...
Before they forced analytics on us I had virtually no truck with stats at all. I have one counter only in case I need to track down a creep, but that was not good enough for Google and when they were busted for their nefarious uses of our stats, it immediately turned into something not optional for anyone using this blogging platform. Now whenever you go to your dashboard, there are numbers up there and you see them even when you are not paying attention. So, betimes, you click on one of them when it seems to be growing more slowly or more quickly than usual... or when you want to see how many clicks came in over a certain range of time... just almost completely meaningless crap... but also gives some general information about what people googled to land here.
I have noticed over the last year that "michaeltsarion.com" is an extremely frequent search term, as is "michael tsarion racist" and other variations on his themes. He has a way of stating things and posting things that immediately force one to consider if he's got some racist mania against black people, and, far from obliging our programming, our defaults, he does not deign to explain himself. You can ask him until the cows come home and if you get any response at all, it's likely to be so in your face and still difficult to parse, that you will want to just go away and forget about him altogether.
He is not for the faint of heart.
Unfortunately, it does not only repel weak minded people; many weak minded people are extremely attracted to him. You can immediately tell why. If there's anything you can immediately tell about Michael Tsarion it is that he is the very incarnation of leadership material. He resents it, and in his resentment, it increaseth exponentially... both the leaderly nectars and the blazingly negative reactions to them. He is a jackass magnet [magnate] of the first order.
The good part of that is that jackasses need the abuse, but the bad part about it is that he makes those with a more serious interest very tired of the kind of testosterone coming up to smack everyone around, the pressure of speech, the deeply resonating tones of earsplittingly high aggravation barely holding on to the kind of coherence needed to make its point. It can be seriously, seriously, seriously hard on the nerves to try to catch his wave, because he is that seriously aggravated by the benighted throngs ruining humanity's chances of freeing itself.
If you've been around here much you already know that I think he has taken this exaltation of the individual approach to trying to impart the wisdom of the ancients to act as a counterweight to all the charlatans out there mouthing "Buddhism" — Zen in particular — despite how intensely they drilled on one extremely salient point; to wit: YOU DO NOT EXIST. This might have been an extremely virtuous choice, one the ancients would praise, because it has long been established that the mode of teaching must ever morph to elude the depredations of charlatans who are simply good at memorizing things, about as enlightened or enlightening as the doornails they're dead as, going to kill you or cure you, for sure.
I still think this has been his intent with stressing self to the extent he does because, while he is quick to dis the snot out of Eastern Mysticism, he frequently waxes nearly worshipful over the Siddhartha Road, and sometimes speaks such that I can tell he has very clearly studied Zen, and holds it in high regard. It's clear to me he esteems the original teaching and has zero time for the crap being cranked out by charlatans across the globe today.
It is unclear to me whether he was sufficiently awakened to take this tack with the general public as he has. I can't tell if he's just off in a long pocket of "habit" deluding him back to sleep, or if he may be so virtuous as to go out among the seethingly agonized minions to spread the sparks that might wrest a few from their fixations on death and out into enough light to change course. I think the weight of my insight is falling toward the former these days. I think his hot Irish blood is just too familiar a default and continues to snatch him back from his own awakening, that his determination itself has been his undoing.
It isn't necessarily permanent, though it's carrying on too long if you ask me.
But, don't be a jackass.
He's not a racist. He's half Indian and half Irish. He's not "white". Kids on the street used to yell to him, "Hey, Kunta Kinte!" And, for fucksakes, can't you see he's trying to yell past your stupid ideas about race? How do you imagine the truth can actually be modified by your horse shit notions of race? What about the human race? Do you resort to calling him a "self-hating darky" now, or what?
And right here is where I am afraid his brilliant resort to inverting YOU DO NOT EXIST may be going to end up having drowned him. I'm still pulling for him, but he just keeps seeming closer to drowning than awakening. Letting the ego do the differentiating between righteous and unrighteous is a bottomlessly dangerous approach — even as it is also more accessible to the denizens of Western "civilization" — and it does not look to me as though it is going well for him just now.
The entire point is to make you see who is the real you and who is the pretend you. It is not who you think. You may insist you are the arbiter of that, but you are a fucking fig newton of imagination and not competent to arbitrate. Once you have gotten a good gander at that, seen for yourself the truth of yourself, then you stand a chance, not before. It's clear to me Michael Tsarion has gotten that gander and has decided to deal with the modern predicament in this backassward way based on some solid reasoning, but... buttering up the Achilles Heel to best the Achilles Heel and free yourself from a cosmos full of the brute savagery of Achilles Heels... well... seems to me it's not going so well for him just now.
And all this libertarian hysteria over "collectivism" and urgency about the individual, the artist, the sovereign human is wasted vitality on your average walking around decent person. You are not going to convince them that doing one's best for the common good isn't a worthy virtue. Both because it is and because you refuse to look at the fact that your dream of individual sovereignty means people not able to fit in with the group you talk as though you revile so much have to be dead in order to insure your sovereignty. Survival of the fittest in-group. When the whole thing has, in fact, been moot all along.
Like "women's lib". You just be it. Fuck the circuses. Those are something else completely. Same with sovereign humans. These are things talking was invented to ruin.
always and any time....
