The Dark Night, Luke Ford and Human Goodness: Marc Gafni

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

Marc Gafni writes: Saw The Dark Knight a couple of weeks ago. Luke Ford and myself had agreed to dialogue on the movie.

There are some huge things that Luke and I disagree on about how to live in the world.
In some regards that might be an understatement.

The movie highlighted some of those and that is what made it a good topic to talk about.

Feel free to listen to the dialogue here.

For now however I want to just touch on two or three basic points that emerged from my viewing and from our conversation.

First;

The Joker. I told Luke that there was a part of him that reminded me of the joker.
Or at least the Joker archetype.

Some of these ideas were expressed by Luke in the first half of a long conversation we had on July 3rd 2008.

For the Joker, all of reality is a joke. The joker is in some sense a mystical master who seeks to strip away the veneer of civilization. The Joker exposes bourgeois morality; he reveals and mockingly revels in the false piety of spiritual leaders and religious establishments, indeed of all establishments and all leaders.

The joker is the jester in the court of King Lear or the “Badran” in the Chassidic court.

But unlike these two jester figures who seek to prick egos in order to provoke human grown and evolution, the joker seeks to destroy both the court and all the people in it.

For the Joker, as for Luke, “people are all creeps with clay feet” and their job is to expose them, for the sake of anarchy, clarity and truth.

Now truth be told, that is only one side of Luke. One of the things I have learned of late is that Luke really is not like the Joker at all. Indeed when you hear his story it is dramatically different then the impression one might get of him were one to reconstruct the web sources that comment on him.

It is more like Luke has a joker strain in his personality that sometimes – in the past – in my humble view – got the better of him.

But that was then and this is now.

In his heart Luke loves to be of service. Ethical integrity is enormously important as a value to Luke and ask him what he is most proud of and he will tell of the lives he saved
when he broke a story about the aids virus in the pornography industry. Luke is a person of integrity; there is a code he follows. He will not break his word in the context of his code – even when it is to his advantage.

What Levi and I have huge disagreements about is the content of some central parts of his code. What he thinks of –as a post modern blogger – as fair, ethical and in Integrity, many of us- but me for sure – think of in much different ways.

Second:

What I love about Batman is that the Joker is fooled. The joke was on him. The Joke is on the Joker. Sacred divine laughter affirming human goodness overcomes the shrill and empty laughter of narcissistic nihilism.

When the Joker rigs two boats with explosives and offers each boat survival if they will but blow up the other boat- in the end both boats refuse – both the boat of convicts and the boat of ordinary people.

Paradoxically in that moment the people do not need a Christ like hero to save them.

They are their own superheroes, their own Christ. The joker thesis that people are

basically creeps is exposed as a lie.

Now for Luke this is the weakest part of the movie as his view of human nature is as he writes and says fundamentally cynical.
My view of human nature is certainly not all sweetness and light.
That would not be a noble view of human nature; it would be simply stupid.
Rather I embrace what I understand to be the kabbalistic view of human nature.

There is in this understanding, what I might refer to as three levels of human nature.

Level One is civil and decent and good. {J.S. Mill. Jeremy Bentham}
Level two; right beneath level one is dark and creepy. For Luke this is the essence of the human being. {Frued is in some passages clearly with Luke on this}
Level Three is gorgeous, beautiful, decent and good. {The Kabbalist and all other great mystical traditions}

For Luke the essential person is located at level two.
For me the essential person is located at level three.

Not that I have not met more then my fair share of level two behaviors. Ultimately however I have great hope and love for almost all people, for I know in my deepest heart realization that level two is but a temporary if terrible aberration, clouding a clearer manifestation of man’s more true and higher nature.

LUKE FORD:

I’m not into comic books, even when they’re called "graphic novels."

I’m not into super-heroes and movies based on them.

I went to see "The Dark Knight" last week because Marc Gafni wanted to do a dialogue with me on the movie.

The film tries to make a variety of philosophical points, all of which I thought were dead wrong.

"Knight" is both more optimistic and more pessimistic than I am about human nature.

A key plot points revolves around two barges rigged with bombs and each barge has the chance to survive if they blow up the other barge.

Only a fool can believe that human nature is fundamentally good (tens of millions of innocent people were murdered in the 20th Century) and only a fool can be thrilled by art that portrays people as basically fine.

On the other hand, the movie says people can’t handle the truth. They need role models without flaw.

That’s ludicrous. People make better decisions when they have better information.

I say the average person is able to see that people can be heroic in one aspect of their life (say Martin Luther King’s leadership role in the struggle for civil rights) and be a loser in another (King plagiarized his PhD thesis).

Heroes are not super-human. Heroes don’t have to be lied about publicly to keep their heroic status. Heroes are all around us.

Every person is a role model. Whether we like it or not, we all influence other people. Every choice we make affects other people.

The movie says society needs human sacrifice and that salvation comes from above.

These notions are repugnant. We don’t need to commit cannibalism, we don’t need to eat the flesh and drink the blood of the god, to be saved. Nor are we helpless to our sinful inclinations. Through our deeds (guided by God’s law), we can create a good world.

We don’t need to live in delusion. We don’t need to demonize good people and hold them responsible for our own sins. We don’t need to be saved by irrational faith. We are not helpless. We can handle the truth. We can handle the task God has given us.

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To fight Trump, journalists have dispensed with objectivity

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

Justin Raimondo writes in the Los Angeles Times:

Are the rules of journalism being rewritten this election year?

My local newspaper, the Sonoma County Press-Democrat, is so clearly in the tank for Hillary Clinton that I no longer take pleasure in my morning read. Trump’s acceptance speech, for example, was covered on the front page with two stories: on the left a straight, albeit somewhat judgmental, account of the speech, and on the right a “fact check” that disputed every point made by the GOP nominee. Clinton’s speech was covered with three front page stories, with headlines describing her nomination as “historic,” “inspiring” and “trailblazing.” A relatively mild fact-checking piece was relegated to the back pages.

This transparent bias is a national phenomenon, infecting both print and television media to such an extent that it has become almost impossible to separate coverage of the Trump campaign from attempts to tear it down. The media has long been accused of having a liberal slant, but in this cycle journalists seem to have cast themselves as defenders of the republic against what they see as a major threat, and in playing this role they’ve lost the ability to assess events rationally.

To take a recent example: Trump said at a news conference that he hoped the Russians — who are accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers — would release the 30,000 emails previously erased by Clinton’s staff. The DNC went ballistic, claiming that Trump had asked the Russians to commit “espionage” against the United States. Aside from the fact that Trump was obviously joking, Clinton claims those emails, which were on her unauthorized server during her tenure as secretary of State, were about her yoga lessons and personal notes to her husband — so how would revealing them endanger “national security”? Yet the media reported this accusation uncritically. A New York Times piece by Maggie Haberman and Ashley Parker, ostensibly reporting Trump’s contention that he spoke in jest, nonetheless averred that “the Republican nominee basically urged Russia, an adversary, to conduct cyber-espionage against a former secretary of state.” Would it be a stretch to conclude from this description that the New York Times is a Trump adversary?

The DNC emails, published by Wikileaks, reveal a stunning level of collaboration between important media outlets and the Democrats. Former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz sought to silence NBC’s Mika Brzezinski, who had found fault with the DNC’s role in the primaries. The emails have headings like “This must stop.” Incredibly, NBC’s Chuck Todd agreed to act as a go-between, even arranging a call between Wasserman Schultz and Brzezinski. Which raises the question: Why was a major media figure taking his marching orders from the Democratic party chair — and how did this affect his network’s coverage of the Trump campaign?

The DNC emails also show that Politico reporter Kenneth Vogel sent his copy for a story on Clinton’s fundraising operation to the DNC’s national press secretary, Mark Paustenbach, prior to publication. Politico has since apologized, but Vogel has his defenders. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple said Vogel’s “prepublication generosity” was meant to give “the people you’re writing about … the opportunity to rebut all relevant claims in a story.” One wonders if the Washington Post does this for the Trump campaign. Somehow I doubt it.

Since last summer, Politico has been vehemently anti-Trump, and it’s only getting more extreme. It’s run several stories linking Trump to Vladimir Putin: “Why Russia is Rejoicing Over Trump,” “GOP Gobsmacked by Trump’s Warm Embrace of Putin,” “Donald Trump Heaps More Praise on Vladimir Putin” — and dozens of similar articles. The gist of these pieces is that Trump’s stated desire to “get along with Putin,” and his comments on the costs imposed by our membership in NATO, mean that Trump is essentially an agent of a foreign power. A recent article by Katie Glueck on Trump’s hacking joke said that Trump “appeared to align himself with Russia over his Democratic opponent” — as if he were a kind of Manchurian candidate.

Of course, Politico is not alone in what was once called red-baiting. The Atlantic also weighed in with Jeffrey Goldberg’s “It’s Official: Hillary Clinton Is Running Against Vladimir Putin,” and a Franklin Foer story in Slate was headlined “The Real Winner of the RNC: Vladimir Putin.” This coverage smacks of the sort of McCarthyism that we haven’t seen in this country since the most frigid years of the Cold War.

Any objective observer of the news media’s treatment of Trump can certainly conclude that reporters are taking a side in this election — and they don’t have to be wearing a button that says “I’m with her” for this to be readily apparent. The irony is that the media’s Trump bashing may wind up having the exact opposite of its intended effect.

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What’s Wrong With Hawaii?

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: Hawaii is a reliably Democratic state in Presidential elections so it is seldom exposed to the kind of media criticism given Republican states, such as in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas.

But, wow, in the 21st Century, Hawaii sure is an underachiever, especially compared to the high hopes invested in it in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, in the Urban Institute’s study of federal NAEP test scores by state shown below, Hawaii’s students do worst of all 50 states when adjusted for demographics. Hawaii’s racial mix isn’t that different, as first glance, from Silicon Valley’s, but they don’t test like Silicon Valley kids.

Hawaii was made a state in 1959 as a Cold War strategy to create a showcase state with nonwhite and mixed race political leaders, such as the war hero and future Senator Daniel Inouye. A goal was to persuade nonwhites around the world to accept American imperial leadership by demonstrating that leadership ranks would be open to nonwhites.

LBJ got Congress to put up a lot of money to make the East-West Center at the U. of Hawaii, the home base of President Obama’s mother for most of her career, the American equivalent of Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University. At the East-West Center, Third World students from leadership backgrounds, such as Lolo Soetoro from a well-connected Indonesian family (Lolo’s father was the top indigenous petroleum geologist in Indonesia), mingled with and married American students.

Oddly enough, the U. of Hawaii’s most important influence on American power turned out to be not abroad but back at home, where a product of the enthusiasm of the era for race-mixing as a demonstration of liberal empire became the U.S. President.

But nobody in the U.S. much thinks about Hawaii anymore. Heck, it took me about a half dozen years to figure out how our current President is a direct product of the Cold War goals behind the Hawaiian statehood that was so celebrated in the media (e.g., the movie version of James Michener’s breakthrough bestseller Hawaii was the top box office hit of 1966) when I was young.

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Donald Trump – The Inarticulate Orator

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

Therefore, it has come as a recurrent shock to the press that a man who doesn’t seem even conventionally gifted in English has liberated for democratic consideration so many forbidden ideas.

How did that happen?

First, the artlessness of how Trump frames his proposals exposes the extremism of the globalist ruling class’ emerging ideology of borderlessness.

For instance, when Trump proposes to build a wall, the establishment replies, in so many words, that the entire concept of national borders is outdated and immoral. When Trump says the U.S. should keep out Muslims, the elites reply that it is unconscionable for Americans to have a choice in who gets to immigrate.

Tipsy on their own rhetoric, the mainstream unintentionally reveals how crazy open-borders doctrines are becoming in a century when the U.N. predicts the population of Africa will quadruple to 4 billion.

But second, it’s also because Trump is a salesman without a silver tongue that he feels the need to avoid the usual eloquent obfuscations and boil ideas down to basic realities. He’s just not verbally adept enough to put over the kind of high-status bilge that has colonized our thoughts.

Seven hundred years ago an English friar named William of Ockham gave his name to the traditional Western prejudice that the simplest feasible explanation is most likely to be true.

Six and a half centuries later we went to the moon.

Lately, however, we haven’t really felt all that inclined to figure out how the world works. It’s more important to demonstrate our mastery of socially preferred locutions.

For example, one pressing public-policy question of the day is: What are the main causes of Muslim terrorism? Now, an Ockhamite might surmise that one useful answer is:

Muslims.

But the respectable answer in 2016 isn’t supposed to be anything that blunt. In particular, any acceptable explanation must include the six-syllable word “Islamophobia.” Read on.

COMMENTS AT STEVE SAILER:

* I can tell you by personal experience that Trump talks like a typical New Yorker. Straight to the point with zero tolerance for nonsense and muddy thinking.

* It’s as if I were reading the cultural values of Ellsworth Toohey made real. Donald Trump is not Francisco D’Anconia, he is Howard Roark. That Trump can see the vacuity ( and nakedness ) of elite discourse is a wonderful thing for those who notice reality.

* Race is like Wegener’s theory that Latin America fits in to the side of Africa: so obvious that most people thought it couldn’t be true.

* Scott Adams has done a large amount of damage control for Trump, explaining how Trump really isn’t off-the-cuff or impulsive, but calculated. It’s amazing the Press/Left/Cucks haven’t figured out his style yet. Three points:

1. Trump sees and works towards big-picture end games. He wants a grandiose, beautiful thing—fame, a huge apartment complex, a huge golf course, a huge casino, a gorgeous model girlfriend/wife, the presidency, NAFTA overruled, immigration ended. So he sets out with the goal of getting that desired thing, no matter how outsized the ambition seems.

2. Trump doesn’t want that object after a long delay; he wants it as quickly as possible. He looks for inefficiencies in the system where people waste their time. He thinks people who wait for years just one shot are losers: he wants as many shots as possible for success when he wants it, and lets everyone else judge whether he’s good enough—he always thinks he’s good enough. He doesn’t cut corners, he cuts out the fat. So instead of building his real estate portfolio slowly and making sure critics were assuaged and he built an “image” of a trusted developer with “taste”, he put a building in as quickly as possible to his own liking, because that’s what he wanted.

3. To Trump, the details of getting there are less important than getting there, and he will stroke as many egos as possible to get there. Details are unimportant unless they impede his progress; e.g. he will let a trusted associate worry about how many ladies toilet stalls there are, unless it becomes a feminist loggerhead and he needs to step in and make promises.

That also means that, on an unimportant detail, he’ll reverse course if it hurts him. That’s why he’s not bothering on details of his Mideast policy or his immigration plan or his NAFTA plan—they are end games, and he will get there how he needs to , the details are unimportant, and he knows that losers are the folks who pay attention to the trees and miss the forest. Leaders think big and get smaller people to do the grunt work for him.

Trump’s off-the-cuff style is designed for the 2nd and 3rd parts—get him to the promised goal of #1 as easily and quickly as possible. But the goal is the key, the vision. Trump has a vision –a grandiose vision—of walls, immigration ending, NAFTA redone. When Trump is done with Presidency, whatever will be said of him, they will say he got things done, and the country was different afterwards.

So if Trump’s goal in a Putin negotiation was an arms deal, and he said something too insulting off the cuff, he’d immediately reverse course and possibly apologize (so long as it didn’t weaken him) because the goal was not yet met, and the means to it were unimportant, so reversing his style wouldn’t matter to him. That’s what the Press isn’t getting—Trump’s style is a calculated, battle-tested means to his ends, his visions. It’s a tactic, not a strategy.

Hillary has no vision. She has nothing more than her desire to win the white house because, darn it, she worked her whole life to be the first woman president and get some graft. In Trump’s mind, she’s a loser because she has no grandiose goal outside the presidency and has worked her whole life for this one shot, and then she’s just a rich man’s puppet in the end. That’s a loser. Every speech she makes and word she utters is party of her strategy—which means she can’t reverse course that easily if the strategy isn’t working.

Trump’s words are like an MMA fighter who switches from jabs to kicks to takedowns when needed versus different opponents, all with the end goal of being champion. Hillary’s MMA style is to continuously use the “proper” footwork and technique all the time, which works on most because she is on steroids, but can’t handle adaptation.

* Funny how, if you go to a top university or upper middle-class neighborhood, you see people of different races and cultures getting along just fine. White people and Asians in Vancouver get along just fine. What do they have in common? That they are well-educated, civilized and intelligent. The whites and Asians in Vancouver tend to be both average. Race doesen’t matter. Nationality doesen’t matter. What matters are individual people and how conscientious, intelligent and reasonable they are. This is what matters. From what I have observed, intelligent and well-educated people of different ethnic backgrounds get along just fine. The reason why open borders “doesent work” is because plebs of all races tend to be barbarians who judge each other based on irrational prejudices and are so intolerant that they are willing to use violence on each other instead of just being civil and tolerating each other. So maybe you’re right, Sailer. Maybe open borders doesen’t work, but that is not because open borders “can’t” work, but simply because most people are not up to haut-bourgeoise standards of civility and tolerance. Don’t blame the “doctrine” for the failure: blame the shittiness of most human beings.

And the elite is “pushing” globalization? Funny that a lot of national elites are actually suffering from Globalization and want a protected market. Riddle me that? Globalization has made only a minority of the rich richer. Most of the gains in wealth happened to the middle classed of First World nations and the poor of Third World nations. The biggest losers have been the lower classes from developed nations, because those jobs got outsourced to the Third World, and many rich people who lost their businesses when the markets were opened and they had to compete against more formidable foreign competitors. Most of the rich are actually against Globalization. Trust me, they don’t like international competition. They would much rather face as few competitors as possible and charge more for what they produce. Yes, the very poor have been hurt by globalization in the First World. But don’t pretend like “globalization” hasn’t benefitted Americans: Americans today have a significantly higher PPP per capita than they did in 1995 even if you adjust for inflation.

Also, Globalization is not something that is being “pushed” by anyone: it is the result of massive advancements in communications and transport technology over the past quarter century. The World has simply become smaller than it used to be. Deal with it! Complaining about this won’t change that.

* Trump comes off as cogent and highly normal in his weekly appearances on O’Reilly and tonight was no different — although after this past week of media tattooing we’re now supposed to think that he’s insane.

But the transcripts don’t read nice and smooth. His verbal tic of self-interruption of nearly every sentence is off-putting in print. But it works as a conversational style. Only partly accurate to describe him as “inarticulate” because he’s been launching memorable rhetorical broadsides for a whole year and dominating the national political conversation.

I go back to the Pacino Vegas boss character in Ocean’s 11 reboot: “I move fast and I slice.”

Trump slices in words and deeds. That’s why he’s hated.

* Steve, this really hits the nail on the head. It is incredibly strange seeing conservative intelligentsia fall into the ‘smooth talker’ language as well. A politician who is articulate should be the highest virtue we demand they seem to suggest. If they lie to us, that’s ok, they do it with such great style. Look at the crease!! It seems the entire intellectual class would happily submit to an articulate invader who could put together a flowing sentence lasting upwards of a minute. Perhaps there is a strong correlation to bookishness and a subconscious craving for dictatorship….or maybe it does boil down to a desire to separate themselves from the unwashed masses.

* Anyone who writes all day thinks the social hierarchy should be based on articulateness. The funny thing is, what counts as articulate is just a set of cliches and tropes that jibe with conventional wisdom. Thus, Dan Quayle is considered moron because of his occasional grammar goofs, where Jesse Jackson is a silver-tongued advocate for the oppressed, even though Jackson’s grammar is far worse.

* Trump is one of only a very small handful of people who can access the greater public via the airwaves. This means he has the ability to project a message of his choosing into to public discourse that is unfiltered by the media. Once it reaches critical mass, the media spin is rendered ineffective. The media’s greatest trick is excluding what or whom it does not like. Much of what if produces is junk but it does not matter because there is no competition.

One of the great lessons from this election that nobody is learning, or really relearning, is that the airwaves are public and we would be served by having much greater public access. Trump and his billions short circuited the regular process. This used to be a staple of leftist politics a la the days of Ralph Nader, but that is now out of fashion. The left made its peace to serve multiculturalism and now has to live with it. It should be noted that the Bernie-Butt-Bros movement to overturn the campaign finance laws is really about preventing certain groups from having their say but they are not trying to open it up for everyone, something that would be very dangerous for them if someone on the alt-right (like Trump) were ever to gain access.

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Steve Sailer Tweet Storm

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

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