Completely Unreservedly and Not Even a Tiny Bit
Many people who call themselves progressive are now openly demented – and it really really shows
Hey folks!
I am greatly inspired in a few directions, while becoming ever more disheartened in others. My dear friend Ian has quite rightly pointed out my duty to discuss what my own X-er generation got wrong (which was a LOT) in order to balance my critique of the boomers – quite fair and entirely correct!
But in the meantime (since that one is both a duty and a doozy), there is a much bigger or at least more fundamental piece of clarity required before I can even make that case, which I often hope (but would be wrong to outright expect) others understand in my writing, and weight appropriately already.
There are (at least) two levels to everything. A huge proportion of modern people want to discuss everything as if it is ‘just’ a matter of morality, feelings, good guys and bad guys, which is a useful lens – some of the time (as long as it is balanced) IF YOU UNDERSTAND MORALITY (and reality) – thing is, we moderns in the ‘advanced’ west (that is, advanced-stage dementia, degradation, decadence, supremacy and ignorance) quite simply do not. We don’t put in the work, and we don’t get the results.
And to be clear I mean not on the left, or the right, or the baffled and terrified middle (who always thought they were doing the right thing, and are now watching the whole thing set alight gleefully by tribalists and righteous imbecile psychopaths anyhow). To be even more clear, pretty much all of those self-blinding tribalist/arsonists do have small isolated little pieces of ‘righteous morality’ to grasp, as justification for them to do their weird and maniacal things – but morality is a WHOLE, not ever just a piece, let far alone the piece that happens to suit us the most at the time, for rationalizing self-flattery (that is justifying outright EVIL philosophy, intentions and actions).
When we challenge the parts of a complete moral constellation which are missing in any tribalist, they always grab for their precious gems and pretend you are saying these gems are invalid, therefore you are an ideological heathen/fascist and everything else you say can and should be dismissed outright.
But let’s just think for a moment about that very simple and frustratingly common interchange – which includes those outstanding and courageous people on the left and right who call out stupidity and failures of ethics and reason on their own side – because it is really important to realize that it isn’t even about tribe versus tribe, the most vicious battles are often within factions – the failure to endorse your own team’s stupidest ideas and orthodoxies will get you attacked like nothing else (because to a demented unprincipled tribalist – simple fairness to those who disagree is itself outright treason).
Some of my readers might find my insistence on talking about tribalism as if both sides are screw-ups and hypocrites, compared to their own stated highest aspirations very frustrating. I am absolutely not trying to flatten-out differences and especially historical contributions to the giant mess we all live in.
What I’m trying to do is introduce reason, to a whole huge range of discussions that we are now trained to engage in almost entirely emotionally. The really screwy thing is that I keep going after this logical angle on extreme passion (political especially) because I hate vicious cruelty and harm done to the weak (as both the old traditional worker based Left and the old Christian right always claimed).
Let me repeat that in a different way, because it is SUPER important. The emotions over reason approach that we take to our modern debates (the crucial reason everything stays fixed in tribalism, instead of working on community and consensus, like practical people-loving problem solvers) guarantees our society works hard AGAINST compassion fairness consideration and responsibility.
The problem is, this error is now so widespread it is very hard for young people to find a role model for a better approach, and it is also so basic, that everything downstream of it is corrupted by EVIL.
Left and right – once we drink this bitter poison of tribalism sanctimony and endless resentment, we become a part of a vast angry thing that wants to see great harm great done to faceless others – all because we have not adequately seen to the needs of our very own personal soul. Substituting a corrupting thrill for the simple solid strength which we all know our hearts are made for.
You ready for it? The big split – the only useful “us” and “them” distinction on the face of this planet?
Gratitude or resentment. That’s the split-point. Yeah I mean it, that simple, and it says EVERYTHING.
When we talk about community, culture and civilization we can be pissed about being ripped off, or we can be grateful for what we are given to start with, and then strive to make it all richer for everyone. (To be one step subtler about it, everyone has a mix of both, so perhaps I should really say we can learn to lead with, and put our main intellectual and moral weight on, either resentment or gratitude).
Of course – there are a TON of very good reasons to be pissed off right now! Please tribalists, bear with me a second here – you need to hear this more than anyone (and if you’re mad, that’s probably you).
Wokeism is exactly the same thing as white supremacy – EXACTLY – because it is the assertion that one model of understanding alone is correct and immaculate and all who disagree must be punished and/or suppressed. These are totalist, psychotic, narcissistic delusions held by fucktarded sociopaths (that would be us).
I mentioned in a recent piece, there is a total difference between someone who says “I am truly sorry that I...” and someone who says, “I’m sorry if I ever, but...” (which denies the acknowledgement of the wrong and the apology both, a hundred times worse than saying nothing at all). There is no less difference between someone who says “Thou Shalt Not Kill” or “Liberate the Oppressed of the World” and someone who says, “Except if they’re Muslims, or sexists, or we heard they are mean to a group that we’ve never actually heard of before, except to be offended on behalf of – then – bombs away.”
The reason I talk about both culture and WAR over and over again is because our culture wars have been used to justify the mass murder of millions of totally innocent people for a quarter of a century now. What we need to see more than anything else (again, left and right together) is that this pattern of murder means we are objectively not the good guys anymore (if we ever were), and we have no right to discuss the morality of those elsewhere, until we can break our addiction to mass murder for profit.
(Because if we do condemn them, we’ll probably proudly mass murder millions more without ever even challenging the assertion, let alone lessening our immaculate ethical ignorance).
I know, I know, those precious little fragments of emotionally compelling “Morality” we cling to, to justify our daily hatreds and resentments and self-pity are powerful, and the whole game is profoundly addictive. But what are we training ourselves for, when we bathe in constant resentment and contempt?
Do we, down the path of fury, develop more kindness, more modesty, more excellence and ambition to make positive things happen for others in the world? Or do we actually train ourselves to remain pouting five year olds forever, locked in tantrum mode! (Insist on being part of the problem forever).
The thing about anger, is that when we’re angry we actually don’t look to see who else might be hurt, whose pain we haven’t yet noticed. We don’t look to see how the world keeps changing since we first decided to be mad at it instead of grateful, which means we miss the constant deluge of evidence refuting claims we once thought true and hopeful, which have been conclusively disproven by accumulation of events since.
Down the anger path we disdain the best most humane parts of ourselves as weakness (yell-them-down, every day), and completely block our most important lines of growth for compassion, humility, greater understanding and usefulness.
So, ultimately – in the name of winning and preserving our super-precious outrage against the world, which helps us justify a continued pout toward the world as a whole (sometimes life-long) which is not a part of any definition of happiness strength vitality or usefulness I have ever encountered, we are training ourselves emotionally, year after year, to become the kind of people who can create nothing other than that outrageous world by demanding punishment for faceless distant categorical others to feed our precious seething hatreds (cheap catharsis at the expense of the greater community itself).
Which is to say, almost every form of popular western “Righteousness” which now exists, from hard left Marxist cadres to Manichean Opus Dei religionists – is drawing key strength and motivation from a dark side of the coin energy source which has always brought society to self-destruction and ruin – evil (functionally, not just judgy feelings).
No, this doesn’t mean there aren’t ideas remaining in many powerful texts on left and right which are valid and useful, it’s we the people who are self-training for invalidity and uselessness!
Now here’s one more key thing which came up in another superb passionate discussion with my thoughtful friend Ian the other day (so sorry we haven’t been podcasting steadily, I keep trying to find something halfway solid to stand on, the way I can in an essay – but that just ain’t the nature of a podcast – especially not in this demented moment – I’ll get over it, promise!)
Because we have all spent so many years arguing about our feelings about the world (often while being actively misinformed by a deeply corrupted media) it is incredibly easy, when we do try to talk about practicalities and objective reality, to slip back into a game of, yeah but who is the most “wrong” here?
Not on a level of planning and outcomes (or even proven motivations and conflicts) but back to that abstract ‘feeling’ level. Who is the most ‘like’ someone stinky from history, or who said something that sounded similar to something once said by someone stinky (you know the drill, all too well).
So here’s how a crazy intellectual anarchist left-libertarian (not about smashing good things but rather – insisting on voluntary participation in all things, rather than constant recourse to state compulsion) finally got dragged kicking and screaming into recognizing the unbeatable importance of civics (which is what got me to finally understand how important anti-tribalism really was – and economics, too).
It isn’t EVER about who you feel most upset about, it’s about how you meet in the square and discuss things openly and fairly, in order to come to a better understanding about one another. I must note that this does not and should not mean you’ll suddenly come to agree with one another (the way the proselytizing and self-certain have always assumed – “just shine the light and all will be converted”).
You might find many unexpected places you agree, but you might also just oppose one another on far better informed grounds, with more respect, engaging with the actual issues the other side considers important, instead of caricaturing them in total ignorance and then warring with pure emotionality.
Zealots who are certain of their own truth are ancient, but not more ancient than super powerful people trying to compel large numbers of less powerful people to obey them. That’s the oldest big trap of all.
The only way to achieve a society governed by people, instead of aristocrats who can buy corrupting unwarranted influence on political processes and thus completely override the influence even of all the people together, is for less powerful people to respect the basic rules of difference and discourse. Engagement is what leads to functional compromise. Refusing engagement is the death of a society which actively responds to the people – handing the whole thing over to the oligarchs to run.
I don’t say this vaguely, I mean history is full of examples of governments which worked for awhile, because they addressed popular will and helped advance the whole society, and then a generation or two later, governments with the very same family (or party) name, and well-heeled backers/courtiers who still say things which sound very similar to that old functional useful code, prove demented and destructive maniacs, emptying the national purse, wasting the wealth of generations on ego and folly.
We can get lost in an argument about the pretty words (these days, the ‘left’ and ‘right’ of things) or we can notice – hey, those ones were imperfect but trying – but those ones were trying to screw us all!
The problem with that approach is, we can’t enjoy our big sweeping angry emotional generalizations anymore (and especially the thrill of feeling better than the contemptible ones – designated however suits us best). We have to wean ourselves from the toxic fuel of constant resentment of strangers, and work harder on our own understanding and capabilities instead. What can we do with all of this?
For my generation (X) a special hatred for Reaganomics was extremely widespread on the left. I have offered my own economic takes on most of the twentieth century now over the course of almost a decade – but to put it very simply, cheating, which is what we in the west have been doing ever since Nixon dropped the gold (reality) standard, is not a sound basis for long term widespread prosperity – whereas doing all the hard work to make a robust productive foundation and then building something solid and well thought-out on top of that, does still work, as the Chinese have proven to the entire world in the last few decades (justly earning a level of admiration for that work and determination around the global South, which is orders of magnitude beyond our western awareness).
But if you hate Reaganomics, and really don’t think America needed a whole new class of Aristocrat investors further screwing-up the politics which was supposed to represent popular will (and decency!) you should hate Clinton even more than Reagan. Reagan almost bankrupted America with his gamble on investor trickle-down (why Poppa-Bush had to raise taxes, despite his “Read my lips...” promise.) but Clinton’s team ran with the worst of Reaganomics and enshrined it at the core of American finance.
You can like his rhetoric better than Reagan’s all day long if that amuses you, but if you don’t notice it was his job to undo the damage, and instead he doubled-down on it, you are an idiot (sucker, mark).
That is the FUNCTIONAL VALUE of the culture war, for the insane unprincipled maniacs who have been governing us, in a continual unbroken line since the assassination of JFK. Sorry, I know that’s a loaded referent and I do apologize, but I keep hearing historian after historian ending up there too, when they try to think about where western culture, and America in particular, took a wrong turn.
I won’t digress far today (because I have done many detailed posts on this stuff, and will again) but for those who look at how the modern versions of “The Great Game” for global strategic dominance have been played since the end of the second world war, the death of Kennedy represented the most malign and corrupting state faction of all achieving final (and to this day unbroken) dominance OVER all forms of elected civilian government. The government is a front. The secret war state sets policy, and presidents, with few exceptions, respond to those orders, then try to represent them as their own.
The reason we are so swept-up in emotional games that hundreds of millions defended Clinton for sexually abusing a young person who he had authority over (even though a few years later, a similar encounter would strike many of that same faction as a capital offence) is that the culture war is emotional entertainment designed to keep us feeling as if something is happening. As if our team wins sometimes, and those evil stinkers do sometimes, but the war continues, so we fight (mostly hate) on!
If I had to make a list of people who (correctly) condemned the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but then made excuses for the destruction and mass murder in Syria and Libya, I would have to include almost every person I know who ever called themselves a leftist. Makes me sick to have to say that, but it is a hard fact of my personal experience. To me, not one of them is a ‘real’ leftist anymore – they left the track of principle and awareness of the world and others aside for emotional satisfaction, decades ago.
I want to insist that there is still a left with both heart and brains, a worthy and principled “loyal opposition” culturally, at least, as opposed to just a seething horde of bitter ungrateful tantrum throwing narcissist neurosis-supremacists, but I keep insisting on objectivity and reality too. It is there, but it is tiny.
There isn’t a big team of good guys and a big team of bad guys, it’s two big teams of bad guys and in the west, it has been for longer than almost anyone who is still alive, has been alive. When a leftist calls a sincere conservative a fascist, what should happen is another leftist should grab their collar and say “Shut the f#ck up, you traitor, you make us all look like disgusting demented scumbags with that kind of talk. Go have a long think about what you did wrong, or we’ll pull your ‘left’ card and keep you out, asshole.”
Of course the right has lazy equivalents also, and also resorts to the cheap association trick, the ‘all ideas for public benefit are socialism which is communism which is Stalinism’ routine, is especially lazy and obnoxious (and common). They don’t run that objection to forty hour work-weeks with weekends off, pension plans, or workers safety – or at least, they wouldn’t, if workers in the west still had and could expect those good things we did long have and do in large numbers. Sadly, that’s a reality fail (many haven’t experienced the benefits the left once won for workers, ever), rather than an ideological one.
Again, let’s remember to thank Bill for that, not Ronnie – the huckster who sold you on fixing Reaganomics, and instead made sure no one ever could (trapped you in a lifetime of constant pillage).
W was a really destructive president. Used the dramatic moment, the weapons Reagan built, and the ultra financialized system Clinton’s team perfected, to destroy entire countries, for vast corporate subcontractor profits and to shift the value of capital and resources for our new Aristocrat’s world jeopardizing high-finance games. (The war in Iraq wasn’t just about keeping oil prices super-high, while American banks were collateralizing the Alberta Tar Sands, but it wasn’t not at all about that, either).
Obama was if anything, even more cynical than Clinton – ran against forever wars, the oligarchs and the infringement of rights in the patriot act, then renewed the anti-constitution patriot act (again, effective enshrining it) AND saved the bonus packages of the very same oligarchs who just destroyed the global economy, while stealing more money from black Americans than any president in history (and then followed up that shocking start by persecuting more journalists as ‘treasonous foreign agents’ (a lie in EVERY SINGLE CASE) than all other US presidents combined).
Thou shalt not what exactly? Liberate who from who exactly?
WE ARE THE FORCE OF DEATH – NOT DEMOCRACY JUSTICE PROSPERITY AND REASON. The simple horrifyingly obvious proof of this is that we don’t even have the expectation of any of those things in our own societies anymore, just fury and complaint and upset and tantrums and factions and games.
Principle. That most basic tool of civics. That most basic muscle of compassion and good-action. That most basic threshold of self-mastery and service to family and community, instead of just self, is dying – not everywhere – just in the west – which we used to think was the only anywhere that really counted.
So now let me take a moment to say something to my friends on the right, that they ought to have heard a lot more people of principle and reason from the left say many times, long before now (and would have, were the imbecile emotionalist hordes not drowning-out what tiny faction of sense remains).
What the right did to our economic system with Reaganomics, and the dishonest political left then institutionalized and made part of the substrate, the left did to the culture at large, with considerable political acquiescence and compliance from the corrupted political right.
The political right specialized in games that cheated the workers of rights and dignity, in exchange for a system of gambling and hopium. We don’t plan for long term outcomes, we ‘incentivize’ and hope the market looks after it. This is the real reason we’re so screwed up on fundamentals like rare-earths – the business has a low return, no one feels like putting up that much capital to make five percent – who needs it? Except of course absolutely everyone at every level of every industry NEEDS IT. We withhold a few hundred million, and thus jeopardize downstream trillions in manufacture. We don’t specialize in doing things that are helpful or even necessary for general wellbeing of citizens, our modern financialized expertise means we do only those things which are super profitable, like stock buy-backs to elevate investor returns without creating any new value whatsoever, and destroying century old businesses and firing everyone so we can sell the real estate holdings, or the big scam that screwed us all up in the first place – off-shoring production so brand names we recognize employ almost no workers in the countries which started them.
It isn’t unfair to say that our current western civilizational economic plan is to either rob a rich guy or win a lottery. I don’t mean we intended to end up here, I mean that’s how broke we are (and how stupid we remain, about doing the proven tested step-by-step construction of a whole and vital economy).
Most of Trump’s stated economic goals – bringing industry and production back to America, actually are valid aims and would bring benefit to workers in huge numbers. An honest democratic party that still represented workers, and not just university educated narcissists, would have done all that stuff many years ago – low hanging fruit.
The problem is that he is also wrong about what year this is, and the levers of power that he is pulling-on so hard now have far more chance of breaking outright, than bending the world as a whole (outside of the disgusting western lickspittles) to US will, as was for seventy five years not only possible, but common and assumed practise.
If only foolhardy plans based on stale-dated assumption were tribally skewed... but really really not.
The ‘individualist’ left has spent a half a century now insisting that right feelings will eventually become right action, without ever looking to see how all the idealist assertions worked out in practise. I mentioned awhile ago, there were feminist theorists in the seventies who insisted spousal violence in lesbian relationships was literally impossible, because that was a male thing, not about relationships.
Of course now that we all know a few lesbians and the culture doesn’t have to hide the way it once did, we understand such idealisms were themselves a grotesque ignorant dehumanizing sort of bigotry - pretending that an entire category of people fell outside the normal range of human feelings and behaviours, simply because of an abstract designation which felt like it had special political impact.
The Dunedin study was even more illuminating on these matters – the largest single population study over time in the modern west – revealed rates of violence are not significantly different for men and women, what’s different is that men are usually stronger, so male violence is far more often recorded as a hospital and police incident. This does not excuse any violence at all, this is just reality. Angry people who aren’t good at emotional self-regulation hit others, and we should work on that emotional maturity as a society, so we can all be kinder to each other. Hating a category (men) ain’t going to help it at all.
Again, are we looking for someone to yell-at, or do we want to make the world better for everyone?
In economic terms, the screwiest thing about Reaganomics was it unleashed a festival of turning real physical production capacity into liquid (paper, abstract) assets, which seemed to increase in value (and functionally did, so long as a US IOU was considered as good as gold – which was roughly half a century, it turns out – and what now?)
But the leftist trick for a full half a century now (that I can testify to personally) though in varying degrees and with varying levels of reason and obnoxiousness over time, is to set out an ‘ideal’ vision and just hope like crazy that these great intentions manifest. We put the environment on our wish-board, so when someone powerful uses one of those big sacred key words (with all the glitter) we vote for them, even when their entire plan is to put the solving of the problem into the hands of those who created the problem (financiers). Again, what I said about Clinton. If you hate Reaganomics and not him, you’re a sap.
Be clear. If you care about the environment and still trust globalists and NGOs to fix it, you’re a dunce.
The popular mass leftist vision (as distinct from intellectual freaks like me and my reality insistent fellow-travellers) is based on self-esteem without accomplishment, gold medals for attendance.
Meanwhile, in China and Russia and Iran and India and Brazil and Indonesia and Vietnam they are giving out gold medals for actual freakin’ EXCELLENCE, and plenty of them! Want to guess why? Because they are all working on the Chinese approach to advance, building infrastructure block by block. You need roads, you need power, you need schools, you need markets, but you also need HOPE!
Problem is, the left, which absolutely did conquer western culture over the last half century (as I say, with much key help from the corrupted political right, just as the corrupted political left reciprocated on economics) has not had a vision of hope, optimism and really grappling with a sensible plan for a better world in decades.
I mean nothing. Far more self-described leftists are now actually apocalyptic misanthropes who consider human beings a pestilence on the surface of the earth, than lovers of the workers, the poor and the bright future of thriving for all, as all boats rise on a sustaining tide of cultural and worker-built wealth.
No really, it’s actually even hard to write that old-style optimistic leftist workers stuff nowadays. It makes me feel like there should be an out of tune upright piano playing ragtime in the background, perhaps the sound of a distant gunfight, lands-sakes, grandpa, what century do you think this is?
The modern left is a self-satisfied sneer of disdain which encompasses the workers who were once the very soul of the left (scorned now, for that same half-century, in the name of self-liberation – counter-revolution). It has also now innovated ways to sneer at, even to the point of justifying the mass murder of, foreign people who fail to conform to our modern values – the fact that our modern values make us by far the most miserable and self-medicating population on planet earth is not EVER considered.
So we are left with a left which is bourgeois, snotty, racist, wasted, and supports lynchings – but considers itself the sole source and custodian of all contemporary morality. Nice.
No seriously, when we talk about theories and evidence, we really can’t keep insisting a social theory must be right simply because we find it emotionally precious. When it hurts people, that means we need a better theory, and this one hurts people, with almost the same psychotic “Forces of history” denial substituting as logic, as Reaganomics (market forces are a thing, but not a god-like thing).
Self is the point, self uber alles. (Again, so not left a starting place, it makes me want to scream). What we feel, what we want, what we crave, as individuals is sanctified as sacred, even though such completely subjective things cannot ever be shared the way an established philosophy or religion can.
The left in particular has transferred a complex of emotional relationships which are supposed to depend on the unique nourishment of relations with other people, inside the brain case of the individual instead. Huge numbers of us are burning out and going crazy, trying to be all the relationships we need for ourselves, but this really isn’t far from the forced subcontractor model of late stage fire-sale capitalism. Yes, some rare few do have adequate levels of hustle to handle every side of everything – but the whole point of family is to live better than that, and civilization, even more so. Why can’t we be cooperating, sharing, and thus making more with less together? (I swear the left once saw all that stuff).
Compared to the loss of incomes and dignity over the last half century, this might seem abstract, but when it comes to soul-shattering alienation, and finding the strength we’ll all need for recovering and rebuilding our foundations back to a solid reality-based footing, it is purest self-disabling poison.
We can’t make happiness that way, and we’re killing ourselves trying, with a recipe that doesn’t work.
The emotional underpinning here is the problem. Beginning with a foundation of complaint instead of gratitude, starts us off with relationship and compassion problems which can get much worse over time. Think about the functional outcomes, not the emotional drivers. Even if both resentment and gratitude are both semi-delusional states (arguable) one leads us to hurt other real humans we hardly know over abstractions we hardly understand, the other makes us new friends and gets us new insight and shared appreciation for the world, everywhere we go.
Functionally speaking it really comes down to a question of, what do you want to spend your years on earth collecting a great big sack of?
What makes me an especially weird lefty in the modern context is that I have had gratitude as a foundation pillar in my life ever since I was a mixed-up teenager and met the amazing woman who would ultimately become my wife. She saved me from a fate worse than death (my own screwed up head at the time) and gave me a reason for every growth and striving of which I’m proud.
So – when I think about who I was in my head before meeting her – what I thought I wanted and was – and I compare that to the uncountable ways that her love has made me want to learn and grow my usefulness to her, myself and the whole world, I am looking at a confused clueless idiot compared to an inspired and incomparably more capable man. (yes, still an idiot, but working on it, with duty foremost).
The modern left’s ‘sacred self’ is no more a functional social unit than the huckster speculator driven trickle-down economy. It’s a seductive lottery ticket on the wish board cheat, a path away from the proven hard work of getting over our petty selves, so we can find our truer more fully realized selves, as we learn them through our interactions of deep caring, duty and respect with others.
Can you be happy and single? Of course you can, and many are. Can you be happy without friends? Haven’t seen a single case of that yet. Doesn’t have to be a lot of them, you just need real friends. But of course, to have a real friend, you have to be able to be a good friend. Not a wish-board problem.
And you know what? You’re more likely to find people who will stick with you for years and decades if you bond with them over shared gratitude, than resentment. And you’ll have way more fun with them too.
So, finally, I have to say something important about the horrifying recent events.
Charlie Kirk was exactly the kind of guy we should all hope to have for a friend or for an opponent.
As I hope I have made clear (repeatedly) I call myself a leftist simply because I refuse to let the maniacal unprincipled hordes hijack the whole side, even if they are now the staggering majority.
I enjoyed Charlie Kirk a lot, watched hours of his interchanges over the years, and I especially hoped that his superb and principled approach, a combination of rigorous openness to all dialogue with firmness about his principles, would catch-on and spread widely. The (tiny real) left could use a few dozen Charlies, who could actually engage in the tough-stuff without name-calling and sneering (but alas, it has been decades, and when they do emerge – the sanctimony-first mass-left kicks them out!)
People who are cheering about Charlie’s killing are disgusting pigs, simple as. Fanatics, insane lynching death cultists. (I can tell you already, they are exactly the same scumbag hypocrites who screamed blue murder about Afghanistan and Iraq, then suddenly changed to excuse Syria and Libya, because when a black man destroys civilizational states, that must be an enlightened thing, right?)
These are people without fundamental compassion, because they base their philosophy on resentment. They prefer a sullen pout to a gasp of wonder (and sure enough, just like your mom said, your face will stay like that). There is no possible vengeance which can be wrought on such self-destroying fools which will exceed the hell that their own delusion traps them inside, endless impotent fury, life-long.
Just imagine being locked in a straight jacket in a padded cell inside your head, lined with disaster clippings and funny bits of string connecting them, screaming your heart out from morning ‘till night, for the rest of your life. Now multiply by millions.
The trick is, shifting the people back to each other, giving the kids the hope of one another again. Bringing them away from the cults of fury and back to a vision of the future where they have a positive hopeful useful role, other than the bearer of our civilizational guilt (none of which retribution they in any way earned).
If the modern left has no hope left to offer, it should crawl into a corner and have a good long think until it stops pouting. Do better. EARN IT. In the meantime, having spent the last decade protesting against due-process and presumption of innocence (me-too and BLM) and then celebrated a festival of destruction even of habeus corpus, under the covid madness, we are all of us going to be reaping the whirlwind awhile.
No, it won’t be fun. But I was saying stop that, back when those idiots were first scattering the seeds – on both teams. And I want my friends on the left and the right to think about something in this very tense moment. There were people on the left and right who saw and called-out these errors long ago.
You can’t make a healthy society out of narcissistic sociopaths, and you can’t make an economy function by handing it over to a bunch of coked-up high-stakes gamblers. Planning, son, it’s called planning.
It is also beyond obvious, and yet completely missing from our modern civil (ha ha) discourse.
What we can do is step out of the tribalist snare, be left or right but be humane and principled FIRST – so that we remain a part of the big team that is trying to make this whole precious thing work, and don’t just resign ourselves to being one more scumbag asshole, so at least we get our fair share of something.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For any who think I am over-stressing the importance of the utter and complete falsity of our entire economic model (for the last half a century) please check out the world’s single greatest authority on the matter (there while the sausage was being made, and stunningly articulate about the repercussions for us all).
Ultra-Insider Economist Michael Hudson talking to the outstanding Prof. Glenn Diesen (who is going from strength to strength of late - must watch stuff! – So many truly brilliant and uniquely informed thinkers bring their very best for him)
And while I’m on Diesen – for my friends who still haven’t recognized the Guardian is now a warmongering anglo-supremacist rag, have a listen to what the former head of the German army and NATO itself has to say about the long and convoluted history of Western treachery and provocations leading up to this madness!










Here is a superb concise description of the real conflict which our culture wars are promoted so very hard, to completely obscure! (Of special interest to Canadians and those in all US and British vassal states - we just happen to have the foul privilege of both self-injuring servilities at once).
https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/two-systems-are-before-the-world
More crucial context (Stoller is beyond outstanding on his beat) https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/on-jimmy-kimmel-its-time-to-destroy