TO RELIEVE THE STRESS OF THE ANALYSIS, DON’T FORGET TO LAUGH!
Syria, Colorado, Guns, Fanaticism, Mutilated Babies, God, Assad, Putin: A Common Thread. Greedy, Manipulative Oligarchies.
Abstract: Just a relaxing essay before another heavy duty one on thinking. A running commentary on recent events. The squeamish and easily offended are invited to go read something else.
They may not appreciate the mix of current events, explained by an overall abusive violence with far reaching subconscience… Even the plutocrat in chief of New York City, Bloomberg, agrees with me that soothing words are little, and action is needed. It is a question of replacing a wholesome order of violence by something more civilized, in other words, more advanced. Enough with deliberate mental retardation, wrapped with a smile and a prayer.
One has to learn to laugh about the unbearable, or make it otherwise interesting, all the more since it is unbearable. Only through laughter does the unbearable become bearable.
Laughter and play blossomed to make interesting skills that it is necessary to muster. Empathy is not everything. Empathy works if and only if it is connected to reason, and that implies little tolerance for weapons, outside of law enforcement, be it local, or global.
Learning to make a religion from reason means learning not to tolerate superstition, except when it is completely, absolutely and definitively innocuous. It does not matter if the religion is supposed to be honorable. Of course, the Aztec religion was most honorable, and I would have been the first to bear witness, lest my chest be cut open by those priests from hell.
Horrific is horrific. Rational lesson number one. Reason rises from emotion, and innocence from a baby’s face.
Having empathy for babies means no tolerance for sexual mutilating them. Whereas having empathy for the Middle East means socially mutilating Allah. Don’t worry about Him: He is a big boy.
Lesson therein for Syria. Retrospective lesson for the Jews: did that self mutilation they swear by, make them more tolerant of Hitler’s abuse?
Yes, philosophy is war, and its armies will not rest. Only thus can civilization can push back plutocracy down the hell hole where it belongs (Pluto is also a big boy, related to the preceding one, as scripture attests; let them have a party together, where they belong.)
BETTER TO LOOK AT IT, AND LAUGH, THAN NOT TO WANT TO HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT:
Most look at sad, or tragic events around the world, and they feel negative emotions: sadness, fear, dejection, rejection. They feel the pain, and that’s great: empathy is important. However, dangers are entangled with this. One of them: becoming a parody of caring, to cover up one’s enormous corruption.
Bill Clinton’s enormous corruption does not have to be presented again. But when one sees Dr. Bernard Kouchner to be corrupt, one has to pinch oneself. Kouchner was a founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders, an indisputably excellent organization providing free medical care for those who otherwise would not have any, worldwide. Kouchner was famous for having landed once in Somali with a rice bag on his shoulder, media in attendance. A decade or so later, Clinton did the same in Haiti, for his own personal glory, rice bag on the shoulder, media in attendance.
The danger is that, once it becomes clear that many “charitable” organization are, first full of charity for themselves, everybody becomes all too cynical.
Another danger is that people either become indifferent to the input, the pain of others, or learn just not to care, be it only because walloping in misery is not something the brain likes to do too much of.
Hence the true humanist will learn to laugh. Not exactly laugh of the misery of others, but laugh of, say, the logic that leads to said misery. A logic of the unsaid, a logic of moods which thrive best, when they do not have a name.
DOES THE USA LOVE OF GUNS COME WITH HOLES?
Another flurry of death: 71 shot in Colorado in a movie theater. USA citizens love to say they need guns to protect themselves. OK, true, they have to protect themselves against other USA citizens, no small feat, apparently. What USA citizens obsession with guns is telling us, is that the citizens feel that no law nor reason will bring them safety, only shooting will. So they are ready to shoot, or be shot. And they kill, at a rate 15 times that of Japan, where guns are severely outlawed.
The USA: a sad case where sadism (shooting) is brought to bear, only through the acceptance of being shot (masochism.)
Guns are not really a debate in the USA: money rules, and, as long as the gun plutocrats want people to have guns, they will. The sheep is too busy bleating, to be thinking.
In all plutocratic matters, one plutocracy can hide another. As long as USA citizens will be terrified of each other, they will not take part in big demonstrations, as people do in Europe. So the ultimate plutocrats, at the very top, are happy to have a country where the rabble shoots each other. It gives the top plutocrats a pretext and excuse to do the same, and raise the level of overall violence, and injustice, be it legal, constitutional, or not.
(Since the decision “Citizens United” of the Supreme Court Of the US, plutocrats and their organizations, are pretty much free to give as much money as they want, under cover, to anybody they chose, hence giving a chance to their rich boy Romney. But that of course is violence, legal violence much more carefully directed.)
HARDER TO EAT PEOPLE WITHOUT WEAPONS:
Once there was a Japanese cannibal in Paris (supposedly a friend of Mick Jagger as related in “Too Much Blood“). He wanted to eat his Dutch girlfriend, so he pointed an old gun he had purchased from organized crime, to the back of her head, and pulled the trigger. The venerable equipment misfired. He tried again, a few days later, and this time the old, tired bullet kicked into action, just enough to pierce her skull and rebound all around inside her head, killing her instantly.
Morality? Sagawa was a tiny weak guy with an inferiority complex (but with a rich father who paid for top lawyers). He selected his victim for her “beauty and health“. Without the gun, he could never have killed her. Guns are enablers. It is harder to eat people, without weapons, in the sense that, before eating them, one has to capture or kill them, and man, without weapons, is pretty much not just defenseless, but rather innocuous.
Reality is stranger than fiction. Condemned to life imprisonment as criminally insane in France, the cannibal was later extradited to Japan, where he was found “sane but evil“, and released (!). He is now a successful author and artist in Japan. A media celebrity and authority on mass murders and cannibalism (even represented on TV engaged in mock cannibalism), he has suggested he may return to his culprit activities. However, he will have to find a gun first.
Second morality: In Japan (where cannibalism is not a crime, and some have advertized body parts recently, so they claimed), clearly, if cannibals have fun with women on TV, it’s not the intensity of Japanese prosecution that make criminals behave. What makes them behave, is the intensity of Japanese prevention. It’s no doubt harder to purchase a gun in Japan than in France (with millions of hunters, with big boar killing rifles, France is armed to the teeth as the Wehrmacht found out in 1941-1944).
DON’T CIRCUMCISE THE SUBJECT: SEXUALLY MUTILATING CHILDREN IS A NO-NO:
Speaking of amputating body parts… A court in Cologne, Deutschland, found that sexual mutilations of children were… sexual mutilations of children. Wow. Civilization, tell me, how long did that take? Wrote the German Court: “The operation does serious bodily harm and only males old enough to consent to it freely should undergo it.”
Some hospitals in Switzerland, appraising the Court’s wisdom, decided to order their doctors to stop mutilating their children, just because their parents want it. Break the cycle. The philosopher will not argue here that what starts with priests dressed fancy torturing children, ends in Auschwitz. Some other time. But violence justified against the innocent is the underlying principle. (And don’t forget those who target deliberately innocent families with drones: that too erects the principle of justifying the unjustifiable, and also leads to Auschwitz; the fact it does not do so right away is immaterial to the logic.)
It is funny that Judeo-Muslims, who profess total subjugation to their furious dad-in-the-sky, the original Yahweh (YHVH), or its clone Allah (2,000 years later), have the arrogance to believe that His creation was so imperfect that He needs to be corrected with the knife every day.
Either Yahweh-Allah is great, or he is so sorely mistaken that only knife play can set Him right. Figure it out. In the meantime, calm down, and drop the weapon, before you mutilate some more, sexually, or not.
IS ALL THE JEWISH-MUSLIM SOAP OPERA RELATED TO SEX MUTILATIONS?
It is well know that those who were abused will abuse in turn. The propensity to violence, intellectual, or physical, is inherited. Intellectual violence is proper to man, it means creatively thinking, it’s a good thing… If we define the best of humanity as good, as we should, because that’s what we are, at our best.
Physical violence can be good, or bad, depending. But certainly teaching it to babies, and calling it love and most sacred, with religious baboons dressed fancy and acting respectable, delivering it, is exactly what civilization does not want to do.
One could actually argue that German Jews were supine, in their vast majority, and as a body politics, when Hitler rose to power, because they had lost, with a body part, the ability to be outraged. How? When the ones one respects most visit gratuitous violence on oneself, and one gets conditioned to respect this the most, when the local Hitler comes to visit violence on oneself, one also religiously accept that.
This is psychologically related to SS officer training, which involved piercing kittens’ eyes with their fingers.
The same holds for Islam, war religion, if there ever was one, but one, more generally related to making military dictatorship optimal. To be sexually mutilated early, I would respectfully suggest, make Muslim more apt to live with grotesque dictates such as the following in the Qur’an:
“Allah wants us to obey whoever detains power: “O ye who believe! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and obey those of you who are in power.” (Quran’s fascist principle, Sura 4, verse 59).”
THEOCRACIES ARE PLUTOCRACIES, REMEMBER THAT IN SYRIA:
Modern technology is incompatible with too much power into too few hands. This is what Obama forgets, when he plays the brainy assassin and decides who, innocent or not, he is going to have killed, worldwide.
This is also the problem with all the shootings in the USA. And it’s no accident so many shootings happen in South West Denver, Colorado (Columbine high school, Aurora, etc.) Not again! says the LA Times.
Why not? It’s a demonstration of reason: same causes, same effects. It’s full of guns, there, differently from Manhattan, where guns are outlawed. In Colorado, if you are 15, and you want a gun, you know where to find it, starting with your parents’ bedroom: cool, man. In Manhattan, tough luck.
South West Denver is also full of police. I resided there for a while, in the richest area, Cherry Hills. Once I got stopped there, just because the officer found my face, my hair or my necklace intriguing, not fitting the call of the local wealth. The police is good at enforcing racial profiling, but race don’t kill people, guns do. Once, after shopping, having to do something else I worried: the car was full of bags in full sight. My sister in law sneered:“Don’t worry, this is Colorado! People don’t break in cars, because they know they would be shot!” In Colorado carrying one hundred fully loaded guns in a car is completely legal. If I narrated all my potentially lethal bruises with Colorado society, it would take another page.
The mayor of New York, the plutocrat billionaire Bloomberg, asked instead of the two people – President Obama and Governor Romney – talking in broad things about they want to make the world a better place, okay, tell us how…Soothing words are nice, but maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it, because this is obviously a problem across the country…I mean, there are so many murders with guns every day, it’s just got to stop…. 34 people get killed by unlawful guns, every day…This is killing people every day, and it’s growing and it’s not just an inner-city, east coast, west coast, big city phenomenon.“
[Quoting a plutocrat approvingly, a proof of open mindedness!]
More than 100,000 citizens get shot with guns every year in the USA. This level of violence presumably make the average USA citizen more inclined to shoot back (starting with Iraqis and Yemenites).
It also inure the population of the USA to violence, and so it cares not what happens to the climate and biosphere. (Although the USA produces directly only 25% of the world CO2 production, it controls much more, through its worldwide plutocratic networks, as when Clinton became hysterical about the European Carbon Tax, and threatened to ally herself with Putin and other goons to do something violent about it.)
VIOLENCE IS A GLOBAL MOOD:
There are tipping points in global psychology: see how the Arab Spring progressed after an illegal street vendor was allegedly slapped by a police woman in Tunisia (she denies it). But it can also go the other way: after the Nazis, fueled by oil men from Texas, launched the Second World War in Spain, in 1936, one thing led to another, and violence erupted everywhere (for example plutocratic, militarized Japan invaded China, and the giant fascist USSR attacked tiny democratic Finland).
In any case, it’s impossible to tolerate arbitrary weapons and arbitrary levels of violence, if one cares about one’s survival, even if one lives on the other side of the Earth.
This is the sense of the anguish about the “Islamist republic of Iran” having nuclear weapons: Israel crammed with nukes is bad enough, we don’t need two. (OK, I am perfidious, Iran calls itself “Islamic”, not “Islamist”… but still praying to Qur’an S4, v59.)
All the Muslim dictators, have, since the Qur’an was written down well after Muhammad’s death, used the Muslim Fascist Principle. It is the milk of dictators, and as long as Arab Spring People have not thoroughly understood this, they bark to a sand storm.
Thus, if the aim is progress, it is crucial that the regime that will succeed the rebellion in Syria be secular. Dictators including the assassin Assad, have been riding for 13 centuries Islam’s fascist principle, that all good Muslims obey all dictators. Enough. Unfortunately, what we have now in Syria is an army fighting an army. A secular, democratic minded authority is not as much behind the rebellion as it should be.
Western Europe got rid of the Middle Ages God-Is-great theocracy, truly a plutocracy masquerading as a theocracy (while still claiming to obey Roman republican law). Time for the Eastern Mediterranean to do the same.
While circumcising Allah’s work with a knife, all the time, his self proclaimed fanatics seem definitively to underestimate His capabilities. Allah can handle been thrown out of politics and society. Yet, I am sure Allah, should he exist, can take care of himself. I am a believer in Allah’s self reliance!
YOUR SURVIVAL IS MY BUSINESS:
Some will whine that it’s not the business of the West, what the Orient does. Well the world now is smaller, much smaller, than France in 1800. From now on, all wars are civil wars, whether one likes it, or not. Damascus is in our neighborhood, not just Aurora, and the problems are related: in both cases, oligarchies have been (mis)leading people by the nose.
The Roman empire, spread for centuries, from Portugal to Iran, and Scotland to Southern Egypt. During that age, the average Roman citizen had a level of creatures’ comfort not equated until the end of the European Middle Ages, a millennium later.
The present day Middle East was the richest part of the empire, it was called its “Oriental Part“. The Islamist invasion ruined it (not right away, but in the fullness of time). Now from the Occident to the Orient of the (ex) empire, a catapult (so to speak) can send an object in a few minutes. One world.
Relevant anecdote: Rome was founded greatly on the reign of reason and tolerance (meaning that reason tolerated what was innocent). However, Jewish fanatics rebelled against Roman order in the famous Judean war. During the siege of Jerusalem, Roman artillery bombarded the city with thousands of pig heads. 2,000 years ago, the Romans already found the Jewish fanatics ridiculous. (Now I have neighbors, and, although very nice and modern, they obsess about pigs… although they don’t even like Jews, as an ethnic group… both notions are crazy… and intimately related!)
In the end, all what the Jewish fanatics achieved, after the insane war of 70 CE, and a similar revolt later, was the dispersion of Israel. (Although the Non-Christian emperor Julian allowed again the construction of the temple in Jerusalem, shortly before his assassination (363 CE), the hostility of the Roman state to the Jews would be amplified in Christianity.)
One can compare with the situation in Gaul: the populations there were even more rebellious than the Jews. But they did not cling fanatically to their old superstition. Instead revolts tried to out-Rome the Romans, by outsmarting them with more reason, and more progress. So the Romans did not massacre and disperse Gaul (after the initial rebellions crushed by Caesar). After five centuries of ever more insistent revolts, coups, “Gallic empire”, etc. the Gallo-Romans allied with the Franks, creating the West as we know it, the official successor state of Rome.
WHEN THE GANGES IS THE NEW RHINE: HOW SMALL THE WORLD HAS BECOME:
A nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India would be, automatically, a war between fascism and democracy. Democracy would have to intervene. So democracy intervenes now. Lest some in China got fancy ideas.
And this is why the French republic is such a strong ally of India. The new French socialist government decided that, besides German and British delegates, Indians will sit on the French defense steering committee. One world, democracy elaborating future weapon systems and strategies.
Whereas the French republic frontier used to be on the Rhine, now it’s from the Falklands to Malaysia. it goes without saying that Great Britain and the USA are fully aware of this (even if Merkel aligned herself on Putin about Libya: all that gas…)
SUPERSTITION FOR BREAKFAST, OR HOW TO NOURISH CIVILIZATION WELL:
Neither Islam, nor Christianity are civilizations. Never were, never will, God willing. they are just superstitions, thinking of themselves as civilizations. They were the cover-ups military aristocracies used to claim they were exactly the opposite of what they truly were (read Nietzsche on this angle, about Chrsitianity).
Some fear that, as the West comes all out against Wahhabism (the Saudi religion often described by primitives as “Islam” by an abuse of language), a clash of civilization would ensue. However a clash between a superstition and civilization, is not a clash of civilizations. It is the clash between an elephant, and a swine.
Civilization is used to do away with primitive beliefs. The tradition was not invented yesterday. Once a Roman general, under the republic, actually a supreme commander, an imperator, charging at the head of his troops during D Day, stumbled out the surf, and fell face first on the beach. That was definitively a bad omen. And not just in the old Roman religion,
However the general laughed, grabbed the sand in both hands, and loudly exclaimed: “Africa, I hold you!”
The campaign was highly successful (the exact opposite story had happened to Athens a few centuries earlier, causing the annihilation of her fleet and army in Syracuse. Superstition can be costly!)
The story of the republican West, overall, is not that of the reign of superstition (yes, republican, in the sense that Frankish kings were elected, and that the republic never formally died under the Roman empire). In the West, the pope was always viewed as independent and separate from political power. And sometimes the relationships between both were really bad, for very long, such as when the Franks let the popes macerate with the hated Lombards (“long beards”) for 150 years.
The secret of the West is in plain sight: the triumph of intelligence and reason, (partly under the cover of crucifixion,) for more than a millennium. Intelligence and reason are best served by democracy. Crucifixion had a double meaning, of course: a reminder that the world is not about circumcising difficulties, and that, sometimes, nothing beats full frontal horror. Charlemagne let his underlings use the cross as a terror weapon.
PLUTOCRACY ROSE & FELL BEFORE. TIME FOR CIVILIZATION TO ERADICATE IT AGAIN:
When Christianity was useless, the Franks did not use it. So Christianity was used to spread Franco-Roman civilization, far ahead of the limes (as the Romans had done). Yet, inside the Imperium Francorum (soon to be “renovated” as the Imperium Romanum again), Christianity was not imposed anymore than Judaism, Islam, Paganism, or Charlemagne’s style polytheism.
Things degenerated into feudalism for military reasons: in the Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Century, the Imperium Romanum of the Franks was simultaneously invaded by savages from the North, The South, and the East. Charles Martel’s trick of endowing the empire with a very heavy cavalry evolved into a caste of professional killers, born and raised. Charlemagne used the heavy cavalry to conquer swiftly where Romans legions had floundered, and Caesar only dreamed of.
A knight, his decades of training, his special giant, huge but swift horse, his squires, his special weapons, and heavy armor, the world’s best steel, represented a colossal spending (that no other power in the world could ever afford; Iran for a few centuries had heavy armored cavalry. but they were not a caste). Thus that European aristocracy (rule of the best) grew, propped in no small fashion by much lower, or exemption from, taxes.
All I can say is that there was a good reason for this. The Nord Men, the Avars, the Magyar, and the Sarah Sons (“Saracens“) were defeated and domesticated. However, that was mostly done by 1,000 CE. Although the reconquista had a long way to go in Italy, Greece, and Spain, in Northern Europe, the aristocracy had lost its reason for existing in the first place. But it kept going. How?
The old aristocracy, truly a plutocracy, oppressed Europe for more than a millennium, its power resting on lower tax rates than the commons, just like it is the case now.
In the USA the tax rates paid by the hyper rich are incredibly low, and many are actually able to pay none at all (with many tricks, such as borrowing against shares). All other industries pay tax, when a transaction happens, it’s only normal that the Lords of Finance would pay one too. The reasoning why they should not are well known: they were held to justify the prerogatives of the so called “nobles”, the plutocrats, for more than a millennium.
However the French republic just passed a financial transaction tax. It becomes effective August 1, 2012.
Plutocracy is an emerging property. Out the many, and the much, comes out something completely different. The financial plutocracy, we learned in recent weeks, is committing fraud on a scale never seen before. From money laundering drug money for murderous Mexican drug mafias, Jihadists or Iranian Islamists, to cheating on 350 trillion dollars of deposits (yes, 350, 000 billions).
My bombing runs over theocracy do not imply that there was never something grand and right about past religions. If nothing else the violence in Christianism and Islamism are unequalled. Therein their utility to the military aristocracies plutocracies. Jokes aside, the civilizational aspects connected to Judeo-Christo-Islamism can be the most inspiring as works of man: just visit stupendous Isfahan. It will nearly turn you Shiah for a day. Certainly Shah Abbas, who built Isfahan into a magnificent capital, did more architecturally than even the so called “Sun King” of France (besides Abbas was even worse of a superstitious fanatic: he had the Georgian queen Kelevan tortured to death for eight years to force her to become a Muslim).
And it’s not just savasges from the desert in a past far away. In Russia three girls are threatened with seven years in jail for singing an anti-Putin prayer in a cathedral. A smart white Russian came onTV, and declared that, in an Islamist country, their heads would have already been cut. So why can Christians do the same? After Assad, may be the West should do Putin?
The past justifications for fanatical variations on the Jewish god have become obsolete and counter effective. Civilization, ever more formidable, has moved on. Civilization, even more than the Devil, is in the mental details, not just in the grand flow of transgalactic intelligence with its transluminal vision.
Plutocracy is to civilization what cancer is to individuals. It proliferates, becomes metastatic, and corrupts all tissues (for example religion in the Islamist area) . It’s a real war: just watch what is going on with Syrian plutocracy. A regime of patented assassins, conspiratorially connected to the best Western banks, is not just fighting Jihadists, but also thousands of warriors for democracy and liberty. The dictatorships in China and the USSR Russia have seen the danger, and feel the empathy.
The plutocratic phenomenon has ruined many a civilization, now it’s ravaging ours. Nothing really new. Same old, same old. History teaches how to fix it: don’t hesitate to go to war, and chose your targets well. And, yes, it is first a philosophical war.