Wednesday, November 7, 2018

If The United States Doesn't Democratize The Senate The Country Will Not Stay Together, I'm Not Expecting It Will

So the great Blue Wave failed, in so many cases, to reach the shore, as the great Charles Pierce put it.  I'm not surprised it didn't in Florida where, as he or someone else said, DeSantis won the governorship on the power of not being Black, which can be said of Georgia if it were not that the Republican-Nazi winner was also ratfucking the election to his own advantage.  That such things were not stopped by judges proves that the law is not only an ass, it's a cowardly ass when it isn't as crooked as Kemp was.

The House will be under Democratic rule, including all of those committees that have enabled Trump but who now are in the hands of people who will be able to issue subpoenas.  We will see how that works, though the media is already trying to sandbag their efforts even before the results of the election are confirmed.

The increasing margin of Republican-Nazi control of the Senate is not good, there is no other way to put that.  Trump will almost certainly get to put another Nazi on the court and there won't be any question of them not getting through, the same for lower courts.

The great struggle against gerrymandering of House and state government districts is made a hard fact nationwide through the intent of the slave-holding framers of the Constitution in the Senate.  That there are mid-sized cities in the United States larger than the population of North Dakota and Wyoming whose citizens have vastly more power than most other citizens.  That is an anti-democratic abomination.   I've seen figures which say by 2040 75% of the voters in the country will be represented by 20 or fewer Senators while the remnant hold the power to rule, thought the Senate and through appointing judges and members of the Supreme Court.  I've seen other ways of measuring it that makes the case that it is far worse than that now.  And that is and has been a hard fact of the idolized Constitution.   That ensures that democracy is increasingly endangered as that difference becomes greater, added into that are the various voter suppression efforts on the part of Republican-Nazis, which their appointed judges and members of the Supreme Court rubber stamp and approve.   And it wasn't only Republican appointees who did that this time, at least one of those who refused to intervene in one of the most egregious cases, the one in Dodge City Kansas was an Obama appointee.  What happened in North Dakota was as disgusting as anything done during the Jim Crow era.

The United States Senate is in a state of permanent gerrymander, it is, under the slave-owner drafted Constitution, a guaranteed prevention of democracy.   Short of amending the goddamned Constitution, itself made next to impossible by the same slave-owners' design since it would depend on small-state legislators giving up their unequally held power, the only means of effecting that imbalance is through the House of Representatives, the delegates from larger states and any cooperating smaller states banding together to hold out against the interests of the reactionary small population states.  I don't know of anyone who has proposed that strategy but I'll bet something like that is found to be the only means of defending democracy against the increasingly anti-democratic Senate. 

I know a lot of people, rightly, fear a Constitutional convention, the one being pushed by the billionaire-oligarchs would be a disaster.  But there will have to be one as this situation grows ever worse.  The tyranny of tiny states will be found increasingly intolerable for the majority of people and the collusion of the corrupt judiciary will only make that worse.  The part that the slave-power on the Supreme Court played in bringing the country to the Civil War and refusing to prevent it is too seldom considered.   As the country grows increasingly "minority-majority" and urban the crisis we are moving towards will be as bad as the one then, in fact, it is merely a continuation of it. .

I think the United States will either blow apart or there will be a major, basic constitutional change.  If the small states in various regions won't allow reform, and I doubt they will, I don't see the coastal regions disadvantaged by the Constitution putting up with their tyranny forever or wanting to continue to  live under it.  I think the country is headed for inevitable break up and it's not going to be good.  And a lot of individual states will also be houses divided.  For example,  I can't see things in Floirida continuing the way they are, non-whites living under a renewal of American apartheid.  Not with anything like democracy being the result.

11 comments:

  1. Serious question: Why don't you move to Canada? I'm asking. Geographically and climatically it is similar to Maine. They don't have the Constitution that you seem to hate so much. Freedom of speech is a mistake us Yanks cling to. Medicine is socialized, and they've a prime minister who has your "feelings trump all" [see what I did there!] social philosophy.

    I live here because, to paraphrase Neruda, I ask for struggle, iron, volcanoes. Also, Jesus warned that his reign was not of the present order, so I don't expect too much. You give every impression of wanting to live in a 1984-inspired utopia where thoughts and words are vigorously policed and punished.

    Are you afraid that your goofy Alex Jones-like Shakespeare conspiracies would be outlawed too? I don't think that is the case but I'll ask my cousin. He lives in Montreal.

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    1. Seriously, I could move to Canada and that wouldn't do a thing to solve the problem of the fact that people in North Dakota and Wyoming have such ourageously more political power than the vast majority of Americans who live in other places.

      As this problem gets worse, as those outrageously powerful and frequently backward people staff the courts and Supreme Court with fascists, as people lose their rights, as they destroy democracy, they're going to reach the point where they won't tolerate it anymore and they'll either take the moderate step of banding together in the House to pressure the tiny state autocrats or they'll say, we're out of this bull shit slave-owner established tiny tyranny.

      More practically, I'm too old for Canada to want me to go to live there. I often wish I'd been in a position to take the offer I was made at Memorial University in Newfoundland but I had family responsibilities here at the time.

      We've argued the authorship question over and over again, I'd have thought you were tired of having your ass kicked over it.

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  2. "as people lose their rights"

    I think the issue here is you have a different idea of what "rights" people have. In America, we believe in freedom of speech, and the right to bear arms, which you think are both outdated and need excising. There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to live in that type of system, but I must repeat Karl Popper's observation that everyone who promises us heaven on earth only brings us hell. That's why I asked about Canada. There, you hurt someone's feelings, you get sued and everyone tells you you're worse than Hitler. Sounds like Gehenna to me but to each his own.

    Ass kicked? You do realize constantly bringing up 'Shakespeare In Love' is not an argument? I counted four times your idle brain conjured it out of thin air and declared it historically inaccurate, which would make sense IF I had the contrary, which I did not. You are chasing windmills, sir. Pride creeps into isolation, and you've long ceased to listen to anyone who disagrees with you.

    There is a joy, sure in being mad...

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    1. The choice isn't between "freedom of speech" and no freedom of speech, it's between speech which is proven to destroy the most basic equality and rights and speech which promotes egalitarian democracy. Only an ass would ignore the record of allowing speech which attacks equality and democracy which has had such a disastrous success in the modern period, education doesn't seem to have protected populations against it, neither do bills of rights in Constitutions, as a freed slave noted during the Civil War, they'd lived under slavery for the whole time the Bill of Rights was the law of the land. And only an ass would claim to be able to produce heaven on Earth so Karl Popper's line as you use it is irrelevant.

      "The right to bear arms" was overtly insisted on by the slave power because the slaver patrols were a means of keeping Black People in slavery for the economic benefit of those who kept them in bondage. The same worked during the continuation of de-facto slavery under Jim Crow and lynching which, as a white guy who has a demonstrated emotional difficulty with Black People, apparently you believe comprises "hurt feelings". Honestly, I think you've been listening to that Jordan Peterson ass too much because that's not what happens in Canada, that guy is a lying huckster whose only use is to show how many people who have been to college are idiots.

      I'm not the one who brought up "Shakespeare in Love" I merely pointed out that like virtually all of the "biography of Shakespeare" including everything written about his alleged education, almost everything said about his professional life (there is not one shred of direct evidence that he had a life as a professional writer, something even Stanley Wells has had to admit) and virtually everything said about the Stratford man as the author, is a fabrication. The difference is that Tom Stoppard admitted his play is 100% make believe, something which even the college-credentialed don't know, something which the Shakespeare Trust promoted when they put a picture from the movie on the cover of one of their recent pieces of propaganda. It is a perfect example of such stuff as "Shakespeare scholarship" is made of.

      I have kicked your ass on things like your citation of Garry Wills, demonstrating that his reliance on the boy actor Rice can't be made to fit the known record of the Stratford man and the production and writing of the relevant plays. As well as pointing out other problems with arguments you've brought up.

      I do have to say it amazes me the extent to which even the most basic standards of scholarship and even such things as the timing of events and even people have to coincided doesn't make a mark on the received common wisdom even among educated people. I believe that it was Kierkegaard who commented on how many nominal Christians are baptized pagans, or was it heritics. There are a myriad of people who represent something similar in terms of holding educational credentials but who may as well use the same standards as FOX and The National Enquirer when it comes to fact checking and cogitation.

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  3. <>

    This argument would have some traction if it didn’t appear to constantly refer to speech you happened to not like and/or disagree with as being worthy of censure. Feelings are not facts.

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    And a bigger, larger, smellier one would look at humanity’s track record of regulating speech and think we’ve any idea what we’re doing. I don’t doubt their tenderness, but the wise among us know where that can lead.

    <>

    Right, I’m just imaging all this identity politic/white privilege/virtual-signaling nonsense. I just wish I knew what I was taking so I could sell it.

    <<"The right to bear arms" was overtly insisted on by the slave power because the slaver patrols were a means of keeping Black People in slavery for the economic benefit of those who kept them in bondage. >>

    So you say. I’ve read historians who beg to differ. You are entitled your interpretation. I am mine. As are others.

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    You really don’t know me.

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    I have never once referred to “hurt feelings” as justification for the 2nd Amendment.

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    Just because Cathy “So You’re Saying...” Newman made an ass of herself doesn’t mean I listen to, read or support Peterson’s cargo cultism.

    <>

    Google “Mike Ward.” You might agree he deserves to be fined. Not the issue. To say that people aren’t being financially assaulted because of hurt fweelings in America’s Hat is dishonest.

    << that guy is a lying huckster whose only use is to show how many people who have been to college are idiots.>>

    That’s not fair. I think he believes his nonsense. Just like Sam Bee. Both can be entertaining though, but zealots are terrifying because of their sincerity.

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    1. The smell you refer to isn't from the regulation of speech that promotes inequality and everything up to and including genocides, it's the product of such speech succeeding in gaining its believers power and them putting their oppressive, enslaving, murdering ideologies and power plays into power.

      To mistake the desire to avoid NOT IT BUT THAT HAPPENING AGAIN as mere preference or not liking something has to be an act of utter irresponsible depravity of the kind that the free speech industry peddles.

      I'm not really interested in debating someone who entertains the idea that it is some moral or intellectual imperative to allow the Nazis or Stalinsts or Maoists or fascists or the American indigenous version of that the chance to, for example, reimpose voter suppression and the reign of terror that kept Jim Crow in effect and who, certainly, are capable of enlarging the scope of their desire to put what they advocate in words in effect in reality.

      The white, especially male, college-university white-collar class is the herd of contented cows from which such depravity seems to mostly come. Which, having put it that way, does't seem as surprising an idea as it once may have seemed to me. That it comes from, especially, the secularists among such has come to surprise me even less.

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    2. Oh, and Jordan Peterson is nothing but a fraud and huckster, there is no unfairness in pointing that out. I wouldn't hitch my wagon to his star if I were you, I think it's more likely to prove a rather fast burning piece of space junk. Even for his field in pseudo-science, his shelf-life is going to prove to be very, very short. Based on his propensity to lie and a Camille Paglia level of bull shitting, it's not surprising.

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    3. I wrote, “[In Canada] you hurt someone's feelings, you get sued,” to which you replied, “that's not what happens in Canada.” I gave you a name to Google. I can give you more. I didn’t say it happens all the time, but some people clearly have gone cuckoo-clock crazy. And that is my point.

      I don’t think Canadians put laws in place while rubbing their hands in rapturous glee at the thought of suing someone for making an off-color joke. But, alas, that’s where they’ve ended up. Dr. Johnson reminded us centuries ago about what good intentions create.

      We have restrictions on speech in place, as we should. But those are done with consideration for the larger public good and the potential damage that can be done if such power is abused. Most of the time you seem to base your proclamations entirely on preferences.

      The irony is, even the greatest practitioners of genocide found ways to hide their intent in plain sight. There are documents from Auschwitz, for example, that contain notes from SS officers reminding their colleagues about using obvious and direct term when writing about their plans. So even if you passed laws outlawing such speech, they’d move from saying “genocide” to “special action.” “Voter suppression” will have its own useful euphemism. Cancel one term and they’ll find another. Spending your time policing words and ideas is wasted compared to focusing on action and behavior.

      I must say, if you think depravity comes mostly from “the white, especially male, college-university white-collar class” you clearly don’t spend much time looking outside of that circle for it. Or at least read more St. Augustine.
      As per Peterson, allow me to quote myself, “Just because Cathy ‘So You’re Saying...’ Newman made an ass of herself doesn’t mean I listen to, read or support Peterson’s cargo cultism.” It is possible for the mind to hold both that Peterson offers an empty philosophy but that he clearly got the better of Newman during the interview. There are plenty of good questions that should be asked of Peterson, but Newman did nothing but create and attack straw men and paint herself into a rhetorical corner. You’re grading her on her intent, not her actions. I see a pattern here.

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    4. People file frivolous lawsuits here, too, so your argument would work as well for impeaching the First Amendment, in Britain David Irving filed a frivolous suit against Deborah Lipstadt and it resulted in his exposure as a neo-Nazi and the review of his historical work that resulted exposed him as a falsifier of history.

      Samuel Johnson is one of the most overrated figures in English literature and frequently an ass.

      We've gone over the incident that made Peterson a hero of men who can't get women to have sex with them over and over again, I listened to the interview, Newman was not being unreasonable, she was interviewing a bullshit artist. He is a bullshit artist, the longer he remains famous, the more obvious it is that he is one.

      I fail to see how your point about the SS hiding their genocidal practices is relevant to my point about the idiocy of thinking that because a bunch of 18th century slave holders and crooked buisnessmen wrote what would be turned in to free speech absolutism by a bunch of idiots in the 1950s and 60s that we MUST, WE MUST! allow their ideological heirs to get to try again.

      Yours is one of the stupidest contentions ever held by supposedly educated people, it could only be held by amorally depraved people who wouldn't mind them getting that chance.

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  4. I'm not the one who brought up "Shakespeare in Love"

    ...um, to quote you

    I merely pointed out

    By bringing it up.

    that like virtually all of the "biography of Shakespeare" including everything written about his alleged education, almost everything said about his professional life (there is not one shred of direct evidence that he had a life as a professional writer, something even Stanley Wells has had to admit) and virtually everything said about the Stratford man as the author, is a fabrication.

    I said he was the author of the plays based on the evidence provided in the historical record. Everything else you are attributing to me what others have said. I don't understand why you can't stop telling me about that, as if I had anything to do with their claims.

    The difference is that Tom Stoppard admitted his play is 100% make believe,

    No, he thinks Elizabeth was the Queen of England, and that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

    something which even the college-credentialed don't know, something which the Shakespeare Trust promoted when they put a picture from the movie on the cover of one of their recent pieces of propaganda.

    All irrelevant to the historical record. It no more proves Shakespeare not the author than the existence of ‘Amadeus,’ with all its inaccuracies, means Mozart was not a composer.

    It is a perfect example of such stuff as "Shakespeare scholarship" is made of.

    I've read 'The Year of Lear' and it's nothing like 'Shakespeare In Love.'

    I have kicked your ass on things like your citation of Garry Wills, demonstrating that his reliance on the boy actor Rice can't be made to fit the known record of the Stratford man and the production and writing of the relevant plays.

    You utterly misunderstood Wills’ point.

    As well as pointing out other problems with arguments you've brought up.

    If you say so. I’m still cataloging his plays under “Shakespeare.” But if THE Diana Price says so, and gets endorsed by ACTORS! I mean, what more is there to say? I'll probably be getting the e-mail very soon telling me we're changing the author.

    I do have to say it amazes me the extent to which even the most basic standards of scholarship and even such things as the timing of events and even people have to coincided doesn't make a mark on the received common wisdom even among educated people.

    Right, like being asked for one single solitary document proving your case, only to insist that it was a conspiracy, and thus no surviving documents would exist. Despite myriad other written schemes that took place during that era, it was clearly forbidden to write about who the real author of those works was. Except poetically.

    I believe that it was Kierkegaard who commented on how many nominal Christians are baptized pagans, or was it heritics. There are a myriad of people who represent something similar in terms of holding educational credentials but who may as well use the same standards as FOX and The National Enquirer when it comes to fact checking and cogitation.

    I’ve mentioned this before, and you ignored it. An historical source is judged on its accuracy, not whether the author can be documented to have known the person directly or witnessed events firsthand. Meres is not disqualified as a source because we don’t know whether he and Will had a pint at the Mermaid. No scholar would think so. There is a methodology to historical research. Your ravings indicate you are unfamiliar with the process. There is a reason Price’s main supporters are untrained in that discipline.

    A better example would be Pope’s point about a little learning being a dangerous thing.

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    1. You don't seem to understand how history works, I mean real history.

      For example, Wills claims about the Stratford man in regard to the boy actor Rice. There is no evidence, whatsoever IN THE HISTORICAL RECORD, that so much as puts the Stratford man in London during the period when the boy actor was acting in London, there is no evidence in the historical record that puts them in the same theater or room, in the same building, on the same street. ThOere is no evidence the Stratford man ever set eyes on the boy crossing any street, nevermind as he was on the stage. There is no evidence that the Stratford man ever saw him BECAUSE THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO WRITTEN RECORD FROM THE STRATFORD MAN OTHER THAN SEVERAL DRAWN, NOT WRITTEN, SIGNATURES ON DOCUMENTS AT LEAST ONE OF WHICH MAY NOT EVEN BE IN HIS HAND.

      Virtually every supporter of the Stratford man's authorship peddles in tripe like that, some of it even more absurd, Greenblatt's book is full to the top with it. The academic and quasi-academic industry that peddles your POV interests me mainly as a means of understanding just how unlike modernism is to its claimed character and how much like the crudest kind of credulity it is. I think that it exposes an inevitable, sometimes dangerous, vicissitude of human life and, especially, human culture, the necessity of relying on things just accepted but not tested and once the acceptance of such things is widely accepted, the near impossibility of things like history or science or religion or logic or even mathematics to alter that mass of folly.

      I will not post any more of your comments touching on this because despite my having obviously read more of the critical case than the true believers tend to, it's really not something I see as very important, outside of the point I just made about it as an example of inevitable human folly.

      Alexander Pope is one of the most tedious poets of any quality. I know that about him. 18th century English literature generally fails to hold my attention. It's the period when some of the dumbest things about the Shakespeare industry started to congeal out of theatrical and commercial interests.

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