I woke up this morning thinking about the disaster that the Supreme Court inventing a right to lie has been for us. If you doubt that, consider the record of Trump's lies and the fact that it was those who bought those lies and such lies as the media created and perpetuated about the total non-criminality of Hillary Clinton which has resulted in Trump, the lies that resulted in the George W. Bush presidency, the lies that have kept us from addressing global warming which has the real potential to end the human species as it is currently ending so many other species and the lies which have produced the weekly, often daily internal terrorist war by white supremacists, racists, facists,etc.
Lies are the basis of it all, including those Constitutionally created lies such as "The Second Amendment". There is no natural right to gun ownership, if there is such a right then there should be a government program that arms us all, including the people of color and women - the majority who are not the class who most often kill lots of people with guns.
Imagine what would happen if the expected first response of women attacked by a man were to unload a Glock into him - I would guess that the very men who are most enamored of guns would instantly become ardent gun control advocates. Sort of what would happen if men were to suddenly become the ones who carried a pregnancy to term and gave birth in regard to birth control and abortion, only faster. That idea, of women using their "right" to bear arms as a response to men who attack them isn't a suggestion, necessarily, it's a thought experiment. Yeah, a thought experiment.
Any "right to lie" that people believe is there, any right to bear false witness is certainly not something you can blame on the Jewish tradition of religion, the foundation of the three most often named monotheistic religions. All of them explicitly reject the idea that there is a right to lie, all of them list bearing false witness as among the most serious of sins. The false witness of the snake to Eve was the first sin in the traditional account of the downfall of humanity.
Of course, there is no right to lie, lies most often result in the deprivation of rights of someone else, of everything from ownership of something rightfully theirs, their rights to self-ownership and self determination, the right to the product of their own labor, the rights to the ownership of their land or, in the American example par excellence, the right of a group to the land they had lived on for thousands of years, and everything up to and including the right to live as an innocent person who has been falsely accused of a crime.
No, to create a right to lie required the scientific calculation of the Enlightenment as embodied in the framers of the American Constitution who didn't make that distinction in the First Amendment, no doubt because as men of business and slave owners, they knew the utility of lies to themselves and those like them who make money in sharp and dishonest dealing.* I'm ever more convinced that the defects and outright dangers in the Constitution were placed there with the intent of rich men to increase their enrichment while calculating how to keep something like a king or a strong central government from disadvantaging THEM in their accumulation and enjoyment of wealth.
Another good example of that is the repulsive creation of artificial "rights" for the various states. That was, first and foremost, a creation of a "right" for states to maintain and enhance the practice of slavery, the "right" to deprive individual people if their freedom and the right to ownership of the product of their labor. The individual states under that scheme were free to continue and enhance slavery even as a majority of Americans were coming to see slavery as the evil that it is.
States, like corporations like companies, don't possess real rights, real rights being, as Jefferson noted, an endowment on human beings not on the artificial products of human ingenuity and, often, malignity. Any "right" bestowed on states, on corporation, etc are phony rights. They are privileges, and as so often with privileges, aren't given with the best of intentions. They're like the privilege given to white men to ownership and exploitation of Black People, of men to the domination and subjugation of women, or rich people to steal the labor of poor people.
Like all products of human intuition, these created and phony "rights" even when they are created with good intentions - the "right" to lie probably among those - the results are liable to prove, with time and the exercise of such "rights" to have had unforeseen or dismissed catastrophic results. And I think that the "free speech absolutist" version of the right to "free speech" including the "right to lie" is probably the best such example of a catastrophically exercised "right" that you can imagine, especially when mixed with others such as "the right to bear arms" and "states rights".
That such "rights" are leading us into fascism if not neo-Nazism is not shocking if you consider the origins of such "rights" in the Constitutional Convention of slave holders and dodgy businessmen, all of them white men of wealth. That requires a deeper reading of history than you get in most cases. You've got to read them in their own words and in the contexts of their activities to really understand it. I'd say it takes the kind of reading that really deep and honest theologians do but which lawyers seldom do. It takes a wider view of things than science or mathematics can take. No surprise that such "Enlightement" produced such dismal results.
-----------------------------------
I guess the crypto-Republican who trolls me figures it was just by meaningles coincidence that so many violent alt-right-white-supremacist-manosphere killers were also deeply into neo-Nazi, violent, misogyinst, racist, gamer culture. That would, apparently, be something he has in common with the pseudo-libertarians of both the left and the right. That's "pseudo-libertarian" "pseudo" because they generally call themselves "civil libertarian" when the results of their ideological position are not civil in any way.
He's still pissed off that it was a woman who documented there is not a single piece of paper found after the most intensive, centuries long paper search which securely ties the Stratford man to the plays and poems until the posthumous and highly dodgey front material of the First Folio in such sarcastically cryptic style, almost all of it now most intelligently attributed to that most sarcastic and often cryptic of poets, Ben Jonson. And that is hardly adequate evidence, not least of which because of its deep sarcasm and ambiguity.
The guy's got a real problem when women or people of color speak up.
Of course it's hard to guess but my guess is that increasingly Diana Price's study of the total absence of a legitimate literary paper trail of Wm. Shaksper** will be seen as among the most significant leaps forward in the authorship question, though she didn't answer it she pretty well destroys the conventional attribution and correctly identifies the force that baseless authority has had in maintaining the traditional and highly profitable attribution. Do read it, it's a real eye opener at how, when you apply the standard methods of scholarship as are applied by any good, modern biographer or historian, the attribution suffers enormously if not fatally. And the only reason I say that is because he's been so OCD about it, among other things.
* It is remarkable, in contradiction to common received non-wisdom, how many of the heroes of the Enlightenment were scientific racists, misogynists, enthusiastic about the subjugation and obliteration of races, imperialists, and slave owners or those who weren't much bothered by slavery when they weren't downright enthusiastic about it. It is one of the more interesting things I've found out in the past decade how truly awful in this regard that enlightenment hero who has had such a profound influence in American civics, John Locke, was not only of slavery of black people but also of the feudalistic enslavement of even white men by those with more power (read "money").
** One of the ways he drew letters representing his signature - he never, once, spelled it the way it's supposed to be spelled, now though no two of his "signatures" match in spelling or even letter formation.
No comments:
Post a Comment