Thoughts in Defence of Prudery

Sex is one of the greater desires and pleasures of life. People do not need sex for their own survival but are willing to place sex and love above their own survival as tales of boys who would go to bloody wars to impress the objects of their desire attest to. Sex then is one of the major human desires.

Sex is a desire of animals (yes, I am aware that Humans are mammals but there is a fundamental difference hence the distinction between animals and humans is made in defiance of normal taxonomy) as well but the focus is not individual pleasure but procreation in all but mammals and apparently only dolphins engage in it for pleasure instead of procreation. Humans then are distinct in enjoying sex.

But one also asks, why are the limits placed upon such desire? We live in an age where the seeking and attainment of pleasure is viewed as a good in of itself. If sex is desirable and pleasure should be maximized, shouldn’t we eliminate the restrictions on sex and unleash our animal desire and enjoyment? The answer is that we are humans who are rational actors and who can appreciate not only our own pleasure but the other person. Love is a desire for the other person. Their body might be a means unto pleasure but the relationship is the core of love and the physical pleasure is an auxiliary to it.

The emphasis on immediate physical pleasure leads to actions that cauterize the ability to build up a different type of pleasure. There is a type of pleasure that is being in the presence of a person whom you desire but without any physical stimulus you feel pleasure. The pleasure comes from your relation to the other person. The person is the desire, not a physical aspect. This may give an almost (and sometimes) physical tingle but the power of it leaves any physical aspect in awe.

The lack of available sex seems to be the problem for those whose focus is on immediate pleasure. Consider which video seems the most exciting. Note that the videos are Afrikaans as the goal is that the tone and actions are what is looked at, not the specific words.





One observes radically different tones. One focuses on the physical bodies of females while the other depicts the relationship as a partnership of two individual personalities. The actions of the people in both videos likely resulted in sex but the approach to it and the meanings attached to it are radically different. One depicts sex as a pleasurable activity with an emphasis on the physical. The other depicts the relationship of the two people and their joining. The other focuses on the relationship.

The dryness of the second video is predicated on the excitement of overt sexuality. The preferences for the videos likely will reveal that disproportionately large numbers of men like the first while women like the second. This likely results from the differences in male and female perceptions of physical and emotional pleasure. Men focus more on the immediate physical pleasures as there is greater neurological pleasure from the physical while the emotional is not as endowed. Females have the reverse. These are generalities and exceptions certainly exist. There are men who have managed to focus on the emotional while some women are obsessed with physical pleasure.

The physical and emotional are both essential elements for human beings and the ability to appreciate one and not the other is true dryness. It does little good if one may contemplate the finest relationship when all around you is dust but to be surrounded by the physical with no emotion is to be lost. We are human beings, not lab rats in a behavioralists study nor beings of pure spirit. We are as C.S. Lewis put it well, amphibious creatures in between pure spirit and pure matter. We feel both emotion and the physical, we desire both company and solitude. What we desire then are often many contradictory things an we prioritize among them.

Human beings are also unnatural beings in that humans alter the environment around them, including the human environment. Our physical nature urges immediate physical pleasure while our emotions are dissatisfied by such things. It is the marvel of our humanity that we have managed to rise above our physical desires by love. Love may be a social construct, it may not be. What is clear that love allows us to focus on the emotional side of pleasure which is deeper. The social restrictions placed upon sex allow love to flourish without the risk of the physical obsessions uprooting it before the physical can be integrated into a combined pleasure.

If the social restrictions are not inherent to animal nature? Then let us thank our unnatural state for the ability to enjoy a pleasure beyond the pure physical. These social restrictions allow the two pleasures to form into one structure that enhances both and that reinforces each other. The reason for this is long forgotten in the mists of time. With the demand that all must be justified by pure logic, the forgotten reasons were unavailable to defend those restrictions and the emptiness and dissatisfied lives we see now are the result of the losses of these inhibitions.

Thoughts on Idealism

I wonder at the great and little crimes of the age and wonder at the perpetrators. The motivations are usually clear enough overall that the wonder is only the initial phase. The greater question is the observer. There are usually four sides to a conflict. What one side sees, the other side’s perspective, the independent observer’s views, and finally what actually happened. With a complex world, any conflict is decided mostly by the views and support of outside forces based on what observers report. Why do observers report as they do? We live in an age that prizes idealism as an end in of itself.

Let us take the case of Darfur. What is occurring is almost universally considered atrocious and most at least offer lip-service to calls to end it. What is not being asked is the reason for the conflict or its relation to other similar conflicts in the same country. One observes the idealistic outcry over Darfur but heard non over the similar conflict in Southern Sudan where Black Christians and Animists were being massacred, sold into slavery, raped, and generally mistreated by the Sudanese Islamist government. There was some outcry but it came from the Christian human-rights organizations. There is incomparably more outrage now that a smaller number of Black Muslims are getting killed.

When speaking with an idealistic young campaigner attempting to raise funds for the UN peacekeepers in Darfur, he was offended at my strategic analysis. I viewed the priority to be a comprehensive strategy that would take long to implement but would save more lives in the medium and long-run. The suggestion was taken to indicate a lack of caring about the situation. The effort to raise funds for UN peacekeepers was unlikely to produce anything more than a slight reduction in the death toll. My view was that idealism was nice but idiocy is morally reprehensible.

But Idealism is more than that. The foreign diplomats, reporters, and actors in the Former Yugoslavia believed that the Serbs were viciously trying to recreate the Holocaust when they had so grievously suffered from the real one. Idealists did not understood the language of Serb concerns in Bosnia as it involved the extreme suffering Serbian society had endured under the Turks. To Westerners that simply seemed like ethnic hatred and idealists are trained from birth to despise hatred and racists. To non-idealists, they saw a reasonable connection between the Bosnian Muslim government’s praise of the Ottoman Empire and desires to re-impose those policies. As most people act, they transform the object of fear into one of hatred as a psychological mechanism to strengthen their resolve. To idealists the Serbs were paranoid thugs who had to be defeated.

That defeat would come at a high price for whatever Serb was left under foreign rule. The Slovene government deprived Serb citizens of the right to vote. The Croatians chose to expel a million Serb citizens from their home (hence the founding of the Republica Srbska Kraijina) while the Izetbegovic government in Bosnia posed a severe concern for Serbs. Izetbegovitch praised the old Ottoman Empire and condemned the new Turkish state as atheist, a complaint commonly made by Islamicists. The other actions of the Bosnian state in regards to minorities were not encouraging and the Serbs decided that the risk was too great to remain as part of Bosnia and seceded to form the Republica Srbska. The breakaway Serb state was seen as aggression by the idealists of the world who believed the (English language) affirmations of a multicultural, democratic, and secular Bosnian identity.

Idealists, who get their information in English as befits good observers, believed the affirmations of the various new Balkan states. The propagandists of the new states had found a way to play upon the idealism and naivety of the reporters. The suffering of the Bosnians Muslims gained the world’s attention and idealists declared their intent to involve themselves in Balkan affaires as a result. They condemned the partial siege of Sarajevo and the internment camps run by the Serbs. They saw no problem with the massacres of hundreds of villages by the likes of Nassir Oric and must have thought the Croatian and Muslim concentration (run far more harshly than their Serb counterparts) were no problem. Idealists pick a side that is idealistic and will not deviate from it based on petty things such as evidence. Aggressive questioning of the right side is seen as the utmost corruption.

Idealism seeks not to improve the world but to be idealistic. It is a self-perpetuating system that provides a great ego to those who are idealists and are not forced to see things on the ground. Idealists listen in English and rarely know local languages (they are cosmopolitan after all) thus their first recourse is to English language statements made by one party. Their second means is by acquiring interpreters that have absolutely no connection with any warring party despite all accusations otherwise. The usual means employed by journalists and diplomats is to rely on the judgment of those who have gone before them without re-examining the perspective.

The protesters of 1968 who caused so much societal upheaval were idealists. They viewed authority as inherently oppressive yet they saw no problem cooperating with the highly disciplined and hierarchical Viet Cong when trying to work their idealistic plans for the overthrow of American society. LBJ was an idealist whose War on Poverty has worsened the lot of those trapped in the Welfare-Charity-Victimology complex. They are still remembered fondly not for their failure but for their idealism which is seen as a redeeming trait that overrides the suffering inflicted upon those it impacted.

Most people would not regard Hitler and the Nazis as idealists given that they were thugs and sought to inflict suffering. They were however motivated by a desire to help out the community, saw the conventions of bourgeois society as needing to be transcended, and attempted to use the power to help people. The brownshirts burning books believed in what they were doing as a good thing. The SS thugs who killed people thought they were improving the world. The Nazis were idealists who sought to remake the world in their image. The Communists also had their idealism. People lost rights because the idealism of the Bolsheviks saw their own wisdom as being able to order things better than the individuals they ruled. The cruel civil war was fought out of a desire to help the masses and modernize the country and the world. The terror and suffering from the five year plans were possible because of the idealism of officials who desired to rid the society of enemies and their willingness to tolerate the temporary suffering of the masses so that there might be a better tomorrow.

The Bolsheviks believed in what they were doing. The NKVD believed in what they were doing. The Soviet planners believed in their plans. Hitler was an idealist who sought to improve the lives of Germans and to make Germany a great power according to a racial ideology. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their ilk all believed firmly in the Communist ideology.

Today the idealists of today do not see the incongruity of praising idealism in the Islamic world when that idealism is directed towards forming the Caliphate that would defeat the infidels and subjugate the world. The Hamas members to seek to kill as many Jews as possible are idealists. The Islamists who sought to topple the Algerian government and impose a totalitarian system were idealists as are those trying to do the same to the Egyptian government. Idealism in the Islamic world is seen in performing the duty of Jihad. They are idealists.

"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."

The journalists failed to report on Muslim and Croatian concentration camps out of idealism. Idealists failed to report on the crimes of the Nazis once they gained power in Germany for fear that it would provoke a second World War. Idealists refused to condemn the Gulags and suffering in the Soviet Union and China out of idealism. Idealists today refuse to permit people to say that Islamic doctrine enshrines Jihad (as Holy War, not as an “internal struggle”) as a key duty of believers.

This is Idealism. Lies become truth because idealism is not about desiring to help people but about being idealistic. Millions can die but idealists must not have their idealism questioned. They are more concerned with the state of their souls (any serious question sullies it) than with the state of the lives of others. Idealism is all about the idealist and so is the height of Narcissism.

A common puzzle

Upon encountering an individual who had made it a point of enjoyment to scream while playing video-games, I asked him to stop. The request was not due to the discomfort the noise of the intermittent electronic noise but by the screaming that triggered concern over a residual fight or flight response.

Screaming, if listened to, is varied given the purpose. A joyful scream might scream as such: Yaaaaa! A battlecry tends towards the Yaaaaghhhh! direction, while a panicked cry for help might be Ahhhhh!. Some cultures, in order to eliminate any confusion on the matter, restrict screaming to emergencies and use other means to express happiness, excitement, of pleasure. America is not one of those cultures. In the age the infantilized adult, one encounters people who have no compunctions about screaming at whatever they choose. Those ungraced by such inhibitions do not feel the need to restrain themselves in crowded living conditions.

Upon attempting to request that the individual in question desist from hi noisome activity, I found failure as a result of his not even opening or communication when I knocked. He was quite clearly present but chose to wait out the complaint. Upon calling on a building administrator, his response was one gratuitous insult. Upon a latter encounter, I asked the reason for his reaction. He agreed to speak on the matter and he sent forth a litany of further insults and vulgarities with little connection to the matter at hand but only a statement that I needed a thicker skin related to the subject.

The first of the two puzzle I can only begin to wonder at is that some would treat the invocation of “fight or flight” so casually and be willing to cause such reactions in others by screaming in vain pursuits. The second I am astounded by is the crudity of the response and the unrelated nature to the matter at hand. I can understand circumstances where the breadth of the vulgar vocabulary might earn some respect when direct to the matter at hand (ie. Combat or when insulting someone for clear reasons) but to do so randomly without connect to the topic is incomprehensible.

The man’s father was similarly vulgar when encountered and spoke in gratuitous terms regarding me even when I was clearly present. Such a disrespect for social norms of politeness and mores regarding the treatment of persons is perhaps more comprehensible in light of a statement made that seemed unrelated at the time. Shortly preceding the more notorious stream of obscenity, he declared the “I can do whatever I want!”. I initially disregarded it as the raving s of a lunatic to be pitied but in retrospect such absurdities might stem from a culture of pleasure.

His comment would by normal minds be seen as solipsistic but was probably the logical extension of the belief that his desires held precedence over the needs of others. Such would likely also explain the disrespect shown to people directly by using obscenity at them and responding to people with casual vulgarity. How could such a situation come about? His father displayed similar attitudes and one may reasonably conclude that the perspective was passed down without further reflection.

But merely filial piety would not seem the only factor in this regard. The larger culture does not deem obscenity or vulgarity reprehensible and so demeans the people such norms are designed to ennoble. The gravity of vulgarity seems to be sapped by the attitude of it merely being old norms of politeness. The disrespect of persons was clearly present in his words and behavior. The emotionalized demeanor was also seen by his willingness to scream and the emotional nature of the response instead of having bearing and responding as man. By responding as a man, I refer to having dignity, maintaining it, proceeding logically, and having respect for others and placing others before you. None of those was seen in his narcissistic behavior.

This demotic trend is most unpleasant and is unlikely to end well as some seek more forceful ways to constrain untoward behavior and others seek the respect so clearly denied by a solipsistic culture.

Considerations on “liberation struggles”

The 20th Century has been noted as the most violent in History. The majority of the deaths have been civilian incurred in the course of violent struggles to liberate their land from foreign rule, “imperialism”, “exploitation”, poverty, racism, and other assorted causes considered liberation struggles.

Yet, for all the protestations of desire to help the people, such struggles have been the most total and dehumanizing of all struggles. The struggle to free Russia from (alternatively) Capitalistic exploitation/Bolshevist terror during the Russian Civil War was extraordinarily brutal and even Russians considered themselves to be less valuable human beings than Westerners. The dehumanization and conflict of the Civil War made the brutality of Stalin’s deportations, executions, and the purges possible.

The liberation struggles in Latin America were also noted for brutality and especially those in Africa. The struggle against the brutal Belgian rule over Congo was more brutal that the very rule the proposed liberation from. The Vietminh(alternatively VietCong) was brutal in its treatment of government teachers, mayors and anyone associated with the government. The moderation that was claimed to exist did not reach 1975 when the Communist government imprisoned 300,000 people who had worked for the ROV government and their families. The aftermath was a disaster for the South.

The most accepted liberation struggle in recent history has been that of the ANC to replace the Afrikaner Government in Pretoria. Yet after the fall of Apartheid, the civil service has lost its professionalism, the most skilled are leaving the country (which remains the economic superpower of Africa), and the military was completely purged with the attendant loss of discipline and quality. This may be an acceptable price if democracy is the result but the farm murders (1,500+ since 1992), and devastating crime rates, and the system of racial preferences known as Affirmative Action are undermining the unitary state and the overwhelming loyal vote for the ANC makes political competition difficult.

Another but less volatile and more ridiculous is the struggle in the US over “White Privilege”. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton explain the relative failures of US Blacks on a legacy of slavery and justify antagonism and even incite violence to right it. The consequences can be immediate and tragic (the Crown Heights Pogrom) or slow and poisonous as the government of Mayor Marion Barry (D.C. is barely recovering).

The problem seems to be that when the Oppressor/Liberator dichotomy is used, other factors and gradations are ignored and one is forced into one camp or the other. Gratitude is also expected to the liberator and this allows the liberator to ignore the promptings of common sense and allows dangerous flights of fancy like Julius Nyerere in Tanzania.

A few reflections on Art

Art was traditionally both a means of communicating beauty and ideals. The classical statues were designed to be both adornment and a focus for displaying ideals. The art of the renaissance attempted to communicate both beauty and truth. The beauty could be communicated by the quality of paint, scenes, humans in the picture and other factors. The ideas could be communicated by various visual cues well understood by a yet largely illiterate society.

The means of modern art are those of free expression. The central theme is to let the whim of the moment take ahold and see if the product is considered artistic. The spirit of art is considered to reside in the individual that the elimination of external constraints will allow the freer expression thereof. The act of self-expression is hailed as a value in of itself and ideas have become a more important element of modern art while shape has become a new element in the non-idea side of art.

The difference in the philosophies of the ancient artists is stark in contrast to many trendy artists. Why is self-expression valuable in itself? Is it that the pressure to communicate is more pressing? If so, the ancient artists and those under totalitarian regimes must have been remarkably unimaginative and left with little to communicate. Rather it appears that an element of modern culture is the narcissism that what one desires to communicate is necessarily worth communicating. The idea of beauty has also disappeared from the trendy artists and leaves us with more ephemeral concepts like “expression” or “profundity” that communicates nothing in any easily understood visual language. The ideas communicated in much modern work like Diego de Rivera and his ilk are those of separation and revolution. We’ve been down that sorry road before. The Italian futurists also supported WWI as a revolutionary event. The goal of shocking the viewer has become an element of a modern art that seeks to overturn taboos as limits on self-expression.

Yet did not the ancient artists also know how to express themselves. Did they not have emotions and ideas as well? They saw horror and yet could paint beauty while modern artists declared that there could be no more beauty in response to the SHOAH. They accepted the use of standard mediums of expression in a manner that the viewer could understand the message without and explanation that the saltshaker juxtaposed to the aspirin bottle on the chessboard is symbolic of something none but the author has heard of.

Greetings (first post)

Good Day, this being my first time posting a Blog, may you forgive any possible clumsiness and errors on my part.

As per the title, you may accurately discern that my views are not widely shared. This is likely the result of vastly different backgrounds and experiences between I and whomever. In order to render this universally comprehensible, I will endeavor to explain my background while detailing my arguments.

That said, I am still rather different due to a certain perspective I bring to life. While but a young lad in Kindergarten, I asked myself what why should I do what all the individualists are doing? All individualists watch television and have more important things to do than read. Individualists care about themselves, what is so great about me? Individualists all rebel against authority and support idealism. Why should I support rebels who lead a comfortable sheltered life and have little experience of both the brutal and higher sides of life? Why is idealism so great when, as the Portuguese phrase puts it, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions and idealism seems to cover up flaws in reasoning and to serve as an emotional salve?

In reaction to the behavior of individualists, I have chosen to be one of the few conformists in the country. I do not use obscenity unlike individualists who challenge arbitrary standards of politeness designed to show respect for other people’s humanity and the higher things in life and to make the grossness of life more bearable. I read to gain knowledge of the world, ideas and for pleasure instead of the highly individualist medium of television. I rely on the work and ideas of those before me in deciding philosophical matters instead of innovatively reconsidering the wheel. Unlike individualists, I treat everyone with a general standard of respect and base further respect based on their actions and ideas rather than as a member of a nearly immutable group or as a given.

Please leave comments and if free to do so, long explanations on your reactions to my postings.
My own postings may be somewhat intermittent due to a relatively unusual schedule.
Please form your conclusions AFTER reading the postings and digesting their contents.