These parallels are misguided and strained. First of all, unlike Crassus who exploited slave labor, Trump called for the revival of the American Working Class. It is the globalists who’ve been pushing ‘free trade’, outsourcing of American jobs, and importation of endless supplies of peon scab labor. The globalist message to the American Working Class has been, "Fuc* you, we will replace you with more brown people, and just overdose on opioids and die, you white-trash losers." Trump’s message is that the American Working Class must be protected and revived in pride and spirit. Also, even though Trump can be imperious in style and personality, he is anti-empire. Except for his belligerent stance on Iran(mainly because of support of ultra-Zionist donors like Sheldon Adelson and pressure from Neocons who still infest the GOP), Trump has been favoring nationalism as antidote to globalist imperialism. Trump’s position on ISIS wasn’t a call for More Intervention but Less Intervention. He basically meant the US should aid Russia and Assad defeat ISIS and restore order. The only reason why ISIS and Alqaeda elements were able to do so much damage is because the US has been under globalist-imperialist control of the Deep State under Obama & Hillary. Jewish-controlled Deep State pushed Obama into smashing Libya into a thousand pieces. The Deep State persuaded Obama and Hillary into working with Israel and Saudis to subvert Syria(an ally of Russia and Iran) by sending and supplying foreign Jihadis into Syria. ISIS could never have gotten so far WITHOUT covert support of US and its allies, especially Saudi Arabia and even Turkey for a while... before it stopped aiding ISIS once Russia entered on the side of Assad. ISIS would have been defeated long ago BUT FOR THE FACT that globalists in the Deep State steered US foreign policy toward waging all these Wars for Israel. Also, it was under Obama that tensions with North Korea heated up. Obama’s administration also meddled in South Korean elections to place ‘conservative’ Park into power as the Korean Right has been reliably subservient to US power. Despite Trump’s aggressive rhetoric, he negotiated for peace with North Korea. Against the wishes of the Deep State, Trump has been de-escalating the US role in Syria. Against Neocon insistence, Trump decided not to lend more aid to ‘moderate rebels’ consisting mostly of Alqaeda elements. Indeed, the US under Obama and Hillary were defacto enablers of ISIS. Thomas Friedman, the Jewish Democrat, admitted he appreciates the role of ISIS in Syria because the war over there is to Israel’s advantage. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/04/15/thomas-friedmans-perverse-love-affair-isis The US, under the cover of fighting terrorism, was actually aiding terrorism in the Middle East. War on Terror had turned into War with Terror. But then, even 9/11 had been blowback from terrorists that the US and its allies had built up during the Cold War against USSR and Iran. Of course, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 whereas US, Saudis, and Israel had something to do with the rise of Muslim radicals in Afghanistan, but the Deep State blamed Iraq, cooked up WMD lies, and invaded. And then, Obama took out Libya and then made a mess of Syria. Obama even hired Jewish Victoria Nuland to recruit Neo-Nazis to pull off a coup in Ukraine. https://www.globalresearch.ca/hillary-clinton-approved-delivering-libyas-sarin-gas-to-syrian-rebels-seymour-hersh/5522647 and https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-u-s-has-installed-a-neo-nazi-government-in-ukraine/5371554 Also, it was under Obama that US-Russia relations worsened to epic proportions. Why? Because the US is really a colony of the Empire of Judea or EOJ. US lost national sovereignty long ago. The US is used by Jewish globalists as its bank and aircraft carrier to rule and dominate the world. Jews hate New Russia because Vladimir Putin restored some degree of national sovereignty after the 1990s during which globalist Jewish oligarchs looted the economy(with the help of Jewish American advisors from Harvard). Under Obama, Jews tried to regain control of Russia by spreading Homomania, a proxy of Jewish Power. Putin saw the Homo Campaign for what it is and said NO. Jews took this as saying NO to Jewish Globalist supremacism and have been waging ‘new cold war’ on Russia ever since, making Putin out to be the New Hitler. This was all part of the Zionist-globalist US imperialism. Obama toadied up to it as his success owed entirely to Jews. And Hillary was a most loyal servant of this Jewish globo-imperium. But Trump came along and runs on the promise of nationalism. Trump said the Cold War is long over. There can be peace and good relations between US and Russia. EU has little to fear from Russia and should defend itself. Trump also said European nations have a right to defend themselves from globalist imperialist vision of people like George Soros who seek to send hundreds of millions of Africans and Muslims into the EU. So, even though Trump is a very rich person, the reaction of the Deep State and globalist imperialist oligarchy to his rise has been like the Roman Elite’s response to Spartacus.
2. https://youtu.be/-m12hzqOojo?t=13m5s John David Ebert says Steven Spielberg was among the directors of New Hollywood who loved European avant-garde cinema and combined them with American Pop Culture. This is not true. Spielberg never had much feeling for European cinema. Most of his inspiration came from American and Anglo directors, such as David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, and etc. If there’s a foreign director who appealed to Spielberg, it was Akira Kurosawa because of the visceral, epic, and sentimental quality of his films. (It’s been said Kurosawa was the most ‘Western’, meaning ‘American’, of Japanese directors. Spielberg mostly owes to the American Tradition of directors like Howard Hawks, John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, and Cecil B. DeMille. There may be a bit of Fellini-ism in Spielberg’s films, especially in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, but it’s hard to discern the influence of key European directors such as Luis Bunuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and etc. In purely technical terms, Spielberg was surely influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein, and Leni Riefenstahl. But his sensibility has been overwhelmingly American and Pop. And the main reason he cast Francois Truffaut in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS was because Truffaut was the least avant-garde of the New Wave directors and most sentimental, crowd-pleasing, and accessible. The only films of Truffaut with somewhat avant-garde touches are SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER and JULES AND JIM. Mostly however, Truffaut grew into the role of the most popular French film-maker and sought publicity around the world along those lines. Of course, Truffaut being half-Jewish also appealed to Spielberg.
3. https://youtu.be/-m12hzqOojo?t=13m36s John David Ebert says movies reflect the anxieties of our time through mythological storytelling, and he mentions the movies of James Cameron(especially with the TERMINATOR series) and George Lucas as being about ‘nightmares’ about technology. While it’s true that there is a killer robot and threat of nuclear destruction in TERMINATOR and technology does much damage in STAR WARS movies, I don’t think those movies are really about genuine ‘nightmares’ about technology. For starters, they are too fun and fantastic. Indeed, the ‘nightmare’ element is the very appeal because it allows for cool action scenes and awesome destruction. Even though Arnold Schwarzenegger is the bad guy in the original, he is clearly the feature attraction of the movie. He is Mr. Wow like Rambo. And even though the Empire is the bad guy in STAR WARS, the audience swoon over the sheer awesomeness of Darth Vader and his Imperial Fleet. Besides, even the Rebels represent a counter-empire of their own and use awesome technology to win space battles. The Millennium Falcon is not some Chinese Junk. Lucas’s real nightmare about technology was THX 1138, a film comparable to Chris Marker’s LE JETEE and Jean-Luc Godard’s ALPHAVILLE. In contrast, STAR WARS is really AMERICAN GRAFFITI in space. Instead of speeding around in cars, the heroes blast across the galaxies in space ships. Sure, there is some stuff about spirituality and the Force, but even the good guys rely extensively on technology to win in the end. As for Cameron, despite his pro-nature message in movies like ABYSS and AVATAR, the man is clearly in love with machines, military hardware, engineering, big guns, and sheer awesomeness made possible by technology. And even his vision of nature is so artificial. Besides, the message of ABYSS is that the undersea creatures are more advanced than humans because their technology is even more awesome. And the natural world of AVATAR looks totally artificial, a world that can exist only inside a video-game. So, Cameron was never sincere in his ‘nightmare’ vision of technology. He just made technology seem dangerous because it’d make for exciting action movies. The main character of TITANIC is the stupid ship.
But the bigger factor of the growing divide between white men and white women is the rise of interracism, promoted by both porn and mainstream culture, especially in music but also in movies, TV shows, and advertising. Because blacks dominate sports and have more muscle, bigger dongs, and louder voices, blackness has replaced whiteness as the standard of Real Manhood in the West. This means white girls become infected with Jungle Fever and go with superior Negroes. This means white guys are made to feel like cuckish losers and dorks. So, many white guys have given up because they feel that they can’t compete with Negro as fantasized in the novel MANDINGO that may be more relevant to our times than TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is. Now, the internet made this problem worse because even young girls have access to pornography and grow up trading photos of big Negro dongs on their smart-phones. Because Negroes have taken over as the standard-bearers of ‘Western’ manhood, white males feel emasculated, dickless, and gender-fluid. If black men are the Real Men, then maybe white men might as well become trannies. In the most popular American Family, the Kardashians, the white girls all put out to Negroes while white male Bruce Jenner turns himself into a ‘woman’. White manhood cannot survive integration with Black manhood because blacks are more muscular, more aggressive, and got bigger dongs. Black guys will kick white boys’ ass, and white girls will go with Negroes. So, the problem is bigger than the internet. If US were all-white, the sexual problem would be less problematic. But because the internet turns white girls onto Negro men while making white men feel like wussified and pussified losers and dorks(vis-a-vis black men), the sexual dynamics between white men and white women is growing far worse.
As for the rise of ideological segregation between far left and far right due to internet culture, some of this is natural because the internet allows and even encourages the rise of subcultures. Prior to the internet, rightists and leftists watched the same shows, like CROSSFIRE with Pat Buchanan and Michael Kingsley. Also, there were handful of magazines that catered to the Right, and some that catered to the Left. One might go to the library and browse through these magazines that served as forums for broad spectrums of readers. Prior to the internet, the National Review could be read by anyone from the center-right to the far right. And New Republic might have readers from center-left to far left. But with the rise of the internet, each political or ideological faction can create its own ghetto.
However, one reason why there has been less interaction of left and right has to do with globalist censorship of the internet, especially of the Right. For example, Twitter favors Democrats and proggies. It shadowbans or outright bans many on the Right. Jared Taylor didn’t violate any Terms of Agreement, but he was kicked off. ADL gives orders to Twitter on these matters, and so many on the Right have been kicked off Twitter. Also, if people on the Right are shadowbanned, their tweets cannot be read by people who don’t follow them. So, the lack of communication between Left and Right is due largely to Internet Censorship. Many sites got rid of comment section altogether because the Politically Incorrect had the temerity to call BS on the Narrative. How can the Left and the Right engage with one another when One Side is so extensively censored or denied service? If anything, those on the Alt Right are eager to engage with the Left. They are eager to have debates. It is the Progs and Leftists who duck these debates and call on the Establishment to shut down, censor, or shadowban those on the Right.
Also, while there is a real Right in America, there is no real viable Left. What is called the ‘Left’ today has nothing to do with classical themes of Leftism, such as Worker’s justice and People power. Rather, today’s ‘leftism’ is about globalism, Deep State power, another ‘cold war’ with Russia, worship of Homos and Trannies, an irrational adulation of blacks as Magic Negroes, and mindless worship of celebrity.
And speaking of incivility, there’s now as much of it in the mainstream media as on the internet. The utterly hysterical, rabid, and virulent derangement syndrome exhibited by those at NYT, CNN, MSNBC, and rest of Jewish-controlled media is truly astonishing. These people are NOT anonymous but totally uncivil, nasty, and vicious. Robert DeNiro is a world-famous person but goes on stage and says ‘Fuc* Trump’. Kathy Griffin is a public figure but holds a bloody mask of Trump. The singer madonna is a global celebrity but gave a speech about blowing up the White House. Ashley Judd yammered about her pussy and her being a ‘nasty woman’. So, we can’t blame anonymity alone for the reason as to why our culture got so ugly. After all, look at SJWs in colleges. They get triggered, throw tantrums, and assault people and all out in the open... with full blessing of professors and college deans who hardly ever take tough actions against them. And BLM was a movement based on a total lie: Gentle Giant Michael Brown put up his hands and said "Don’t shoot" but was shot by some crazed white bigot cop. And all this craziness happened out in the open. In the 60s, there was no internet, but the radicals were out in the streets acting like total louts and thugs. So, the culture of incivility didn’t begin with the internet. For one thing, Rap music became popular before the rise of the web. It taught generations of kids to call women ‘bitchass hos’ and yap endlessly about murdering people with guns. Black culture has been especially shameless, thuggish, abrasive, violent, and savage. But it was promoted by Jews who control the media. And white women like madonna and Chritina Aguilera who imitated crazy black bitches were favored and lionized as the new ideal for young white girls who unsurprisingly became cruder, wilder, and more uninhibited. While the internet has spread this savagery far and wide, it has also allowed voices to emerge against it. Prior to the internet, the Jew-run media was the only platform for all of us. Jews totally controlled the Narrative of what’s good and what’s cool. But the internet at least gave us a chance to call out on the corruption of culture by Jews, blacks, vain homos, and deranged bitches who are into ‘slut pride’.
5. https://youtu.be/-m12hzqOojo?t=19m44s John David Ebert says Trump used the new media of the internet and HD-TV to play on the fears, anxieties, and ‘xenophobia’ of Americans. This implies that Trump played on ‘fears’ while Hillary and others didn’t. Actually, what really changed in 2016 was that we began to see the rise of politics where white ‘fears’ became a legitimate issue along with the ‘fears’ of other groups. After all, the Democrats have been playing on ‘fears’ forever. Blacks are made to feel that GOP is the closet-KKK party. Jewish Liberals still act like they are poor Holocaust People who may be attacked by Nazis. Democrats tell Hispanics that they are saintly ‘dreamers’ who are set upon by white bigots who hate brown people. So, Democrats have been using racial demagoguery to feed on the fears of blacks and other minorities. Also, Democrats tell women that the GOP means to end abortion and women will have to use coat-hangers to kill their unwanted unborn babies. Until 2016, it was fair game for Jews, blacks, Hispanics, feminists, and etc. to play on the Politics of Fear and scapegoating White People for all the problem.
But in 2016, there was a White Awakening where whites too acted as though they have legitimate grievances and fears. So, 2106 was about Fear vs Fear. Democrats said Trump is Hitler and his supporters are ‘Deplorables’. Trump and his followers said Democrats(along with cuckservativs of the GOP) feel no patriotic loyalty and have no connection to historical America. Why shouldn’t the Right play on ‘fears’ when Globalists do it all the time? After all, the term ‘far right’ is now applied to mere European patriots who say NO to massive migration-invasion from Africa and Muslim world. These patriots are not Nazis or even necessarily right-wing ideologically. They are patriots who want to defend and preserve their own lands. But that is defamed as ‘far right’ by the Jew-run media that fully supports Israel’s right to be a Jewish State that allows Jewish-Only Immigration.
6. https://youtu.be/-m12hzqOojo?t=20m28s Kevin Michael Grace argues Steven Spielberg, though a talented entertainer, cannot be considered an artist due to his lack of appreciation for darkness and tragedy. Kevin Michael Grace mentions ALL THAT JAZZ, a film that left Spielberg cold due to its abrupt downer of an ending. Kevin Michael Grace calls ALL THAT JAZZ a ‘masterpiece’, one of several by Bob Fosse. Now, ALL THAT JAZZ is probably Fosse’s best film, and it is indeed eccentric and one-of-a-kind. But it’s also Fosse’s all-too-imitative version of 8 ½, and if we look past the glitzy fireworks of flashy editing and outlandish choreography, it’s far less than meets the eye. There is far more sauce than meat. It is ultimately a self-aggrandizing and self-pitying portrait of a ‘misunderstood’ artist. There’s something phony and self-indulgent about the whole thing. Now, what would Fosse’s other masterpieces be? Okay, I’ll admit I haven’t seen CABARET, but I’ve seen LENNY and STAR 80, and they’re hardly what I’d call great works of art. For a movie about a comedian, LENNY is solemn and humorless. STAR 80 is essentially a sleazy work that feigns moral outrage about sexual exploitation. It practices what it preaches against, rather like Robert Altman’s THE PLAYER that is really a valentine to Hollywood than anything else.
But there is something to what Kevin Michael Grace saysabout Spielberg. In his heart of hearts, Spielberg is not an artist. When he made grand entertainments like JAWS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, E.T., and JURASSIC PARK, it didn’t matter that Spielberg was not a true artist. He made grand spectacles that engaged the senses and entertained the audience’s appetite for pop-mythology. But at some point, Spielberg decided to get serious... as Woody Allen did too, especially beginning with INTERIORS. And even though Spielberg made his serious movies with great care and craft, something of the true artist was missing. There remained too much of the populist, crowd-pleaser, compromiser, and schmoozer. Certain key moral issues were overly simplified, dialogues turned into sermons, images were overlaid with Disneyesque sensibility, or sobriety gave way to delirium of spectacle(as if Spielberg couldn’t suppress his natural instincts as circus showman). There are many great things in EMPIRE OF THE SUN, but too often the movies veers into something like an amusement park. I haven’t seen COLOR PURPLE, but some have said Spielberg stole chunks of pictorialism from DOCTOR ZHIVAGO(itself an overly sentimentalized adaptation of the novel), especially with the flowers. MUNICH is a rather complicated and mature film, but one senses the complexity is entirely the product of the writer. But then, even the writing doesn’t rise much above, "All sides do bad things, but Jews are ultimately more justified because... the Holocaust thing." Despite the great battle scenes of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the movie doesn’t rise above the homily of Norman Rockwell paintings. Indeed, precisely because the violence is so realistic and brutal, the sentimentality seems even more out of place. And SCHINDLER’S LIST, like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, works only on the level of violence. Dramatically, it’s predictable and simple-minded, not least with Gandhi-as-Jew. If Spielberg were a true artist, he would have explored the degrading effect of war and horror on the victims as well on the perpetrators. But all the Jews in SCHINDLER’S LIST are such wonderful and lovable people no matter how much hell they go through. Compare that with KAPO by Gillo Pontecorvo, a real work of art. Pontecorvo wasn’t afraid to show how the Nazi terror degrades the humanity of all involved, from oppressor to oppressed.
But SCHINDLER’S LIST, despite all the horror it shows, would have us believe that Jews remain so saintly and pure-as-snow, indeed even more so than the Good People of Frank Capra movies. So, even though Spielberg could technically make a movie that looks like a work of art, his lack of understanding about the depths of the human soul prevented him from being a true artist. His serious movies are certainly worthy and nothing to be ashamed about, but there is either an unwillingness or inability on Spielberg’s part to probe deeper into human motivations or tease out the ironies of why people act as they do. In the end, the resolutions are too neat, too final. However, A.I. is the one movie by Spielberg that could be considered a work of art. Here, the vision was supplied by Stanley Kubrick, Brian Aldiss, and Ian Watson, and what a screenplay it was. Spielberg directed faithfully, and the result is one of the darkest dreams put on screen. Contrary to Kevin Michael Grace’s objections about A.I. the ending in the movie was all Kubrick’s, and it’s not really a happy ending but a simulacrum of such by the future beings who take pity on David. Indeed, the entire reunion with his ‘mommy’ could be taking inside the mind of David during an act of euthanasia. The illusion of happy union as David sinks into eternal abyss-as-bliss is what makes the ending unbearably poignant. Kevin Michael Grace also faults MINORITY REPORT for botching its artistic integrity by not ending with the imprisonment of Tom Cruise’s character. He faults Spielberg for extending the story toward a happy ending. But that isn’t the real problem with the movie. After all, the resolution at the end was brilliantly conceived, and besides, it’s not entirely a happy ending because Cruise’s character will never have his son back. Also, we don’t feel triumphant when Max Von Sydow’s character kills himself. Yes, he’s the villain but a tragic one because he really believed his system could bring down crime for society and make things safer for people. If MINORITY REPORT is to be faulted for excessive Spielbergisms, it’s the extended cartoonish action sequences that belong more in INDIANA JONES movies. Also, it’s worth asking why the prisoners must be put into deep sleep? Why not just keep them confined until the danger blows over? If a certain person was ‘precogged’ as committing murder on Monday, why not keep him locked up until the Monday passes and offer him some therapy? Why put him into indefinite deep sleep? It makes no sense. Also, why is security at the deep-sleep prison so flimsy that anyone could come and release a captive? Finally, if Spielberg had been more courageous, the happy ending would have been accompanied by a dark overtone. Yes, the precogs have been freed from their servitude to the state, and there would be no more precog Orwellian control over society. But surely, the crime rate would have exploded. So, what was good for the precogs would not have been good for society that would have been overrun with crime again. But Spielberg overlooks all that. THAT lack of curiosity or courage is what has prevented Spielberg from being a real artist. In contrast, the ‘happy ending’ of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE is more twisted and perverse. Yes, Alex has been restored to ‘normal’, which in his case is nuts and psychotic. And the social experiment used on Alex will not be implemented on society, and that is a victory for freedom. But it also means youthful anarchy will continue to plague Future London.
Also, the real issue is not happy ending vs unhappy ending. A movie can have unhappy ending and still be pretty stupid. Take John Woo’s THE KILLER where the hero is killed at the end. It’s still a pretty retarded blood-splatter-fest. Sergio Corbucci’s THE GREAT SILENCE has a depressing ending too, but it’s no work of art(though, I must say, a one-of-a-kind Western). In contrast, there are many works of art with ‘happy endings’. What makes them works of art is that, regardless of whether the ending is happy or sad, the tragic sense of life has been explored and experienced. Some of Kurosawa’s films can be said to have ‘happy endings’: IKIRU, SEVEN SAMURAI, HIGH AND LOW, and YOJIMBO. But there is a sense of tragic cost in man’s search for grace or redemption. Or there is the courage to look at the darker side of human nature straight in the face, as in YOJIMBO especially. The killer is caught at the end of HIGH AND LOW, and much of the money is recovered. But there is a sense that the hero was also forced to face his own darker nature(and rise above it), and he will never be whole again, and there is no rhyme or reason to neatly sum up the what and why, no "Have I been a good man?" BS at the ending of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. And even though the villain is a despicable character, we feel no righteous joy or closure when he’s led away to his jail cell to await execution. With Spielberg, complexity is merely perfunctory in his serious films. They have the glaze of complexity but no real depth. Spielberg is like a chef who always has to add cream and sugar to dishes that don’t call for them.
8. https://youtu.be/-m12hzqOojo?t=31m54s
Luke Ford asks John David Ebert if he believes in ‘objective good and evil’, and Ebert answers no, and then Kevin Michael Grace enters the discussion that soon devolves into childish bickering between Ebert and Grace. Grace loves being the provocateur, and Ebert doesn’t like to be triggered. Too ‘hostile’ for him. The problem is both of them are totally confused on the issue.
Now, when Ebert said he doesn’t believe in ‘objective good and evil’, my sense is he doesn’t believe there is a COSMIC sense of Good vs Evil. If there was Objective Good and Evil, then such forces would exist even if Earth and Humanity didn’t exist. After all, Good and Evil as part of Objective Reality must exist independent of humans. My take is that Ebert doesn’t believe there is evidence of such Good and Evil except on the basis of Faith. Instead of humans living in a world defined by cosmic good and evil, morality is something that arose from the souls/minds of man. So, if humanity or some other sentient thinking life-form hadn’t evolved in some parts of the cosmos, there would be no Good or Evil. Now, those who believe in God would argue that there is Good and Evil even without humanity or any life form in the universe. After all, the Bible says God and Satan existed prior to the creation of humanity. So, from a certain religious point of view, there is Objective Good, which is represented by God, and there is Objective Evil, which is represented by Satan. Granted, religions and mythologies differ in their cosmic views. According to Greek mythology, the idea of good and evil arose only with the emergence of gods and humanity. There was a world of chaos PRIOR. And there are some religions that believe Good and Evil aren’t opposites but two sides of the same coin.
I don’t know about John David Ebert, but for non-believers such as myself, the idea of ‘good and evil’ is the product of evolution of human consciousness. So, there is no Objective Good and Evil in that sense. Without our sense of morality, there can be no Good or Evil. When an asteroid rammed into Earth and wiped out dinosaurs and scores of other life-forms, was that evil? Or was it just an unthinking event in the cosmos? There was no cosmic malice. Rather, a huge rock just rammed into Earth due to laws of physics. And the disruption killed millions of life-forms. Now, if one believes in God or gods, one could argue that such cataclysm is an act of evil or an act of good. One could argue that gods are evil and malevolent and mean to do us harm. Gods are cruel and sadistic. But since we are at their mercy, we must make sacrifices to them, as the Aztecs did. Appease the gods because who knows what terrible thing they may do to us? Or, one may argue that since the gods are evil, humanity must unite to fight the evil gods and summon the good gods that may appear from somewhere. Or, one may argue that the cataclysm was actually an act of goodness. Maybe we are wicked, and God is punishing us. It’s like the Bible says God sent the flood to punish wicked mankind. And God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because they were having one too many homo ‘pride’ parades and indulging in ass-buggering orgies.
But for those who don’t believe in God or gods, there is no Objective Good and Evil. Rather, good and evil are concepts that we’ve arrived at and enforce to make for a more orderly society and meaningful existence.
Also, good and evil rely on intent. So, if an asteroid or volcano kills ten million people, it was neither good nor evil. It just happened because ‘shit happens’ in the universe. But if a man intentionally kills another man for money, it is an act of ‘evil’ because intent was involved. But intent alone doesn’t make an act evil. After all, animals kill, steal, and rape all the time. If a leopard is feasting on its kill and if a tiger comes and takes it, the tiger willfully took the kill of another. Or if a tiger wants the territory of another tiger, it willfully fights and kills the other tiger. So, are those acts of evil? No, because animals live by instinct and lack ability for moral sense and reasoning. Thus, we can’t hold them accountable for what they do, just like we can’t judge children like we judge adults. Good and Evil applies only to organism that can understand the concept of such. Same goes for ‘stupidity’. It’s wrong to say animals act stupid because, after all, animals are limited to their intelligence. Also, it’d be wrong to say a retarded person is stupid because we can’t blame him for his limited mental faculties. But when people with power of reason and knowledge do dumb things, it’s stupid because they should know better.
So, the matter of Good and Evil depends on the capacity for moral reasoning within the organism. Good and Evil can only exist in the minds of humans who can understand the concept and/or feel emotions that can be shaped to do the right thing than the wrong thing. To this extent, morality and Good and Evil are subjective than objective. And yet, they are collective-subjective than individual-subjective. By that, I mean they are subjective within the rational capacity and complexity of emotions of certain organisms. Humans can share in this collective-subjectivity, but other organisms cannot. If morality was Objective on the Cosmic level, it would be felt and practiced by everything from fish to frogs to rocks and stones. But it only applies to humans with the capacity of complex emotions and moral reasoning.
And yet, morality is useless as individual subjectivity. Such morality would be a nihilism, or "Good is whatever I say is good, Bad is whatever I say is bad." Such a social order cannot long exist. It’d be like a world of black thug rappers, each one claiming that ‘muh fist’ and ‘muh gun’ have the right to rule. Rather, morality has to be agreed upon by the members of the community. And morality arises from four sources. Sensations, Sacredness, Tradition, and Reason. Sensations are crucial to morality though insufficient by themselves to determine morality. Sensations tell us what is good and what is bad. Animals know this too. If you kick a dog, it knows it’s bad. If you throw a pig into a pit of fire, it reacts in pain. When a tiger sinks its claws into a cow, the latter bawls in fear and horror. So, all organisms know from sensations what is good and what is bad. But what feels good isn’t necessarily good, and what feels bad isn’t necessarily bad. Eating lots of ice cream feels good, but it will ruin your health. Exercise may be tiring, but as they say, No Pain, No Gain. Also, sensations don’t necessarily mean empathy. You may not want to feel pain but have no sense that others can feel the same pain. So, even though you don’t want to be burned alive, you may not mind burning others alive, especially if you can eat them later. Morality begins to arise when you feel a kind of empathy and sense that others can feel what you feel. Such is not unique to humans. Wolves, lions, elephants, hippos, and etc. are capable of feeling compassion and concern for others in the group. They sense a kind of proto-morality, but they haven’t the power of moral reasoning to turn their feelings into concepts.
If we felt no pain or pleasure, there might never have been morality. If I stab you, but you feel no pain, no fear, no panic, no nothing, you may not object and just bleed to death, without pain or panic or fear. It is because sensations make us feel panic, pain, and fear that we use those powerful emotions as the basis for thinking about right and wrong, good and bad.
Another source of morality has to do with a sense of the sacred. This may be unique to humans, even though certain animals can develop a sentimental attachment to things. Morality based on attachment to the sacred isn’t rational but powerful nevertheless. For Muslims, Hindus, and Christians, certain symbols, icons, and words are sacred and divine. Thus, it is a grave sin to violate the taboos around them. This isn’t rational in the materialist or scientific sense, but such feelings exist in all societies, even secular ones. To many proggies, the names and images of MLK and Mandela have something like mythic and sacred resonance. For many proggies, the Statue of Liberty is the sacred icon of Immigration as the Basis of America. (Of course, American Indians would have disagreed because, as far as they were concerned, Immigration meant more white people and others coming to take lands from Indians and bisons that Indians depended on for food.) If you mess with certain holy idols in India, a mob may tear you from limb to limb. But even in the secular West, consider something like Beatlemania where mobs of young girls chased after the Fab Four as if they were gods or something, even leading Lennon to remark once that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus.
Another source of morality is tradition and customs. People don’t think too much about the WHY of this. They believe it must be Good because it’s been done by their ancestors as long as they can remember. Since it’s been around for so long, its rightness isn’t questioned. And finally, there is the morality based on human reasoning. The logic behind this is essentially the Golden Rule. If you don’t want others to hurt you, you shouldn’t hurt others. Also, through the power of reason and observation, one tries to figure out what is best for a Good Life, one of health and sanity. For example, heroin and crack are bad for one’s health. So, one should not fall into the habit of using them, and one should not peddle such stuff on others. Sure, one can profit from selling dope and living the good life. But your ‘good’ life is at the expense of others’s suffering. The good life in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is based on making things bad for other people. And yet, so much of what is deemed the Good and Normal Life is still dependent on taking from others. Hollywood riches come mainly from feeding us trash culture. Las Vegas gambling industry is about addicting us to fork over out money to oligarchs. We are told it’s all fun and games, and it’s good for the economy, but is it? And so much of the food and beverage industry is built on addicting us to sugary, fatty, and creamy stuff that turn us into fatsos. Of course, it takes two to tango. Food companies sell us junk, but people also demand junk because it feels so good. The problem of life derives from the fact that life evolved by feeding on other life. So, a kind of universal morality where all can benefit equally is impossible. For one bunch of organisms to live, they must devour other organisms. Think of all the cows and pigs and chickens that are killed to feed us. And for Jews to have a nation of their own, Palestine had to be wiped off the map. And for the US to be founded and created, the American Indians and wilderness had to be destroyed. Even what we call the Good was built on much blood, sweat, and tears. Also, even though we humans may flatter ourselves as thinking moral creatures, our brains are the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution that was utterly ruthless and heartless in favoring organisms that were more efficient in killing and devouring other organisms(and evading the appetites of other organisms). So, our ‘souls’ are not heavenly gifts of God but the product of ceaseless ruthless warfare among the organisms in the evolutionary journey that favored the organisms that could kill best and most effectively destroy rivals and overcome dangers. Indeed, we can move around safely in the US because humans wiped out almost all dangerous animals anywhere near human habitat. (The only real danger now is the ghastly Negroes who are more muscled and more aggressive than white folks.)
John David Ebert says he’s doesn’t believe truth is relative but morality is. By that, I suppose he believes that ceratin facts of the world are independent of what any person or culture believes. If someone says gravity is all in the mind and jumps off a tall building, he is sure to be dragged down by gravity and go splat. If a people of a culture say they can be made bullet-proof with some magic potion or charm, they will still be killed by bullets. In a sense, truth is ‘relative’ to the extent that every society has its own cosmological and phenomenological way of explaining the world. So, if a primitive forest tribe(shut off from the modern world) sees an airplane, it might believe a god or some divine spirit flew over them. So, as far as they are concerned, that is the truth. And in a dream, we believe what is happening even though it’s all mere psycho-drama in the mind. Even in science, truth conforms to the latest update favored by the brightest minds and authoritative institutions, but they could be disproved with new findings. Open up a book on geology or biology from a hundred years ago, and so much of what scientists assumed were true back then proved to be untrue.
Still, just because human understanding of truth is wobbly and flawed doesn’t mean there is no certain truth out there. A hundred person could be wrong about something, and each may believe that his idea is the most truthful one. But regardless of what they think, that something is truly something, a fact. I think most people can agree with John David Ebert on this matter. Regardless of what various cultures think, there is a factual, real, and objective world out there. Among all the peoples, those in the West came closest to devising a system of inquiry, thought, and experimentation to arrive closest to what reality is really like. For example, every culture had its theories about disease. Some said it was the work of evil spirits. Some said it had to do with spiritual imbalance within the body. Some said the body was lacking some magical essence. People in the West used to believe such things too. But the rise of the scientific method and development of tools such as microscopes led to a better and more accurate understanding of how bacteria, viruses, and certain toxins are behind so much of what ails us. So, Ebert isn’t a relativist about objective truth. Even though he may respect why a certain culture may believe as it does about ‘reality’ from an anthropological perspective, he doesn’t believe that truth is relative in the phenomenological sense. The real world is real, and the West has the best methods and instruments to understand how the world really works. Also, ignorance of reality, while forgivable in primitive or less advanced cultures, isn’t so forgivable among modern people with access to education and information. It’s not stupid for some backward tribe to believe Earth is flat, but it’s downright stupid for any modern people to believe in such nonsense.
On the matter of morality, however, Ebert is a relativist, and he explains why. He says our moral sense depends on situations, circumstances, peculiarities of histories & experiences, and etc. He mentions a certain New Guinea forest tribe that practices a ritual with young ones that involves an orgy, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. He defends such practice as ‘moral’ at least within the context of that community. We may find it appalling and cruel, but to the people of the community, it seems right and necessary. Perhaps even sacred and spiritual. So, who are we to judge? And in a way, if that tribe were to hear certain things about our world, they might be appalled and grossed out. I can understand where Ebert is coming from.
After all, globalists tend to believe that they are ‘most evolved’ in morality and that what they believe should be accepted by all the world. They say ‘gay marriage’ is moral and ‘more evolved’, and that means any people who won’t get onboard on ‘reactionary’ or mentally ill with a ‘phobia’. Globalists say Tolerance, Inclusion, and Diversity are the ultimate values. So, if there is some European nation that is mostly white and says NO to mass migration-invasion, it is ‘far right’ and must be compelled to change its ways. And Homos and trannies are holy, and they must be associated with the ‘rainbow’ and must be celebrated with ‘pride’ festivals in all nations. If a nation like Russia says NO to such stuff, the globalists shriek and declare ‘new cold war’ on that nation as ‘evil’ and ‘nazi’. Globalists certainly don’t accept the position that different cultures have different values and that it is wrong for the Current ‘woke’ West to impose its cultural and ‘moral’ hegemony on the rest of the world. Globalists believe in the End of History conceit that ‘liberal democracy’ of the globo-homo kind is the final answer for all the world.
Of course, those who oppose globalist hegemony are not necessarily moral relativists. Some oppose globalist hegemony on grounds of moral/cultural relativism. They say that different peoples are of different civilizations and heritages, and the Current West has no right to pressure all the world to adopt the Western Way that has come to be about the glory of gambling, porn, slut pride, homomania, tranny vanity, Holocaustianity, Magic Negro cult, and ‘white guilt’(that is used as paralyzing agent to make whites submit to Jewish supremacism). Anti-globalist moral-relativists argue that what works for the West should be kept in the West. The Non-Western peoples have their own cultures, values, and sense of right and wrong. It’s wrong for cucky globo-homo West to push Homo ‘gay prides’ into Turkey and Africa.
But many anti-globalists oppose the Current Western push for Hegemony on grounds that has nothing to do with moral relativism. Whatever may be wrong with Russia, Iran, or China, these anti-globalists believe that those civilizations are on firmer moral and cultural ground than the West that they see as hopelessly decadent, degenerate, self-indulgent, excessive, hedonistic, and batshit crazy.
On the matter of the New Guinea tribe, Kevin Michael Grace calls it ‘decadent’, but that’s a mischaracterization. Decadence is what follows the rise, advancement, and prosperity of a people. Romans became decadent. The French aristocracy became decadent. Weimar Germany was decadent. Ottomans and Imperial China became decadent with arrogance, vanity, and complacency. In contrast, as ugly as the New Guinea ritual is, it is virile, fierce, and alive. The problem here is not dissipation but excess of life energy that is used for savage ends.
In a way, I can understand why Ebert doesn’t want to pass judgement on the tribe. After all, its people are trapped in their own narrow experience, cultural reference, and rhythm. European pagans also used to practice human sacrifice and maybe even a bit of cannibalism, as imagined in Michael Crichton’s THE EATERS OF THE DEAD.
Also, one could make a racial or race-ist argument that we shouldn’t expect New Guinea savages of lower IQ and meaner temperament to take easily to more sophisticated moral reasoning. We see this with blacks too. Despite the spread of Christianity and Western Ideas to blacks, it seems blacks all over the world are reverting to what comes naturally to them, which is ugabuga. Black Christians like to dance and holler and clap their hands and treat the church more like a disco than a temple. Blacks went from the soulfulness of the Negro spiritual to the hip sophistication of Jazz to the sensuality of Soul to the ugity-bugity savagery of Rap and Twerking. So, once blacks got total freedom, they’ve been reverting back to their nature, which comes down to ‘muh dick’, ‘muh fist’, and ‘muh booty’. So, from a race-ist viewpoint, it is wrong to expect blacks and other races of lower IQ and more aggressive temperaments to think and act like white folks. While any people can become wild and crazy, some races are more adept to rise higher when given the chance. It’s like Asia and Africa both had the chance to catch up and modernize like the West, but East Asia did this far more successfully than Africa. Indeed, compare Hiroshima and Detroit since WWII. Once flattened Hiroshima is a thriving city again. Detroit, taken over by blacks who reverted to ugabuga jungle-jivery once they got the freedom, now looks like some African nation. Apartheid was ended in South Africa with the hope that blacks, once given a chance, could rise to white levels. Instead, blacks tore many cities apart, and if anything, whites are being dragged down to poverty because so much is now in ruins. Now, John David Ebert isn’t a rational and enlightened race-ist like myself, so he surely rejects the notion that blacks are, by nature, due to revert to ugity-bugity destructive tendencies.
Being a racial relativist, I don’t believe all races should be judged equally or expected to achieve the same. If anything, I argue against Diversity and for Separation because integrating smarter & weaker races with dumber & stronger races will lead to decline of civilization. Mass integration between whites and blacks doesn’t lead to blacks rising to white level but only to whites falling to black level. Why? Stronger black men kick white boys’ ass, and white guys turn cucky and wussy and lose manhood. Then, white women lose respect for white boys and become infected with jungle fever. They reject white culture as weak and wussy and twerk their white asses like black asses to jungle music. And white women mate with black men and produce mulattos who identify as black and hate on whitey... like Colin Kaepernick. It’s total disaster for the white race.
Now, how far is John David Ebert willing to go with his moral relativism? Would he not pass judgement on a slave society on grounds that people of such a world don’t believe slavery is evil? Should we not judge the American South that practiced slavery since Southern Whites thought slavery was okay by God? After all, the Bible never said slavery should be abolished. And black Africa had slavery for 10,000 yrs. And the Koran doesn’t condemn slavery either. And all pagan societies had extensive slavery: Egypt, India, China, Persia, Ancient Greece, Germanic tribes, Mongols, and etc. So, was it wrong to condemn the American South for having slavery? If we shouldn’t morally judge a New Guinea tribe that is into ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism, why condemn the American South for its slavery? Didn’t both societies believe that what they’re doing is right? But maybe, one could argue that the American South should have known better and was justifying slavery in bad faith. After all, what is forgivable in a child is not forgivable in an adult. Whereas a New Guinea tribe is ‘innocent’ in its savagery, the American South was an extension of Western Civilization that had deemed slavery as wrong. After all, Christian Europe first stopped all enslavement of Christians and then extended it to pagan Europeans as well. At one time, Christian Europeans and Jews had sold pagan Slavs to North Africans, but the Christian West came to believe slavery is wrong. So, when the West took part in the slave trade, it was doing what it believed was wrong. It wasn’t acting in ‘savage innocence’ but with disingenuous bad faith. After all, the US was founded on principles of freedom and equality of rights. Also, whites in the South regarded themselves as good Christian folks. So, all their justifications for slavery were unconvincing. It was moral sophistry to justify their greed. Granted, Southern Whites did have rational reasons for fearing the emancipation of the Negroes. As blacks are naturally meaner, more muscular, and got bigger dongs, the end of slavery didn’t necessarily mean equality and harmony between the races. It could very well mean black guys kicking white guys in the ass and hollering, "Where da white women at?" Indeed, so many of the fears of D.W. Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION has been confirmed by history. Today, ugly and thuggish rap is the culture of blacks. Black guys kick white boys who are cucky-wucked wussies. Black culture has degraded white women into skanks who now feel contempt for white men and welcome ACOWW or Afro-Colonization of White Wombs. This was made all the worse by Jews controlling media, sports, music, and porn to promote Jungle Fever among white girls and cucky-wuckery among white men.
Now, if the problem with the American South’s rationale for slavery was unconvincing and bogus, what about National Socialist Germany that really and sincerely believed in its radical ideology? With the American South, we can argue, "They should have known better" given the founding principles of the US and values of Christianity. But Nazi Germany was neo-pagan, radical racist, and Aryan-supremacist. Hitler and the Nazis really believed this. So, would it be wrong for us to pass moral judgement on them? Weren’t the Nazis as sincere in their conviction that they were right as the New Guinea tribesmen in their ‘innocent’ belief in their ritual of human sacrifice and cannibalism? This could also be said of the Aztecs.
Also, there is, of course, a huge difference between the harm a small tribe can do and what a powerful modern nation can do. If Hitler had come to power in some small primitive tribe, how much harm could he have done to the world? It’s like Jim Jones Cult turned out horrible, but it only affected those in the community. But imagine if Jim Jones had controlled a nation like Germany. One shudders to think. So, moral relativism, while interesting when applied to primitive tribes, becomes downright dangerous when applied to big modern nations. Now, as some nations are armed with nuclear weapons, we can only hope that they’re not led by men like Hitler, Jim Jones, or Idi Amin.
But even within the confines of a small tribe, would it be wrong for us to judge? Suppose John David Ebert is studying a certain primitive tribe that doesn’t practice human sacrifice. Indeed, suppose the people of the tribe believe such would be wrong and cruel. But suppose a dark pathological figure takes over the tribe and says the gods demand sacrifice. Suppose most tribesmen disagree, but the chieftain orders his henchmen to shut down and kill anyone who opposes his new rule of human sacrifice. Would Ebert say the tribe went from good to bad under a tyrannical figure, or would he say he has no right to judge?
Now, suppose human sacrifice becomes an annual ritual in the tribe. Over time, all people in the tribe come to believe it is necessary. But suppose a boy and girl discover that they are to be sacrificed, but they don’t want to be killed and eaten. So, they come to John David Ebert to help them. They ask him to save them by helping them escape. What would Ebert do? Would he try to save them? Would he say he must remain neutral for the sake of scholarship as an anthropologist? Or would he try to convince the boy and girl to take part in the ritual because it’s part of their culture after all: Since most people of the tribe believe the ritual is necessary, it must be carried out, and it’d be wrong for the boy and girl to want to run away and live. In LORD OF THE FLIES, the boys begin to form a kind of primitive culture. They began to develop their own hierarchies and rituals that come close towards human sacrifice. And in the end, they try to hunt down one of the kids. Should we judge them? Or should we say the boys organically formed their own culture on the island, and we must respect it for what it is?
Or consider the case of Japan. It went from a feudal system that had slavery/serfdom, laws allowing samurai to cut down any peasant, and rituals like seppuku(aka harakiri) to a modern society that moved toward a system of rights. Did Japan make moral progress? Or was the old way just as morally sound as the new way? Was the old way different but no worse than the new way? Is a society that has ritual suicide and slavery as good as a society that bans such practice and grants legal rights to all citizens? In a way, one say the modernization of Japan was the result of imperialism. US and UK exerted pressure on Japan to open up to the West. Force and threat of more force was used on Japan, and that is why Japan decided to modernize in order to grow stronger and defend itself. But in modernizing, could one say Japan actually made moral progress toward greater freedom, rule of law, and rights for its people? Could we say Western Philosophy was morally more advanced than the Eastern because it was based on reason, logic, empiricism, and greater empathy? After all, so much of what the Japanese considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’ relied on the idea of the sacred or power of authority. Under samurai rule, the master had to be obeyed without question. It was not up to the subordinate to question, challenge, or argue with the superior. His role was to obey and serve. Now, the lord or master could be wise, and his commands could be sound. But it could be bad and stupid. Either way, the role of subordinates was to serve without question. This made for a cohesive and orderly society but not a very thoughtful one on the matter of ethics. Also, Japanese had a sense of the sacred. Their land was sacred, a world of gods and divine spirits. So, the idea of foreigners setting foot on Japan was an act of desecration. Also, shame and honor mattered more than mere morals. To defend one’s honor, a man was expected to kill himself to prove his innocence or repentance. Yukio Mishima is an interesting figure in this debate about morality. In some ways, he was very modern, even decadent and excessive. But he was also a nationalist and not just a modern nationalist but one who dreamed of lost Japan with its gods and spirits. He didn’t believe the Emperor was divine in the literal sense. He accepted Western science and all that. Still, he believed the Idea of Japan as a people and culture could not survive without the concept of the divinity. Japanese people could feel special and unique only as the kinsmen of the Emperor who is descended from a line of gods. This isn’t rational thinking, and some people would say it’s crazy. Some would say morality should be entirely based on reason and materiality. Good and Bad cannot be chosen on grounds of what some regard to be sacred. After all, people disagree on what is and isn’t sacred. To Westerners, a cow is what turns into hamburgers. But if you kill a cow in front of Hindus in India, they might tear you limb from limb. Cow is sacred to those people. In EARRINGS OF MADAME DE, a pair of earrings go from mere jewelry to near-sacred items when the woman who sold it gets it back as a gift from a man she falls in love with. In BLOW-UP, a bunch of rock attendees are willing to kill one another over a broken guitar neck tossed by Rock Star Jeff Beck of the Yardbirds, but when someone picks it up later(unawares of its origin), he tosses it away as junk.
In a way, the idea of the sacred can make us crazy and obsessed over irrational things. But without such sense of the sacred, there can be no culture, no vision of purity, no poetic sense of tragedy. The tragedy of the American Indians was they didn’t merely regard their lost land as real estate but as sacred hunting and burial ground. And the reason why Japanese were so traumatized by defeat and occupation in WWII was they revered their nation as the sacred land of gods. And the reason why Jews wanted to reclaim Palestine/Israel was because of its sacred meaning in Jewish history and culture. Of course, Palestinians find the land sacred for different reasons. At any rate, we are not simply logical creatures but symbolic ones. Idols and iconography matter to us. To a Catholic, destruction of a church isn’t merely demolition of a building. It is a desecration of a sacred house of God. So, even though the West was admirable in advancing the rational aspect of morality more than any other people, modern people cannot resolve the conundrum of the morality of the sacred. After all, it’s culturally too subjective. What is sacred to one culture may mean nothing to another. What is holy to one culture may be profane in another. Still, a world where all senses of right and wrong are defined by reason and cold logic alone cannot be a symbolically rich one. So, even though we can say Japan did make moral progress via modernization, there was something to Yukio Mishima’s desire to cling to a sense of the sacred that gave meaning to Japanese that went beyond the material, individual, and legalistic. And the "right of Israel’s right to exist" can only be justified on sacred grounds, i.e. Jews have historical, cultural, and spiritual claim to the Holy Land because it became holy only through the Narrative of Jews.
That said, as important as morality of the sacred is, moral progress happens through the rise of reason and concern for reality. Assessment of reality is crucial to moral progress because it connects the objective to the subjective. To illustrate this, consider a society where people are killed at the age of 50. This is done with the sincere belief that those killed at that age will ascend to heaven and live happily ever after. So, people of the society don’t see it as mass murder. They see it as helping people to enter heaven. Subjectively, they believe this, and it’s moral to the extent that they really believe that people killed at 50 will go to heaven. They believe it to be objectively true. But is it really true? Can they prove that those killed at 50 will go to heaven? Do they have evidence of heaven or afterlife? If they can’t prove it, isn’t it all based on faith or fantasy? And if there’s no heaven, isn’t it just mass murder? And even if heaven does exist, who’s to say being killed at 50 will assure one’s admission?
This is where our objective sense of truth affects our subjective sense of morality. If we are committed to knowing the objective truth, we need to rely on reason, logic, and empirical facts. And knowing those things, we can devise a moral order in accordance to those facts. So, if people of reason and facts can prove that there is no evidence of heaven(and even less evidence of people going to heaven by being killed at 50), they have a good argument for bringing that practice to an end. Or take prayer-healing. Suppose a religious family has a sick kid. Suppose the kid can be saved by modern medicine, but the parents are devoutly religious and believe the kid can be healed by prayer. To the extent that the parents are sincerely religious and believe in miracles, they are not evil people. They are moral in the sense that they want to cure their child by the help of God and angels. But, a moral case can be made for forcing the parents to taking the kid to a hospital. Why? There is no objective proof that praying cures diseases. The Bible says Jesus cured people with miracles, but there is no material evidence for such claim in our world. So, from a rational moral perspective, the parents are being immoral even if they’re subjectively moral. Their morality is not in sync with the objective facts of the world. The only sure way to give the kid a fighting chance at life is to take him or her to a doctor.
And this is where John David Ebert’s view of the New Guinea tribe is problematic.
Spirituality advanced in the same way. Primitive tribes see spirits in everything. But as mankind thought more deeply, it began to ponder the source spirit behind the many spirits. Just like there is an underlying Laws of Nature behind all physical phenomena, the idea in spiritual advancement is that there is an underlying one-spirit behind so many spirits. And this led to monotheism among Jews and Monism among Hindus. Monotheism says there is one God, and Monism says there may be many gods but they are part and parcel of the deeper spiritual force where all things come into unity.
Morality follows in the logic of spirituality. Christianity and Buddhism were moral advancements to Judaism and Hinduism in that it sought to universalize spiritual truth for all mankind. Jews said there is only one God, the holder of Truth, but God only favors Jews and doesn’t much care for dirty goyim. Christianity says the one and only God loves all mankind equally, and all can be saved through His Son, Jesus. Hinduism is a profound religion but confused and messy. Also, it favors certain castes over others, who are deemed filthy and untouchable. But Buddhism said Nirvana is open to all regardless of race, caste, or sex. The spiritual truth of Nirvana doesn’t care about such things as social standing or hierarchy. It cares about the goodness of souls and willingness to gain the truth, and that path is open to everyone. Of course, Jews can make a universal moral claim for Judaism. They can say that being Chosen doesn’t mean that Jews get to see non-Jews as stupid filthy shits to be exploited. It means God burdened Jews with a special responsibility to be wiser for the benefit of all mankind. A sort of Jewish Man’s Burden. And Hindus could also make a moral case for the caste system. They can argue that, while the caste system may seem unfair, it’s a form of cosmic justice. Those who are born into untouchable caste could be (1) being punished for crimes in the earlier life or (2) being rewarded for good karma in the earlier life. Being born an untouchable could be a cosmic demotion or promotion depending on the earlier life. Suppose a Brahmin committed a horrible deed. He would be cursed with bad karma, and he could be born into an untouchable in the next life. Or suppose a dog was a very good dog. So, in the next life, it was reincarnated as a human in the lowest caste. In that case, an untouchable was promoted from dog-hood to human-hood. At any rate, to the extent that Hinduism believes in Karma, it is wrong to mess with the carefully ordained caste system that, according to Hinduism, is part of how cosmic system works. In order for someone who is an untouchable to be born into a higher caste in the next life, he must accept his lot as an untouchable and live a good life.
Anyway, just like science moves toward grasping the deeper underlying forces behind physical phenomena and just like spirituality moves toward glimpsing the underlying one-source behind countless spirits and miracles, higher morality seeks to formulate the essential principles and foundations of right and wrong. And for many, the highest moral law is the Golden Rule. If you don’t want others to rob you, rape you, or murder you, YOU shouldn’t do it to others either. That is what sets the morally advanced from animals or savages. Animals know what is bad. No animal wants to be attacked or stolen from, but every animal will attack and steal to get what it wants. And even though savages or barbarians may practice tribal morality, a kind of honor-among-thieves, these rules don’t apply to those outside the tribe. So, Vikings ransacked other towns. Mongols raped and pillaged other peoples. Even civilized people could act in this manner. Japanese in Nanking treated Chinese as subhumans, and Nazi Germans treated Russians as untermensch. Granted, there are times where the cultural differences are so stark that even good-willed effort to live in harmony with another culture isn’t possible. Even if white settlers in America had wanted to get along in peace with Indians, the Red Savages simply wouldn’t have understood Western morality or values. They would have put up a fight, and so, the only way white folks could create civilization in America was to expel the Indians from their lands. Indeed, so much of peace and harmony only followed wars and subjugation in Leviathan fashion.
So, the Golden Rule cannot always triumph of its own accord. Rather, those who don’t comply to the Golden Rule must be smashed, crushed, defeated, and forced to adopt the Rule. This is how Christianity spread. Even though Christian morals did much for mankind, it didn’t spread by turning the other cheek or sermons about the meek. It spread through the sword and gun. People had to be forced to submit to the Golden Rule. Still, the Golden Rule works best for people within a system where it’s embraced by most as the best moral contract and consensus. Also, most people admit that the Golden Rule is fair, decent, and noble.
In contrast, the kind of morality one finds in a New Guinea tribe requires delirium, mania, and terror. For one thing, no one wants to be the poor boy and girl who ends up killed, sacrificed, and eaten. They want it to happen to the OTHER person. Now, a society that practices human sacrifice may convince its members that it’s noble to be offered to the gods. As such belief comes to be deeply ingrained in the people, they may sincerely believe that their deaths are necessary and good. But humans being human, there will always be side of them that wants to live and resists death. It’s like the samurai may have convinced themselves that it was noble to die by seppuku(or harakiri), but when the moment came, their natural-human self was really shitting bricks. It’s far easier to believe than to practice, to talk than walk. And even though Kamikaze pilots convinced themselves that they were dying noble deaths, a repressed side of them was peeing their pants. The film SEPPUKU dramatizes the gulf between honor and horror.
So, higher morality requires us to be truthful about our nature. Sure, we want to believe in the cult of courage, but we also want to live. All living organism want to live, and that is a fact of life. Some cultures may develop death cults and convince people that it’s noble to die in sacred rituals, but so much of it goes against human nature. Take the Hindu ritual of sati or suttee, the burning of widows at the funeral pyre of their husbands. While Hindu women were raised to see such as noble and even though many women fulfilled their duties with honor, the very human-natural side of them found it appalling. Same with female circumcision. Many girls in certain cultures may convince themselves that it’s good and necessary, but the human-natural side of them still remains appalled at the prospect. So, higher morality needs a better understanding of our nature as living organisms with certain needs.
Taking those things in consideration, could we say there is such a thing as higher/superior morality? Even if it’s not entirely objective, a certain moral system may be closer to a clearer understanding of human nature and our needs. Suppose there is society A that commits human sacrifice(like in New Guinea) and society B that lives by the Golden Rule. Could we say that the latter is morally more advanced? If not, what does it imply? Are we to believe that if Society B becomes like Society A, it’s no different from Society A becoming like Society B? Suppose people of Society A realize that their ways are barbaric and move toward something like the Golden Rule. In time, it becomes like Society B. Would that be moral progress? But if we say morality is relative and there is no superior morality? Suppose people of Society B who believe and practice the Golden Rule decide to adopt the cosmology of people of Society A and begin to practice human sacrifice. Are we to believe that there was no moral regression since there is no superior morality? I think one could argue that IF truth is good and if truth is gained through knowledge, the more people gain knowledge and arrive at more truth, they will agree that the Golden Rule beats Human Sacrifice. So, in that sense, there is superior morality. Now, this doesn’t mean that we should beat up on the New Guinea tribe like Kevin Michael Grace does. Given the limited knowledge, superstitions, and genetics of the tribesmen, we should try to understand why they do what they do. But that doesn’t mean morality is relative. It means morality has validity only according to the limits of one’s knowledge. So, if the New Guinea tribe were capable of gaining more knowledge and more truth, it could morally advance by realizing that it serves no real purpose to commit human sacrifice. We don’t practice human sacrifice because we know more. We know that sacrificing humans to gods offers no benefits. We know there is no evidence of gods who demand human sacrifice. Knowing more, we can have higher morality that isn’t bound to superstition.
Still, a moral case can be made against human sacrifice even if such gods existed. Indeed, suppose modern man discovers that the dark gods really do exist. And these gods will punish humanity unless a million people are sacrificed every year. So, unless Americans sacrifice a million people, the gods will send floods and droughts to kill ten million people. Would it then be moral to sacrifice a million people to save ten million people? Or would it be more moral to defy the gods’ demands and suffer the consequences even if you and your family members die? More people will die, but there is the pride in that humanity stuck together against the sadistic gods. We can run this moral experiment without gods. Suppose a bunch of thugs say your family’s life will be spared IF you kill another family. If you don’t kill the other family, both families will die. Which is the more moral thing to do? Kill the other family so that at least your family will live? Or die along with the other family in the name of solidarity against the cruel thugs?
One paradox of higher morality is it’s about both rising above animal emotions and connecting with it. On the one hand, we can’t attain higher morality if we act like animals and give into animal lusts and passions at every moment. We’d be like crazyass Negroes. But, there are times when it’s the animal-side of us that alerts us to what really matters. It’s the animal side of us that wants to live and be happy. Sometimes, it is the ‘higher sense’ of duty that can blind us to the machinations of power that seek to exploit us. In Kurosawa’s BAD SLEEP WELL, the corporate chieftains invoke a sense of duty and honor to persuade the underlings to take the fall and commit suicide. That way, the company is spared of the scandal as the sacrificial lamb took the blame for all the wrongdoings. A man who takes the fall may believe he’s acting out of loyalty, a sense of duty, and sacrifice for the company. Yet, he could be a dupe used by powerful men who only care about themselves. In Kurosawa’s DREAMS, a military officer is able to convince the dead soldiers to return to the underworld. He apologizes but appeals to their sense of duty. They are dead, belong with the dead, and can no longer be of the living world. But when the officer is confronted by the ghost of a dead dog, there is no way to persuade it with ‘higher concepts’. It’s like in KAGEMUSHA, so many men are fooled but not the horse.
It is because humans have a higher sense of honor that they can be persuaded with words and ideals. But this can also blind them to how they’re being abused by the power. Consider all the US soldiers who died or were crippled in Wars for Israel because they were persuaded by appeals to patriotism, heroism, and etc. But in fact, they were just cannon-fodder for cynical Zionists whose idea was to make white goyim fight Muslim goyim for the sake of Israel First.
So, sometimes the best guide to moral sense is to listen to our ‘animal’ nature. We want to live and find meaning and happiness. Unless there is something truly worthy that calls for our sacrifice, we should listen to our nature than to the appeal to the ‘better angels of our nature’ for devilish ends by fiendish elites who look upon us as little more than cattle. The very Jews who used white Americans as cannon fodder now want to use globalist mass-migration-invasion to replace whites with Third World peons.
Kevin Michael Grace derides John David Ebert’s remark about WWII as moral-reductionism to a ‘teachable moment’, i.e. maybe WWII wasn’t all bad since it taught us to be good. But Kevin Michael Grace misunderstood Ebert’s point, which has both cosmological and psychological implications. In the Book of Job, God doesn’t explain why Job, a good man, had to suffer so badly. What did he do to deserve such treatment? As far as Job is concerned, everything that happened to him is bad and serves no purpose. And at the human level, he’s right. And it even seems to violate God’s promise. After all, God said He’d punish the evil and bless the good. So, why was Job the good punished? At the end, God explains that there are reasons that humanity simply cannot understand. Even if we don’t believe in God, the immensity of the cosmos can only leave us guessing as to the why and what. On such grand scale of things, what is good, what is bad? For the dinosaurs and other creatures, the giant asteroid that made them go extinct must have been horrifying. And even we can understand it as a most terrible event. And yet, would humans have evolved if not for that event? If dinosaurs hadn’t died out, maybe THEY would have evolved into the smartest species. So, what is good, what is bad on the grand scale of things? This doesn’t mean we should forgo morality on the human level, but our sense of good and evil cannot explain the Why on the cosmic scale. If God really does exist, why did He send an asteroid to wipe out so many animals who committed no sin? After all, all those dinosaurs and other animals couldn’t have sinned because they were just animals. So, why did God create all those animals and wipe them out? By our morality, it seems cruel and pointless. Why create those magnificent species of creatures that lived for over millions of years and then wipe them out with an asteroid? But if God did just that, He paved the way for the eventual rise of humans. And if we don’t believe in God and if events in the cosmos are unfolding according to laws of nature, then even what we call ‘free will’ is just an illusion. WWII, terrible as it was, was inevitable given the butterfly effects of so many forces in the universe.
But putting aside cosmology, Ebert’s point carries some psychological truth. While we can all agree that WWII and similar events were horrible, it’s a fact of history that humanity can only move forward through certain terrible events. Why? Human psychology favors the same old, tends toward complacency, and easily falls into amnesia. As Merlin says in EXCALIBUR, "It is the doom of man that they forget." It would be nice if humanity could gain the wisdom that came with WWII without WWII. But it can’t. Does that mean WWII was good or we should have another to learn more lesson? Of course not. But there is no denying that some of the greatest wisdom arose only because of great tragedies that shook up humanity. WWII was horrible for Japan, but for awhile in the 1950s and 1960s, the cultural and intellectual flowering owed to an effort to come to grips with what had happened. As years passed, Japan grew richer and quieter, but it began to become decadent and shallow as generation after generation only knew peace, complacency, hedonism, and consumerism that led to apathy.
When we look back on our lives, we feel a certain paradox. We wish certain terrible things hadn’t happened, but we also know that we would not know what we know if they hadn’t happened. Some may argue that we can learn the lessons through books, but they’re not the same thing. One cannot understand true love and loss without having gone through courtship, marriage, divorce, or death of a loved one. Imagining what it would be like to lose a loved one simply isn’t the same as losing a loved one. And we cannot learn about the reality of war in movies and books alone. One had to have been there. We don’t want wars and such horrors. But there are lessons can only be gained through going through the cauldron of horrors. In a way, we are stupid that way. Unless we get whupped real good, we forget lessons all too fast. Also, the good can lead to the bad, and bad can lead to the good. Communism was a bad system, and Hungary and Poland suffered under Soviet tyranny. That was definitely bad. But it was that experience that made Poles and Hungarians appreciate and value their freedom, nationhood, and independence. Swedes, in contrast, had it very good during the Cold War. They had peace and prosperity. Those are good things. But given the basic stupidity and shallowness of humanity, the good things led to complacency, vanity, glibness, and/or utopian delusions. So, while Hungarians and Poles struggle to preserve their nations, the Swedes are pissing away everything like deers in the headlights because the Good Times made them overly naive and shallow, as if all the world could be made nice like Swedish if enough people had Good Will.
There is something to Harry Lime’s remark about the Swiss and the Cuckoo Clock. We want peace and brotherly love, but so much of what we value are the result of the great tragedies that hardened, inspired, and reminded people of what humanity is really capable of, for good or ill. This doesn’t mean WWII was good or is to be appreciated as ‘teachable moment’. What it suggests is the sad fact that humanity can only progress and learn through tragedies because (1) humans are forgetful and (2) certain truths reveal themselves only through horror. It’s like childbirth. It is terrible and agonizing for the woman, but only through such pain is new life born. Too often, the great truths were born only that way. And in the realm of creativity, the artist had to come close to madness to create something great. He had to be obsessive, single-minded, and even megalomaniacal. Now, those are not good qualities in people, and yet, so much of great art wouldn’t exist if artists didn’t flirt with madness. For Richard Wagner to realize his vision, he had to abuse so many people and indulge in megalomania. Indeed, even the religion of Christianity is built on such paradoxes. Why did the Son of God have to die and in the most horrific way? And even though we say Judas was a bad guy, he was totally necessary for Jesus to be captured and crucified. It was only through torture and death that Jesus could demonstrate the triumph of the spirit over flesh. So, as horrible as the torture and crucifixion of Jesus was, they were totally necessary for the myth of Christianity take root. If Jesus just went around preaching sermons, He would have been remembered as a well-meaning guy. It was because He was killed and then came back from the dead that Christians believe He is indeed the real thing, the Son of God. Since Kevin Michael Grace is a Christian, he should know that many great truths and myths are born of ‘necessary horrors’.
9. https://youtu.be/-m12hzqOojo?t=46m20s Luke Ford says he loves LOVE STORY and wept watching the movie and asks John David Ebert how one should respond when most people ridicule a movie he loves. For starters, a correction for Luke Ford. LOVE STORY was a huge hit, and it got as many good reviews as bad ones. Surely, sophisticates found it sentimental and manipulative, but its defenders cherish the movie on those very grounds. It is NOT a great work of art but a very Hollywood movie, and it works perfectly along those lines. I love it too, along with OLIVER’S STORY the sequel.
John David Ebert expands on the theme of love and says LOVE is one thing he believes isn’t relative. Morality is relative from culture to culture, but love is not. It is or should be a universal principle according to Ebert. But it seems to me there is nothing more relative than love. Sure, we can imagine an abstract love as a universal principle and argue that we should love everyone. Some people will expand to how we should all animals and plants too. Some will say we should love all things, even the inanimate: All the stars, galaxies, asteroids, comets, and black holes. But there is no love without life. When an asteroid smashes into a planet and destroys everything, there is no consciousness, no emotion, no love, no hatred. It just is. And even most living things have no sense of love. Plants have no consciousness. And insects, worms, clams, snails, crabs, fish, and such creatures have nothing that resembles what we know to be emotions. Now, amphibians and reptiles(and maybe more advanced animals like octopuses) may have some primitive sense of emotions. But it’s birds and mammals that have what we would call recognizable emotions. And this is true especially of smarter mammals such as dolphins, apes, monkeys, dogs, cats, seals, bears, pigs, wolves, and etc. Dogs can feel something that seems like love to us. And elephants have been known to have compassion for fellow elephants of the herd. And mother bears are very affectionate toward their young. So, love is not a universal principle. It can only exist in the consciousness of advanced animals, and only humans are capable of formulating a concept around it.
But here’s the thing. Love cannot exist without hate. Indeed, love is the flipside of hate. Lower animals feel neither hate nor love. They can be aggressive in hunger. A shark can hungrily attack and devour other animals, but it feels no hate. It is like a killing machine. It just follows instinct. When it’s hungry, it becomes aggressive and will attack prey. But a shark feels neither love nor hate. Lower animals can become agitated, but it’s not acting out of hate. If you step on a snake, it will bite. It’s reacting by instinct to what is perceived as danger. A snake has no special hate for anything. It will strike at anything that endangers it. A snake feels no hate but also feels no love. With a primitive brain, it has no understanding of ‘my offsprings’ or ‘my clan of snakes’. It feels no attachment. So, if a mother snake crosses path with its very offsprings, it will not recognize those snakes as her own and feel love for them. If the mother snake sees a man kill her offsprings, it will feel indifferent. It will feel neither love nor hate. But take a mother bear. It feels a powerful attachment to its young. It feels what we would recognize as affection, even love. But it’s precisely because a mother bear feels so much love for its young that it feels extreme hatred for anyone or anything that might endanger her cubs. This is why a mother bear is more dangerous than even a big male bear. If you come near her cubs even by accident, she might charge you and tear you limb from limb. Love means attachment to something. That means you will, indeed must, hate whatever threatens what you love. If a human mother were like a snake mother, she would hardly recognize her children as her own. She would feel no attachment. So, if someone hurts her children, she will feel indifferent. Feeling no love, she feels no hate either. Indeed, this is the premise of the Pod Philosophy in INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. The Pod People feel no emotions EXCEPT the zeal of turning other humans into fellow Podkins. Podkins believe that is the right way. Because podkins feel no emotions or attachment, they get along together. They feel no love, but that means they feel no hate. Among themselves, they feel indifferent. A podkin doesn’t favor certain podkins over other podkins like humans favor certain humans over others. A human favors his family over strangers. Any person would be more upset if a single person he cares about is killed than if a 1,000 strangers die in an earthquake in another part of the world. Any person would be more outraged if someone killed his mother than if he found out someone else’s mother was killed. On the cerebral level, we can tell ourselves that all human lives are of equal value, and that it’s equally sad whoever dies. But emotionally, we never feel that way. Human emotions favor those whom we love, have personal attachment to, and have developed affection for. And we feel this way even about animals. Pigs are just as smart as dogs or even smarter according to some animal experts. And yet, we love dogs more because they are cuddly, expressive, and easy to interact with. In contrast, even though we may recognize pigs as equals of dogs in brains and emotional complexity, we don’t feel much love for pigs because they look ugly, are too big and ungainly as house pets. Also, our love for the pleasure of eating pork blinds us to the slaughter of pigs in the hogocaust. Is love for food a kind of love? But that means we must kill other organisms to enjoy our love for their tastiness. But even vegetarians feel a need to kill and wipe out entire organisms to ensure the safety of those they love. Suppose a vegetarian couple love their children. They believe killing animals for food is wrong, but their main attachment is to their kids. But suppose a cougar enters the town and attacks people. In the news, it says the cougar killed and ate the child of another family. Would the vegetarian family support the culling of the cougar? Of course. Their love of their kids makes them fear and hate the cougar that might come prowling to drag their child away. Now, the cougar may have killed the kid of the other family because it too is filled with love. Suppose it’s a mother cougar that feels affection for its own cubs and wants to feed them. And when the cougar saw some child, it saw ‘food for my beloved cubs’. So, the cougar’s aggression and violence were also the product of love. Love is a difficult thing. Love is rarely, if ever, about loving everyone or everything. It’s about attachment to specific things, and that means one grows to hate whatever threatens what one loves. If one loves art, one will hate desecraters of art. If one loves Jews, one will hate Nazi Germans who killed them. If one loves Russian Christianity, one will hate Jewish Bolsheviks who went about killing millions of Christian Slavs and smashing 50,000 churches. In ROMEO AND JULIET, the love between the boy and girls leads them to hate whatever stands between their love. Love can also lead to the hatred toward the very object of love if love is not requited or apparently betrayed. In MANHUNTER, the big ugly guy comes to love this blind woman, but when he suspects she is cheating on him, he grows angry and hateful towards her. We hate traitors because the people whom we care about turn on us. It is because white men love white women that they are coming to hate white women as Race Traitors. Because female nature is to go with the stronger male and mock the weaker male, increasing numbers of white girls are noticing that black guys have more muscle and bigger dongs. So, they become infected with jungle fever, go with black men, offer their wombs to black men to have black babies, and mock & deride white men as wussy weak ‘white boys’. This obviously leads to much anger among white guys who feel betrayed by these ‘mudshark’ whores.
Love always favors something over something else. To love something is to prefer it to what you don’t love. So, if you love rabbits more than gophers, and if there is a fire from which you can save rabbits or gophers, you will favor the rabbits while letting the gophers burn to death. Surely, every parent is more concerned about their own kids than for kids of others. In abstract principle, they will say every child is equally precious, but their emotions are far more attached to their own kids. Any parent will be more saddened by the death of his child than by deaths of a thousand children in an misfortune in some other part of the world. Why do Jews care so much about Shoah but not so much about the Great Famine(Ukraine), the Killing Fields(Cambodia), the Great Leap Forward(China), and Rwandan Genocide? Because Jews care more for their own people as fellow tribesmen.
Now, a people can be made to feel virtuous by hating their own kind. Whites used to favor whites just like Jews favor Jews, but Jewish-controlled media and academia have convinced so many whites that white-caring-for-whites is ‘racist’ and ‘hateful’. So, whites can only seek absolution for caring more for Jews. And whites who are convinced of this virtue-signal by praising Jews and Israel while attacking fellow whites who express white identity and solidarity. Also, these cucky whites are so enamored of Jewish holiness that they favor Jews over Palestinians EVEN WHEN the IDF death squads gun down Palestinian women and children for the ‘crime’ of wanting to return to their lost homeland that was stolen by Zionist colonizers. So, the slavish and cucky white love for Jews requires whites to hate fellow whites(who are into white identity and unity) and Palestinians(and Iranians and Russians). Whites who love Jews feel they must hate whatever Jews hate. So, if Jews hate Russia and Iran, whites must hate them too. So, love is always tied with hate.
Even when someone tries to love all of humanity equally, it poses more problems. Should he love humans more than animals? Imagine a conflict between humans and animals. For humans to live safe and well, the animals must be eradicated. For animals to live well in their natural habitat, human development mustn’t be allowed. If one is for All Humanity, should he favor human interest over animal interest? Also, can we really love all of humanity equally? In the most abstract sense, we can say we believe in the brotherhood of man(and sisterhood of woman). But can we love a nasty, vicious, and stupid thug as much as a nice fellow? Christianity says we should love even wicked people and forgive them because they do not know what they do. But in reality, this isn’t easy. I mean it’s hard to forgive someone who killed your family, especially if the person is unrepentant and laughs at your face. The character of Luis Bunuel’s NAZARIN goes nearly mad in trying to love everyone, even those who torment him. It’s like a man can try to convince himself that he loves all women equally, but his real emotions will always favor beautiful and kind women to fat, ugly, gross, disgusting, rude, and piggish women.
The problem of trying to love or care about everyone and everything was illustrated in Buddhism and Christianity. If Jesus was mostly concerned with human souls, Buddha was concerned for all life. He saw suffering everywhere, from man to the lowest creature. So, should he love everyone and everything and feel compassion for them? But the problem is life exists by devouring life. Life cannot exist without these endless cycles of destruction. Lions and tigers must kill. Rabbits must eat plants. Plants also grow from the decay of life that enriches the soil. So, no matter how much we try to love life, the fact is life is about destruction of life. All life feeds on other life. So, love is not the answer in Buddhism. After all, love means attachment, and attachment means desire. As long as life clings to life and attaches to other life, it wants to live, and in order to live, it must devour other life. Even a beautiful woman exists by eating plants and animals. She too is a killer. Even the cutest child grows up by devouring life. By the age of 20, imagine all the cows, pigs, chickens, lambs, fish, and etc. you have eaten. They had to die so you could live(and enjoy food as pleasure). So, for Buddha, the answer was not attachment but detachment. To reach Nirvana, one must dissolve one’s emotional attachment to things, even to one’s own life. Indeed, Buddhism says all of reality is really just an illusion, a bad nightmare into which are born into over and over and over via reincarnation because our life-spirit clings to life through attachment and desire. We must let that go and realize that life and all of reality are just an illusion, and then we can depart from the bad dream of illusion forever and gain eternal extinction. Buddhism’s answer is a negation of everything.
In contrast, Jesus tried to love everyone equally. But how is this possible when there are so many people, so many wretches, exploiters, bullies, and etc.? Also, if a man must love all of humanity, it means he can’t have a family because having a family means he loves his own flesh and blood more than any other. In THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, Jesus is tempted with what a man wants: A woman to love, family, and children who care about him. But if Jesus were to lead such a life, he can’t offer his love to all of humanity. But even if he rejects the temptation of a family life, how can he love and offer salvation to all of humanity? After all, the world is wicked, fallen, and dark place.
According to Christianity, Jesus’ universal love was presented as a promise to enter Heaven for those who accepted Him as the Messiah who can heal them of their sins. If Moses led the Hebrews toward the Promised Land, Jesus would go the extra step and lead the soul of anyone of any tribe to the Kingdom of Heaven if he was willing to repent before Jesus as the Son of God. Christians believe in this, but it’s been impossible to lead the Christian life. Love thy enemy, Turn the other cheek, the stuff about surrendering one’s entire wealth to the poor, and etc. So, even though Christians believe Jesus offered humanity the final answer, few have been willing or able to live by the precepts of Christianity. Indeed, most Christians are more interested in the forgiveness part than in the redemption part. They basically want to live as they please with the hope that, when the day comes, Jesus will just forgive them and love them just the same. As for Homos, they’ve gone the extra mile and claim that Jesus will not only forgive them for their buggering lifestyle but fully endorse it as ‘holy’ and wonderful. Homos are so narcissistic that they will even rewrite Biblical texts to serve their egos that are as over-stretched as their bungholes.
John David Ebert says he came to love movies because Phoenix was such a decadent place that had nothing to offer in the way of art. That’s rather odd because places that offer lots of arts and culture tend to be the most decadent. There is a lively arts & culture scene in NY, but it’s a very decadent city. To an extent, creativity feeds on decadence because decadence, despite all its problems, allows more freedom and experimentation that often comes with subversion. So, maybe the problem of Phoenix wasn’t really decadence. Maybe, it had people who were mostly materialists or moralists. Materialists like to get things done; they are pragmatic and profit-oriented. And moralists have a strong sense of right and wrong, and they generally feel a bit triggered by art, especially modern art, because the ‘erotics’ of creativity is often threatening to the social order. It’s like both the Greeks and Chinese had misgivings about the role of music in society. It encourage sensation and thrills over reason and ethics.
At any rate, I think John David Ebert is being too harsh on the place of his childhood and also being too narrow in his concept of culture. Yes, when most people say ‘culture’, they mean the arts, entertainment, creativity, intellectual discourse, and etc. Lots of modern people consider everything ‘boring’ and ‘dead’ unless they have access to the bright lights of the street and stage. But there is another kind of culture that gives deep meaning even without the glitter of creativity and intellectual ideas. It is the culture of family, community, memory, heritage, customs, tradition, and shared spirituality. After all, consider the American pioneers of the 19th century. Most were farming folks. They didn’t have access to big libraries, theater, and big concerts. And there was no radio, TV, movies, and etc. back then. So, did they have no culture? Was their life without meaning? Of course not. They had family, lore of kinsmen, memory of ancestors, storytelling around campfires or fireplace, reading of the Bible, diaries and letters, church attendance, community gatherings, funerals, weddings, and etc. For most of human history, most people lived in ‘dull’ and ‘boring’ communities without access to what we call ‘culture’. So, were they lacking in culture? I would say they had a rich culture just the same. Indeed, by our standards, even the great cities of Ancient Greece were ‘boring’ and ‘dull’. After all, there was no electricity back then. No movies, no cars, no radio, and etc. At night, most of the city was pitch dark. There were sculptures, paintings, and theater to be sure, but most people had no ready access to them. And yet, they had culture in marriage, togetherness, bond between parents and children, stories passed down through the generations, conversations over the dinner table, and social rituals. Read the New Testament, and what did Jesus and His Disciples have? Not much except clothes on their backs. But through dialogue, sermons, and deeds, they had a sense of culture and meaning. So, people can make culture of their own instead of thinking of culture as something made by others for consumption and enjoyment. After all, Jesus came upon His Truth through solitary meditation(as did Buddha). He learned from the Rabbis but, in the end, He found His own truth and not only created His own culture but founded a whole new religion.
10. https://youtu.be/-m12hzqOojo?t=50m45s Luke Ford asks John David Ebert if sentimentality has negative connotations in the arts, and Ebert says yes, even though he talks of good sentimentality and bad sentimentality. He mentions Stephen King’s novel of THE SHINING as bad sentimentality and praises Kubrick for having filtered out the mawkishness from the story to allow for a more intellectually accomplished work. That said, Ebert says he loves the sentimentality of Spielberg movies and sees no problem with that. The way I see it, sentimentality is problematic in art but permissible, even necessary, in certain kinds of entertainment. While sentimentality can work in art, it has to be justified and controlled. Because art is about exploring the truth, which is often dark and painful, sentimentality can be unconvincing or an evasion of the facts of life, social or psychological. Sentimentality is like sugar. It’s an added sweetner, a childlike wish for a happy ending, a shoulder to cry on, or hope that others will care. Sentimentality does exist in the real world. People feel sentimental about lots of things. But if art is about the truth, it must have the courage to show that reality is ironically removed from our sentimental wishes. A world is not a dream-come-true or filled with angels who care about us. There’s a scene in VERTIGO where Scotty(James Stewart) says to Judy(Kim Novak) that she shouldn’t have been ‘so sentimental’. She got so swept up in the fantasy that she wore the necklace, but the dreamy object only woke Scotty from his own sentimental slumber and leads him to a collision with the cold facts of what really happened. VERTIGO is one of strange movies that was made as genre entertainment but has so many shades of meaning and psychological depth that it attains the status of art.
But when it comes to entertainment, ‘sentimental’ was never a bad word. Indeed, all critics would agree that sentimentality is integral to certain kind of movies as sugar and icing are to cake. THE WIZARD OF OZ without sentimentality wouldn’t work. Disney movies were meant to be sentimental. Of course, it has to be in the right measure. Too much sugar and cream can ruin a cake, and excessive sentimentality can ruin a movie that needs it in just the right dosage. Also, there is a difference between real sugar and saccharine. With Spielberg, the sentimentality wasn’t a problem in his entertainment movies, but it is problematic in his serious ‘art’ movies. SCHINDLER’S LIST and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN hit hard with grim violence, but they are too sentimental for their subjects. Tom Hanks is meant to be Mr. Nice Guy who tugs at our heartstrings from beginning to end. The relationship that develops between Schindler and the too-good-to-be-true-Jews is unconvincing given the context of what is going on. That Schindler overcame greed & evil and came to care about the oppressed is real enough, but ultimately, it feels schmaltzy, especially with the bogus farewell speech he gives at the end. So, Spielberg the entertainer was a master of sentimentality, but Spielberg the ‘artist’ could never let it go for a deeper and darker exploration of life, as in the films of Martin Scorsese. Even in Spielberg’s most serious movies, there is a sense of angels hovering about the characters sprinkling miracle charms of goodness. This was a problem with Charlie Chaplin too. Everyone, moviegoer or critic, loved the sentimentality of movies like CITY LIGHTS or GOLD RUSH. But some people had problems with MONSIEUR VERDOUX, a disturbing bluebeard story that is expertly crafted but tad too cute and charming at times for such a grotesque tale..
Finally, John David Ebert says he disagrees with the Pauline Kaels of the world who couldn’t abide by the sentimentality of Spielberg movies, but where does he get this? Kael loved Spielberg. She was one of his first champions, favoring SUGARLAND EXPRESS over BADLANDS(by Terrence Malick), a film she dismissed. She loved the sense of wonder, excitement, and cheerfulness(and naughty tricks on the audience). She highly praised JAWS and compared Spielberg’s skills with Eisenstein’s. She loved CLOSE ENCOUNTERS for all its flaws. She really loved E.T., about which she wrote an ecstatic review. She didn’t care much for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK but she loved TEMPLE OF DOOM. (She also raved over EMPIRE STRIKES BACK by Lucas.) And she loved the first part of EMPIRE OF THE SUN before it got confused in story, style, and sensibility. If anything, Pauline Kael was often attacked for being too anti-intellectual, too emotional and visceral in her reactions. After all, she loved Brian DePalma too. Kael often championed American cinema over the European, much of which she found belabored, strained, and pretentious. Kael was beloved by many because she was an intellectual who had a pop sensibility and wrote in a style that was fun and emotive. Above all, she shared how she felt about a movie as a personal experience than as an intellectual exercise. The kind of critics who were more dismissive of film-makers like Lucas and Spielberg were people like John Simon(a culture snob or classic humanist), Jonathan Rosenbaum(ideologue and contrarian), and J. Hoberman(a fetishist for the avant-garde).
11. https://youtu.be/-m12hzqOojo?t=57m57s John David Ebert says Political Correctness has gone out of control even though we need some of it, presumably to suppress race-ists and neo-fascists like myself who speak the truth about Jewish Supremacism, Black Threat to Whites, and Homo degeneracy. Then, he mentions Trump rallies and Charlottesville as examples of ideological lunatics acting badly. But most of the violence at Trump rallies were instigated by anti-Trump activists. Also, in 2016, there were many more anti-Trump violence by Hillary supporters, Antifa, and anti-American thugs, none of which was condemned by the Jewish-controlled media. Also, the incident with the car at Charlottesville was the result of panic on the part of the driver who was attacked from all sides by blacks and antifa mobs. Indeed, the Unite the Right rally would have happened without incident but for the fact that the city authorities and the police chief shut down the event and then willfully pushed the Unite the Right attendees into a crowd of Antifa. The violence was not instigated by the Unite the Right people. Rather, it was the doing of local authorities and antifa mobs. But the Jew-run media spun the Narrative like it was the fault of ‘nazis’. This is the very media that promotes HATE against Palestinians, Russia, Iran, Syria, Christians, and White Americans(and white Europeans who want to defend their nations from African-Muslim invasion). While there were extremist elements on the Unite the Right, it is a fact that the violence was instigated by the mayor, the local police, and antifa. The rally was shut down even though a federal judge decided that the Unite the Right had a constitutional right to hold it. Since the fiasco, the Jew-run media have conspired to blame it all on the ‘white supremacists’, and Jewish law firms have conspired with certain residents to sue the Unite the Right for the mayhem even though it was the result of the Jewish mayor and black police chief who ordered the police to shut down the event and push attendees into a crowd of Antifa. If John David Ebert is ignorant of what happened, what planet has he been living on? Even an independent inquiry into the event concluded that the local authorities were most to blame for the havoc. https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/01/us/charlottesville-riots-failures-review/index.html If Ebert knows the truth but is just playing dumb to sound ‘goody-good progressive’, he has no respect for the truth. Bad mindset for someone who claims to be a philosopher.
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