I'm on a friend's computer as I type this. I'll post a real post when I can get it fixed. If I can't who knows when I'll be back.
Have I mentioned I hate Windows 8 recently? Has anyone ever uttered those word? I LOVE Windows 8?
Windows 98, well it wasn't love but it worked.
Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Monday, July 6, 2015
Dan Savage: Big Mouth Little Journalism
I don't like Dan Savage very much and especially don't like that he's held up as some kind of great and positive figure representing LGBT* folk. His sex advice goes from OK to dangerous and disastrous, his antics like turning "Santorum" into an especially gross and obscene synonym was attention getting but politically unproductive - it had nothing to do with the eclipse of Rick Santorum's political career - and early his role in "Draw Muhammad Day" combined all of the above with an indifference to the real possibility that his childish advocacy could have gotten people killed. His more benign role in "It gets better" hardly makes up for the rest of it. At the very least, he isn't a great role model of responsible adulthood in a group which is targeted by negative stereotypes of the past as superficial, immature and self-absorbed, attention-getting and not capable of being reliably serious and mature. And I'm just waiting for the straight folk to tell me just how wrong I am about that, as if a life time of being a gay man didn't prepare me to understand that better than a life time of not being gay would. I'm also used to being condescended to by straight folk from that life time of experience.
The link to this video was thrown at me a while back, I didn't watch it then but I did watch it this weekend and it is especially stupid and especially galling because its central premise is so obviously and demonstrably false. The vid is entitled, "The Christian Left: Do They Exist?" Despite what the disclaimer at the front of it says, there is no mature view point expressed.
So Savage, who has been part of the trendy religion bashing, Christian-bashing effort of the past dozen years is blaming liberal Christians that they aren't heard, claiming that liberal Christians haven't stood up to the fundamentalist right.
One thing about this is transparently clear, neither the alleged journalist, Savage nor "TakePart TV" did the minimum of fact checking as liberal Christians have done everything he claims they should start doing, have been doing it for, not only years but decades, only to have both the corporate media and the neo-atheists ignore that effort.
As I pointed out last week, the United Church of Christ began advocacy for the rights and equality of LGBT people in 1969, the year Savage turned five. They've issued statement after statement, were pioneers in ordaining lesbians and gay men, expanding their commitment to equality just about every year in between that year and now. And they are hardly the only Christian and Jewish denomination to have done so. If Savage had done what counts as the minimal level of journalistic practice these days, a google search, he could hardly have failed to discover that. And equality for us is not the only liberal effort that those churches and even many churches considered conservative have been engaged in.
Dan Savage is a media fixture, he's not a journalist, he isn't a mature voice or especially interested in knowing what he's talking about. Savage has a long history of not knowing what he's talking about, loudly, vulgarly, in the most attention-getting way, an odd trait for an alleged journalist. Though that's pretty much the standard of being a media celebrity today. Unlike another person who uses vulgarity and brash expression, The Rude Pundit who is enough of a journalist to know what he's talking about when it comes to the substance of what he's saying.
Savage is a symptom of what's wrong with a large part of the alleged left today, why we aren't going anywhere. And he's hardly the only one. Such people are just the flip side of the right wing media fixtures who spout off colorfully about things they don't know about and don't care enough to find out about. They're not useful for making a convincing, fact-based case for something, they're only good for congregating those who are like them, such people don't make positive change, they're just camera hogs who are useful to our opponents. I would classify him as being more of a libertarian than any kind of liberal or useful leftist. While I wouldn't echo him and wish he "would just die" or "be dragged by a truck until just the rope was left" I wish people would get tired of his act and look to someone who at least knows what they're talking about.
* Considering his past comments about trans-folk and his "outing" of a public figure as trans, when they weren't, I'd be surprised if many informed people from that community would welcome him being considered as speaking for them. I certainly don't want anyone mistaking him as representing how I think and live.
The link to this video was thrown at me a while back, I didn't watch it then but I did watch it this weekend and it is especially stupid and especially galling because its central premise is so obviously and demonstrably false. The vid is entitled, "The Christian Left: Do They Exist?" Despite what the disclaimer at the front of it says, there is no mature view point expressed.
So Savage, who has been part of the trendy religion bashing, Christian-bashing effort of the past dozen years is blaming liberal Christians that they aren't heard, claiming that liberal Christians haven't stood up to the fundamentalist right.
One thing about this is transparently clear, neither the alleged journalist, Savage nor "TakePart TV" did the minimum of fact checking as liberal Christians have done everything he claims they should start doing, have been doing it for, not only years but decades, only to have both the corporate media and the neo-atheists ignore that effort.
As I pointed out last week, the United Church of Christ began advocacy for the rights and equality of LGBT people in 1969, the year Savage turned five. They've issued statement after statement, were pioneers in ordaining lesbians and gay men, expanding their commitment to equality just about every year in between that year and now. And they are hardly the only Christian and Jewish denomination to have done so. If Savage had done what counts as the minimal level of journalistic practice these days, a google search, he could hardly have failed to discover that. And equality for us is not the only liberal effort that those churches and even many churches considered conservative have been engaged in.
Dan Savage is a media fixture, he's not a journalist, he isn't a mature voice or especially interested in knowing what he's talking about. Savage has a long history of not knowing what he's talking about, loudly, vulgarly, in the most attention-getting way, an odd trait for an alleged journalist. Though that's pretty much the standard of being a media celebrity today. Unlike another person who uses vulgarity and brash expression, The Rude Pundit who is enough of a journalist to know what he's talking about when it comes to the substance of what he's saying.
Savage is a symptom of what's wrong with a large part of the alleged left today, why we aren't going anywhere. And he's hardly the only one. Such people are just the flip side of the right wing media fixtures who spout off colorfully about things they don't know about and don't care enough to find out about. They're not useful for making a convincing, fact-based case for something, they're only good for congregating those who are like them, such people don't make positive change, they're just camera hogs who are useful to our opponents. I would classify him as being more of a libertarian than any kind of liberal or useful leftist. While I wouldn't echo him and wish he "would just die" or "be dragged by a truck until just the rope was left" I wish people would get tired of his act and look to someone who at least knows what they're talking about.
* Considering his past comments about trans-folk and his "outing" of a public figure as trans, when they weren't, I'd be surprised if many informed people from that community would welcome him being considered as speaking for them. I certainly don't want anyone mistaking him as representing how I think and live.
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Mary Osborne Trio - Blues in Mary's Flat
Mary Osborne - guitar
Sanford Gold - piano
Frenchy Couette - bass
Mary Osborne played with a lot of really great musicians, including Coleman Hawkins, and holding her own with the great Mary Lou Williams in many really great recordings, one of my favorite of those which I've posted before, Boogie Mysterioso.
Despite what the picture says, that was by Mary Lou Williams' Girl All Stars including Mary Osborne - Guitar, Margie Hyams - vibraphone, June Rotenberg on bass and I think it's Bridget O'Flynn on drums but am not sure.
I had no idea Mary Osborne sang until I came across this today.
No Moon At All
Can't find the credits, though that's definitely her playing guitar as well.
Update: That one was intentional. You know you missed your calling, you could have probably been an honest secretary instead of a dishonest scribbler. Now, I'm done toying with you and will ignore every lie you choose to tell about me for the rest of the summer, so, go ahead. See if I care.
Last Update to a bad date: I had the vision of you as a fussy English teacher but, then, thought I had far too much respect for fussy English teachers. You'd never put that much work into anything.
Is This My Most Daring Crime Yet?
Apparently there has been a furious 2 Minutes Week Hate going on over the suggestion of putting pureed peas in guacamole. I hadn't been aware of it until I saw Echidne had posted on it with links. Apparently many 1st worlders have been up in arms, or at least fingers on the issue and have been carrying on peed off about peas for days.
I could have added some practical advice, having found a recipe in one of Dean Ornish's books for low-fat guacamole using frozen peas. A lot cheaper than using avocados too. So, I happened to need a quick thing to bring to a family pot luck a few years back and I made it. I didn't tell anyone how it was made and it passed off as guacamole quite successfully. No one flipped out when I told them. Here's what I think is the recipe I used on that occasion.
GREEN PEA GUACAMOLE
3 C. green peas, fresh or frozen
2 T lemon juice
1 C. red onions
2 tsp freshly minced garlic
1 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/8 tsp cayenne
Salt
Steam the peas if fresh. Do not overcook. They should still have their bright green color. If using frozen peas, just defrost them. (I blanched them)
Puree the peas in a blender or food processor (I used a hand cranked food mill) with the lemon juice, onion, garlic, cumin and black pepper. Add cayenne and salt to taste.
Refrigerate
I'm pretty sure I probably added more garlic and probably more seasoning, probably threw in a few other things too, though I don't remember.
I'm really counting on being condemned and vilified over this post. I'll be very disappointed if I'm not. Go ahead, do your worst. That just means the more for the rest of us.
I could have added some practical advice, having found a recipe in one of Dean Ornish's books for low-fat guacamole using frozen peas. A lot cheaper than using avocados too. So, I happened to need a quick thing to bring to a family pot luck a few years back and I made it. I didn't tell anyone how it was made and it passed off as guacamole quite successfully. No one flipped out when I told them. Here's what I think is the recipe I used on that occasion.
GREEN PEA GUACAMOLE
3 C. green peas, fresh or frozen
2 T lemon juice
1 C. red onions
2 tsp freshly minced garlic
1 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/8 tsp cayenne
Salt
Steam the peas if fresh. Do not overcook. They should still have their bright green color. If using frozen peas, just defrost them. (I blanched them)
Puree the peas in a blender or food processor (I used a hand cranked food mill) with the lemon juice, onion, garlic, cumin and black pepper. Add cayenne and salt to taste.
Refrigerate
I'm pretty sure I probably added more garlic and probably more seasoning, probably threw in a few other things too, though I don't remember.
I'm really counting on being condemned and vilified over this post. I'll be very disappointed if I'm not. Go ahead, do your worst. That just means the more for the rest of us.
Another Reason I Despise Republicans And Other Libertarians
By now I guess most people have heard about the poor drunk fool from my state who killed himself by trying to fire a fireworks mortar tube off from the top of his head, no doubt to impress his equally drunken friends. I'm surprised to read he's only the first to get killed, many have been hurt, I would guess some actually maimed. Last night here was the worst I've heard yet, if it were as dry as it sometimes is at the 4th of July I'd probably be homeless and writing this from some homeless shelter, our woods blazing.
They should require at least as much training for setting off serious fireworks as they do cutting hair. Some of them are as dangerous if not more so than guns AND THEY ARE SET OFF IN RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOODS. From back yards, for the love of Mike. Someone told me that their friend spent all night in fear as her idiot neighbors set off two pallets full of fire works. Though I'd suspect they didn't set all of them off and she might have one or more nights of anxiety ahead.
We won't ban fireworks again till one or more big, expensive structures owned by connected fat cats get burned down or some rich person gets killed. Just another of the benefits of Democrats losing the election in 2010 and us getting the criminal and odious Paul LePage and a raft of some of the worst Republican goons in the legislature in living memory. Despite that movie I posted yesterday, fireworks are nothing for idiots to be setting off. They don't require training or sobriety to set them off, it's a disaster waiting to happen. And, as the tragedy in Calais shows, it's already here.
They should require at least as much training for setting off serious fireworks as they do cutting hair. Some of them are as dangerous if not more so than guns AND THEY ARE SET OFF IN RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOODS. From back yards, for the love of Mike. Someone told me that their friend spent all night in fear as her idiot neighbors set off two pallets full of fire works. Though I'd suspect they didn't set all of them off and she might have one or more nights of anxiety ahead.
We won't ban fireworks again till one or more big, expensive structures owned by connected fat cats get burned down or some rich person gets killed. Just another of the benefits of Democrats losing the election in 2010 and us getting the criminal and odious Paul LePage and a raft of some of the worst Republican goons in the legislature in living memory. Despite that movie I posted yesterday, fireworks are nothing for idiots to be setting off. They don't require training or sobriety to set them off, it's a disaster waiting to happen. And, as the tragedy in Calais shows, it's already here.
Louis Armstrong Earl Hines - Weather Bird
Update: 1947 Ain't Misbehavin' with his All Stars
The Band: Louis Armstrong, (Tp Voc); Bobby Hackett (Crt); Jack Teagarden (Tb Voc); Peanuts Hucko (Cl); Dick Cary (Pno); Bob Haggart (Bs); Sid Catlett or George Wettling (Dr).
I think it was Miles Davis who said something about no one playing anything in Jazz that Armstrong hadn't played first. I'll have to look up the quote. And Davis passed out compliments about as seldom as .... well, no, I'm almost done with playing this game. Fifth of July, holiday's over.
Update: Thanks for the heads up on the typo. Though I'm sure you didn't mean it as help. You see, I type so many more words for a post than you do and, unlike you, I generally haven't typed them out at least a dozen times before, copying the from other kulcha vultures who said it before I did.
Really, that's the closest you've gotten to the truth in this duel. Sort of like when Dershowitz caught Chomsky on a truly minor point which changed nothing about the fact that everything else in the debate proved that Chomsky was the one telling the truth and Dersh was Dershing.
Louis Armstrong - West End Blues
There's a reason this was called the most influential solo in the history of American popular music. Both the trumpet and the singing.
Louis Armstrong, trumpet
Fred Robinson, trombone,
Jimmy Strong, clarinet and tenor saxophone,
Earl Hines, piano,
Mancy Carr, banjo,
Zutty Singleton on drums.
And that was just one of the pieces from just the 1920s, there were dozens of others that could as well prove my point.
Here's Potato Head Blues from the year before and the original personnel of the Hot Five.
Louis Armstrong, cornet (or trumpet, his playing on cornet is so strong it's hard to tell)
Johnny Dodds, Clarinet
Kid Ory, Trombone
Johnny St. Syr, banjo,
Lil Hardin Armstrong, piano
Compared to that, your choice of genius, meh.
Hate Mail is Over Flowing Today
Now Simels is pointing to a joint appearance Springsteen made with The Beach Boys. He's an adult, he gets to decide who he's going to appear with. That doesn't make Brian Wilson greater than Beethoven and Louis Armstrong. I'll bet if he got the chance to play with either Wilson or Armstrong, he'd take the greater musician and that's, beyond any doubt, Armstrong.
And more about Simels' favorite group, American Atheists and its creator goddess.
In the past, Madalyn has claimed as many as 100,000 members in her organization. If that were true, the $40 annual dues would exceed by more than five times the $750,000 budget of the American Atheist Center. Sometimes Madalyn uses the more ambiguous figure of 60,000 or 70,000 “families.” When William Murray resigned from the center, he said that the organization’s mailing list comprised only 2,517 names, less than half of whom were actual members. “If I headed the atheist movement for twenty years and had only twelve hundred and forty members, I’d look for something else in life,” he said in 1980. The latest official numbers are 55,000 members representing 45,000 families. Brian Lynch, the former treasurer of American Atheists, whom Madalyn fired for alleged sexual misconduct (he emphatically denies the charge), says that the actual membership is about 2,400, “the highest total she’s ever had.” Lynch continues, “That’s pretty pathetic considering that there are somewhere between eighteen and twenty-three million atheists in the United States and that when you mention atheism to most people, the only name they can think of is Madalyn Murray O’Hair—a loudmouth who has a bad family life, communist ideas, and a negative personality. She’s brought atheism into a position of intellectual disrepute, accomplishing in only twenty-five years what churches haven’t bee able to accomplish in centuries. I think she ought to get a check from the pope.”
The checks Madalyn counts on come from the estates of deceased atheists. Lynch maintains that Madalyn’s organizations (besides the American Atheists, there are the Society of Separationists and the Charles E. Stephens American Atheist Library and Archives) took in $1.9 million, most of it from estates. “Madalyn told me she learned from Jerry Falwell that if you create a crisis every month, people are more likely to respond with money,” says Lynch. Although Madalyn occasionally does report bequests to her members, it’s also true that her complaints about money are legendary. Her newsletters are filled with urgent requests for funds. “In a continuing way, I feel like an old dog outside the stoop of your house, waiting for you to throw me a well-chewed bone, devoid of the meat,” Madalyn complained to her members. Frequently she has told her employees that she cannot meet their payroll that month. At the annual American Atheist convention she hectors her loyal followers about the need to include her organizations in their wills. “Madalyn is not an atheist activist,” wrote G. Richard Bozarth, a former employee. “She is an atheist mendicant.”
... In 1970, after the student movement had made leftist politics more acceptable, Madalyn began calling herself an anarchist. In 1976 she contemplated a race for governor of Texas, but turned her attention to running for the Austin City Council instead. She received six percent of the vote. Undaunted, Madalyn briefly considered running for president. Instead, she became the chief speech writer in the 1984 presidential bid of pornographer Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine. It was, in many respects, an odd alliance. Only a few months earlier Flynt had declared himself “saved” and had returned to his native Kentucky to be baptized in Stenson Creek. “If elected,” he said after announcing his candidacy, “my primary goal will be to eliminate ignorance and venereal disease.”
Flynt’s campaign was cut short by his imprisonment for contempt of court when he refused to disclose the source of secret tapes he had released in connection with the drug arrest of carmaker John DeLorean. While Flynt was in prison, Madalyn apparently got him to sign over a power of attorney, giving her and Jon Garth “every cotton-picking thing that the owned, all real, personal, and mixed property,” including Hustler magazine. Madalyn privately estimated the fortune at $300 million. This coup was blocked by Flynt’s brother Jimmy, who filed suit in Los Angeles for a conservatorship of Flynt’s estate. By the time Flynt got out of prison, he had apparently changed his mind and decided to keep his fortune for himself."
And there's a lot more of that. I guess the atheists have more than their share of the suckers who are born every minute.
And more about Simels' favorite group, American Atheists and its creator goddess.
In the past, Madalyn has claimed as many as 100,000 members in her organization. If that were true, the $40 annual dues would exceed by more than five times the $750,000 budget of the American Atheist Center. Sometimes Madalyn uses the more ambiguous figure of 60,000 or 70,000 “families.” When William Murray resigned from the center, he said that the organization’s mailing list comprised only 2,517 names, less than half of whom were actual members. “If I headed the atheist movement for twenty years and had only twelve hundred and forty members, I’d look for something else in life,” he said in 1980. The latest official numbers are 55,000 members representing 45,000 families. Brian Lynch, the former treasurer of American Atheists, whom Madalyn fired for alleged sexual misconduct (he emphatically denies the charge), says that the actual membership is about 2,400, “the highest total she’s ever had.” Lynch continues, “That’s pretty pathetic considering that there are somewhere between eighteen and twenty-three million atheists in the United States and that when you mention atheism to most people, the only name they can think of is Madalyn Murray O’Hair—a loudmouth who has a bad family life, communist ideas, and a negative personality. She’s brought atheism into a position of intellectual disrepute, accomplishing in only twenty-five years what churches haven’t bee able to accomplish in centuries. I think she ought to get a check from the pope.”
The checks Madalyn counts on come from the estates of deceased atheists. Lynch maintains that Madalyn’s organizations (besides the American Atheists, there are the Society of Separationists and the Charles E. Stephens American Atheist Library and Archives) took in $1.9 million, most of it from estates. “Madalyn told me she learned from Jerry Falwell that if you create a crisis every month, people are more likely to respond with money,” says Lynch. Although Madalyn occasionally does report bequests to her members, it’s also true that her complaints about money are legendary. Her newsletters are filled with urgent requests for funds. “In a continuing way, I feel like an old dog outside the stoop of your house, waiting for you to throw me a well-chewed bone, devoid of the meat,” Madalyn complained to her members. Frequently she has told her employees that she cannot meet their payroll that month. At the annual American Atheist convention she hectors her loyal followers about the need to include her organizations in their wills. “Madalyn is not an atheist activist,” wrote G. Richard Bozarth, a former employee. “She is an atheist mendicant.”
... In 1970, after the student movement had made leftist politics more acceptable, Madalyn began calling herself an anarchist. In 1976 she contemplated a race for governor of Texas, but turned her attention to running for the Austin City Council instead. She received six percent of the vote. Undaunted, Madalyn briefly considered running for president. Instead, she became the chief speech writer in the 1984 presidential bid of pornographer Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine. It was, in many respects, an odd alliance. Only a few months earlier Flynt had declared himself “saved” and had returned to his native Kentucky to be baptized in Stenson Creek. “If elected,” he said after announcing his candidacy, “my primary goal will be to eliminate ignorance and venereal disease.”
Flynt’s campaign was cut short by his imprisonment for contempt of court when he refused to disclose the source of secret tapes he had released in connection with the drug arrest of carmaker John DeLorean. While Flynt was in prison, Madalyn apparently got him to sign over a power of attorney, giving her and Jon Garth “every cotton-picking thing that the owned, all real, personal, and mixed property,” including Hustler magazine. Madalyn privately estimated the fortune at $300 million. This coup was blocked by Flynt’s brother Jimmy, who filed suit in Los Angeles for a conservatorship of Flynt’s estate. By the time Flynt got out of prison, he had apparently changed his mind and decided to keep his fortune for himself."
And there's a lot more of that. I guess the atheists have more than their share of the suckers who are born every minute.
Saturday, July 4, 2015
Carla Bley Trio - The National Anthem
Andy Sheppard, sax
Steve Swallow, bass
Somewhere I heard a video where she says that no implication of support for American foreign policy at the time should be drawn from the title or substance of the piece. Sorry about the rather abrupt ending.
Here's the piece they played before that one from another occasion,
Ups and Downs
I'm Sure I'll Regret Posting This But
as a service to my readers, the greatest 4th of July movie ever made.
OK, so it isn't a highly competitive field. The high school band isn't bad, I believe it was from Massachusetts.
Update: Yes, the band was The Chelmsford High School Marching Band, from Chelmsford Mass. I'll have to ask my sister-in-law if she knew anyone in it.
OK, so it isn't a highly competitive field. The high school band isn't bad, I believe it was from Massachusetts.
Update: Yes, the band was The Chelmsford High School Marching Band, from Chelmsford Mass. I'll have to ask my sister-in-law if she knew anyone in it.
Money, Corn Sweetener (Ethanol even) And The Dreaded Peep For The Fourth
I could write an essay about how this movie is a truer celebration of what the founders gave us than the traditional pieties, but, for now, I'll just say, it's a bit of fun.
Friday, July 3, 2015
Gerald Clayton - Deep Dry Ocean
Gerald Clayton, piano
Gretchen Parlato, singer
Joe Sanders . bass
Justin Brown . drums
So good, so deserving to be widely known. But, what can I say, they aren't listening to Brian Wilson for the jillionth time since the 60s.
Update: Simels says that Brian Wilson's white boy beach blanket and acid California pop is better than Louis Armstrong and Beethoven. And, let me point this out, Beethoven never recorded his music so we can't listen to Beethoven for the jillionth time. Louis Armstrong, anyone who doesn't hear new things in his playing over decades of use has a tin ear or a tin mind. I would challenge anyone to listen to a hundred covers of Brian Wilson's best tune and not get bored while as acute an ear and as exigent a listener as the late Gunther Schuller listened to virtually every recording of the 5th and 7th symphonies he could get his hand on and he said he didn't find it boring at all.
And I mean really listening to it, not just having on as background muzak while you groove like you haven't been for those five + decades since you were a kiddie. Some of us never liked it (I always hated surfer muzak) and some of us grew up, many are still the same Peter Pan they always were.
Update 2: Now he's trying to refute my statement that Beethoven never recorded his music. I'm afraid that even after a lifetime of scribbling about the most mind numbing of pop music it's official, he's suffering from Simile dementia.
Update 3: And now he's denying he said that. Simels, I hope your custodial arrangements are in order.
Update 4: A written score isn't a recording of music, it is a graphic representation of the pitches, rhythms, and indications of how those are to be played. They aren't any more music than the paper they're printed on is. It takes a person or persons to produce that music in sound which can be heard. The record isn't the music either, or the CD but they can do what a printed page can't, reproduce what the people who made the music did in sound. Even a piano roll, if it's produced directly by a composer or performer is closer to the music than a printed page is. If you want to understand that, you should see what Gunther Schuller said in The Compleat Conductor and why it is problematic when a composer leaves scores but not a record of the actual music, as they perform it or it is performed under their supervision.
Update 5: Composers Separated At Birth
Update something or other: Now he's quoting the quasi-racist Muslim slammer, Jeff Foxworthy, and he thinks I'm going to find something so clueless upsetting.
I told you Stevie, when you insult me I take heart because you are such a boob.
Update whatever: Now he's fuming because I called him on quoting a racist alleged comedian and he's claiming he did it to upset me. Him proving he's a low-grade, low-class, low-brow, clueless, doofus is supposed to upset me. Just to show you just how clueless he is.
Further update: Now he's pretending it was all according to his plan, it's something he does when he's caught up in his idiocy. I've seen it often enough to know it.
Ibid: I'll pay Steve Simels ten bucks if he can locate anywhere I've ever expressed a negative opinion of Bruce Springsteen. I don't believe I ever have, he's doing what he always does, he lies.
"Using Different Type Is A Sign of Mental Distubance"
Oh, I don't know, Sigmund Freud jr, I like variety in type. Perhaps it's of a Marshall McLuhan nostalgia thing. Or maybe not. I suspect this kind of thinking explains a lot about how we came to the post-democracy we are in now, not to mention your kind of thinking.
On the other hand, maybe it's for the same reason they used big letters in We Look And See
Pretty much the reaction my posts get over in your neck of the woods where you put on the grownups' shoes.
Really, it's more of a Buckminster Fuller thing, I'm not going to bother fighting it anymore, you'll never learn, I'm using it.
Update: The McLuhan text is from his book, Counterblast. It says "Bless the fast-talking illiterate American for his face to face, ear to ear method of learning." And if you want to see what that leads to in real life, look at the product of education by TV instead of from books, what has produced the intellectual culture you can see on most of the internet, right and alleged left. I have to say, I hadn't looked at the book since about 1972 and that particular page stuck in my craw, if not mind, ever since. That McLuhan is taken as some kind of major intellectual figure is further evidence of the result of edutainment replacing education. And there was no place he was more influential than in the elite universities. I was assigned that book in a course taught by the product of one Harvard. It contained bull shit of the kind promoted by the likes of the amateur shrink who inspired this post. Even if I agreed with some of it,
its superficial, self-contradictions and anti-intellectualism negated that. I don't know if it informed my future skepticism about modernism and cultural secularism, but it could have. Which makes his religious identity quite ironic.
Modernism, based in the limits of materialism and scientism is bound to increase the incoherent contradictions of modern culture, championing the new with some of the worst of the old. It's not the way to go. It certainly fueled my eventual hatred of TV and the movies, ironic, as well, his appearance in Annie Hall, made by that icon of New Yorker cream-puff culture, Woody Allen, where most of those like my principle detractor know him from, if anywhere. Ironically, in terms of this page, the CBC was probably his greatest promoter in the last few decades.
Update: The McLuhan text is from his book, Counterblast. It says "Bless the fast-talking illiterate American for his face to face, ear to ear method of learning." And if you want to see what that leads to in real life, look at the product of education by TV instead of from books, what has produced the intellectual culture you can see on most of the internet, right and alleged left. I have to say, I hadn't looked at the book since about 1972 and that particular page stuck in my craw, if not mind, ever since. That McLuhan is taken as some kind of major intellectual figure is further evidence of the result of edutainment replacing education. And there was no place he was more influential than in the elite universities. I was assigned that book in a course taught by the product of one Harvard. It contained bull shit of the kind promoted by the likes of the amateur shrink who inspired this post. Even if I agreed with some of it,
its superficial, self-contradictions and anti-intellectualism negated that. I don't know if it informed my future skepticism about modernism and cultural secularism, but it could have. Which makes his religious identity quite ironic.
Modernism, based in the limits of materialism and scientism is bound to increase the incoherent contradictions of modern culture, championing the new with some of the worst of the old. It's not the way to go. It certainly fueled my eventual hatred of TV and the movies, ironic, as well, his appearance in Annie Hall, made by that icon of New Yorker cream-puff culture, Woody Allen, where most of those like my principle detractor know him from, if anywhere. Ironically, in terms of this page, the CBC was probably his greatest promoter in the last few decades.
I Was The Only One Who Showed Up To Work
Apparently it was expected that no one would show the day before a major holiday. No one told me. Bring back Saturday classes, that's what I say.
Also, too. Apparently the idea of looking up the meaning of words is not kewl with the kewl kids who sit on the jr. high school steps. Seventh grade geezers. And they make fun of other people for being ignorant.
I've got weeds that need weeding.
Update: You go out for hours of peaceful weeding in the punishing Maine sun (don't laugh, it gets friggin' hot in the full sun here) you come in, look at your e-mail and find out that Simels' and the Simpletons are still fuming at being called for not looking up the meaning of a word they obviously didn't know the meaning of. Apparently they never learned how to use the dictionary in the 3rd grade. We used this one.
Also, too. Apparently the idea of looking up the meaning of words is not kewl with the kewl kids who sit on the jr. high school steps. Seventh grade geezers. And they make fun of other people for being ignorant.
I've got weeds that need weeding.
Update: You go out for hours of peaceful weeding in the punishing Maine sun (don't laugh, it gets friggin' hot in the full sun here) you come in, look at your e-mail and find out that Simels' and the Simpletons are still fuming at being called for not looking up the meaning of a word they obviously didn't know the meaning of. Apparently they never learned how to use the dictionary in the 3rd grade. We used this one.
I Wonder If This Will Annoy Such As Those Who Hate The Clavichord
One can only hope.
I can see it has potential, just that it will take better music to tease more of that out.
Quakers Address The Mass Incarceration Industry In The Land of the Free
The violence of mass incarceration is a symptom of a dying democracy, a country in the hands of people who use jailing as a political tool, to win elections and to disenfranchise black people, Latinos, poor people, dissidents.... It provides a hateable other for people to fear and loathe and to believe that those who hold power are the only thing between those terrifying people and their safety. The imprisonment of non-violent, minor criminals, making truly minor crimes felonies with long prison terms.
One of the requirements to follow Jesus was to care for those who are imprisoned, one of the least popular of his hard teachings. Overwhelmingly, it has been religious people who have worked on this issue, not all religious people, certainly, but most of those who have concentrated on it. Many, perhaps most of the liberal churches have similar and active missions of this kind. And it certainly isn't limited only to Christians who do that.
I think, in addition to the columns of Richard McBrien, I'm going to post more of these kinds of efforts. As RMJ said, the decades long effort by the United Church of Christ on behalf of justice for LGBT people "the loudest sound you never heard." It is the kind of work engaged in by religious people, every day, every month, every year, which is totally disappeared from the collective consciousness by the media. The thing which must be suppressed for the same reason that such efforts in liberation as the Haitian revolution had to be suppressed by American presidents and politicians, starting with Jefferson, it is an example the oligarchs don't want other people following because it is subversive to their hold on power and wealth.
The Gospel is radical, any religious holding that moral obligations are real and binding and that among those is the equal respect of rights and dignity in all people is an absolute requirement. Inequality in wealth and power depends on denying that moral requirement and the reality of those rights. There is no more effective means of doing that than throwing a harmless person in prison, where they are brutalized, exploited, used as slave labor and released into a society which has been trained to turn them into the lowest class of human beings created just for them. Hollywood has certainly played its part in that. It is one of the most effective tools of the oligarchs in creating and maintaining that system. TV, hate talk radio and the cabloids may as well count as being the same thing. It's no wonder that they have tried to bury liberal religion.
You can subscribe to the weekly videos from Quaker Speak here.
Thursday, July 2, 2015
McBrien on Fridays - Independence or Interdependence?
This Saturday, July 4th, is Independence Day in the United States. It is a day for celebration, to be sure, but all too rarely do those Americans who observe the holiday reflect on its original inspiration. The same, of course, holds true for Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and even Christmas.
Many countries have their own distinctive celebrations to mark the anniversary of their liberation from foreign rule or autocratic government. There is nothing unique about what occurs in the United States on the Fourth of July. Canada Day, celebrated on July 1st, offers a close, but not exact, parallel.
It is an occasion not only to reflect on the courage and sacrifices of those who made the original "declaration of independence," often at serious risk to their own lives, but also to acknowledge that we can take their inspired idea of independence to extremes.
The spirit of independence can degenerate into what was once commonly referred to as "social Darwinism," which applies the Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest to groupings within society itself. Social Darwinism is partially captured in the saying, "I'm up, pull up the ladder."
There is still a mentality abroad that identifies the well-being of one's own group with the well-being of the whole. If some groups fall by the wayside, so be it.
According to social Darwinism, the poor are poor because they are lazy. People of color and other minorities falsely claim discrimination when their lot is really attributable to their own failings.
What Independence Day should inspire, in whatever country it is observed, are some deeper reflections on the most effective antidote to social Darwinism, namely, the spirit of interdependence, which is an essentially Christian idea (even if not exclusively Christian).
Jesus left us two great commandments: love of God and love of neighbor. The "disciple whom Jesus loved" (John 20:2), John the Apostle and Evangelist, elaborated upon Jesus' teaching in his First Letter, or Epistle.
"Whoever says he [or she] is in the light, yet hates his brother [or sister], is still in the darkness" (1 John 2:9).
"For this is the message you have heard from the beginning: we should love one another...." (3:11).
"If someone who has worldly means sees a brother [or sister] in need and refuses him [or her] compassion, how can the love of God remain in [that person]? Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth" (vv. 17-18).
"Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God....Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love....No one has ever seen God. Yet if we love one another, God remains in us and [God's] love is brought to perfection in us" (4:7,8,12).
And then we come to the classic text, which is rightly quoted so frequently, and which clearly defines what may otherwise seem a complicated theological principle, namely, the principle of sacramentality: "If anyone says, 'I love God,' but hates his brother [or sister], he [or she] is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother [or sister] whom he [or she] has seen cannot love God whom he [or she] has not seen. This is the commandment we have from [Jesus]: whoever loves God must also love his brother [or sister]" (4:20-21).
The principle of sacramentality applies much more broadly than to the grace-bearing rituals commonly known as the seven sacraments. The Church itself is a sacrament, and so is Jesus Christ. They are sacraments insofar as God is present and redemptively at work in them.
The principle is at the heart of Christian faith and practice. Christianity is not only a matter of belief, but also, and more fundamentally, of action. In fact, beliefs that do not issue in action are empty. As St. John put it in his First Letter, it is not a matter of loving "in word or speech but in deed and truth."
Over the past five centuries Catholics have traditionally countered the Reformers's "sola fides" ("faith alone") with an appeal to the Letter of James, with its own classic expression: "Be doers of the word and not hearers only..." (1:22), and its equally classic: "So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead" (2:17), and "a person is justified by works and not by faith alone" (v. 24). Again, "faith without works is dead" (v. 26).
Every Independence Day, therefore, must also be a celebration of the spirit and demands of interdependence. It is what Christian discipleship is all about.
6 / 29 / 2009
Many countries have their own distinctive celebrations to mark the anniversary of their liberation from foreign rule or autocratic government. There is nothing unique about what occurs in the United States on the Fourth of July. Canada Day, celebrated on July 1st, offers a close, but not exact, parallel.
It is an occasion not only to reflect on the courage and sacrifices of those who made the original "declaration of independence," often at serious risk to their own lives, but also to acknowledge that we can take their inspired idea of independence to extremes.
The spirit of independence can degenerate into what was once commonly referred to as "social Darwinism," which applies the Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest to groupings within society itself. Social Darwinism is partially captured in the saying, "I'm up, pull up the ladder."
There is still a mentality abroad that identifies the well-being of one's own group with the well-being of the whole. If some groups fall by the wayside, so be it.
According to social Darwinism, the poor are poor because they are lazy. People of color and other minorities falsely claim discrimination when their lot is really attributable to their own failings.
What Independence Day should inspire, in whatever country it is observed, are some deeper reflections on the most effective antidote to social Darwinism, namely, the spirit of interdependence, which is an essentially Christian idea (even if not exclusively Christian).
Jesus left us two great commandments: love of God and love of neighbor. The "disciple whom Jesus loved" (John 20:2), John the Apostle and Evangelist, elaborated upon Jesus' teaching in his First Letter, or Epistle.
"Whoever says he [or she] is in the light, yet hates his brother [or sister], is still in the darkness" (1 John 2:9).
"For this is the message you have heard from the beginning: we should love one another...." (3:11).
"If someone who has worldly means sees a brother [or sister] in need and refuses him [or her] compassion, how can the love of God remain in [that person]? Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth" (vv. 17-18).
"Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God....Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love....No one has ever seen God. Yet if we love one another, God remains in us and [God's] love is brought to perfection in us" (4:7,8,12).
And then we come to the classic text, which is rightly quoted so frequently, and which clearly defines what may otherwise seem a complicated theological principle, namely, the principle of sacramentality: "If anyone says, 'I love God,' but hates his brother [or sister], he [or she] is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother [or sister] whom he [or she] has seen cannot love God whom he [or she] has not seen. This is the commandment we have from [Jesus]: whoever loves God must also love his brother [or sister]" (4:20-21).
The principle of sacramentality applies much more broadly than to the grace-bearing rituals commonly known as the seven sacraments. The Church itself is a sacrament, and so is Jesus Christ. They are sacraments insofar as God is present and redemptively at work in them.
The principle is at the heart of Christian faith and practice. Christianity is not only a matter of belief, but also, and more fundamentally, of action. In fact, beliefs that do not issue in action are empty. As St. John put it in his First Letter, it is not a matter of loving "in word or speech but in deed and truth."
Over the past five centuries Catholics have traditionally countered the Reformers's "sola fides" ("faith alone") with an appeal to the Letter of James, with its own classic expression: "Be doers of the word and not hearers only..." (1:22), and its equally classic: "So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead" (2:17), and "a person is justified by works and not by faith alone" (v. 24). Again, "faith without works is dead" (v. 26).
Every Independence Day, therefore, must also be a celebration of the spirit and demands of interdependence. It is what Christian discipleship is all about.
6 / 29 / 2009
Mary Lou Williams Don Byas- It Must Have Been Moonglow
Alvin Banks, bass
Gerard Ponchonet, drums
The moon should be beautiful here tonight, as well as, I believe Venus and Jupiter appearing near each other in the North West shortly after sun set. I hope to be getting to a tiny bit of that weeding I need to get to by the light of the rising moon.
And I can't resist, my absolute favorite waltz
Mary's Waltz
I'm going to be cutting way, way back here for the rest of July, posting videos and audios of music, lectures, etc. Perhaps the occasional new piece. I had a serious financial setback and don't think I'll be able to keep this up full time for a while. I might even have to bleg, as I was recently encouraged to consider. Thank heavens I've still got students.
Of course, I've got a big mouth, so to speak so who knows how long I'll be able to tolerate going silent.
Update: Opus Z
From This Moment On
Hate Mail - Strike When the Pouter Has Lied
Oh, I don't care if Simels and the Eschatots mock me, that's to be expected by people as immature as they are. I find it encouraging, at this point. I'm certain few if any of them bothered to look up the meaning of the word "henotheism" which I used once in a post several weeks ago which Sims has been harping on, ignorantly, ever since. I'm certain he never looked it up and doubt he knows how to pronounce it. Really, you have to spoon feed everything to those kiddies, in little bite sized pieces or its a choking hazard. Which probably accounts for Duncan's sub-tweet length blog posts. They get all pasted up when you use a word they don't know. To go with Simels' childish chicken theme.
Hold the notification of mocking, wait till he lies, which is guaranteed to come later.
Update: Apparently the geniuses, in their own estimation, at Duncan's blog are so lazy they won't even click on the link to find out what a word they don't know means. Apparently senectitude is the new 12.
That means "old age", for the pablum and vodka set.
Hold the notification of mocking, wait till he lies, which is guaranteed to come later.
Update: Apparently the geniuses, in their own estimation, at Duncan's blog are so lazy they won't even click on the link to find out what a word they don't know means. Apparently senectitude is the new 12.
That means "old age", for the pablum and vodka set.
And Now A Word About Events In My State: Impeach LePage But Also Prevent The Likelihood of Another One As Bad Turning Up
I wonder how the people at Maine Public Broadcasting* are going to deal with the very real possibility that their favorite governor, Paul LePage has made himself vulnerable not only to being impeached but possibly indicted because he openly blackmailed a private school in Maine when they offered the outgoing Speaker of the Maine legislature, Mark Eves, a job as head of the school. He threatened to withhold a half a million dollars in state funds for the school which services many at-risk children which would set off a loss of other funds, possibly as much as two million dollars. The school, which, I think, has been unfairly accused of caving to the blackmail, had little choice in retracting the offer, LePage has, since he took office, withheld funding which has not only been approved by the legislature but also by the voters in referendum. The man is totally out of control, a bloated little dictator who holds that he is above investigation and the greatest argument in our state's history against allowing anyone to take office with less than 50% +1 of the votes with run-off elections to ensure that. And, as well, making it far harder for a millionaire spoiler like Eliot Cutler to buy his way onto the ballot. The "liberalizing" of ballot access, one of the flakier ideas to come out of the heady days of the 60s and 70s when it wasn't considered that those laws would be vulnerable to the kind of manipulation they have been put to, not least of which, by egotistical millionaires.
I would love to see LePage not only impeached - preferably after the elections next year, if, as may happen, control of the Senate will return to Democrats and another of his other targets could replace him - but indicted and convicted and imprisoned for the corruption he has brought to Maine politics. After the governorship of Jock McKernan, widely considered the worst governor in living memory, the LePage administration has, beyond any doubt, taken that title from him.
But most of all I would like to see the elections laws changed to prevent a 38% governor ever taking office again or for a millionaire or millionaire financed spoiler to put someone as obviously unsuited and unqualified to be governor as Paul LePage in office. I blame Eliot Cutler and the Maine media for this situation as much as I do Republicans who have never given us a worse governor. And there are many Republicans, even those I would never, in my life have imagined saying it, who want him impeached if not convicted of blackmail, today. He is a disgrace, the shame of our state.
* I'm told that their service to LePage was not forgotten by him in his budget proposals, though I'm so disgusted with things in Augusta that I can't bear to read much about it these days. I've stopped listening to the uniformly LePage friendly broadcast media. If I saw Irwin Gratz of MPBN, I don't think I could keep myself from yelling at him, not to mention the people in the other corporate media. Maine Public Broadcasting is so compromised it should have its licenses taken away and those given to an entity which won't include anyone employed there or on the present board of it. Anyone who gives to them thinking they're buying an objective and accurate news service is deluding themselves.
I would love to see LePage not only impeached - preferably after the elections next year, if, as may happen, control of the Senate will return to Democrats and another of his other targets could replace him - but indicted and convicted and imprisoned for the corruption he has brought to Maine politics. After the governorship of Jock McKernan, widely considered the worst governor in living memory, the LePage administration has, beyond any doubt, taken that title from him.
But most of all I would like to see the elections laws changed to prevent a 38% governor ever taking office again or for a millionaire or millionaire financed spoiler to put someone as obviously unsuited and unqualified to be governor as Paul LePage in office. I blame Eliot Cutler and the Maine media for this situation as much as I do Republicans who have never given us a worse governor. And there are many Republicans, even those I would never, in my life have imagined saying it, who want him impeached if not convicted of blackmail, today. He is a disgrace, the shame of our state.
* I'm told that their service to LePage was not forgotten by him in his budget proposals, though I'm so disgusted with things in Augusta that I can't bear to read much about it these days. I've stopped listening to the uniformly LePage friendly broadcast media. If I saw Irwin Gratz of MPBN, I don't think I could keep myself from yelling at him, not to mention the people in the other corporate media. Maine Public Broadcasting is so compromised it should have its licenses taken away and those given to an entity which won't include anyone employed there or on the present board of it. Anyone who gives to them thinking they're buying an objective and accurate news service is deluding themselves.
The Fixed Origin of Rights Is The Pole Star of Egalitarian Democracy It Can't Survive Without That Being Held As Absolute
Today is the day that John Adams, in 1776, predicted would be from then on celebrated with fireworks and the such, the glorious 2nd of July, when the presumptuous aristocrats who met as the Continental Congress voted themselves independent of Britain. You see, even then they were excluding Canada, Quebec, Mexico and the native inhabitants from counting as North America.
But my text this morning is the one I mentioned a few days back, the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence they based their vote of the 2nd on and which they would formalize two days later.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Those words are certainly among the most familiar to Americans out of any of the civic documents of our history, the ones who the later figure who should count as a founder of modern America, Abraham Lincoln explicitly adopted as the basis of his political philosophy, the ones that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. based the demand for political equality on in the next century. The reason that both men asserted those words were that the author and the adopters of them in 1776 immediately proved they had no intention of allowing them to govern their conduct in their personal life or, certainly, not of the government they would form after the war. The author of them, Jefferson, certainly did his best to hollow them out with his slave holding which became more exacting as he applied his rational analysis of the value of their labor to enrich him, not them, developed.
The other day I pointed out that, against the entire grain of today's intellectual elite, when Jefferson and his fellow heroes of The Enlightenment* sought to explain where their rights to be listed below and which they accused the King and the British Parliament of violating came from, those great minds could think of nothing else than to claim them as a gift of God.
I am certain they rehearsed different arguments of how to turn rights and the moral obligation to respect them into some kind of political geometry in terms of pure reason without recourse to the already intellectually unfashionable divine. Only they found that couldn't be done and it still can't. They must be held to be self-evident but can only be self-evident with that origin already held. Much as I delight in breaking the taboo against dissing those secular gods, I doubt anyone is likely to outstrip them in their ability to do that. There has been no attempted scientific location of the origins of rights and moral obligation to respect rights which hasn't reduced them from an absolute reality into a shifting, appearing and disappearing mirage which no one can rationally demand be respected in any durable manner.
Every atheistic explanation of rights can, with the greatest of ease, be alienated from any individual or member of any identity group by the merest of whim. I have had the great pleasure of being able to point out to the people who promote those cheap imitations of rights and obligations, that in any society which deemed that atheists had no rights would have, truly and irrefutably demolished any rights that atheists asserted or could ever assert while being faithful to that popular atheist exposition of rights and morals. In such a society, atheists making claims to rights would, by their own holdings, have made their claims to rights a delusion. And I have used them as an example only because, these days, it is atheists who make those claims of being able to produce rights without them being an equal endowment of God, if anyone else tries that, their own identity works as perfectly to impeach their attempt in every case. It especially works when people try to link rights with intelligence** because that argument makes everyone the inferior in rights to everyone who is more intelligent than they are. Making such a silly argument so vulnerable to that answer doesn't do anything to support the intellectual status of the one making it.
This is no small point in their political geometry, it is stated in the second sentence because it is the basis on which their entire argument for the violations of their rights is made, which, in turn, they use to argue for their independence from Britain and, especially, the British king. It was the same holding necessary to argue for the rights of those held in slavery, women, workers, poor people, etc. They had to make rights inalienable and enduring or they would have, as well, been deluded that they possessed such rights and there is no way to do that without asserting that rights and the obligation to respect rights are nothing less than gifts from God. Rights among people, in society originate in moral obligations. We, today, have not made any more progress in locating rights and the equally important moral obligations on which the exercise of rights rests in any other place than as an inalienable gift equally bestowed on all people by God. There is no philosophical explanation of those, no pseudo-scientific attempt to create them with natural selection or an assertion of physical law which isn't vulnerable to exactly the same practices that led those gods of the Enlightenment, the "Founders" to hollow out those words into a dying echo, the vastly corrupt antebellum period, requiring another bloody war and bloody struggle which made the sacrifices of the Revolution seem like a minor thing. If we ignore that, first moral obligations will be pushed aside, as they already are, with those go the freedom to enjoy rights, the life that those ensure and, eventually, there will be another conflict as the conditions those lead to become unendurable. I would expect the next one might make the Civil War look like a dress rehearsal, the products of the Enlightenment by way of arms and lack of inhibitions to use them being what those are now. Look at the results of the Russian and Chinese revolutions for a clue as to what will come.
* I've been thinking of expanding the series I did in February on the documents proving the religious origins of abolitionism, contrasting those with statements by the heroes of anti-religious propaganda both asserting the natural inferiority of non-whites and the rightness of holding them in slavery or, at least, in an inferior condition to white poeple. Virtually all of the heroes of the enlightenment said something to that effect, Voltaire, Hume, Jefferson, Kant... In every case I can think of, in that period, the ones who held the equality of people regardless of race were religious. And that line of thinking goes back to the early Christian period. It could hardly have avoided it as the mainstream of religious thought held to a single origin of all people instead of the frequently asserted "rationalist" separate origination and scriptures which held in respect converts from Africa and which aspired to bring the Gospel to all people.
** The question of such rights as self-determination by the profoundly retarded is one of the more troubling of those. Clearly, as with young children, people who have very little intellectual capacity, still have rights, one of those is the right to be protected from those who would take advantage of their condition but, also, from their own inability to protect themselves from other dangers. Rights don't exist as disembodied, abstract entities but as aspects of the person in their very being, different rights becoming more relevantly asserted in different conditions. The right to free speech is certainly not the most important one to someone hiding from someone who is trying to attack or kill them, the right to go where you want to is certainly not the one to assert for a person incapable of avoiding the raging river near them.
But my text this morning is the one I mentioned a few days back, the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence they based their vote of the 2nd on and which they would formalize two days later.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Those words are certainly among the most familiar to Americans out of any of the civic documents of our history, the ones who the later figure who should count as a founder of modern America, Abraham Lincoln explicitly adopted as the basis of his political philosophy, the ones that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. based the demand for political equality on in the next century. The reason that both men asserted those words were that the author and the adopters of them in 1776 immediately proved they had no intention of allowing them to govern their conduct in their personal life or, certainly, not of the government they would form after the war. The author of them, Jefferson, certainly did his best to hollow them out with his slave holding which became more exacting as he applied his rational analysis of the value of their labor to enrich him, not them, developed.
The other day I pointed out that, against the entire grain of today's intellectual elite, when Jefferson and his fellow heroes of The Enlightenment* sought to explain where their rights to be listed below and which they accused the King and the British Parliament of violating came from, those great minds could think of nothing else than to claim them as a gift of God.
I am certain they rehearsed different arguments of how to turn rights and the moral obligation to respect them into some kind of political geometry in terms of pure reason without recourse to the already intellectually unfashionable divine. Only they found that couldn't be done and it still can't. They must be held to be self-evident but can only be self-evident with that origin already held. Much as I delight in breaking the taboo against dissing those secular gods, I doubt anyone is likely to outstrip them in their ability to do that. There has been no attempted scientific location of the origins of rights and moral obligation to respect rights which hasn't reduced them from an absolute reality into a shifting, appearing and disappearing mirage which no one can rationally demand be respected in any durable manner.
Every atheistic explanation of rights can, with the greatest of ease, be alienated from any individual or member of any identity group by the merest of whim. I have had the great pleasure of being able to point out to the people who promote those cheap imitations of rights and obligations, that in any society which deemed that atheists had no rights would have, truly and irrefutably demolished any rights that atheists asserted or could ever assert while being faithful to that popular atheist exposition of rights and morals. In such a society, atheists making claims to rights would, by their own holdings, have made their claims to rights a delusion. And I have used them as an example only because, these days, it is atheists who make those claims of being able to produce rights without them being an equal endowment of God, if anyone else tries that, their own identity works as perfectly to impeach their attempt in every case. It especially works when people try to link rights with intelligence** because that argument makes everyone the inferior in rights to everyone who is more intelligent than they are. Making such a silly argument so vulnerable to that answer doesn't do anything to support the intellectual status of the one making it.
This is no small point in their political geometry, it is stated in the second sentence because it is the basis on which their entire argument for the violations of their rights is made, which, in turn, they use to argue for their independence from Britain and, especially, the British king. It was the same holding necessary to argue for the rights of those held in slavery, women, workers, poor people, etc. They had to make rights inalienable and enduring or they would have, as well, been deluded that they possessed such rights and there is no way to do that without asserting that rights and the obligation to respect rights are nothing less than gifts from God. Rights among people, in society originate in moral obligations. We, today, have not made any more progress in locating rights and the equally important moral obligations on which the exercise of rights rests in any other place than as an inalienable gift equally bestowed on all people by God. There is no philosophical explanation of those, no pseudo-scientific attempt to create them with natural selection or an assertion of physical law which isn't vulnerable to exactly the same practices that led those gods of the Enlightenment, the "Founders" to hollow out those words into a dying echo, the vastly corrupt antebellum period, requiring another bloody war and bloody struggle which made the sacrifices of the Revolution seem like a minor thing. If we ignore that, first moral obligations will be pushed aside, as they already are, with those go the freedom to enjoy rights, the life that those ensure and, eventually, there will be another conflict as the conditions those lead to become unendurable. I would expect the next one might make the Civil War look like a dress rehearsal, the products of the Enlightenment by way of arms and lack of inhibitions to use them being what those are now. Look at the results of the Russian and Chinese revolutions for a clue as to what will come.
* I've been thinking of expanding the series I did in February on the documents proving the religious origins of abolitionism, contrasting those with statements by the heroes of anti-religious propaganda both asserting the natural inferiority of non-whites and the rightness of holding them in slavery or, at least, in an inferior condition to white poeple. Virtually all of the heroes of the enlightenment said something to that effect, Voltaire, Hume, Jefferson, Kant... In every case I can think of, in that period, the ones who held the equality of people regardless of race were religious. And that line of thinking goes back to the early Christian period. It could hardly have avoided it as the mainstream of religious thought held to a single origin of all people instead of the frequently asserted "rationalist" separate origination and scriptures which held in respect converts from Africa and which aspired to bring the Gospel to all people.
** The question of such rights as self-determination by the profoundly retarded is one of the more troubling of those. Clearly, as with young children, people who have very little intellectual capacity, still have rights, one of those is the right to be protected from those who would take advantage of their condition but, also, from their own inability to protect themselves from other dangers. Rights don't exist as disembodied, abstract entities but as aspects of the person in their very being, different rights becoming more relevantly asserted in different conditions. The right to free speech is certainly not the most important one to someone hiding from someone who is trying to attack or kill them, the right to go where you want to is certainly not the one to assert for a person incapable of avoiding the raging river near them.
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
For Canada Day
Margaret Atwood
Through the One-Way Mirror
I read this years ago in The Nation and it always stuck with me, especially today when the Harper government is trying to turn Canada in to an annex of the United States. Or that's how it seems to me. I liked Canada a lot more when it was Canada.
It was either this or The Guess Who's American Woman. I figured most people have heard that, already.
Through the One-Way Mirror
I read this years ago in The Nation and it always stuck with me, especially today when the Harper government is trying to turn Canada in to an annex of the United States. Or that's how it seems to me. I liked Canada a lot more when it was Canada.
It was either this or The Guess Who's American Woman. I figured most people have heard that, already.
When Someone Is Determined To Lie About What You Say You Aren't Under Any Obligation To Ignore It
This appeared within the past hour on Duncan Black's Eschaton Blog. Anyone who reads my post, below, will see that it is a total distortion of what I said and any possible coherent or rational interpretation of it.
Samuel Alito Thuggish Hit Man of the Supreme Court
I long ago concluded that the reason conservatives in the law and the judiciary are so enamored of the death penalty is that it is an essential tool of any despotic government to be used against any opponents, as a means of terrorizing any subjugated groups and as a general means of degrading the meaning of human life, essential in their program of turning people from beings possessing inalienable rights to objects which are subject to disposal. In that, the proponents of state murder are generalizing the attitudes that allow some people to commit illegal murders as prerogatives of the state and the judicial system, and judges. It isn't any accident that the very same Supreme Court Justices who voted for the state of Oklahoma in the appalling, morally bankrupt Glossip v. Gross are the same justices who have been attacking democracy and self-government in favor of corporations, this is all part of a general program of destroying both a democratic government and a decent society of the only type which can sustain a democracy.
That it was the coldest blooded of the casually cruel Republicans on the bench, Samuel Alito, who issued the ruling is not shocking. He is never slow to do something like that, an intellectual Luca Brasi. This case is particularly telling of how twisted his mind is, especially in light of his dissent on the United States vs. Stevens case, in which I agreed with him that the filmed torture and killing of animals in porn could be banned, against all eight of the other justices. It was about the one and only case that I ever agreed with him on anything, though with his holding that human beings can be killed without any regard for torture or suffering leaves me to consider that his goal wasn't animal welfare.
The current ruling, like all of Alitos, tries to destroy past progress towards a more decent government,
Gossip v. Gross is a crushing blow to opponents of the death penalty. The narrow issue in this case is whether a particular drug that Oklahoma wants to use in executions sufficiently dulls inmates pain that the intense suffering caused by the remainder of the state’s lethal drug cocktail does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Yet the Court’s 5-4 decision goes well beyond this narrow question. It effectively enlists death row inmates’ attorneys to become agents of their clients’ demise. And it elevates the death penalty to a kind of super-legal status that renders it impervious to many constitutional challenges.
Glossip opens with the eight most frightening words a liberal will ever read: “JUSTICE ALITO delivered the opinion of the Court.” In characteristic fashion, Alito uses his opinion to pry open gaps in the Court’s precedents that lead to extraordinarily conservative outcomes. By the time he is done, some of the most important victories for death penalty opponents in the last several years have been transformed into defeats.
At oral arguments, Alito was openly contemptuous of the work of death penalty opponents — many of whom work for companies that manufacture drugs that various states would like to use in their execution protocols. The reason why Oklahoma was in court seeking the ability to use a painkiller of questionable reliability in its executions is because many drug companies have refused to sell their products to states if those states intend to use them to kill a human being. During arguments in this case, Alito labeled this effort a “guerrilla war against the death penalty.”
As a legal matter, it is not at all clear why the actions of drug companies have any relevance whatsoever to a constitutional challenge to the death penalty. Drug companies are private actors, not government actors, so they are free to sell or not to sell whatever they choose so long as they comply with the law. Alito’s opinion, however, effectively punishes these drug companies for their opposition to the death penalty by holding that, should the companies continue to make their more reliable drug unavailable, then executions will just move forward with less reliable painkillers.
This is so extraordinary, especially given that Alito has been, almost uniformly, a supporter of so called "corporate rights", here, in order that executions are carried out, he tries to force them into becoming part of the government's killing team, even if they would rather not. It rewards the LEAST moral of businessmen, it creates a race to the moral bottom when any company which would not aid the effort to kill.
The key paragraph in Alito’s opinion is a declaration that, no matter what happens, there must always be a way to execute inmates:
"Our decisions in this area have been animated in part by the recognition that because it is settled that capital punishment is constitutional, “[i]t necessarily follows that there must be a [constitutional] means of carrying it out.” And because some risk of pain is inherent in any method of execution, we have held that the Constitution does not require the avoidance of all risk of pain. After all, while most humans wish to die a painless death, many do not have that good fortune. Holding that the Eighth Amendment demands the elimination of essentially all risk of pain would effectively outlaw the death penalty altogether."
It's no wonder that Roberts assigned this decision to the cold-blooded Alito. The other natural choice to issue such a morally depraved ruling, Scalia, couldn't be counted on to not make a joke on the way to delivering as bad if not a worse decision.
I will point out that all of the Justices in this ruling are in the most basic violation of Catholic teachings on the death penalty in this ruling, not to mention in the whole line of death penalty cases they have heard, though I don't suppose any of them would be turned away from communion at the next Red Mass they attend or will run into any bishops pressuring Catholic universities from barring them from speaking. At least not until the current holders of most of those positions are replaced, one hopes as soon as possible, with men or more integrity and less bald support for Republicans.
That it was the coldest blooded of the casually cruel Republicans on the bench, Samuel Alito, who issued the ruling is not shocking. He is never slow to do something like that, an intellectual Luca Brasi. This case is particularly telling of how twisted his mind is, especially in light of his dissent on the United States vs. Stevens case, in which I agreed with him that the filmed torture and killing of animals in porn could be banned, against all eight of the other justices. It was about the one and only case that I ever agreed with him on anything, though with his holding that human beings can be killed without any regard for torture or suffering leaves me to consider that his goal wasn't animal welfare.
The current ruling, like all of Alitos, tries to destroy past progress towards a more decent government,
Gossip v. Gross is a crushing blow to opponents of the death penalty. The narrow issue in this case is whether a particular drug that Oklahoma wants to use in executions sufficiently dulls inmates pain that the intense suffering caused by the remainder of the state’s lethal drug cocktail does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Yet the Court’s 5-4 decision goes well beyond this narrow question. It effectively enlists death row inmates’ attorneys to become agents of their clients’ demise. And it elevates the death penalty to a kind of super-legal status that renders it impervious to many constitutional challenges.
Glossip opens with the eight most frightening words a liberal will ever read: “JUSTICE ALITO delivered the opinion of the Court.” In characteristic fashion, Alito uses his opinion to pry open gaps in the Court’s precedents that lead to extraordinarily conservative outcomes. By the time he is done, some of the most important victories for death penalty opponents in the last several years have been transformed into defeats.
At oral arguments, Alito was openly contemptuous of the work of death penalty opponents — many of whom work for companies that manufacture drugs that various states would like to use in their execution protocols. The reason why Oklahoma was in court seeking the ability to use a painkiller of questionable reliability in its executions is because many drug companies have refused to sell their products to states if those states intend to use them to kill a human being. During arguments in this case, Alito labeled this effort a “guerrilla war against the death penalty.”
As a legal matter, it is not at all clear why the actions of drug companies have any relevance whatsoever to a constitutional challenge to the death penalty. Drug companies are private actors, not government actors, so they are free to sell or not to sell whatever they choose so long as they comply with the law. Alito’s opinion, however, effectively punishes these drug companies for their opposition to the death penalty by holding that, should the companies continue to make their more reliable drug unavailable, then executions will just move forward with less reliable painkillers.
This is so extraordinary, especially given that Alito has been, almost uniformly, a supporter of so called "corporate rights", here, in order that executions are carried out, he tries to force them into becoming part of the government's killing team, even if they would rather not. It rewards the LEAST moral of businessmen, it creates a race to the moral bottom when any company which would not aid the effort to kill.
The key paragraph in Alito’s opinion is a declaration that, no matter what happens, there must always be a way to execute inmates:
"Our decisions in this area have been animated in part by the recognition that because it is settled that capital punishment is constitutional, “[i]t necessarily follows that there must be a [constitutional] means of carrying it out.” And because some risk of pain is inherent in any method of execution, we have held that the Constitution does not require the avoidance of all risk of pain. After all, while most humans wish to die a painless death, many do not have that good fortune. Holding that the Eighth Amendment demands the elimination of essentially all risk of pain would effectively outlaw the death penalty altogether."
It's no wonder that Roberts assigned this decision to the cold-blooded Alito. The other natural choice to issue such a morally depraved ruling, Scalia, couldn't be counted on to not make a joke on the way to delivering as bad if not a worse decision.
I will point out that all of the Justices in this ruling are in the most basic violation of Catholic teachings on the death penalty in this ruling, not to mention in the whole line of death penalty cases they have heard, though I don't suppose any of them would be turned away from communion at the next Red Mass they attend or will run into any bishops pressuring Catholic universities from barring them from speaking. At least not until the current holders of most of those positions are replaced, one hopes as soon as possible, with men or more integrity and less bald support for Republicans.
Not "Gay Married" Married
With the ruling by the Supreme Court issued last week, let's drop the qualifier of "gay marriage" and just call it marriage. The qualifier already creates a different category which can't help but absorb and to an extent justify inequality. If you want to see what that includes, you can do what I've been doing and raise the apparently odd idea that gay people who marry should have a right to expect faithful monogamy in their marriage and see how people can't believe that's a possibility. That is even believed of marriages of lesbians, I was surprised to find out because, if anything, lesbians I know who are in a stable relationship are probably more likely to be faithfully monogamous than the straight couples I know.
I said the other day that if the marriages of gay people aren't held to include faithful monogamy, we are already making it an inferior bond, and marriage is a voluntarily entered into bond, an agreed to restriction in some aspects of choice entered into on a mutual basis or it is a bogus marriage. If we regard our marriages as not including that, WE will be the ones accepting an inferior status for our marriages and any families that might result from those. If the marriage doesn't come with bonds to care for each other for better or worse, in sickness and in health on a continual basis until death do us part, it is a mere economic contract without any personal and emotional commitment to each other and no one should expect more from it than financial advantages, which already degrades it and makes it less than those marriages which are true pledges of support. As I mentioned the other day, the inclusion of sexual fidelity in the promises we have a right to expect of the agreement of marriage is especially relevant to gay men, given the very real possibilities of one spouse becoming infected and passing on AIDS or other STDs rampant in the gay population. That is, of course, something that straight folk, who are also prone to that possibility, to consider in the degradation of marriages among them.
The successful marriages I've seen, with benefit of an officiant or not, have been among people who took the promises they made seriously. They have pledged to constantly work at it through all of the problems that are bound to come up, through the disagreements, the stupid mistakes with money, with selfish behavior, etc. Some have even endured the realization that one of them could probably have "done better" or that romantic love tends to fade. Though it is very possible for an immature relationship to come to a more adult appreciation and respect which is probably better than the idiocy of immature infatuation which the movies, TV and stupid novels have led us to think of as the highest point of marriage. Which accounts for why so many people in those businesses tend to seek out one after another, after another of those relationships and they never grow up but may merely get too old to fool around anymore.
Worst of all is the cynical immaturity of sex advisers in the media who are among the greatest scoffers against the possibility of gay folk having faithful, mature, adult marriages. Perhaps that is due to the fact that the people who seek advice from such unlikely sources of good advice tend to be the ones in a relationship with selfish, immature people, quite often that person being the one asking for the advice. I doubt most people in good relationships give such personal pundits much business or material to make into columnage. If I were looking to make a good marriage, they're about the last place I'd look for ideas.
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expressed a negative opinion of Bruce Springsteen. I don't believe I
ever have,
Update: Now Simels is trying to extend my comment about a genre of pop music, rock and roll as opposed to the blues, to cover anything produced by any boys of European descent, by name. Really, maybe I should start posting his comments, pure Baron Munchhausen territory. And remember, he posts this stuff on Duncan Black's Eschaton blog to the adoration of the ever shrinking blog community there.
As to what a nasty, bigoted, sleazy operator the founder of American Atheists, Simels' hero, was, here's just one comment from a fairly honest atheist, Jim Lippard:
Phoenix, AZ
Too much honesty? That's an erroneous diagnosis. Have you read Bozarth's _The Mouth That Roared_? Have you read Fred Woodworth's _The Atheist Cult_? Have you read Lawrence Wright's _Saints and Sinners_ or his profile of O'Hair in the _Texas Monthly_? Have you spoken with G. Richard Bozarth (who worked at AA HQ), or Anne Gaylor, or Jeff Frankel, or Brian Lynch (who worked at AA HQ), or Judy Sawyer of the Phoenix Skeptics, or the former student members of University Student Atheists at UT Austin, or anyone else abused or lied to by O'Hair? If not, then you have no basis for your judgment.
Here's a letter from Madalyn Murray O'Hair to John Lauritsen (for what it's worth, he's now an HIV-denier kook), kicking him out of the American Atheists:
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John Lauritsen,
The California Chapter of Society of Separationists, Inc., has sent me a zerox [sic] copy of your letter dated May Day, 1976.
I would expect this kind of literature to issue from a misogomist [sic]. I am a _female_ head of an American Atheist group. You are a cock-sucker. You like men and boys. You don't like women. We don't have cocks for you to suck.
Also, we are not Marxists as you are.
Form your own group of cock-sucking Atheist Marxists and be happy, kiddo; but don't count on me as an ally.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
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Image of this letter: http://www.discord.or...