"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
The Last Escape by R. D. Wingfield with Lyndon Brook as Seaton and Chris Hallam as Det Supt Dawson Seaton had been a model patient for all those years - and then something had been triggered off. Directed By: Christopher Venning Landlord: Walter Hall Harry: Malcolm Gerard Doctor: Jonathan Scott Det-lnisp Garwood: Kevin Brennan Police Constable: Anton Phillips Brindle: Gavin Campbell Secretary: Penelope Reynolds Sir Charles Ebsworth: Richard Hurndall
Male Nurse: Crawford Logan Listen now before they remove it from Archive.org
Going through Walter Brueggemann's book Gift and Task this Lent has led me to appreciate how following a set liturgy has the effect of forcing you to think about things that you either aren't inclined to think about on a particular day or, perhaps ever. Going with "the spirit" might be good for some things but I think it can be as dangerous as becoming too liturgically directed, it has a very high potential for narrowing your scope and your activity. I am not going to give the readings and his commentary for every day of it because this illness has made it harder for me to read while I type. Wish everything was available in large-print. I was, in my early adulthood, afraid of falling too much under the influence of any specific would-be authority which, looking back, was unwise. Someone who is aware of the dangers of falling under the influence of other people is probably already more or less immune from the greatest dangers of that happening. It did have the effect of leading me to seriously consider the Society of Friends, the local variety here in New England who have unprogrammed meetings* and who wait for the Spirit to move them. Which led me to think well of some aspects of that and not so well of others. I was kind of troubled at how Quakerism seemed to peter-out from a lack of cohesive substance in some of the Quakers I encountered and their families. And I also found, both in the reading of the history of Quakerism and what I observed that even the unprogrammed following of the Spirit didn't protect Quakers from developing very rigid habits and practices and even conventions of thought, Rufus Jones, one of the major figures in Quakerism in the early 20th century mentioned some of that that, seeking to free the Society of Friends from those but I think even modern Quakers can become quite rigid. Looking at some of them online, there seem to be some rare instances of that even among some of the most purportedly liberal among them. From this I take it that we can take what we can get from even the most set of liturgical practices in even some of the more rigidly legalistic churches, I read or listen to the daily readings from the Catholic Conference of Bishops - most days - and find I get new things out of it. I listen to sermons and read commentaries and find that whatever spirit leads the observations others have had can, sometimes, also lead me in similar directions. I also find that when it leads me to disagree with those commentaries that thinking about them can be helpful too. Sometimes I have had to go against my own inclinations to conclude what I disagreed with was worthy of consideration or even agreement. I should have realized that back a few years when I went through Brueggemann's book, The Bible Makes Sense here but I guess I wasn't ready to think about the value that was to be had from commentary. The idea that just a plain-sense reading of the Scriptures was the safest to avoid falling into a distortion of the meaning of it was silly. You're as capable of distorting the meaning and I'd say more likley to if you don't consider what other people have gotten from it. Which makes things a lot more complex than just reading it for yourself but it also means that you are open to someone maybe being guided to a deeper understanding than you're going to get from it. Rugged individualism is one of the more destructive delusions of modern thought, it can be as destructive as following a multitude to, perhaps, evil results. It might make a satisfying theme in a stupid movie but it's no way to approach the Jewish-Christian Scriptures. Jesus told us to pray "Our father" "Give us" "Forgive Us" "As we forgive those" and "Deliver us from evil". I'd have to check to see if I'm right but he seemed to address individualism mostly when he talked about matters of taking personal responsibility. I'll bet some commentator, somewhere, has addressed that in exhaustive detail, I just don't know enough to know about that. I hadn't known, until I heard Rowan Williams talk about her, that St. Edith Stein had addressed some important theological and philosophical problems directly relevant to egalitarian democracy until I listened to him the other day. * I do actually like Quaker meeting, though I wish they had them earlier in the morning than they do. Haven't gone for decades because of that. What I really wish there was around me is a house church led by a Roman Catholic Woman Priest, I'm tired of waiting for enough of the clerical reactionaries to die off so Pope Francis will open up the official priesthood. He'll never do what needs to be done.
Just thought I'd give an update. They said the last test they did on my sister they have results for were negative but we are still being told we should self-quarantine - at this point I'm not sure if they have any idea what's going on or maybe it's just an abundance of caution. NOT that any of us feels like going anywhere. My sister's coughing pretty badly, still, her fever is up, again, her school just announced they are suspending classes. I'm expecting that will be the rule. Things are going to get really bad really fast, I suspect. I heard one of the idiot podcasters sounding very Trump of several days ago not seeming to be able to believe it's not going to be better next week. I don't know how to write shaking my head in disbelief or I'd insert that here. Good thing I've got food in the freezer and wood in the wood bin. I would imagine everyone is mentally listing all of their family members, friends acquaintances who are old, are on chemo, have respiratory illness other illnesses that put them at increased risk. Keep well.
I was curious to see if the Bernie Bots online were still spitting poison at Elizabeth Warren. They are. Sam Seder is doing it as I type this, his community of commentators are as misogynistically vile as they have been for the past year. They've clearly got some major daddy issues around Bernie Sanders but I think it's also got more than a little to do with the fact that Warren is a woman just as it was that Hillary Clinton was a woman. I also find it hilarious that the Bernie Bots at Majority Report are going on and on about the "Boomers," they seem to believe that millenials are Bernie Bots and "Boomers" are Warren supporters. What's hilarious about that is that, born in 1941, by some common definitions Bernie Sanders is a "boomer" and Sam Seder, born 1966 was either one or practically one, depending on whether or not you include the entire quarter of a century from America entering the war as the boomer years. But, looking at their scribblage and babblage (Don't get me strated on that opportunistic idiot Sam Seder protegee, Nomiki Konst) the dead-ender Bernie Bots don't seem to be very big on history or thinking. The Bernie Bots belong on the ash heap of history, speaking of history. They're hoping to spoil the election putting Republican-fascists in power for four more years. After all, they learned nothing from 2000 and 2016.
Susan Collins criticizes federal coronavirus response, urging Trump to ‘step back’ Susan Collins is feeling the pinch, I think she realizes this on top of her deep unpopularity after the exposure for what she's always been might just finish her off.
This passage from Rowan Williams' second lecture is one of the most useful for opening up to the idea that our current notions of absolute rights in modern minds conditioned by the limits of secularism might be far from the ultimate expression of those that so many of us - my younger self certainly included - thought they were. It will certainly have an effect on my further use of the words we use to talk about them. The anchorage of human rights in an act of the creator and in the mutuality of the Body of Christ can't mean any weakening of the reach of this universal justicia, this justice in God acting for for God's sake. So unless we allow for some sort of convergence along these lines between the theological tradition and the discourse of human rights, I think we're going to be stuck with, on the one hand, a theological account which fails to find any traction in the real world of contemporary legal and social argument, especially in the context of acute oppression and inequality and on the other hand a secular rights discourse which is forgetful of its history and so incapable of looking at itself critically. The language of rights was learned and refined over a long period. And if you take nothing else away from these lectures, that's worth bearing in mind. It took time to learn how to talk about rights.
And it will certainly take time to figure out how that talk has gone so wrong in the United States which has produced, within two decades, a George W. Bush and now a Donald Trump regime. Clearly the notions of rights that flourished in the post WWII era has been a mixed bag otherwise we would not be in the serious trouble we are in now. We figure out way past that clearly inadequate, secular, libertarian view of rights to produce better government, or we die.
It is one of the things about those who do theology at this level that their breath and depth of scholarship, combining the style of academic philosophy with that of other disciplines, is hard to match in any other field. I remember being impressed with the breath of knowledge that 1960s-early 70s style medievalists of my experience considered a basic prerequisite but theologians outdo them. I am certainly not equipped to deal with what Rowan Williams says in more than a few details that impinge on practical politics. I think the most important thing for that is the explanation that no rights held by human beings can be held to be absolute without enormous danger coming from the exercise of those rights. At best I'm able to jot down a few ideas. The ideas that Rowan Williams discusses here strike me as being extremely important. Someone coming up with a simple and easily understood articulation of that complication in a notion of rights which protects individuals from both an oppressive government and from other people and institutions in the private sector will become more important in the preservation of egalitarian democracy. The simplistic view of it in secular thought is extremely dangerous. I think that in the context of the United States, there is no better example of that than in capitalist economics and the popular culture and academic culture that takes that as a given. The result of such a view of rights is that "market state" which I pointed out in Williams' lecture posted yesterday. I think where we are is a direct result of that secular view of rights unregulated by the Jewish-Christian, likely, Islamic conception of our Creator. Where that or a similar kind of limit put on rights, the admission that no human being has an unlimited divine right to do anything is absent, rights will turn around to oppress those with less power.
Things are changing hour to hour but as of the last thing I read, they were planning on keeping schools open in Maine because so many of the school children depend on the meals they get at school to eat. What a terrible country it has devolved into from the time of FDR and LBJ. One where you have to choose between letting children go hungry or protecting the population from a deadly virus.
And I understand the Trump regime is still intending to kick a huge number of people off of Food Stamps the First of April.
"These guys are businessmen, the ONLY thing they care about is money." That's what our lawyer said to us when a businessman tried to steal some of our family land. As he is still alive and in practice - and a good lawyer he is - I won't name him. We won the case and the crook had to admit he was wrong, though he didn't know till it was too late that he would have to admit it. I will never forget the look on the crook's face when he read the boundary agreement our lawyer wrote up that he was compelled to sign. I'm sure he realized the crook wouldn't read it till he was standing in front of the notary. I'm smiling as I type this. As a number of people have noted throughout the Trump regime, it pretty much puts to rest the slogan and the notion that what the United States really needed was a businessman in the White House. RMJ, I believe, noted that we have had a real businessman who had run a successful business as president, Jimmy Carter . But, certainly in his long and rightfully illustrious post-presidency, Jimmy Carter proved that he was entirely more than a businessman, a farmer, a nuclear engineer - his educational and military career credentials. I would guess that the entirely idiotic idea that businessmen were universally competent was hatched by businessmen or those who wanted to suck up to them in academia, economists, etc. If there's one thing that businessmen are sure to do as soon as they have the money to do it, is to collect a sycophant or so to praise them. And there are academics who have always been willing to be those. In thinking about this the last couple of days I kept thinking of how if you narrowed the range of your thought it could make what seems like sense, if you looked at it superficially. Which is what modern thought seems to specialize in doing, looking at complex things superficially and categorizing things and people who are not really much like things. I think Adam Smith was guilty of some of that but nothing like 20th century economists were, especially in the most recent period when they like to pretend they're evolutionary biologists. But I doubt the low to mid-brow, college credentialed businessmen and children of the such members of the Trump regime, the Republicans in Congress, on the Supreme Court, in the media do more than get the notions that flake off of that academic babblage, perhaps picked up in their business and econ courses in college. I would guess more of it comes from the movies and TV shows and scribblage in the Wall Street Journal style of journals or, most influential, TV bull shit. If some academics are ready to prostitute themselves, people in show-biz will claw each other apart to do that. I would bet that most of that kind of nonsense that spurts from the mouths of the talking heads comes from what they or their writers heard other talking heads on TV say about it. I would guess in the early years of that stuff on TV it might have come from the idiotic, total bull-shit. Tracy-Hepburn movie State Of The Union.* Though I'm sure there were other sources. Rich people like to be flattered and no one flatters rich people like the shills of show-biz. Its probably not worth thinking of where it originated from, it's far more worth kicking the stupid idea to death so that, for a while at least, it is buried. Being a politician is the job of being a public servant hired directly by The People. In every way it should be held to be a higher calling than making money and maximizing profits and self-gain. And all politicians should be held to the ideals that we have a right to expect from people who ask us to trust them to keep us safe and to protect us from dangers as well as enemies. Donald Trump is the mentally deficient, pathologically spoiled son of a fascistic, racist gangster who made money in one of the sleaziest of all businesses, New York City real estate. He was sent to about the most minor of the minor Ivies, no doubt kept there because the school wanted money from his gangster daddy, in a major that really never had any business being a department in a university. My guess would be that since Jimmy Carter majored in a real topic at a real place of learning, one that trained people for doing some of the most serious work there is, that saved him from the evil banality that the businessmen who have held that office make of it. Trump, George W. Bush. But I think that Jimmy Carter was always more than that because he was always about more than just his own, personal interest. And I think his religious belief had everything to do with that. I think he really does believe as so many others merely profess to. * It has a line here or there but boy, did I hate that movie.
California Rep. Katie Porter exacted a commitment from the director of the Center for Disease Control to pay for coronavirus tests of uninsured Americans, grilling the Trump administration official repeatedly in the middle of a Congressional hearing until he agreed the government would pay for the tests. When CDC director Robert Redfield agreed to Porter’s demands, she quickly turned to the American public to urge them to get tested. “Everyone in America, hear that. You are eligible to go get tested for coronavirus and have that covered, regardless of insurance.” Porter cited a provision in federal administrative law to ask Redfield, if he would commit to “using that existing authority to pay for diagnostic testing free to every American regardless of insurance.” I bet they go back on the promise but it was one of the best things I ever saw happen during a Congressional hearing. Though testing is only one small part of it, it was an enormous achievement. * Elizabeth Warren
From yesterday's passage from the Lenten passages from Walter Breuggemann's Gift and Task, I went to start looking into one of the theologians he mentioned, Stanley Hauerwas, who I was totally unfamiliar with. I listened to several of his lectures on Youtube - got to cheer myself up with something these difficult days - and from what he said I went on to listen to the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who is a very fine scholar and thinker.
In lieu of going through Brueggemann's passages for today and tomorrow, I'm going to post a two-part lecture that Williams gave on the topic of Human Rights and Human Identity from a Christian perspective and more. His deep thinking about the problems of our abstract "rights language" and its impact on real life where rights can overwhelm the common good and can deprive other people of their rights is enormously important. I have looked for a transcript of this talk and have found what looks like one of an earlier iteration of his lecture on the topic. I haven't had the chance to read it yet, William's discourse is full enough and deep enough that it's definitely going to take a number of readings and more hearings to be able to address it, so I'm giving you the chance to do that for yourself. I could't possibly do it justice by writing a response at this point. I haven't understood enough to address it but I am certain that what he said is very important, especially for the political theme of my blogging.
Here's part 1.
I think what he says here is enormously important as the results of the notion of absolute rights of individuals and, especially, those with large fortunes and, so, power overwhelm, swamp and destroy the common good. It also poses important problems for Christians and Christian churches. I'm especially struck and frankly, chilled by what he talked about as the "market state" after about 18:30 in the lecture.
THEY'VE LOST MY SISTER'S COVID-19 TEST MATERIALS A SECOND TIME! You get the feeling they're "losing" it on purpose. Actually, I believed that the first time it happened. I don't remember which public health figure it was who said it when they were still claiming there were no cases in my state that it was a certainty that there was, in fact, Covid-19 in my state but that they weren't testing effectively to identify them. At this point we don't have any idea of what to do but act as if we've got it. And it's going on the third week of our experience with this. Republicans are the party of criminal irresponsibility and willful depravity. "We bury our mistakes," is their honest motto. Stealing elections and telling big lies aren't the only thing they got from the (post-)Soviet gangsters. They've reduced us to a state where Italy, ITALY! is being more efficient and responsible. I remember back when I said I'd never want to have to go to an Italian hospital but now I'd rather go there than an American for-profit one.
Rachel Maddow said that Trump destroyed the Directorate for Global Health Security And Bio-Defense at the National Security Council for reasons that are "inexplicable". I can give you three reasons why a Republican-fascist would have done that. A. It violates the ideological faith of neo-classical economics, it shows that the government can do such things which the private sector cannot and would not do if it could. It violates the faith that flows from the University of Chicago that the market economic system can do everything and whatever they can't do doesn't matter. This is a product of the decadence of economics as an academic department and a pseudo-scientific enterprise. I think this is a product of the choice of PBS to put Milton Friedman on the screen in the late 1970s, popularizing a particularly evil and grotesquely decadent and irresponsibly romantic load of economic bull shit. One which the previous history of the 20th century had shown was a lie. B. It violates the racist, neo-Confederate sensibility that the federal government should do such a thing. Perhaps the libertarian, what I'd call Hollywood cowboy mythos as much for the government to do such things, especially when those serve the common good. C. Obama did it so the racists could do what they want want, to complete the nullification of the presidency of the first Black president. When you think about it, it's not in any way surprising that it was done by the people who destroyed our capacity to address a pandemic like the one we're in and for the reasons they do it. Ideas have consequences, neo-classical economics, "states-rights" and that human pandemic virus of racism combined to bite even the ones who practice those who wield power under them. Whats inexplicable? This is what happens.
I don't usually listen to Donald Trump because he is a habitual and pathological liar whose every word is undependable. And his lies are dangerous and have consequences that kill people and destroy the very basis of life and are carried dutifully by the mass media and which poison the minds of Americans. If I had realized how easy it was for a hideous talking head on a screen to lie a quasi-democrcy into the state we've become, I might have been better prepared for what we are living through in increasingly terrible horror. I did listen to him and his dead voice coming from his dead, bronzed face under dyed hair, trying to read through the words on the teleprompter in front of him - sounding like some of the slower readers in my third grade class as Mrs. M had us read aloud. I listened and it was even scarier than the press event at the CDC was. The second most scary thing I heard yesterday was the idiot Representative Grothman of Wisconsin repeatedly demanding that Dr. Faucci predict how many people are going to get the Covid-19 virus as he kept repeatedly telling the fathead that he couldn't give him a number that means anything, THAT WHATEVER HAPPENS WILL DEPEND ON WHAT WE DO. His demand that they put it in terms the "average American" will understand - I think he meant in terms he could wrap his mind around - not understanding what Faucci was saying. Demanding what he said could not be given, over and over again. That followed from Grothman wanting to make this the equivalent of the seasonal flu - which I guess, someone like him thinks is inconsequential. What's clear is that Grothman wants to put this in politically advantageous terms. And that is how the Republicans in charge are responding to it. The following testimony and the substantial questions Representative Krishnamoorthi asked about the testing kits (especially Trumps privatization of testing last night) only added to the horror. The contrast in the substance of the questions deserves to stand as the character of the two parties, the one out of power and the one who is destroying the common-good. I think we are going to find out that there was political pressure to not test, to keep the numbers down. And a legal system that doesn't consider that a felony level attack on the American People is one that is totally inadequate to perform the most basic function of a government, to protect us. I will bet you a hundred bucks that there is a financial motive from somewhere in the Republican-fascists close to Trump if not the Trump-Kuschner families. I'll bet they're looking to make money out of this.
There is something really unpleasing when you find out your seemingly paranoid suspicions the reason your family's Covid-19 testing seems to a. not be that high a priority as they're hospitalized with serious symptoms consistent with the virus, b. when they finally do test they screw up the first test and, c. when they finally retest the results are "inconclusive" but you're still under a quarantine order (overt for her, assumed for those of us who got infected by her) . . . when you hear that medical experts in Washington State were told to stop testing people because the numbers were not Trump regime friendly, you realize there was nothing paranoid about it. I'd rather have been wrong about that, though I never really believed it wasn't among the most rational explanations for what was going on. Trump is proof that an absolute monarch is a guarantee of a crime spree conducted under the morality of the worst of gangsters. And that's what the Federalist Society, the Ivy Leaguer unitary executive theorists are pushing as what our system should be. And Bernie wants a chance to tear down Biden before Florida and Georgia were Biden will lock down the nomination. I guess my hopes for Sanders doing the right thing are what is wishful thinking.
Joseph is practicing the rough art of statecraft, testing the suppliants who have come to him for food. But he is also toying with his brothers, secretly working revenge on them by keeping them in suspense and letting them experience the danger of being before him. By contrast, Paul continues his rigorous instructions to the Corinthian Christian community. He makes a sharp contrast between those inside the church community who are held to a higher moral expectation and those outside the church. He urges this because of a more radical ethic, the church will do well to maintain its own discipline. The juxtaposition of these texts poses the difficult question of the relationship between a public ethic that governs both the state and the corporate world, and a more intense ethic that guides the church. On the other hand, Reinhold Niebuhr has famously allowed that much more latitude is to be recognized in the pubic domain, as public affairs require greater "realism" about issues of justice, unlike the church, with its more insistent requirements of mercy and compassion. on the other hand Stanley Hauerwas[*] more recently, in a sustained appeal to the "peace church" tradition, refuses such a sharp distinction and expects more in the public sphere. This is an issue in which Christians must be engaged, especially since our public economy has largely been taken over by an oligarchy of wealth that skews all social relationships and that readily leaves behind those it judges to be disposable. Paul seems to want an exclusive focus on the church. In our time we might do well to require more of the state and the world of corporations. * Great, another theologian I don't know but have to read and don't have the time to. I'll be listening to his many lectures on Youtube, in the mean time. I think theology is the source of the most useful radical traditions without intending to be radical, they have to be considering the Gospel is radical and the Prophetic tradition is, the Law is radical in its economics and its vision of society. I just started listening to one very interesting and troubling one calling the inherence of rights into question. I'll certainly try to get around to addressing what he said in it. I think he is right about "rights language" which force us to understand that even the most obvious of inherent rights are limited in relation to our exercise of them when those impinge on the rights of others. I think his points are especially important in terms of the law and Constitutional law.
mmzen 8 hours ago “Maybe, just maybe, it’s the PUBLIC... that sucks.” - George Carlin But, you know, they'r all about the welfare of the masses over there. George Carlin, the marginally amusing comic who learned he could have a career by telling his kewelster fans that they were smarter than everyone else. *or Aspects of The Play-Lefty Personality.
My criticism of the play-left, that left which has not and still has not produced any real electoral success, has gotten the pat response that they exercise influence by being a threat to Democrats. I fail to see that tactic as having worked in any way. Anticipating the thread-bare arguments of the play-left in advance let me head two of those off. There is nothing more idiotic about the more than a century of lefty-third-party spoiler politics than the fact that their choice produces worse government. The idea that things would get so terrible that their imaginary force, the dialectic, would swing radically the other way is one of the more absurd delusions of intellectual pretenses. IT HAS NEVER HAPPENED. Revolutions are almost uniform in producing governments as bad if not far worse than those they replace, that is what you get from that fantasy of the play-left. That those delusions could persist among intellectuals only proves the power of a theory detached from reality to gull those who refuse to learn from observed experience. The threat to spoil an election that turns into a spoiled election weakens Democrats, to start with, what influence the play left hopes to exercise over them is weakened even more. Preventing Democrats being elected, putting the presidency or legislative branch into Republican hands prevents them from doing anything or protecting past gains and enables Republicans through elected offices and, most perniciously, through the courts to destroy chances of Democrats winning and making the change that is needed.
There is no doubt that if Democrats took decisive control of the federal government and state governments that the Republican-fascists on the courts would do everything they could to destroy any good change that they made. Those judges and "justices" were put into power through, among other things, the tactic of the play left playing spoiler in elections against Democrats who had to listen to other Democrats and supporting independents as well as the real left (those who win office and their supporters) and the play-left whose tactic have been to keep Democrats out of office if they didn't get their way. Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court are certainly all relevant due to the Green Party and other play lefties getting their way, keeping Al Gore and Hillary Clinton from winning their elections. And those are only the four worst consequences for the real left and the ever cutting off their own noses play-lefties. I mentioned Michael Moore yesterday, his piece written after the Green Party fame-fucker candidate Ralph Nader enabled Jeb Bush's adminstration in Florida to steal the election for his brother, the man who used to be the worst president in modern time, George W. Bush in office. The piece is a not-even-clever piece of jr. high level sophistry that mocks that reality by using what are the other pathetic play-lefty parties who ran candidates in Florida's presidential election that year, picking the fourth from the bottom, the Workers World Party mentioned here yesterday. I could make a number of arguments that show that Michael Moore made several rather obvious mistakes in logic - the play-lefties are really good at latching onto those to impress their fellow idiots - but one will suffice, the Greens got more than fifty times that number, his argument would apply to the Greens that much more than it would to the pathetic WWP and it was an announced tactic of the Greens to do what they, in fact did. If you think Michael Moore and the Green style spoiler potential is not a serous problem, think about it the next time Roberts and Alito join in the next guaranteed depraved decision of the Supreme Court. If you think the Bernie or Buster, Susan-Sarandon types are not someone who have to be overcome, not won over, think about what they did the next time you bemoan a decision pushed into law by Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. Bernie Sanders will soon face the fact that he cannot hope to be the nominee of the Democratic Party, he will also face the fact that he can either work as hard to prevent being a two-times Nader traitor of the real left that can win elections, make laws and change reality or he can become the enabler of Trumpian fascism. His asshole of a campaign mananger Jeff Weaver will almost certainly opt for being the same kind of jerk he was in the wake of the 2016 disaster. But this is a choice that is Bernie Sanders' alone. He can choose to enrage the Democrats haters in his cult or he can act, soon and decisively to persuade those of his supporters who are not play-lefty spoiled brats to support Democrats up and down the ballot. It matters not a bit that that is what he would have to do to make him at all respectable in my eyes, now. I will never forgive him for sandbagging Elizabeth Warren who, like Hillary Clinton is massively more qualified to be president than just about any of the men who were in for the nomination. But I can forgive that if he finally does what he should have done for the party whose nomination he sought twice and for the real left, defeats Republican-fascism by getting as many Democrats elected as possible. And while we're at it, the electoral power of the real left and those who can be convinced to get real is very real, too. Joe Biden and his people had better not blow their chances to get us out in large numbers in November to support Democrats. And that is get us out everywhere. Biden shouldn't, for a second, believe that his nomination is a product of the center policies he favored as a Senator for big business from Delaware, what allowed him to win over better candidates was that people thought he would get other people to vote for him over Trump. I mentioned the other day that on a ranked choice vote I would have put him after Warren but before Sanders who would have been my third choice in ranked-choice. That was because I thought he was more electable than Sanders, not because I liked his policies better than those of Sanders. If Sanders were ten or fifteen years younger and he didn't have the bull-shit Marxist and Vermont 1960s-70s radical baggage and had the same or slightly more moderate policies, I might have had a hard choice of choosing him or Warren for first place. I think the vice-presidential candidate is going to be more important than ever in this race, the age of the candidates, I think Biden had better choose one that the real left can be enthusiastic for. I would love for that choice to be Elizabeth Warren, though there are a number of others I could feel as good about. Kamala Harris is an obvious one, Amy Klobuchar wouldn't be the worse, though I think one with more appeal to the real left would be better. Julian Castro would be good. I would prefer he not choose someone who, if elected, would weaken the Democrats Senatorial prospects. We will need to win the Senate, another reason I did not support Sanders for the nomination. Joe Biden is going to have me nervous every time he opens his mouth though I think this election is, oddly, not going to be about Biden it's going to be an anyone but Trump election. Michael Moore is an ass who should retire into the obscurity he has earned. The entire play-left who remain the play-left should just go do fantasy sports or something like that. Their kind of politics is the exact equivalent of those, anyway. It's not real though it can have real and disastrous consequences because they play it with real entities. People die when they do it.
My sister has been released to house quarantine, her phenumonia has cleared and though she's weak she can breathe without the oxygen and she hasn't had a fever for a while. Her testing still is inconclusive and she can't return to work till the results are in. Not that she would be able to do it the condition she's in. She's wondering if it wasn't Covid-19 what's going to happen when she's exposed to it having had pneumonia so badly and so recently. It's kind of strange, we're hoping that that's what it was and that it gives some immunity to the virus. I'm still saying it was good for us that we had the experience especially if it wasn't Covid-19 because it forced us to think about just how hard it is to avoid getting it or passing it on. I'm hearing about the number of disposable garments and gloves the hospital is going through and remembering the stories my mother used to tell about washing surgical gloves and garments in the hospital in the 1930s and through the war years. I'll bet they'll get back to that before this is out. I hope the State testing goes better because the CDC is clearly either overwhelmed or they're responding to Trumpian pressure. That press conference the other day was the scariest thing I've heard or read about this, yet. I've still got the cough and am feeling pretty weak, too but nothing like she had it. I'm wondering if I should pick up a wind instrument again to build up my breathing.
Gee, I knew Duncan Black was lazy and that he would go all cynical because a. it's as easy as watching TV, b. it gets clicks from stimulating the buffalo butt geezers who are his rump community, so I guess it shouldn't surprise me that he's already talking down the Democratic ticket when the only other alternative is four more years of Trumpian fascism. Or, No, you don't have to be a Marxist to be a play-lefty jerk. Duncan Black has been doing this act since about 2006. But it's older than even he's getting to be. It's always been part of the play-left "let's spoil it for the Democrats" tactic. It's what Bernie's Vermont cult was originally based in.
I thought it would be fun to go a bit into the genealogy of another of the Marxist parties in the list I mentioned the other day and decided to go into one I'd never heard of before but which got the most votes of any such parties in 2016, the "Party for Socialism and Liberation" which is listed as an overtly communist party. Saying it might be fun but not especially important and being fully confident that ONLY an insider, true-believer in such a play-left-play-party would produce a Wikipedia article about it, I decided to treat articles there as self-reporting. The article for the Party for Socialism and Liberation starts with its founding. The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is a communist party in the United States established in 2004 after a split in the Workers World Party (WWP). The PSL is running Gloria La Riva and Leonard Peltier in the 2020 election. My guess is that the reason that they got what is for such a party, enormous vote of 74,392 or (0.05%) of total votes cast in 2016 was due to Peltier being on the ticket, such "parties" will latch onto a celebrity or hero of the left for that purpose, which they might get. The achievement of getting 0.05% of the votes cast in an election counting as an accomplishment in such play-politics. Especially if they get one who is as romantic a figure as Peltier is. I'll forego looking at the brief history of the party, such as it is, since I'm here concentrating on the genealogical history of it. So I'll go to the Workers World Party from which the PSL broke off from (no doubt bitterly) and which I also had never heard of before doing this exercise. But before making that jump, I'll note that the PSL party article gives the reason for its founding as: The PSL was formed when the San Francisco branch and several other members left the Workers World Party in June 2004, announcing that "the Workers World Party leadership is no longer capable of fulfilling [the] mission" of building socialism. Given what I'm about to go into, the idea that it was "no longer capable of fulfilling [the] mission" of "building socialism" rather hilariously takes it as a given that they ever were capable of such a goal and, implying that they, the mighty PSL has taken up the torch that the torch was never much more than a kiddies' party lite-stick that faded out a long time ago, they don't notice. But they do seem to like to play let's pretend in the play left, even outside of the Bay Area. If you think that last analogy was too mean. Well, they have built a website. It might be the most important thing here to note exactly what the "socialism" that such play-lefties want to build consists of. The best way to do that is to look at what "socialism" they support being built (or, rather, imposed) in other places. Its wiki article at the link to the Workers World Party starts out by noting it is a splinter of the party Bernie Sanders' will be slammed as having supported if he is the Democratic nominee, the one I went into here the other day, the Socialist Workers' Party. The Workers World Party (WWP) is a revolutionary Marxist–Leninist political party in the United States founded in 1959 by a group led by Sam Marcy of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Marcy and his followers split from the SWP in 1958 over a series of long-standing differences, among them their support for Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party in 1948, the positive view they held of the Chinese Revolution led by Mao Zedong and their defense of the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary, all of which the SWP opposed. The WWP describes itself as a party that has since its founding "supported the struggles of all oppressed peoples". Well, so long as those "oppressed peoples" weren't in China, the Soviet Union or Hungary (for a start), noting that in just numbers of those murdered by the governments that the Workers World Party, the body count dwarfs that of Hitler and perhaps of all of the Axis power combined - though even if it were a tenth of that total, it would certainly not mark them as places of non-oppression. It is one of the original sins of the play-left that mass murders, suppression of workers rights, literally the total suppression of all of the Freedoms enumerated in the American Bill of Rights, including those the play-lefties insist are theirs, here in the hell-hole of imperfect American democracy are entirely OK by them if they are done by those who wear one of the labels of Marxism, or communism or, most relevant to my present purposes, socialism. And as long as they aren't the ones having to live under what they advocate those living under Mao or Khrushchev or under the Soviet occupation of Hungary and under its installed puppet government had to live under. The American play-left who whine and cry about the suppression of their First Amendment and other rights while supporting some of the most brutal dictators of the modern period are uniformly hypocritical assholes. But I don't want to get into that in terms that upset the romantic myths* of those dear old commies as seen in the movies right now.* There is certainly nothing more hypocritical than their alleged support of independent unions in the United States while supporting "socialist" regimes which were uniform in their suppression of real unions that were chosen by and representative of workers. Oh, yeah, they've got a website, too and in the election of 2016 their candidate got 4,314 votes which rounds up to 0% in the total insignificance of their play-party in which Monica Moorehead was their presidential candidate. Her wiki post starts out by saying it all. Monica Gail Moorehead (born 1952) is an American retired teacher, activist, and perennial candidate for the presidential nomination of the Workers World Party (WWP). She is, actually, more relevant to my purpose because of what it shows about the quality of Bernie Sanders' biggest name celebrity endorser. In an open letter (entitled "Blame Monica!"), posted on his website shortly after the U.S. presidential election of 2000, filmmaker and activist Michael Moore sarcastically argued that Moorehead, not supporters of Ralph Nader like himself, were responsible for the election of George W. Bush. Which leads me to say, again, that Michael Moore is someone I don't need to hear another word from for so long as both of us have life in us. The guy is a loudmouth asshole and an idiot. I will leave it with this short version of things because, as I said, to trace these "third parties" fully is inevitably an incredibly futile listing of dozens and scores of such "third parties" and factions (just about every faction generating a party or ending one) leading back well into the 19th century and apart from the old Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Victor Berger, they are characterized by one thing more than just their complete hypocrisy and treacherousness, THEY HAVE NEVER WON ELECTIONS OR HAD OFFICE HOLDERS.** I'd say in that, The People have spoken. They have rejected their leadership, they have rejected their platforms, they don't want to join their imaginary revolutions. * The history of the Progressive Party and its various contributing progenitors and descendants is interesting too, but this is already longer than I'd intended when I started the exercise. I'm not sure that the communist support Henry Wallace got was exactly welcomed by him, it certainly didn't get the progressives anywhere. ** One exception to that is the American Labor Party which I believe was overtly not Marxist, though I'd have to fact check that. It was formed in a fracturing of the pathetic remnant of the Debs Socialists in a period when they were overtaken by Marxists though that history, too, was baroque and opaque and would fill a large number of posts of this length, too. Needless to say, the best the old Socialists could do after the Communists split it and its officeholders lost office or died was things like acting as spoilers to throw elections to Republicans, they were trying to do that well into the FDR period. I would love to ask those who hold to that strategy for the "left" what they imagine the world would have been like if FDR had lost in 1936 or Truman had in 1948. These people have always been a bunch of friggin' assholes. Don't believe their PR without fact checking it. NEVER BELIEVE THE HOLLYWOOD VERSION OF IT, the movies are a lie factory.
Paul is confronted by a case of sexual misconduct about which the perpetrator brags. Paul has a vision of the gospel community as a fellowship that has purged from its midst such exploitative practices. such misconduct is never an isolated act; it comes with a cluster of self-indulgent practices that are rooted in anxious greed that characteristically culminates in violence. These are the "desires of the flesh" to which Paul contrasts "the fruit of the Spirit" (Gal. 5:16-26). The arrogance about the affront makes cler that the community has compromised the norm that Paul champions and has arrived at a capacity for shamelessness in imitation of a larger society that traffics in shamelessness. The passage from First Corinthians names the offense, a son who takes up with his father's wife. Adultery with a step-mother, one imagines a much younger woman than the father but Paul doesn't specify. His advocacy of excluding the adulterer from the Corinthian Christian community to avoid spreading the corruption that comes from accepting immoral behavior is something I expect would be considered to be a terrible thing, it being Christians who are at issue but I would guess that if it were a small community of Native Americans or some small community in Africa or Asia or Australia, the same practice of banning would be considered to be just fine with your typical European style enlightenment liberal. For the nature of the community, Paul utilizes the image of heaven. By this usage he recalls that it was unleavened bread that ancient Israel ate in its hasty departure from Egyptian slavery. The mention of the "pascal lamb" and the "festival" attest that the early church has departed the shameless habits of greed and exploitation that mark the empire of Egypt and belatedly the empire of Rome. The imagery is a reminder that the community gathered around Jesus is indeed an alternative community in which the conduct of its members matters for its testimony to the world. Clearly compromised conduct, when visible in the church, undermines the claim and the news that the church intends to perform for the world to see. Given this exodus allusion, we may note the somewhat remote connection that the sons of Jacob must return and submit to Egyptian authority for the sake of food. Such bread, with old leaven, is seductive and many talk the community out of its vocation of holiness. Brueggemann was wise to insert the citation of Galatians here because the passage contains what that vocation of holiness comprises, " . . the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law". Think about whether you'd rather live next to someone who was like that than most other people encouraged to give into their passions and to assert their personal desires. If you found such a person, they would embody the anti-Trump. * I was listening to a lecture the other day that talked about what Paul said about the Resurrection and what was obviously an anti-Christian questioner in the largely college-student audience said that since Paul was a "murderer" that nothing he said about anything could be trusted. I wish I had been there because I'd have pointed out that everything we know about the sins of the pre-conversion Paul was due to the confession of Paul after his conversion. So his identity as a "murderer" rested in the reliability of his own testimony. Just thought I'd throw that in. I probably listened to more lectures last year, alone, than in all of the decades before I started using the internet, given by a large range of scholars and speakers in a number of different fields, sometimes several in a row by the same scholar giving different facets of the same topic and with the ability to go back and listen to passages that were unclear. I'm also, in many cases, able to look at books and papers and other things they cite to fact check them. Which is something I wish I had been able to do in my early years. Especially the fact checking. I'd have realized a lot of what I was successfully sold by the play-left was a lie a lot sooner than I had been, a lot of other stuff too. On the other hand, I've learned a lot more about the depravity of total license through seeing the exposed inner thinking of so many, too. Especially when you throw sex into it. People, the smartest as well as the merely average and stupid go stupid and selfish when you throw sex into it. I think there is nothing we do in life that leaves us so open to evil. I've found out that when you throw sex in, people go stupid and bad at just about the same rate, unless they're extremely careful not to. Note: Since I know Walter Bruggemann is the kind of Protestant who seems to discourage a belief in a literal afterlife, I thought it was worth going over a point Paul makes in First Corinthians. I think what a lot of them really object to are the evils that come from a belief in original sin,vicarious atonement and eternal damnation and the distortions and evils that come with those. In talking about Paul's encouragement for them to throw the adulterous son out of the congregation, Paul says, "you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." Which is interesting for what it says about the consequences of sin and seems to give Satan the task of "destruction of the flesh" which is certainly in line with the universalism of St. Macrina the Younger as documented by her brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa in which hell is seen as a purgatory to get rid of the evil that the soul has gathered to itself in life. It more than just implies that that purging is necessary for his spirit to be saved. I'm sure a scholar as old and experienced as Brueggemann must have noticed that, I don't know what he makes of it.
Update on my last update. My sister's doctor told her that the reason her test is inconclusive is that the CDC screwed it up. He said he suspects they've screwed up a number of them. They've sent new samples and she remains in the hospital on oxygen and we're still wondering. As she was working in a school when she got sick, you'd really think they might want to know if that's what she has, though, it being under Trump, maybe they'd rather not have to report it. After hearing Trump talking about that cruise ship bumping up the numbers if they let the passengers land to get help, that's not paranoia talking, it's informed speculation. The Republicans-fascists have made a ruin of the public health system in the United States. I won't say what I'm wishing they'd get and what would happen to them. We have got to have a real means of getting rid of a Trump in the presidency, once there but we have got to get rid of the goddamned Electoral College and make important appointments by presidents pass BOTH the Senate and the House and make it possible to remove those by a vote of no-confidence in both bodies, not subject to presidential veto. I'd get rid of the asses Trump and the Senate put in charge of health. I'm telling you, the more I find out about the fucked up testing in the United States, the more convinced there is either Republican money or Trump family money involved. That's the only reason they ever do anything.
I have said from the start of this, repeatedly and will repeat it as many times as necessary that if Bernie Sanders were the nominee of my party, the Democratic Party - the only person who will stand between the world and the United States and four more years of Donald Trump - I will certainly vote for him. If he could put much of his program into law, I'd be thrilled and I would revise just about everything I said about him but the prospect of that reaches the finding a unicorn in my back yard when I look out the window level of probability. And I face that fact even as I wish it were really possible. I have over and over asked that Bernie Sanders and his cult pledge the same thing if someone else is the nominee. There are Sanders supporters who have made that promise, there are many who have said that they will never vote for the Democratic nominee if it isn't Sanders. I'm unaware of Sanders pledging to do that, himself, though I have found he promised that if elected he would remain in the party for the duration of his term of office. Sort of a lukewarm thanks for a party that allowed him to become president but better than nothing. That very brief look at the total and abject idiocy and damaging futility that is the history of Marxism and almost all of various "socialisms" in American History leads me to think of two things, which may or may not overlap. It's possible to look at the futile waste of time and resources and lives on those scores and hundreds of "parties" and "movements" and factions and, just about what all of them really were, cults and shake your head at the waste of what that energy, commitment and effort spent on something worthwhile could have done if put to something useful. If the left had worked together on a worthy list of goals we would certainly be more likely to have avoided most of the disaster of the past fifty-two years and counting that has brought us from Nixon through Reagan and the Bushes, Gingrich, McConnell and Trump. And the stinking awful courts that came with them. You look at the idiocy and you feel like dope slapping all of them into sense as they carried on like the Three Stooges using borrowed material and producing crap only theirs isn't innocuous or frivolous. It's been enormously damaging and discrediting of the American left and, yes, to socialism. Only maybe such people were never emotionally or mentally predisposed to do anything else and they would have done the same damage internally in the Democratic Party and, while it was too stupid and damaging to progress to call it "good," maybe them being all wrapped up in their play-parties and internal jr. high level spats saved the Democrats from a lot of headaches and even worse damage that would have come by having them inside. The Bernie Sanders cult has certainly not been helpful for that while it's been trying to follow the Trotskyite plan of entryism. When you look at the biographies of the major figures of Marxism and socialism, you find a few people you can imagine might have had more productive lives if they hadn't gotten all wrapped up in Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, etc. theory. But most of them were a bunch of real jerks. Bernie Sanders had enough to him to do what none of them ever managed to do, get himself elected to office. That counts for something, I don't totally dismiss Bernie Sanders, as you can read in my side-bar, until he started the bull shit presidential runs as a carpetbagger, he was listed among those I used to admire. I think he'd probably have been a far more effective Democrat if he hadn't gotten so enamored of all of that theoretical bull shit. But he made his choices in life and he reaches the end of it as a product of his choices. This last one is about the worst one he's ever made. Update: I am reading comments from her fellow Bernie supporters slamming AOC for liking Elizabeth Warren's Saturday Night Live appearance. I'm half expecting that they'll be doing that on The Young Turks and Majority Report today. Just to prove the point made last night about how his greatest fan boys and gals would turn on him if he ever did what they hate in politicians the most, achieve high office. It reminds me of how many of AOC's biggest fan boys and gals turned on her when she wouldn't dump on Nancy Pelosi. They especially do this when it's a woman. They're all a lot more Cenk than they'd want anyone to say. I include the gals among them in that.
The state health officials say that none of the samples sent to the CDC tested positive for Covid-19 which is good news, if true. My sister's doctor will only go so far as to say that the results he got were inconclusive. Which means no one knows what it means. I know that's not unheard of for even more well established tests but this one is hardly well established or which has a short history without problems. Before Trump went to the CDC and it was clear that the actual health professionals there are feeling political pressure, I'd have had near total confidence in them, now I don't know. We're still being told to take precautions. For whatever that's worth. If nothing else, it's been good practice for either this round or the one they think might come later this year or next. Nothing concentrates your attention quite like being told you've possibly got the plague. I have been trying to find out if they think this years version of it might confer some measure of immunity to another strain and what I'm reading isn't reassuring. I've still got a fever and an unproductive cough though I'm drinking a lot more water than usual. Still taking large doses of vitamin-C. Still wondering what's going on. Still not seeing students and that's going to start pinching soon. I've never been the hands-on type of teacher who had physical contact with students but I do have to stand close enough to see what they're doing. But my teaching space is really small. I might have to take up pod-casting for cash. Looking at the ones that make money it doesn't appear it takes much work. Speaking of which, I'm apparently banned from commenting at Majority Report now, which sort of pleases me. They're not as bad as The Young Turks comments which are the most putrid I've ever seen outside of the overtly fascist right. But they're getting there with the encouragement of Sam and Jamie and Michael and their guests. I don't know how Digby can go on that thing, now.
As a student of the history of the American left, one of the most obvious though little discussed phenomena of that history is that about the only thing that said "left" has ever produced is the creation of tiny little political parties and cells and, really, cults and the constant splitting and fracturing and endings of those political parties and cells, the cults sometimes enduring as long as the central figures of those cults live but seldom that long and almost never after they die. And in that history, I think you can see its typical pattern being repeated right now, today. If you want a slight idea of that history, look at the list of political parties of the United States at Wikipedia and click on the various ridiculous third-party parties listed to read how they either started or ended in fracturings of previous parties that split into other parties, frequently more than one at a time. It's really been about what most of them are good at, THE ONLY THING THEY'RE GOOD AT. That would include the political party which Bernie Sanders has supported BUT WAS NEVER A MEMBER OF (sound familiar?) The Socialist Workers Party, one of the larger such parties in American history. For this purpose the history of that party as given in the Wikipedia article is quite sufficient. It begins, not with the founding of the Socialist Workers Party but with 1. A pre-history of the Communist League For America which was comprised of former members of the Communist Party USA, kicked out for supporting Trotsky as Stalin won the power struggle to dictate to the Soviet Union. 2. That is only the start of the list of Marxist and socialist parties involved in the absurdly complex history of this party. I'll start listing the ones named a. Communist League of Struggle b. they approached the Norman Thomas's Socialist Party of America (the remnant of the previous Socialist Party which did what no other one has done, win elected offices in any number, destroyed by the faction that would form the CPUSA), to make common cause only to be (temporarily) rebuffed. c. French Trotskyists of the Communist League who tried to infiltrate the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière, to poach some of the Trots in that rival party. d. The mainline Communist Party of France. e. the Communist League of America which merged with A. J. Muste's American Workers Party - forming the Workers Party of the United States. Here I'll note that the Wiki article, which is unusually useful for a Wiki article introduces readers to the tactic of "entryism" in which a smaller group infiltrates a much larger group to take it over or at least alter its character and activities, something which is a constant of such Commuinst and socialist groups, indeed, it is one of the few "activities" of the play left. It was clearly what was done to destroy the Socialist Party in 1919 and it is clearly something that feels oddly familiar in what the factions supporting Bernie Sanders does, now, to hijack the Democratic Party which he has never deigned to really join except temporarily, as it suits his interest. f. Not done with my listing of the various Communist and socialist "parties" and finding the listing tedious (not to mention I'll run out of letters well before it's done), I'll just give a few more paragraphs from the article. Throughout 1935, the Workers Party was deeply divided over the "entryism" tactic called for by the "French Turn" and a bitter debate swept the organization. Ultimately, the majority faction of Jim Cannon, Max Shachtman and James Burnham won the day and the Workers Party determined to enter the Socialist Party of America, though a minority faction headed by Hugo Oehler refused to accept this result and split from the organization. g. We're hardly done yet. Here's the very next paragraph The Socialist Party was itself beset with factional disagreements. The party's left-wing Militant faction sought to expand the organization into an "all-inclusive party"—inviting in members of the Lovestone and Trotskyist movements as well as radical individuals as the first step towards making the Socialist Party a mass party. Although there were no mass entries at this time, several radical oppositionists did make their way into the party, including former Communist Party leader Benjamin Gitlow, youth leader and ex-Jay Lovestone supporter Herbert Zam and attorney and American Workers Party activist Albert Goldman. Goldman at this time also joined with YPSL leader Ernest Erber to establish a newspaper in Chicago with a Trotskyist orientation, The Socialist Appeal, later to serve as the organ of the Trotskyists inside the Socialist Party. Which doesn't even get us through the 1930s. I'll remind you that none of these groups, other than the original Socialists ever produced actual office holders elected in democratic elections. Though I believe the Stalinist Communists (can't remember which of the many Stalinist parties) did, at one point, actually manage to get two of their members on to the New York City council, though I'm not going to bother looking for the citation for that, now. But they could put out a newspaper or a magazine! And you should read them if you want to see how boldly and absurdly they can present their efforts and the prospect that they offer "the workers". There is no more fecund a producer of bull shit than the Marxist-socialist-"leftist" media, then and today, though it's done mostly through podcasting and online now. h. They couldn't do much by way of actually producing electoral successes or law making. But they sure as hell could split and divide and organize new cults and if you read their material, you can see how they could whine and complain at the wrongs committed against them by their former comrades as they spit poison at each other. In January 1936, just as the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party was expelling the Old Guard for their factional organization and alleged "violation of party discipline", James Cannon and his faction won their internal battle in the Workers Party to join the Socialist Party, when a national branch referendum voted unanimously for entry. Negotiations commenced with the Socialist Party leadership, with the admissions ultimately made on the basis of individual applications for membership rather than admission of the Workers Party and its approximately 2,000 members as a group. On June 6, 1936, the Workers Party's weekly newspaper, The New Militant, published its last issue and announced "Workers Party Calls All Revolutionary Workers to Join Socialist Party". I'll leave it to you to go read the entire thing but remember two things as you read the continuing history of splits and formations of new factional parties for the rest of its history . . . THIS IS ONLY THE HISTORY OF ONE OF THOSE PARTIES one which, you'll note if you read the entire history which must have been written by believers true enough to bother to be familiar with this pathetic history, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE PERSON ELECTED TO A SINGLE OFFICE IN A DEMOCRATIC ELECTION ANYWHERE IN IT. If you bother to look at the article, search it for the word "won" to see what their idea of winning comprises. This is the absurdity which the history of Marxism and socialism in the United States is comprised of. The kind of thing which I think we see being reproduced in Bernie Sanders' effort to do the one and only thing which has been held as a success in the history of such socialism, trying to take over a larger party and, failing to do that, to destroy it. And if you know that history, you have every reason to suspect that is exactly what his carpetbagger campaign for president is motivated by with the totally ahistorical and lunatic faith that in the ruins of the Democratic Party the glorious socialist-Marxist revolution will unite and win power. That is a wet dream of these idiots going back more than a century, one which their own history proves to be a complete and utter delusion. This is why, from time to time, the Bernie Bots will admit that they don't care about what they do to the Democratic Party because they aren't Democrats. I just thought I'd go into what I have to conclude they're really up to. ----------------------- It occurred to me a few days back, listening to the rumor mongering about DARK FORCES! that are out to get Bernie when he loses primaries, the kind of idiocy that claims that something must have been done to rig the races in places like Maine and Massachusetts - claimed by them as Bernie country - that their imaginations cannot comprehend that PEOPLE MAY JUST NOT CHOOSE HIM AS THEIR CANDIDATE BECAUSE THEY DON'T AGREE WITH HIM OR BELIEVE HE WILL WIN THE ELECTION. They can't imagine that becaue they believe with the faith of true believers that their success is scientifically proven to be inevitable. That is one of the founding faiths of Marxism, that its predictions of what will be are infallibly founded in science (they really do believe that history can be made scientific!) and so when they and their heroes fail to convince "the masses" that the masses are asses led astray by DARK FORCES! or that the vote was rigged. Bernie Sanders cannot believe that people hear him and don't agree with what he says they should want or, as it is with me, that I am certain he will lose this election and put Trump and McConnell in charge for four more years. His cult did it before, as they didn't follow his endorsement of Hillary Clinton in large enough numbers to prevent that disaster, he'll do it again and if not him, then his Bots. If it's any comfort to him, if, by some miracle, he won the presidency, they'd turn on him and split off as he failed to fulfill their idea of Marxist or socialist or, whatever, purity. It's what they always do.