLD NATIONS THAT THEY ATTACK FOR A PAYCHECK. CARRYING A GUN DOESN'T MAKE YOU A MAN.

The Disgrace is the Racist, Sexist, Xenophobic failed business man and crook who is the accidental president in the WH.

if there's no place on the field for political expression... which does each game start with a nationalist pep rally?

can't we all agree that the presence of the flag is the cause of the issue? Stop with the jingoistic Nationalist propaganda of going through the ritual of singing the national anthem. I'll flag has no place in a baseball game I didn't go to the baseball game to look at a flag.

you tried to use your military service as if it gave you superiority. It does not especially since the USA have been the aggressors in every war since WW 2, and then was totally wrong in using nuks. So even when the US military has moral High Ground we have chosen to be the bad guys. Anybody who joins the military doesn't deserve respect in my book.

It couldn't be any worse than the Sexual Assault Grabber-in-Chief of 'alternative facts', N-A-Z-I sympathizing, and Russian treason.

These folks are crazy or stupid or ignorant, or likely all three. You'd think they'd have a hard time fitting into any "we," but you'd be wrong. Turns out there is a vast movement of misfits, cranks, perverts, cosmic inverts, bitter females, beta males, overeducated fools, undereducated animals, race-obsessed losers, and generally lost souls.

These in aggregate constitute the sufficient reason of the left: there is no effect without a cause, and the cause of the left is always some kind of alienation from, or inversion of, reality. The alienation is a treatable condition, susceptible to correction. The inversion is generally not. Once a person has inverted reality, he tends to stay there. But thanks to the left, he's never alone.

I'm thinking, for example of all those rock star cosmic inverts who haven't taken a new cognitive imprint since the 1960s: people such as David Crosby, Bruce Springsteen, Grace Slick, Paul Simon, Carole King, James Taylor, et al, are saying exactly the things they said fifty years ago, like a cognitive tick.

Which in effect it is, i.e., an obsessional defense mechanism that helps organize the psyche. It conveniently displaces evil and hatred and projects them into a fantasized right wing -- just as hordes of leftists literally believe President Trump is a white supremacist or Nazi sympathizer.

I've highlighted so much of this book, I don't know where to begin. Maybe I'll start with some of the notes to myself in the back, such as: "How to have one nation with two such completely different experiences?" You might say this goes to an identity crisis, only on the collective/interior level -- the We rather then the I.

What is the meaning and purpose of a nation? These two are nearly synonymous, or at least two sides of the same reality, since purpose follows from meaning. If you think America means Equality, then you will have a very different purpose from the one who believes it means Liberty.

I also have a note to myself about deconstruction and historical revisionism being analogous to False Memory Syndrome, only afflicting the We rather than the I. If, say, you major in history, then false memories of America's past are implanted into your psyche -- like those of the commenter above, who "remembers" America being the aggressor in every conflict since 1945. Remember when we invaded Korea and enslaved the south?

But one no longer even has to major in history to suffer from False Memory Syndrome. Rather, the implantation process begins in grade school, which essentially softens the ground for the reception of even more outrageous lies in college and grad school. The idea of tearing down historical monuments or insulting the flag doesn't come out of nowhere. Rather, it's just the reductio ad psychotum of idiocies people assimilate as early as kindergarten. It's why we homeschool our son.

It is also important to bear in mind that you can't implant one set of symbols without first destroying another. For example, when I was in school, George Washington was still the unproblematic father of our country, which in turn made us all siblings, i.e., members of the American family. The left has succeeded in killing Washington and other symbols of unity, such as the flag, so what takes their place?

Ideology. Ideology creates a false past in order to justify its current wishes. A nation's identity is a vertical phenomenon involving both imagination and recollection. One commenter above calls the anthem a form of "jingoistic Nationalist propaganda." That is what he imagines and remembers when he hears it. That's the vertical space he inhabits when it is played at a sporting event. I suppose when the fighter jets fly overhead, he thinks of the vast Military Profit Machine that benefits Bankers and Corporations.

Thanks to multiculturalism and identity politics, we are not one nation (a we) under God (the source and ground of unity), but many warring tribes under Diabolos, i.e., the sprit of division and father of lies.

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