Going down for the first time, the second time, .....

I suppose I should admit that Simps has been such a useful volunteer to show how stupid the pseudo-left has become and so much that is wrong with the pseudo-left and why it has sunk the real left into the political mire where it has been struggling to keep from drowning for the past half-century.  I don't imagine for a second he's smart enough to realize what a good specimen of futile, counterproductive stupidity he's been, serving as a jumping off point for making arguments, he's simply not smart enough or reflective enough to realize that.  As a foil, he's all tin,dull on both sides.

His response to my article last night was to whine that in an article which dopey googled in search of ammo David Bentley Hart used the word "perplexity" To quote Simps,  

I think we can safely dismiss him as a thinker of any sort out of hand. Unless perhaps English is a second language for the guy. Perplexity? Jeebus, what a poser.

Since I can google, too, I find that etymological dictionaries say that the word "perplexity" has been used in exactly the way that Hart used it has been found in the English language since c. 1300, that would be news to a guy who believes himself to have been a professional writer.  If I had time I'd go look through the corpus of such writers as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, etc. to see if any of them had committed the foolish act of having made use of that particular word offered by the English language since before English was English.  I wonder if his host, Duncan Black, ever used it, way, way back when he still wrote stuff. 

One of the sources of endless smiling when being insulted and derided by Steve Simels is his utter cluelessness about what he, himself, says in his own comments.  He's upset that I spent most of a post responding to his accusation that David Bentley Hart was my "favorite theologian" by me listing some of my actual favorite theologians.   The man is such an ass he gets upset when someone responds to what he said in the very terms he said it in.  It's not enough that he's made an ass of himself, he also expects his opponents to pull his out of the sling he's put it into, himself.  

I know that the rump remnant of the Eschaton commenting community is, with few exceptions, not the best of what it was ten years ago.  But it isn't even the best of what it was two years ago.  I would recommend anyone who wants to see why the left was lost go look at what gets said there today.  Duncan Black openly maintains it as a source of income for himself while doing the very minimum to keep it open.   I have, in the past, noted how like Harry Hope's bar in the play The Iceman Cometh venues like Eschaton are, only, as Harry Hope, Black isn't going to risk anyone coming in and upsetting the regulars with any unwelcome reality such as what Hickey upset the regulars with in the play.  It might impinge on his profits if people stop clicking on, generating ad revenue for him and buying stuff through his Amazon bar.  I'm afraid that even those who have some vestiges of ability and maturity left are as stuck in the futility of the place as those characters in O'Neill's play.

Update:  Oh,Yeah, There was a time when Duncan Black showed some promise, some potential.  The thing is, those have a shelf life before they go bad.  His past-code was about 2008/ 

In Way Over His Head

Simps thinks that David Bentley Hart is an "ultra reactionary".   Yeah, you can tell how much of one he is by his article that caused huge controversy among conservative theologians when he told them that their natural law arguments against gay marriage didn't work.  And you can also tell what an ultra reactionary he is by his slamming capitalism like in the video I posted last night which Simps claims to have listened to.

What Hart is is subtle, too subtle for someone who is as lazy and illiterate as Simps to even begin to comprehend.

Actually, Hart isn't, as Simps declares "my favorite theologian".  I don't happen to have an official one,  though I would definitely say that James Cone, the great Black liberation theologian is probably about my favorite current theologian.  Here, again, is his preaching the ordination sermon of the radical journalist, Chris Hedges.

The Latino liberation theologians, such as Gustavo Gutierrez,  are right up there.

 I do have a favorite book of theology, I've quoted it many times and mentioned it many times, The Gospel in Solentiname, the great classic of radical New Testament theology as articulated by Nicaraguan peasants who worshiped at a Christian base community which was destroyed by bombs by the dictatorship supported by the United States government.  I've never made any secret of that.  The priest who initiated the discussions that are recorded in the book and who compiled it was  Ernesto Cardenal. the priest who Pope John Paul II shook his finger at and forced into retirement from the priesthood, a monk who had been trained in the United States by the liberal, critic of the Vietnam war and all round 1960s radical, Thomas Merton.  The last interview I read with him, he was a critic of the current Nicaraguan government under Daniel Ortega because he had betrayed the ideals of the Sandinista movement, the one that Reagan conducted his dirty war against.
Here's a Rawstory piece about him from a year ago.

On  the eve of his 90th birthday, storied Nicaraguan poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal laments what he calls the betrayal of the Sandinista revolution by President Daniel Ortega. 

Ordained a Catholic priest in 1965, Cardenal left a mainly farming community he founded on the Solentiname Islands to join Sandinista rebels fighting against the Somoza family regime, which had ruled the country for nearly half a century.

“It was a beautiful revolution. But what happened is that it was betrayed,” said Cardenal, who turns 90 on Tuesday, in an interview at the Nicaraguan Writers Center in Managua.

“There is now the family dictatorship of Daniel Ortega. That’s not what we fought for.”

Cardenal insisted he does not regret having supported the revolution, but minces no words when it comes to Ortega, who first came to power with the Sandinista National Liberation Front in the 1979 revolution.

Ortega ruled until 1990 and then returned in 2007 for a second stint as president, amassing “all the powers of the country” and “fabulously enriching himself,” Cardenal said.

Hunched over and walking with the help of a cane, his thick white mane covered in part by a trademark beret, Cardenal speaks ardently of a long life of accomplishments as a politician, priest, sculptor, translator, poet and author of numerous works that have been translated into some 20 languages.

Cardenal, who made international headlines in 1983 when the late Pope John Paul II publicly reprimanded him during a visit to Managua for supporting the revolution, no longer has the same boundless energy as before. But he remains in good health.

– Protagonist of revolutionary struggle –

Adamant that religion “cannot be oblivious to political struggles,” Cardenal celebrated Mass in the guerrilla camps, helped create an international network of solidarity with the fighters, served as Sandinista spokesman when guerrilla leaders were in hiding and participated with Ortega in the Sandinistas’ triumphant entry into Managua in July 1979.


“It was the feast of a people who had never seen anything like it in their 500-year history,” Cardenal recalled in his book “The Lost Revolution” (2004).

Cardenal has said of The Gospel in Solentiname that it is his best book because it wasn't written by him but by the peasants whose theology is profoundly insightful in a way that academic theology seldom can be because these peoples' lives were the subject of the Gospel, the ones who are the focus of its message. That is what makes it such a great book.

Big deal, JR-Freki is second only to Simps as the premier liar of Eschaton and that's only because unlike Simps she's got a day job.   

Update:  It's so cute when Simps pretends to know something that you know he'd never heard of before someone told him about it.  Let me guess, either Boy Tunder or JR looked it up.

As it is, I'm not bothered by it, Simps.  You see, I've read him and you haven't. 

No Laughing Matter And "First Lynching of 1934"

What did I tell you, I'm accused of not having a sense of humor, not getting Silverman's alleged humor, the satire of it.

I have to confess that since I knew that was coming, I already had my argument prepared in advance, holding it until Bozo dropped his shoe.

Now, I don't think anyone who knew better would accuse Sarah Silverman of being as clever or funny as Will Rogers was, if they would they're just exposing their stupidity.   I used Stepin Fetchit as an example for a reason, I can never think of him or Will Rogers without thinking of the scene in the 1934 movie Judge Priest  in which Rogers plays the would-be loveable character of the old, wise Confederate veteran, country lawyer and judge the movie is named after.  I won't go into the plot the exchange fits into, you can watch the movie somewhere, I'm sure.   Here's what is said, finding Jeff Poindexter (Stepin Fetchit) playing the harmonica he always has with him.

Judge William 'Billy' Priest: Say, wait a minute. Can, can you play Dixie on that thing, there?
Jeff Poindexter: With that coon coat, yes, I play Dixie with Marching Through Georgia.
Judge William 'Billy' Priest: Wait, hey, Marchin' Through Georgia? Yeah, I got you out of one lynchin'.
Jeff Poindexter: Yes, with that coon coat, I know I was going to get.
Judge William 'Billy' Priest: If I catch you playin' that Marchin' Through Georgia, I'll join the lynchers.

Which might be funny if you had never read accounts or looked carefully at the pictures of actual lynchings, somehow that makes the jokes so often found made by wits of that era not funny.  It is especially not funny if you look at the statistics of lynchings in the United States by year, the years 1933, 1934 and 1935 during which the movie was made and released had some of the highest numbers of lynchings in the 1930s, the previous decades, the period the movie is supposed to nostalgically evoke in the manner of popular yearning for the old South, had even more horrific numbers of lynchings.



I suppose that I'm as humor impaired as Abel Meeropol was when he wrote the lyrics of Strange Fruit three years after the movie was made and as little sense of humor as Billie Holiday had when she recorded the song two years after that.  The role that entertainment played and plays in making black lives not matter, the role that it plays in today's epidemic of killings of black people is no laughing matter. The feeling that they don't, not something that would be articulated or admitted to, comes from somewhere.   The same for the lives of women of all ethnic groups and identities, who have been under the equivalent of an even more violent regime of terror-killing, continually, only, for reasons I have never been able to fathom, it's not called "lynching".

Will Rogers was what none of today's dreary comedians who use stereotypes is, clever.  I can say that this many years after that, none of it should be peddled as comedy.  I can't claim that those lines from Judge Priest don't come back to me whenever I hear his name, see his picture or hear his voice, since thinking about it.

You Know It's Not The Real Left When This Kind Of Crap Is A "Cause"

For things to be thankful for in the year past, one of them is that I didn't, until the last two days of 2015, know who Sarah Silverman was.  I only know about her now because the athei-net is trying to blow up flack she got from a stupid tweet about Jesus being "gender fluid" into turning her into some kind of cause célèbre, as if people reacting predictably were some kind of major issue.

I've seen it before, online atheist would-be wise-guys cracking jokes about  Jesus being gay, unknowingly exposing themselves as being uneasy about the "gender fluid" in the process.  Being gay, myself, that was as obvious about it as anything.

Amanda Marcotte's copy-cat Salon post on it yesterday, not the first I'd seen about it, had all of the idiotic features of this ritual.

Conservatives love decrying liberals for “political correctness” and “oversensitivity,” a particularly poignant form of hypocrisy since liberals could never reach the levels of whininess and hyper-sensitivity to perceived insults that the right wing coughs up daily. Doubly so when it comes to anything that a celebrity says.

Freaking out on celebrities allows conservatives to double down on their sense of victimhood — not only do they get to feign offense, they also get to wallow in how supposedly unfair it is that the giant liberal media conspiracy is oppressing them by allowing celebrities to say progressive things in public.

The dumb bunny doesn't realize that every single thing she accuses the people reacting to Silverman's stupid tweet of are exactly the same thing she's making of their reaction to it.  Silverman, who, from what I can see of her career, is one of the dime a thousand, ephemeral "celebrities" who have a short-lived "hit show" on some cable channel, who yucks on one of 500 or so channels and frets on the ephemeral nature of their fame and is soon heard of no more.  Her chances of being any more famous than she is now, ever again, is entirely dependent on her kicking up attention, the entire reason for her stupid, unshocking, undangerous and uninteresting tweet.

Marcotte, as well, has only so much fame as she can kick up for herself in the way over-populated world of online scribblers.  The substance of her "literary career" consists of her entirely vulgar, common as dirt and stupid anti-religious shtick and that's getting old.  But she doesn't have much more to her than Silverman does.  I was not even mildly curious when I went to see some of Silverman's work, online, her "American Jewish princess" act was old in the 1960s and unfunny and just stupid.

For anyone to complain that people remark on her intentionally offending conservative Christian sensibilities on the basis of her being Jewish, what's offensive about that that her own claim to fame isn't?   Jewish folk in show-biz who hold up being Jewish to the general ridicule in order to get attention are despicable.  If you want to see why antisemites don't feel inhibited about expressing antisemitism on such occasions, they were given permission by such acts as Silverman's.  It's as unfunny as Stepin Fetchit, only he had no possibility to try to make any other kind of career in show business and little other opportunity in the pre-Civil Rights Act America he lived in.  Members of minority groups who pander to bigots don't have that excuse, today.   Silverman's entire career would seem to be based on expressing internalized self-hatred, it appeals to the hatred that other people feel.  It is hate for the amusement of people who hate women and Jews and especially Jewish women.

As predictable as anything in this, I am am going to be accused of not having a sense of humor over this, which is as predictable as Silverman and Marcotte wrote.   The problem for them is that I do have a sense of humor, enough to know what they're doing isn't funny, it's just stupid and dull and was done before.  Show biz was full of negative Jewish stereotypes in the vaudeville era, those go back into antiquity.  Do I have to mention Tacitus again?  They were never funny.  Neither were the consequences.

New Year

Being a democrat as well as a Democrat, a liberal Democrat in the original, American meaning of the word liberal, I spend a lot of time thinking about rights.  The Civil Rights Movement is one of the great events of my life, especially my early years.  The power of the continuing struggles of Black People to overcome their oppression, the facts of that oppression, are some of the primary themes of my life, both political and religious.  They are the lens through which I see politics, they are the lens through which much of the most potent aspects of salvation became and still become visible to me.  And it is not like an optical lens, it is not limited as the physical metaphor would indicate, it, likewise, opens up other essential, indispensable means of viewing the universality of the struggle for salvation, both political and religious.

The egalitarian nature of the salvation we are all to find means that no exclusion can exist.  The struggle for any aspect of equal justice is as essential to the goal as any other.  It was one of the great insights that the greatest of the figures of the Civil Rights Movement articulated that the rights of one people are the rights of all people.   Anyone who articulated a rights struggle for "their people" alone, presenting "their people" alone as uniquely oppressed, uniquely entitled to first if not only consideration was not only a lesser figure of the Civil Rights struggle, they were guaranteed to do damage to that struggle.

Equality means equality, do unto others what you would have them do unto you is a universal law, you should be good to each other is an ideal we either live by or we make no progress, politically or towards that highest goal of politics, salvation.  That is the only secure and legitimate goal of democracy, democracy is, in a cruder, political and legal form nothing less than a means of attaining a basic but progressive path to salvation.  Any lower goal will prove to be the same kind of impediment to the achievement of democracy that having an exclusive focus in the struggle for equality.  Aiming too low for democracy will produce the dispiriting and depressing quagmire the American left has been mired in since the abandonment of the goals of the Civil Rights leadership as exemplified in the Reverend Martin Luther King jr. of his associates and such other great figures as Diane Nash who we are blessed to still have with us.

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Yesterday I posted something which got a lot of flack, my examination of the defective articulation of equal rights under scientistic materialism, a current fad among the phony face obscuring the real political left in the United States and across the English speaking world.  It got some mockery from some of the atheists who read the words not understanding that I was presenting equal rights as the reductionist materialism THEY HOLD TO would have to find them in order for them to be any more real than the Creator who endows us with those rights they so derisively dismiss because their materialism can't account for God.  As they whine about perceived violations of their rights, which in most cases aren't rights but privileges they believe are denied them, they blithely ignore that their very own faith is one of the greatest forces which has hindered if not destroyed the struggle for equal rights and the reason that we are equally bound to respect those rights.

The cosmological debunking of God that such figures as Sean Carroll, Lawrence Krauss, Steve Weinberg, and, most famous of all Stephen Hawking are engaged in forces the issue of what their program of insisting that all things that are real must be located in the tiniest scale of reality, quantum or Planck scale, depending on which faith tradition those materialists made their career of, including the Creator who is the only plausibly convincing candidate as the source of effective and articulable equal rights, forces the question of where the scientific high priesthood of Carroll, Krauss, Weinberg, Hawkings and any of these scientistic materialists would locate those rights and the moral obligations that make their exercise real in the real lives of real people.

The fact is that intellectual framings have a real effect on real life because how and what people think has as much of an effect in society and politics as it does in quantum physics.  The intellectual framing that turned people into material objects during the under the so-called Enlightenment is the mechanism through which the French revolutionaries could kill so many people with such conviction, including their rival revolutionaries.  It is what made the 20th century murder industries under dictatorships so much more effective in murdering people and which makes us able to pretend to have superior motives and more rational lives as we destroy the planet even as we use predator drones and other means to murder remotely, even automatically with no human input as a result of an autonomously operating program, no doubt even that programming to be automated as soon as science finds a way to do even that.   And for figures on the nominal left such as Barack Obama to pretend to the loftiest of motives as they choose to do that.

In the video I posted yesterday David Bentley Hart noted that we are all caught up in the framing of a mechanistic universe, the very substance of the would be Enlightenment.  It is even a mechanical god as imagined in those terms which the mechanistic atheists reject, even their non-existent and rejected God is the product of scientific imagination.  I used to have that same faith, though, perhaps, raised as a Catholic I should have known better.  The hegemony of that mechanistic framing of the universe doesn't cover the world, it has, though established itself like a destructive, invasive insect damaging and destroying everything it reaches.

As David Bentley Hart also noted, it is one of the most logically even scientifically, incoherent intellectual programs which have ever become influential in human history.  As far back as the 1920s, people like Arthur Stanley Eddington noted that the then contemporary findings of physics had pretty much killed off materialism as a plausible explanation of the humanly observed universe, that nothing of the physical universe which people could discern through science was not inevitably a result of human consciousness.  And as Kurt Gödel and others would soon after show, even the mathematics and logic on which the scientific and materialistic thinkers depended produced paradoxes that highlighted the most basic problems with their philosophical foundations.  Yet almost a century later that news has yet to catch up with the high priesthood of materialism and its faith community.

I am a political person, an equality absolutist, a democrat.   I am most concerned with overturning the conditions that destroyed the Civil Rights and equality struggles of my youth and which have allowed those who want inequality, the denial of rights through the denial of the universal moral obligation to respect rights.  And not all of those destructive forces were external, the worst of them, the ones which destroyed the movement from within are what did the most damage.  They largely came from the elites who believed or just out of habit, felt themselves to be superior to other people, including many people who could have been persuaded to join with instead of oppose the struggle for equality. If I were going to go into detail about that, I'd point to such stuff as All In The Family and other entertainment industry "leftism" but I've done that before.

Those are the very snobs who manifest themselves in the new atheism as they did in the old line atheists of the communist left.   The failure of those old line commies to gain traction in the working class they pretended to struggle for their insane and destructive presence in Civil Rights leads me to think that atheism is emblematic of the self-defeating wing of leftism.   As Marxism is an anti-democratic and elite manifestation even as it pretends to be of by and for The People, it never had a legitimate place on the left.  Now that it is so dead that even the Communists in China are, in fact, capitalists on steroids and uppers, that same atheism has taken a different form, atheism which not only denies that there is any real thing as endowed, inherent rights turning those and the obligation to respect them into a mere social convention.  If there is something which people can refuse to do, it is respect mere conventions when they can do so to their advantage and their convenience.  They can do that as easily as they can take advantage of the free shipping that Jeff Bezos provides to Amazon Prime customers at the cost of the workers in his shipping facilities.  They can even claim that doing so is a benefit to the left because Bezos pays it off.

That pantomime of a left is still alienating the very people we will have to struggle with and for in order to revive any kind of politically effective left, a left which is truly OF, BY and, so FOR The People.   I don't think there is going to be anything easy about that, I don't make any kind of fraudulent guarantee that it's going to happen because some imaginary dialectic will swing that way as an matter of scientific inevitability.  I can guarantee you the way leading forward isn't through the atheist window into the world, it goes backwards, how far back, I don't know. 18th century, 17th century...  For now it seems stuck in the 20th century, the bloodiest of centuries, the one which sent us hurtling into complete catastrophe, in the epic mass slaughters and the ultimate slaughter of all life on Earth which continues even as we, somehow, mistake that for progress congratulating ourselves on our superior insight and the good things that science has given us, as sold at Amazon, the Walmart of the play left.

J. S. Bach - Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 1

Concentus Musicus Wien,
Nikolaus Harnoncourt, director

Boy Soprano: Soloist of the Wiener Sängerknaben
Tenor: Kurt Equiluz
Bass: Max van Egmond

David Bentley Hart - The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

A New Year present, if you hadn't heard it before.  I don't expect the kewl kiddies will be able to follow the first five two minutes but I'm not posting it for them.   I especially like his comments about capitalism and the new atheism, though it isn't the best of what was in this lecture and answer session. His comments on the incoherence of naturalism are some of the best I've heard.

And then there is what he says about prayer being radically subversive of capitalist consumerism.

La Bolduc - Bien vite c'est jour de l'an (1931) Very Soon it will be New Years Day

La Bolduc and her children, I believe.

In traditional French Quebec culture New Years was the big day for partying and celebrating, Christmas being a religious holiday.  As it happens, it was also the big day for my Irish family because it was easier to get that many people together on New Years than on Christmas day.  I always think of the music of La Bolduc around this time of year.

Bien vite c’est le jour de l’An qui nous r’vient à tous les ans (bis)
Parlons donc de l’ancien temps tout l’monde s’amusait gaiement
On rassemblait les parents on avait plus d’agrément (bis)
On souhaitera la bonne année pareil comme dans l’temps passé (bis)
On commencera par les vieux car ils sont les plus précieux
On demand’ra la bénédiction au grand-père de la maison (bis)
Pendant qu’les enfants joueront la parenté s’embrass’ront (bis)
Avec une grande tendresse et fait avec politesse
Sur les deux joues sur le front mais tout ça sans permission (bis)
C’est bien beau de s’amuser il faut penser à manger (bis)
On mang’ra des bonnes tartes à la farlouche et aux dattes
Et aussi de bonnes tourtières faites par notre bonne grand-mère (bis)
Après l’repas terminé qu’on a dit l’bénédicité (bis)
Le père pousse sa chanson et tout le monde répond
Tout chacun de leur manière y a des grosses voix pis des claires (bis)
J’oubliais d’vous mentionner des cadeaux faut emporter (bis)
Des beaux patins à Réal, à Lucienne une traîne sauvage
Et comme Fernande c’est le bébé on lui donnera une poupée (bis)
Quand la journée terminée que tout l’monde s’est amusé (bis)
Mais chacun prend leurs guenilles et retourne dans leur famille
Répétant en s’embrassant bien à l’autre jour de l’An (bis).

Le Jour de L'An

Hate Mail

As luck would have it, I've already pointed out the answer to your whiny insult in an answer to another whiny atheist.

Where do these rights humanists purport to support come from?  Do atoms have rights, molecules?  How do combinations and conglomerations of molecules start to have rights?  When in the line of evolution did that start?  Do bacteria have rights? Do flat worms?  Where did their rights come from and do we have a moral obligation to respect them?  Where in the history of life on Earth does our obligation to respect rights begin?

It would seem to me that in order for rights and the moral obligations to respect rights to be real under atheist-materialism, they would require some moment like the Genesis moment of God creating Adam, instilling such qualities within him and, as an afterthought, Eve.  I remember way, way back in an early Catechism class, Sr. Jean saying that God must have chosen a species in the evolution of people to put a soul into them.  I can't see how any "Humanist" (read "atheist") who wants to pretend to believe in equal rights can avoid locating some similar point in the development of life to have NO ONE endow our ancestors with equal rights.  At least dear old Sr. Jean had some coherent proposed mechanism of how that happened. And she'd trained as an elementary school teacher, not a sci-guy or a philosopher. 

As it is, atheism has no coherent account of where rights come from and no coherent reason that would keep anyone, atheist or not, from merely choosing to violate rights as they figure they can get away with it. 

Update:  "Religion likewise has no enforcement mechanisms (except ones you like to whitewash, like inquisitions) and in any case its track record has, historically, been less than stellar."

If religion had the power to compel people to respect the rights of other people, you'd be the first one to whine about theocracy.  
I'll put the checkered history of moral integrity of the Christian religion against the 100% record of atheist amorality when they have the kind of power to enforce behavior any day.  As it is, I didn't expect you'd be the one to understand the point made in those posts.

Hey, Stevie, you going to slam Duncan for saying what you jumped all over me for saying about your idea of a cool cat, not mine, Bill Cosby?

Update 2:  Nah, I'm not bothered with the jr. high mockery of Simps and Boy Thunder.  I figured years ago that if Duncan wants to sponsor that instead of something serious then his blog would not turn out to have any kind of positive effect on much of anything.  Like I said, once I realized it was just a means of making money for him....

and it was time to move on. 

Update 3:  It is kind of surprising for me to say it but any evidence I've seen would lead me to believe that Boy Thunder is even stupider than Simps.   Is there anyone with a narrower mind than someone who had the equivalent of a voc-ed education in some narrow scientific specialty?    Apparently it's news to Simp's sidekick that you've got to read something before you know what it said.  Lots of that going on at the ol' Brain Trust. 


Update 4:  Yeah, I blame Duncan Black for letting his blog be a place where dishonest and superficial schmucks trash talk other people who don't go there.  It's his blog, he could have done something about it years ago and he's too much of a self-absorbed narcissist to take the responsibility to stop that.   

I noticed last week that his regulars were trashing a former regular who showed up to beg for money, Jurassic Pork, calling him a grifter, etc.  How that differs from Duncan whining that they aren't supporting him by buying stuff from Amazon.com, using Adblock software, not donating to him must be some kind of Masonic secret among them because I can't see any difference.   

Duncan Black has been living off of his former promise as asserted by his mentor, The Horse of Media Whores Online and a few things he got recognition from before c. 2007.  His blog has been a drag on the discourse since about that time. 

Cosby Is Indicted But The Online Pseudo-left Red Channels Had Him Convicted More Than a Year Ago

OH MY WORD!  Duncan Black has said exactly what his commenting community has been slamming me over for more than a year, that Bill Cosby hasn't been convicted of anything and that there is a presumption of innocence that is the right of all of those who have not been convicted of crimes they're accused of.  Will any of them notice?  Simps?  Thunder Boy?  Your man, the A-man himself, has said exactly what I said all along.

Cosby

No deep thoughts, but if pattern of allegations is true then the guy was a serial predator for decades. (Innocent until proven guilty under our legal system. The court of public opinion is not our legal system.)

Oh come on, Duncan, make an effort, have a deep thought about something other than the parking in Philly.

Apparently some of his commentators still don't get the whole presumption of innocence, cross examination, establishment of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt (I assume that's the standard the prosecution will have to meet) and jury system.  One of them has the current demand that

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  ms fahrenheit femme fatalist • 30 minutes ago

  
  

  I think one should always believe the victim not blame them. If they are all lying we look stupid....

Well, if you want to not appear stupid, then it's best to begin by not assuming that someone making an accusation is stating the facts as they happened BEFORE ANYONE HAS A CHANCE TO EVEN HEAR THEIR ACCOUNT NEVER MIND TEST IT UNDER QUESTIONING.   As it is you've already rendered a summary judgement by assuming that there is a victim of a crime without that having been established in court.   The misconception that makes the victim of a cad a victim of a crime abounds in online discourse.  They aren't necessarily the same thing,  victims of crimes may be victims of cads but not all victims of cads are victims of crimes. 

It's amazing that these people who believe themselves to be the enlightened cream of American society don't get the most basic of principles under which any kind of fair legal system works.

As a number of us said when the campaign to get Cosby started in those most lofty of precincts, statements by stand up comedians and on web-loids like Salon, if there's enough evidence to bring an indictment and put him on trial, let's hear it.   If there is enough evidence to convict him of an actual crime, an actual crime on the books in the locations they are alleged to have happened, not the ad hoc expressions of rage and, frankly, racism, that have proliferated online and in tabloids, then the place to convict him of that is in a court of law, not of online rumor and salacious scandal.  

Really, for a group of people who are, no doubt, going to flock to see the movie, Trumbo, if they haven't already, who are such ardent haters of McCarthyism, they've come to comprise something not anything unlike Red Channels and the other organs of extra-judicial accusation, conviction and punishment.   

I think Duncan, considering the content you've supported on your blog, you really owe us more than your terse,  twitter style non-comment.  


Update:  Simps, if you're not going to read something and comment on what was said instead of what you, in your stupidity, would like to have been said, I'm not going to post the comment.  

These are words,
You have to read all of them to know what they say.
They don't work if you don't work. 

Kickin' Up The Dust The Mophead Left Behind

Given the choice of listening to Carmen Lombardo or whatever brainless andenoidal twit they've selected to intone the smart mopheads dreary atheist dirge at Time Square tonight, I'd take Carmen, he has historical interest and almost certainly a better back up band.  

Listening to those early Guy Lombardo arrangements, I can sort of hear what Louis Armstrong said he did.  “I haven’t heard no band that plays more perfect music than Guy Lombardo yet.”  Unlike Simps and the Tots I figure that someone who created the continual and perpetually inspiring musical genius that Louis Armstrong did, if they hear something in music that I haven't noticed, there must be something there that I'm not hearing and it might be worth the effort to hear it.  I also figure anyone who wouldn't rather take instruction from Louis Armstrong than from a washed-up c-list pop music reviewer from the equivalent of an ad flyer is a dolt. 

I'm Feeling Really Ornery So Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians with Kate Smith - River Stay Away From My Door

Update:  Love Me or Leave Me

Carmen Lombardo vocal

Reductionists Whining About People Who Are Willing To Make Arguments On Their Own Terms

Longtime readers will know that one of my sources of pride is the one and only time I got the atheist ideologue and ideological cosmologist, Sean Carroll, to admit that there is not a single object in the universe, not an atom, not a proton, neutron, electron, quark, no, not even the current star of the reductionist pantheon, the Higgs Boson which physics knows comprehensively and exhaustively.  He was reluctant to admit that - as I counted, it took 17 days of repeatedly asking that he answer the question to get him to admit to the obvious - because there is nothing that more conclusively shows the pretension of his ideological brand of cosmology that it will soon or not quite so soon have a theory of everything, a TOE, which will explain the entirety of the physical universe and, so, according to them, put the final nail in the coffin of God and religion.  

The idea that particle physics or quantum physics would be necessary to discern the tiniest basic component of physical reality and to, as they think, come up with the most general of all possible theories of the forces those exist or, really, move under,and so explain everything is the materialist and atheist faith tradition of reductionism.  It is the ideological conceit that everything is reducible to its smallest and simplest components which contains the ultimate reality of everything at every resolution of perception.   It is, to say the least, fervently believed in by most atheists with the intellectual capacity to either follow the incredible contortions of thought necessary or the many, many more who depend on the oracular statements of that priesthood.  The lower levels of that laity depend on the Discover channel, PBS and, Planck help us, Youtubes.  The even lower level of that laity relies on repeating mantras and mysterious phrases harvested from other commentators.  They're the same folk who like to argue whether they're chimps or bonobos on some of the sillier of the pretentious blogs.  

Such folk are the ones who believe that anything that is real must be reducible to the nature and qualities of tiny fundamental particles and the most general of humanly construced physical law*.  

All of that precedes my challenges surrounding the reality of equal rights and the moral obligations to respect those.  It's an atheist faith that without them being present at that level of resolution in the physical universe that they are not really real or are illusory or have ephemeral and transient existence and. so. can be disposed of and which no one needs to observe if they can get away with not considering them.  If rights are real then subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, the combinations of molecules enclosed in structures made of such groupings of molecules that comprise our bodies must all, at every level, have those qualities of rights and moral obligations.   I don't have any problem with pushing people who believe such reductionism is the key to all reality to account for the existence of their rights, of demanding that they tell us where their rights come from and why we should take them as being really real and that we are morally obligated to respect them.   

It's your faith, not mine, I gave you the logical foundation of rights and moral obligations according to mine.  That you don't like it changes nothing about me having an absolute foundation by which I am morally obligated to respect your rights even when I really don't want to and I know I could get away with it in every day life.  I know that there is a consequence to not doing that, you don't.  That it's an argument that's longer form than you seem to like to think in doesn't mean much.  It's simple compare to what the guys like Sean Carroll have to present to try to do what they obviously can't. 

*  Sorry, bunky, even physicists aware enough to be aware of it freely admit that physical law is a creation of human imagination.  The stupider ones believe they are not mitigated by the minds in which their only locus in the universe is known.

Update:  Oh, Neil Diamond. Not even Neil D.T. but Neil Diamond.   I'll bet you thought he was real boss back in the day. Or did you still say "gear"?   Well, we can't all be as groovy as you. 

Year End Challenges To Atheists, Materialists, Sci-rangers and Other True Believers In Scientism

As we come to that great holiday which is no more significant than taking down an old calendar and putting up a new one, as the chosen crooner of modest Time Square talent is warming up to intone John Lennon's dopey, insipid atheist anthem which would make anyone who has any musical taste long for the days of Guy and the Royal Canadians oozing out Auld Lang Syne, I'm going to reissue my several challenges to atheists that I've been making most of this year with a new spin on one of them.

The first is to explain how the currently fashionable materialist's "brain only" mind in which all ideas are the epiphenomenona  of physical structures made by our body chemistry acted on by physics would create a new idea.  The brain, to create a new idea, would have to make exactly the right physical structure to embody that idea before the idea existed within the brain that was to make it.  That would go for all ideas, those coming in from the outside and those which arise within the mind.

How would the brain know what to make, exactly, before the information contained in the idea could exist as a physical structure in the brain?

How would the brain know it had made the right structure since it would have nothing to judge what it had made on except what it had produced?

Remember, anything you come up with for a proposed mechanism to create these idea-structures will have to work in real time, matching the real-life experience of thought and creation of new ideas.  And it will have to work for every, single idea that we come up with in the course of our life, those which are "correct" and those which we accept as accurate.  If you propose some kind of "trial and error method" which would have to work at incredible speed and largely unconsciously, it would have to account for the myriad of "bad ideas" which our brains end up accepting and maintaining, that is if you can even account for such cumbersome, clunky "brain-only" minds being able to distinguish the good from the bad.

The few proposals that came in exposed nothing more than the superficial thinking that sustains the materialist "brain-only" dogma, either coming up with a vague, illogical and baseless Just-so story of evo-psy style natural selection or some even sillier assertions.  My past decade of seriously looking at materialism has led me to the same conclusion that David Bentley Hart has that materialism is one of if not the most logically incoherent ideologies that have ever gained currency among the allegedly educated.  That any trained philosopher could hold with it is simply amazing, certainly a defect in their educations and the logical rigor required by contemporary academic philosophy.  That scientists could, in such large numbers, hold with it probably shows a great deal about the down side of the time required to devote a life to a narrow scientific specialty and the downside of allowing them to opt out of prerequisites in training in logical rigor in favor of nothing but their narrow vocational training.

I also posed the similar question of the materialist-atheist location of equal rights and, as important, the equal endowment with moral obligations to respect those rights.   I will assert that since scientistic materialism is a program holding that all reality is reducible to the smallest physical objects and forces and their movements and arrangement, in order for their conception of people as physical objects to have rights, those rights would have to be an embodied aspect of those smallest and most general of objects and physical forces.  In order for us to have rights which were real, subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, physical structures, the most primitive of life forms would have to have rights and moral obligations to other physical objects, those rights and obligations would have to be a generally held physical condition extending throughout the entire scale of physical existence.  They would have to be true in any of the imaginary universe such as is fashionable with today's insane cosmologists.

I would like an explanation of where atheists imagine rights come from, taking into account what they require by way of explanation of origins such as the incoherent question "who made God, then".  Such a demand that they account for where rights come from, where the moral obligation to respect rights from under their monistic materialism is far more coherent as, in theistic belief, our status as created beings would require such an explanation. Far more than their demand to account for the creation of God.  The God of monotheism is not a created being, the God of monotheism is not a thing in the created universe, to ask where God came from is an incoherent misconception of what thinking theists believe about God.  And the monotheistic religions also have a coherent explanation of the origin of equal rights and moral obligations because those are endowments of all people, perhaps all sentient beings, from the uncreated God who created the universe.   You might not like that answer but it is a logically coherent assertion from which assertions of rights and moral obligations come from, the foundations of egalitarian democracy.  Atheism provides nothing to make those from, the best they seem to be able to do is to either skirt the issue or to deny the reality of those things, so real in the experience of human beings but which they can't fit into their ideologically girdled minds.


Update:  I'm old enough so I remember when Matt Groening was still mildly amusing.  Though just barely.  "Genius" yeah, just like ol' Gert Stein, huh?

Ok, here's his cartoon:



You tell me how that differs from your typical member of the rump Eschaton community.  I suspect in Matt's case, it was a self-parody from his Life is Hell period, back when I used to read him in  In These Times, before I started to think he was kind of boring and obvious.  A "genius"?  Compared to who?

Goya Witnessed the Failure of Reason As A God Substitute

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, c. 1797-99
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Salon Magazine's premier hate monger, Jeffrey Tayler recently dipped into the common received cultural lore of atheism to use Francisco Goya's print as a condemnation of religion.   Goya's print was part of his great series Los Caprichos, condemning the corruption of the Royal-religious establishment in late 18th century Spain.   Meanwhile, just north of the border, reason was deified by the French revolutionaries, reason was turned into a replacement for God and its promotion turned into everything from a popular cult (erecting an idol of "Reason" in the Cathedral of Notre Dame) to a political ruse and, in that most typical of French ways, a fashion statement. And that continues down to today among atheists, "free thinkers*, and barroom blowhards of whom a large number spout ignorantly in Salon magazine, Alternet, even in such better venues as The Nation and In Theses Times.

But the test of reality that reason as a replacement for God was given during the time that Goya was making his series of etchings.  As compared to such often cited and, admittedly evil evils as the Spanish Inquisition were restrained in their violence as compared to the cult of reason in France during the Revolution and in its aftermath as such secular "reason" continued.  The estimate for all of those who were executed after being condemned by the Inquisition are between 3,000 and 5,000 people over the course of centuries.  The overwhelming majority of those brought before The Inquisition were either found not guilty or were allowed to repent and reenter into society without harm, as compared to the various courts under secular authorities, The Inquisition was far less likely to end up killing you or torturing you as they killed you.  The goal of The Inquisition was to save souls, not kill people who endangered worldly powers.  You can compare that to the French revolutionary courts and the not infrequent resort to summary execution in which even the most ardent of worshipers of "reason" in the French Revolutionary manner found themselves in the tumbrel to that most emblematic machine of such reason, the Guillotine.  A number I've seen estimates the toll of those who died by guillotine as 16,594 with as many as 25-30,000 killed through summary execution, and that's only for the months of the "official" Reign of Terror.  The figures for the entire term of the revolution are far higher, higher still if you include the aftermath of the glorious French Revolution in the military despotism and imperial adventures of Napoleon** which Goya documented in his later series of etchings, c. 1810-1820.

For my purpose it is interesting to consider this less often cited  Con razon ó sin ella, with reason or without her.



Which was in his great and terrible series about the fate of the Spanish people under the benefits of Napoleon's liberation from the old Spanish regime the depravity of which Goya's previous series documented.  It is noteworthy how many of those hideously killed by the French in Goya's later series informed by his witness of the benefits of such "reason" were priests and Franciscan friars.   Such as in his famous painting The Third of May



Reason, as presented by the anti-religious cult of reason in France and as is still admired in ignorance by secularists-atheists today, turned out to be the falsest of gods, racking up a body count far higher in far less time than the Church's Inquisition and even more than under the often mentioned Spanish Inquisition which was administered by the crown, not the Church.

It is important to consider what place The Inquisition holds today in the official words of The Catholic Church as compared to the secularist-atheist presentation of the horrific violence under the regime of "reason" and, later science as seen in governments controlled by committed atheists.  You can compare the public confession made in 2000 by Pope John Paul II and the future Pope Benedict XVI (two of my least favorite of recent popes, by the way) in which they admitted the crimes of the Inquisition and other such events in the history of the Catholic Church.  I don't know of any well respected member of the Catholic Church who would defend the actions of the Inquisition today and there have been many in the past who condemned those sins.

I don't see that atheists are about to admit the role that atheism played in historical horrors or those that continue today.  I don't see them even admitting what's obvious about that to anyone who wants to look at what happened after Monsieur Arouet, the sleazy watch peddler and lottery gamer, sycophantic swindler of what was probably the greatest slave holder of his time, Catherine The Great and other fans of Enlightenment reason, died.   Christianity holds that moral reflection, examination of conscience, confession of sin and sinning no more is one of the highest uses of reason.  Materialism doesn't hold any of those requirements, atheism doesn't.

*  For newcomers, I've gone over and over again how materialism, the almost universal basic belief of atheists, makes "free thought" impossible, everything under it being a matter of material causation and, in its most radical form, consciousness being nothing but an illusion, which would, inescapably, include reason.  Though atheists almost never want to consider what is necessarily the result of reasoning through their faith.

**  Napoleon's position as a liberator and a figure of reasoned enlightenment is one of the most bizarre instances of refusing to see what is right in front of you and the falseness of slogans that modern history provides.  It is recapitulated in the cults of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, etc.

Hate Mail

So we're supposed to just make believe there's a God even if we know it's not true.

Luckily, the majority of people don't pretend to know that God isn't real and a lot of them believe that God endowed people with equal rights.  The majority of the world isn't emotionally opposed to God like so many atheists are.  And a lot of people are quite prepared to at least consider the idea that other people, even ones they don't know and aren't attached to have rights that are equal to the ones they believe they have.

You explain to me where rights come from if they are not an endowment of God, I mean your rights as well as the rights of anyone else.  I've been through that with an atheist before and, as I find generally happens when you work through atheist assertions of these things, their ideas fall to pieces that they can't put back together.  Here, from almost two years ago, you see if you can do what another atheist couldn't.

I know that I said yesterday was going to be the end of this exchange, but the questions and issues it raises are important as atheists claim that they will soon or eventually "rule the world".   Just what would happen to rights and equality under the atheist framing of them.   I will point out that "kogwonton" deals with the points and questions raised by either distorting them or clipping them, "cherry picking" if you will, the least salient aspects of them.  That prevents him from really dealing with the problems his framing poses for rights and the moral responsibilities that constitute the foundation of democracy and a decent, egalitarian society.  You will remember we left off last night on the point that Lincoln raised about a black woman's right to eat the bread that she earns without needing the permission of any man.   A right that was denied by the slave power that the Dred Scott decision had just upheld, which was what Lincoln was addressing.  The social consensus had not "created" that right, under the atheist framing of rights.   The Taney court had used that as a fact to deny that black people had the rights set out in the Constitution. 

These are real questions and they have real life consequences as dramatic as any in our history.  Whether or not governments respect rights, equally held is the most dramatic and powerful issue in the exercise of the moral obligation to respect those rights possible.   The brutal dictatorships of the past three centuries, since the articulation of those rights became common place and an aspiration of hundreds of millions, then billions of people around the world, are the real life example to study to find out what variou framings of those issues lead to.   The results of those put into practice in the past are what people should learn from as they are our only real-life evidence of what you can expect from those different framings.   Just as the "founding fathers" based their secular framing of the United States governments on the lessons of recent European history, making all religious viewpoints politically equal, we should learn from subsequent history to show what different religious understandings of reality can lead to, so we can make an informed choice in which to put our faith in.

kogwonton  Anthony_McCarthy • 14 hours ago
So, then, morality and human rights are as real as your opinion, and become more potent when others agree with you? Excellent. Now we're getting somewhere. The fact that a black woman in 1857 could be prohibited from eating bread she earned with her own hands proves that her 'right' to do so was not an objective reality, but that others agreed and fought to make it real felt that it SHOULD be a reality. It became such when enough people believed it, and forced it to become real. What is and what should be are not the same thing. I would agree with you that all humans should be regarded as equals, at least in terms of the law is concerned. The facts on the ground show that this is not the case, and I don't see gods coming down here to make it so. If they did I would celebrate.

Anthony_McCarthy  kogwonton • 12 hours ago
It proves that the society you give the power to "create" a right deprived her of her natural right, as Lincoln put it, the people who did that and the country that allowed it were in a state of sin. They deprived her of what was rightfully hers.

If, since the polls that atheists are always whining about show that a majority of Americans don't trust atheists enough to vote for them, do atheists have a right to run for public office?
If an atheist, managing to avoid answering the question of their atheism, won an election with the votes of people who don't believe an atheist should hold office, does that atheist have a right to hold the office? If your answer is yes, where did that right come from?

kogwonton  Anthony_McCarthy • 11 hours ago
Atheists have a right to make noise, make their arguments, and convince society that equal rights means equal rights for them also - that is, if society claims to believe in equal rights. If society doesn't really believe its own bullshit, then it won't change, and ultimately will have to resort to force to sustain the status quo. As it always has. You let me know the next time you see God come down here and lay down the law. Ok?

Anthony_McCarthy  kogwonton • 9 hours ago
Don't dodge the questions, answer them.

Do atheists have a right to run for office if the majority of the voters don't trust atheists enough to vote for them?

If an atheist is elected while concealing their atheism from voters who don't believe an atheist should hold public office does the atheist have a right to occupy the office?

If they do, where does that right come from?

Don't screw around with stuff irrelevant to the questions, if your theory is right, that societies create rights you should be able to answer these questions.

kogwonton  Anthony_McCarthy • 9 hours ago
Read your question dipshit. "Do atheists have a right to run for office if the majority doesn't trust them enough to vote for them?". Of course they do, you idiot. They have a constitutional right - which was created as an obstacle to consensus being a matter of whim. It is built into our constitutional democratic republican system. If the majority doesn't vote for them, they don't win. Their right to run for office comes from a constitution that was ratified by people, not god. The point is, while I may agree that rights SHOULD exist, I don't agree that they actually DO as an objective fact, apart from the will of people. This does not mean I have no right to appeal to my constitutional rights, since 'rights' is the default position (at least in theory) of the system of government we live in. If you want to point to a document that established rights, Magna Carta actually conferred human rights. You could argue that the bible influenced them, but it was the decision of people that made it happen.

Anthony_McCarthy  kogwonton • a minute ago
You don't want to deal with the question, the questions. If, as you frame their existence, the reality of rights, they depend on social consensus. I did not specify any particular society we were talking generally as to whether or not atheists had equal rights in any society that hadn't done for atheists what you insist is necessary for those rights to exist and be real.

Under the atheist framing of rights, if the majority don't trust atheists with public office, they don't even possess a right to run for office, win or lose. The favorite whine of atheists that a majority of Americans poll as not being willing to vote for an atheist for president is baseless under atheist framing. In the United States the law and the constitution could be changed to deny the exercise of the right to run for office to atheists and, under your framing, that would not constitute a violation of rights because those rights wouldn't exist.

Though we didn't go into it, specifically, if the existence of rights depends on social consensus, then a changing social consensus could make rights go extinct. If The People of the country, by vote, and then their representatives, by changing the constitution, said that atheists were untrustworty, due to their their lack of a belief in sin, unworthy of having a right to hold public office, give testimony in a court of law, serve on a jury, sign contracts, etc. your atheist framing of rights would force you to admit that atheists in that country did not have those rights. The social consensus they depend on would not exist so the rights couldn't exist.

Which is why I asked the second question that if an atheist managed to win election while concealing their atheism with the votes of people who would not vote for them if they knew they were an atheist, does that atheist have a right to hold the office.

I knew you wouldn't answer those questions honestly because if you say no, you just denied the validity of the rights of atheists in societies that don't hold atheists have rights. If you answered yes you would be at a loss to explain where those rights, not "created" by that society came from .

See what your atheism forces you to do. It forces you to deny the reality of the rights of atheists. I look at this and I look at the history of atheists with control of governments, which have been, in each and every case a violent, oppressive dictatorship, often the result of a brutal power struggle among competing atheists and think that may well be the real life evidence of what happens under the atheist framing of rights. There has to be a reason for that uniform characteristic of atheist governments in the past.

That atheists as brilliant as Karl Marx held the most deluded, view of the French Revolution, in which revolutionaries, atheist materialist parties spouting the phrases of liberty, equality and fraternity, turned on each other and chopped each others heads off, is testimony to the ability of materialism to make its adherents as blind to the most potent of reality. The mockery that the revolutionaries in France made of their motto in that fratricidal bloodshed should have made even someone less impressed with the questions of equal rights as Marx claimed to be, notice the lapse between profession and act. Yet, even today, alleged radicals, in just about every case I can remember, atheists hold up that first experiment with government by "rational materialists" in some absurdly romanticized historical fiction. Perhaps they don't notice the blood so much for their rose colored glasses, but they should be able to see the heads all over the place. And that was just the first experiment with a :"rational, scientific, materialistic, enlightened," atheist regime. The subsequent examples confirm the lessons of that one.

I really do think it makes all the difference in the world whether or not you believe rights are the equally distributed gift of God's grace which everyone is morally required to respect on that basis. It has in real life, allegedly the scientific acid test of all theories. In the absence of that belief held with sufficient strength by sufficient numbers in a society, all hell breaks lose. And even atheists suffer the consequences, except those who are the most ruthless who climb to the top of the mountain of bodies.

Hate Mail - Democracy Then Was Not Democracy Now

Someone is pissed off that what I said this morning would disqualify the glorious, so-called Athenian democracy of the classical period. 

Well, you tell me. Only men who were citizens of Athens- based largely on ethnic considerations, who owned land could vote and not all of them could, for example, any man who was accused of having been anally penetrated during sex would lose their rights of citizenship*.  There were other disqualifications. 

Though the greatest number of people who were not allowed to participate in the vaunted Athenian democracy were slaves and women who had no political rights and, in the case of slaves, hardly had any rights at all.  So, Athenian democracy was pretty much like the worst of American democracy at the end of the 18th and the early 19th century, only a lot worse.   It makes America under Jim Crow look, by comparison, quite liberal. 

The word used to describe that ancient regime of rule by men of certain families who owned property while the vast majority of people living under their rule were deprived of any rights, is the same one we use for a government of universal suffrage and equal rights but they're not the same thing, at all.  

You tell me if you would like to live under classical Athenian democracy and I'll tell you your gender, your economic status and your ethnicity without having to think too hard about it.  I will also tell you your politics.   Same for democracy before the great reform movements of the 19th century which were all based in the teachings of the Bible, the ones which succeeded here instead of producing what atheists sold as workers paradises in various places.   They called those "democracy" too.   You want to live under the rules of the "German Democratic Republic?" 

* In ancient Greece there is one particular adult male who is identified with homosexual behavior. The Greeks had a name for this individual, “kinaidos’. This individual was the one who took the passive receptive role in the male homosexual behavior of anal intercourse.

In doing so by being willing to take the passive, submissive role he was seen as unworthy to be a free man, and more like a male prostitute. As a result forfeited his right as a citizen to hold office. The man who would allow himself to be anally penetrated it was thought would also subject himself to the abuse of alcohol, eating, money, or power.

“An adult male was not supposed to take the receptive role. According to Plutarch, “Those who enjoy playing the passive role we treat as the lowest of the low, and we have not the slightest degree of respect for them.” The passive role was the role played by a woman, a youth, or a slave; it was shameful for an adult man-though not for a youth or a slave. A youth’s subordination to an older man was “natural” and temporary, and a slave by definition subordinate to his master.” 

Greenberg,Transformations of Homosexuality-Based Classifications, p. 181 in The Gender/Sexuality Reader Culture, History, Politico Economy, editors Roger N. Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo

Screwed up kind of "democracy", huh?  

Update:  I have always and will remain a political blogger, it's just that my studies of the problems of politics in the past decade have clarified a lot of these issues in ways I didn't suspect they would when I started.  

Update 2:   Really, how seriously should I take the insults of anyone who takes what Steve Simels says at two-faced value?  

"be always watching unto prayer, and when the good old ship of Zion comes along, to be ready to step aboard"

Escape of Harriet's Three Brothers

In 1854, Harriet Tubman received news that Eliza Brodess planned to sell her brothers over the Christmas holiday. Harriet, who could not read or write, had a friend in Philadelphia write a letter to Jacob Jackson, a free black man who lived near her brothers in Dorchester County. Fearing authorities might read her letter, Harriet included a carefully coded message to Jackson to alert her brothers of her pending arrival: “tell my brothers to be always watching unto prayer, and when the good old ship of Zion comes along, to be ready to step aboard.” 

She arrived Christmas Eve at her parents’ cabin on Dr. Thompson’s plantation at Poplar Neck in Caroline County. Robert, Ben and Henry, and several other friends joined her during that night and the following morning. They hid in a nearby corncrib, where they could wait until dark and begin their journey north. Only their father knew of their presence, because they were afraid their mother, distraught that she might never see them again, might detain them. At nightfall on Christmas Day, Harriet safely led them on their journey towards freedom, traveling through Delaware, Philadelphia and across upstate New York to St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.