By The Way

Here's a poll. I know you like those.

Who out there considers me naturally modest? Instead of, say, an egotistical son of a bitch?

Or am I just being obtuse again?

End Canine Slavery

AHA. The Herald-Leader, local McClatchy branch, has revealed Award-winning dog escaped.

I hope this dog finds somebody worthwhile to take care of him. See the dog's head & face in the picture? Does that look like fun to you?

So the owner is desperately trying to find her award-winning dog because it's her rainmaker. This is the equivalent of slavery: a hunting dog is at least kept alive while performing that job they were bred for, while "award winning" dogs have to spend most of their lives in activities that make no sense to them. Both are tyrannical, but this is another case of "Trotsky was a better Leninist than Stalin." It's bad enough that for many millennia we've domesticated dogs from wolves and kept them captive, which is something most "natural" communists don't do in quite the same way. Someone who's helping her dog hunt squirrel by allowing the dog to direct the hunt is someone true communists want to claim as a "close relation," at least, as equal partnership is that personal relationship communists cherish most. And people who spend a lot of time forcing others to serve their will declare themselves our enemies.

By the way, it's been said that "BDSM is contrary to anarchist principles and an effective bar to an anarchist way of life." (Remember in this sense anarchism is a part of that "natural communist" tendency that a Leninist could understand only hypothetically.) Will somebody out there please explain that opinion, so we can have that much of it in writing? (I mean writing done by myself, as clearly most of that is beneath attention.) Then your own readers can Like what you say (or not, whichever is better for the cause at that time) and thus spread your ideas. With enough of that your chances of being selected as a member of the "equal rights for all" conspiracy increase.

Yet y'all in general should mind your manners, as we've figured out that we don't want to wind up like Fred Hampton and his family and friends, and have come up with ways to avert that (or die trying). Natural communists such as (adult) anarchists ain't people it profits you to fuck with.

To Belabor The Obvious...

I can't imagine a nation with a culture that has not been successfully out-thought and programmed by its "elite." That's what "civilization" is. What gets problematic for the "elite" is when they out-think themselves. Forgetting that the way to keep their power is to duplicitously manipulating those they oppress, instead they treat in that way their friends, relations, and other social peers -- or even often themselves. Remember that someone who can be struck by conscience is of only minimal social power, or thereby is persuaded to relinquish any but minimal control by the self: that is what "submission" is.

Woe betide the powerful person who believes and/or practices their stratum's ideology they strive to enforce upon the poor. What worse thing can happen to someone than losing or surrendering control of one's own mind and life? That shows you've been persuaded to bullshit yourself. To the extent that if you were already powerful or had the potential to be, you've revealed yourself to be incapable of exercising that personal power properly -- if you manage to keep any of it at all. In this respect your fellow "Athenians" are doing you a favor by not beating you to death. But is it any wonder that monks and nuns died in miserable droves from nursing plague victims, something no person of consequence would contemplate, when that keeps down the part of the educated citizen population who are unable -- perhaps too stupid -- to be trusted with themselves.

E.g., the only psychotherapy the elite can afford to indulge in, without some kind of winking and nodding that are necessary when one is being taught something deemed very important, is to preserve one's social power by swindling the many of theirs. Imagine an emir or emperor, or vital person of their class with connections to others, who has been educated and manipulated to surrender completely at the earliest opportunity. No successful "oppressive conspiracy" has even tried to tolerate in their siblings the kind of nymphomania they encourage in those peons they intend to use as prostitutes. Either society thereby becomes inbred and uncomfortably socially entangled, or sections of these segments are triaged out to make room for fresh blood and new money.

To maintain the position of conspiratorial masters they must always remember that they're conspiring together, albeit each for their own advantage. And to remain in the Club one must acknowledge one's own capacity for mental jiu jitsu (or worse) and advertise a certain relish for it as a word to the wise. To let it slip that you take what you teach others seriously will make it likely that your social peers do that shit to you. The Club too must be culled, after all.

Even to an anarchist, properly considered, voluntary submission is a sin. To remain free one must not act like a slave. That's what fascism is: a means of inspiring one to sort oneself aside, or inspiring others to render you at least useful.

The inability to volunteer for slavery is a prerequisite for not winding up a slave yourself. That's what freedom most frequently is. Too bad that only a random few in every generation are capable of thinking in those terms about themselves: the culling is necessarily relentless and ruthless. Thus a sense of honor must remain "among thieves," and a society's ethics must be the kind the "best" will profit from most when they don't participate in it themselves.

St. Augustine was obviously a has-been, or maybe a never-was, to have devoted so much energy to trying to persuade others of his own class to join the slave religion or caste. To perpetuate it you've got to learn to avoid tasting it. Don't Use The Product. This is the practical meaning, regardless of intent, of teaching about Nietzsche and Foucault: if you don't immediately grasp that even society's ways of thinking are set up to facilitate control by (and participation in) the Inner Party you don't deserve to be included.

Big Brother is your bestest friend when your worst enemy is yourself: one culls best when one culls oneself. Room 101 must be staffed somehow, and they might as well enjoy it.

Don't be poor Winston, is the message.

Those who do not display rigid ethical self-control, whether or not they bother to practice it themselves, perhaps should be programmed to self-destruct. There are certain things that just are just not done, or that one must never be caught at. See for example an example of how one purges oneself in Judaism.

Busy Old Bugger

Google Fit tells me I burned 2198 calories today, ~500 of them walking 6.54 miles in 17,547 steps, not counting the steps I took not carrying the cell phone around, such as ~240 calories pedaling determinedly to nowhere and whatever calories "strength training" burns. I don't think today's caloric intake will exceed 2500 calories, so going by the numbers I might have lost a few grams. Indeed the scale in the men's locker room says my weight's decreased two pounds in the past couple weeks, surely largely because of the dogs' increased need to march me around (Nina in particular seems to have goal of 1.5 miles a day); I'm trying to eat a little less but in that respect my self-discipline will probably always be remiss. ('I have to walk a lot: you've seen me eat.') I might yet make my goal of getting down to 155# by Xmas. (It's ony 3 more lbs., why not be optimistic?)

As to my other physical goals, it seems I'm doomed by inexorable heredity and by age-diminished androgens to never quite "turning into the Hulk," as my baby sister puts it. For one thing my biceps just don't want to get much bigger: I do get stronger but it doesn't look like it, and it's taken 2 years to go from 40# barbell curls to 60# without much pain. (One reason I don't get BDSM: pain is for people I don't like, which naturally rules out me and anybody I put up with more than strictly necessary for my survival.) And I'm still frustrated that my bust ain't increasing enough, though some progress is visible there; yet posted photographs show my upper back develops okay and my shoulders seem a little broader. I should have started this shit like 40 years earlier. But still, for a guy my age in my neighborhood I'm in half-decent shape, like they haven't told me I'm diabetic yet. I'm considering doing a month or so of more intensive body building before too long if my budget allows for buying creatine -- it's usually more fun to buy better liquor -- and, assuming I keep my visceral fat in check, I plan on wiling away part of the depth of winter working on "details" like my abdomen, calves, and gluteals. (Every middle-aged pervert should have a nice firm booty.) I'd rather increasing senescence not involve excessive debilitation, at least. At least not physically.

As for everything else, what is there to say? I hesitate to publicly post my senile sexual fantasies (though those who are interested know how to reach me), and I doubt anybody will really care that this week's reading concerns how the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 played out. (Till Hitler made his worst miscalculation, if Hitler can ever be said to have calculated anything.) There just ain't much about my life that strikes me as anything anybody should give a damn about. Let's face it, I'm boring. Very few people have it in them to care whether I live or die, let alone what's passing through my damaged little brain at any given time. Those few things that happen during my day that aren't (AFAIK) illegal get posted to Facebook, along with whatever my view of whatever current events have been happening happen to be, and the only people I really fear rejection by are those who keep dogs for me to befriend and exercise with. What more can there be? I've got no money for anybody to scheme over, I can't imagine anybody woud ever want to see my senile self naked let alone take advantage of it, and my mindset is still so far beyond the pale that whether I can be a person like other people will always be an open question. (I think of myself as a freak from outer space, and I'm naturally charitable even to myself.)

As for me in general, well, at least I'm no longer old, ugly, crazy, boring, poor, *and fat*. So bite me.

Keep 'Em Marching

[Click photo for larger version.]

By that more complex graphic I'd say the ideal for a society on the scale of "the West" would be #16, libertarian socialism, after a slow (i.e. not Great Leap, maybe 2 generations) progression through social democracy. In general my idea would be closer to the lower left corner, but I don't see any way for the USA to get there from here without a major worldwide population reduction: if our body politic gets proportionally much smaller and if our society gets any nicer to our "broad masses" than say Israel is to its Jewish citizens we'd risk being conquered by a nastier regime with a bigger military, the way the USSR beat the Nazis.

In fact one of my proposals involves a larger standing army & navy, instead of letting so many un- or under-employed Americans become mentally & physically lazy "couch potatoes" who do little every day but overeat, watch TV and consume intoxicants. For one thing, historically it's been the Army Corps of Engineers that led the way in building the infrastructure we have that now needs repair or replacement, and it would probably take something very much like military discipline to get enough people to actually help do it.

In general don't see any better way then gentle compulsion, i.e. giving poor people a much more secure & purposeful life in uniform than out, to keep our people productively occupied now that we have no need for a large industrial or agricultural base. And part of that would be that to advance in grade you'd have to be physically fit and attend academic courses as well as those training & refresher courses directly related to your MOS. I'd also require some kind of national service after high school, for the same reasons those countries that do that do it.

I credit my brother-in-law for this insight: his & my sister's strategy to keep my youngest niece on track was to see that she was too academically and athletically busy to get into the kind of shit I did as a teenager. I thought it was a bit much then, I am an anti-authoritarian at heart, but I must admit now that the kid's almost 21 that their strategy seems to have worked well enough. So, broadening my perspective, I've become convinced that that kind of "benevolent despotism" is necessary to keep America from eating itself.

If nothing else we've at least got to keep the morons marching. Because, as that niece said when she was 17, "people are too stupid for anarchy." Hell, for the past 8 Presidencies we've been too stupid to manage representative democracy.

(Oh hell. This was not originally intended to be more than a quick paragraph. I sure do go on.)

It Lays Like A Rug

It's been so long since I've tried to have a real conversation with anybody that I've lost whatever knack I had for interacting with my family. As if I ever had one: I don't recall ever really hitting it off with anybody I wasn't fucking, which categorically excludes my family (as far as you'll ever know anyway). Yes, that was a joke. "What was?" Oh just skip it. ... It's eight months later than (above). I'm preparing to go visit an old friend or two, one I bored silly on the phone for 6 months in 1981 and one maybe one guy I've known online for 20 years but never met. These two have been my most loyal buddies, if you can call it that, for several years, the others having disappeared or gone into middle management. If there's anybody I can relax and communicate with these two are it: they've both had several periods of social Otherness and they've always been willing to admit being acquainted with me. Ain't that something? Anyway. About this medium: I've never finished even a 10-page very short story because I've always approached writing like an adolescent, waiting till I was required to as in school assignments or till inspiration struck me as in my feeble attempts at poetry. This is not the way one makes significant contribution to the Western Canon. It's not that I have nothing to say, just that I'm remiss at getting out anything but occasional scraps. Perhaps trying to be more "professional" about writing, even scheduling regular times for it, would help; that's worked since last summer for going to the gym at least. We'll see.

Rachel Dolezal, Bruce Jenner, and Political Idiocy

I woke up this morning to discover (among other things) a Morning Mix piece in the Washington Post "summarizing" the Jenner/Dolezal "controversy," which I will now elaborate on, and from which the majority of the essays I will cite are linked. ("Reinventing the wheel" on this would take more time than I have today and in any case on a planet of 7 billion people that's been crawling with H. sapiens sapiens for over 100,000 years "total originality" is a rare thing indeed.)

First I'll paraphrase very closely a sentence from Zeba Blay's recent essay in the Huffington Post: 'Transsexual identity is a concept that allows men to indulge in womanhood as a commodity, without having to actually engage with every facet of what being a woman entails -- discrimination, marginalization, oppression, and so on. It plays into sexual stereotypes, and perpetuates the false idea that it is possible to "feel" a sex.' Note that I am not equating biological sex with psychosocial gender: it is transsexualism that does that, by "forgetting" that it is possible to be a feminine person, and even in some societies assume a "female" social-sexual role, while having male genitals. Note also that among "the left" I am not alone in this: I haven't found, nor could I come up with, a better elucidation of this position than that put forth by the radical lesbian-feminist Janice Raymond in her book The Transsexual Empire.

Properly speaking these linked issues are not left/right matters, but rather (as "right-wingers" are quoted as saying) an issue of objective fact, of simple true/false. Bruce Jenner is in fact not a woman, and Rachel Dolezal is in fact not Black. It's unfortunate that "rightists" are the only people being quoted as agreeing with me, because such willingness to play make-believe does indeed paint those called "leftist" as fools and show how strong the tyranny of "PC" on those who stand "left-of-center" in fact is.

Don't get confused: on the vast majority of other issues involved in the "left v. right" debates the rightists are in my opinion simply wrong. And only an an idiot would deny that rightists have their own version of PC: for example for a rightist to stand with me in upholding the idea of strict separation between church and state and point out that the Consitution of the USA is a strictly secular document would today get someone who claims to be rightist called a "RINO." Republican PC declares that the USA is "a Christian country," and a Republican who "refudiates" that dogmatic assertion would be a long shot indeed.

And I must admit that Rand Paul -- with whom I disagree with on practically every other issue of his campaign -- is in fact correct when he states that among the effects of "the War on Drugs" is in fact to unjustly deprive racial-minority American citizens of the right to vote (and also to hold political and governmental offices, though I haven't yet seen him go that far), which I'm sure will cause problems for his campaign. I believe that if you push most white self-described Republicans hard enough they'll reveal that they do in fact believe "the Negro" is a born criminal, and anyway is not smart enough to be trusted to vote "rationally" (as if most Americans of any race are, which is questionable). Of course one of the right wing's pet crusades -- which to his credit Rand Paul is willing to be "flexible" about, "the Defense of Marriage" -- depends a great deal on the tendency of most Black church-goers and preachers to be heterosexist, but that's an issue for another day. Perhaps it's enough for Senator Paul to be publicly heretical on only one major Republican issue: he clearly needs the support of one of the two "major" parties, because it's a fallacious "truism" that third-party or independent candidates can't win (because nobody with any "sense" will vote for them because the media pundits they let do their thinking for them declare that third-party or independent candidates can't win because nobody will vote for them), and Rand Paul's hunger for power is too blatant to be denied. (As is Rachel Dolezal's, for that matter.)

Anyway. These recent "controversies" concerning Bruce Jennner and Rachel Dolezal baldly show that facts are simple things it's stupid to deny, and that too much of American public political debate from most "major players" consists of self-evident idiocy. And one need not be a rightist to point this out, any more than Rand Paul championing the right of black ex-felons to vote makes him a socialist. It is a good thing that not every rightist can be an idiot all the time.