Saturday, May 16, 2020
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Bob Gallagher - Preferred Medium
Preferred Medium by Bob Gallagher Tells the story of Irishwoman Ceila O'Dowd, the ambitious director of an English public art gallery, who feels her latest curated exhibition represents the last chance for promotion and preferment.
Kathy Rose O'Brien was Ceila O'Dowd
Nick Dunning played Robert Tromans MP.
Stephen Berry, the man in the gallery, was played by
Chris Mc Hallem
Michael James Ford was David Knott.Moira Devlin and The Neighbour were played by Natalie Radmell-Quirke.
Sound supervision was by Richard Mc Cullough
Produced by Kevin Reynolds.
Among other things, this play demonstrates the credibility of the idea that there is no man so awful that some woman won't ruin her life for him.
To Further Annoy The Guys Who Disdained My Post Yesterday
Being charmed by the video of G3RJV, the late Reverend George Dobbs I looked up some of the things mentioned by him and links about him and those he mentioned. I found two things that might be interesting to the complete beginner, one was his book on how to make your own transistor radio, which I may try as my first attempt before trying to make a transceiver. I made one of these from a hobby store kit when I was a kid, without an antenna or a battery it managed to pick up several local AM radio stations which didn't interest me much. The instructions didn't tell me anything about how to make it better. I wonder if I could make one that would get short-wave transmissions. I've got a number of radio antennas stringed up.
The second thing was a fascinating publication of his group, SPRAT "Dedicated to low power communication" The Pixie Files which gives a number of schematic descriptions and information about building these tiny, incredibly cheap transmitters.
Here's a list for sourcing kits and parts which might come in handy for anyone who is interested. I am kind of interested in seeing what I might take out of old, broken radios. There is no shortage of those around, though I will need a more modern solder iron with a smaller point - haven't used one for forty years, for Pete's sake - and a better magnifier stand. That alone is going to take a lot of practice for me.
The second thing was a fascinating publication of his group, SPRAT "Dedicated to low power communication" The Pixie Files which gives a number of schematic descriptions and information about building these tiny, incredibly cheap transmitters.
Here's a list for sourcing kits and parts which might come in handy for anyone who is interested. I am kind of interested in seeing what I might take out of old, broken radios. There is no shortage of those around, though I will need a more modern solder iron with a smaller point - haven't used one for forty years, for Pete's sake - and a better magnifier stand. That alone is going to take a lot of practice for me.
When It Is Possible To Justify Indisputably This Medical Ethos
3. A new approach to therapy: If there is a God as Christians understand him, who is a God not only of the mind but also of the body, a God not only of the healthy but also of the sick, not only of the young but also of the old, a different attitude can be adopted not only to man's eternal salvation but also to his temporal healing, then it is possible to justify indisputably for a medical ethos . . .
I am going to break in here and note how this observation, that God is the God of the sick, the old, is so at odds with the current American Republican, I say fascist propaganda around the Covid-19 pandemic in which it is explicitly being advocated that the sick, the old be sacrificed to their real god, the god of Republican-Mammonist-"christianity" the economy, profit making, a politically advantageous stock-market. That so many nominally Christian ministers, priests (though more Cardinals and Bishops) self-ordained TV and radio based hallaluliah peddlers, the rich brats of the same in inherited leaderships of entirely worldly empires of pseud-Christian corporations is proof that in the United States, in 2020, Christianity is often, and as almost always presented by the media, is anything but Christian. As they will demand that the schools be reopened prematurely, they recreate even the cult of Baal in their . . . well, apostasy isn't the right word because they never were followers of Jesus, no one who does to others as they would not have done to them, who do what all of the above do can be said to follow the teachings of Jesus.
continuing on:
. . . it is possible to justify indisputably for a medical ethos
- that a human being may be understood neither materialistically merely as a mindless body nor idealistically as a mind dominating the boy, but must be taken seriously as body-soul unity, totally, person;
- that every human life is meaningful and remains meaningful and consequently all care for human life is meaningful and remains meaningful, that every human being therefore - even the poor, underprivileged, aged person unable to cope with life - has a right to appropriate care;
- that the doctor has to treat, neither merely the illnesses that the person has, but the person who is ill;
- that every form of therapy has to be based on pathophysical knowledge, experience and prognostic assessment, but has to be oriented at the same time to moral norms;
- that highly techicized medicine with its therapeutic apparatus must not be allowed to lead to the isolation of the person who is seriously ill and the perfect clinic in particularly must not become merely a service station for the best possible biochemical provision;
- that on the contrary a halt must be called to the lack of consultation in our consulting rooms, to the depersonalizing of our hospitals, to the everywhere threatening dominance of apparatus, by means of a renewed dominance of the human person.
All this presupposes an appreciation of the fact that the person is healed only by a total therapy, comprehensive aid to body and soul, a humane atmosphere in the clinic and especially by human conversation, which is an absolute prerequisite for the patients's trustful collaboration with the doctor. There must certainly be a necessary therapeutic disassociation, but always combined with empathy; certainly an unavoidable objectivity, but always sustained by human concern - even to the point of dying.
All of this is something that corporate medicine totally rejects, Hans Kung may not have stressed it in 1982 Germany, but in the United States and elsewhere, what he warned about as a result of a purely physical, physiological, technical and scientific treatment of human persons is even more dangerous when the basis of doing that is profit. In the United States in 2020 and for the entire period, the greatest danger isn't that sick people will be treated as physical objects without minds and souls under a regime of scientism, it is that they will not become patients or won't in time to help them because they cannot pay.
Capitalism has always had that tendency, it is a product of the same scientism that gave rise to materialist-atheist-scientism. As Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out in The Irony of American History
On the other hand, the liberal society never achieved the perfect harmony of which it dreamed because it overestimated the reciprocity of the free market and also equated economic competition with all encounters in society. It overestimated the reciprocity of the market because it was oblivious both to the elements of power in society, and to the disproportions of power in economic life. Power, in the thought of the typically bourgeois man, is political. He believes that it must be reduced to a minimum. The earlier bourgeois man wanted to eliminate political power because it represented the special advantages which the old aristocracy had over him. The present bourgeois man wants to reduce it to a minimum because it represents the effort of a democratic society to bring disproportions of economic power under control. In the shift of motive from earlier to later bourgeois man lies the inevitable degradation of the liberal dogma. Marxism was bound to challenge the dogma, and to find the later form particularly vulnerable.
The reciprocity of the market was too simply equated with the social harmony of the community because self-interest was restricted to the economic motive. The false abstraction of "economic man" remains a permanent defect in all bourgeois-liberal ideology.
Two things to remember in that is when Niebuhr talked about "liberal society" he didn't mean in terms of traditional American style liberalism, he mean in the later European meaning of the terms of laissez-faire libertarian economic activity. The assumptions he refers to in this passage are not those of reality but of academic and philosophical abstraction, the reality was anything but admittedly a matter of free reciprocity.
There are a number of extreme circumstances in which the things pretended in order to uphold that view of society vanish, being arrested, being the victim of a crime, being the victim of an official injustice, being a social outcast, being seriously ill and in need of medical care ESPECIALLY IF THEY CANNOT AFFORD IT!, or being a witness to those or someone who is driven to stop pretending what is the required pretense to retain your passive acceptance in the general society. Being a member of a beleaguered minority is also such an extreme circumstance in the United States which accounts for why members of minorities in such large numbers are not deceived as are privileged white people, especially white men. Though women, members of beleaguered minorities, even the imprisoned and sick and dying can choose to uphold the pretense and cling to it in hopes of improving their lot.
What Hans Kung has said in the excerpts I've posted in the past few days is saying is that none of that is consistent with the absolute requirements for believing in the understanding of God of Abraham, Isaac, Moses, the later Prophets, Jesus, James, Paul, etc. If you really believe in their descriptions of God, you cannot possibly make that consistent with the alternatives to those things Kung presented as a necessary consequence of that belief in regard to sickness.
Without that framing, the framing of the Jewish-Christian understanding of God, all of that which should have always been seen and practiced as required becomes merely optional, arguments against it as have been made since before Malthus declared war on the poor and even before then as the Tudors made poverty a crime and which have become only steadily worse as a pretense of Christianity has given way to scientistic modern Mammonism.
I am going to break in here and note how this observation, that God is the God of the sick, the old, is so at odds with the current American Republican, I say fascist propaganda around the Covid-19 pandemic in which it is explicitly being advocated that the sick, the old be sacrificed to their real god, the god of Republican-Mammonist-"christianity" the economy, profit making, a politically advantageous stock-market. That so many nominally Christian ministers, priests (though more Cardinals and Bishops) self-ordained TV and radio based hallaluliah peddlers, the rich brats of the same in inherited leaderships of entirely worldly empires of pseud-Christian corporations is proof that in the United States, in 2020, Christianity is often, and as almost always presented by the media, is anything but Christian. As they will demand that the schools be reopened prematurely, they recreate even the cult of Baal in their . . . well, apostasy isn't the right word because they never were followers of Jesus, no one who does to others as they would not have done to them, who do what all of the above do can be said to follow the teachings of Jesus.
continuing on:
. . . it is possible to justify indisputably for a medical ethos
- that a human being may be understood neither materialistically merely as a mindless body nor idealistically as a mind dominating the boy, but must be taken seriously as body-soul unity, totally, person;
- that every human life is meaningful and remains meaningful and consequently all care for human life is meaningful and remains meaningful, that every human being therefore - even the poor, underprivileged, aged person unable to cope with life - has a right to appropriate care;
- that the doctor has to treat, neither merely the illnesses that the person has, but the person who is ill;
- that every form of therapy has to be based on pathophysical knowledge, experience and prognostic assessment, but has to be oriented at the same time to moral norms;
- that highly techicized medicine with its therapeutic apparatus must not be allowed to lead to the isolation of the person who is seriously ill and the perfect clinic in particularly must not become merely a service station for the best possible biochemical provision;
- that on the contrary a halt must be called to the lack of consultation in our consulting rooms, to the depersonalizing of our hospitals, to the everywhere threatening dominance of apparatus, by means of a renewed dominance of the human person.
All this presupposes an appreciation of the fact that the person is healed only by a total therapy, comprehensive aid to body and soul, a humane atmosphere in the clinic and especially by human conversation, which is an absolute prerequisite for the patients's trustful collaboration with the doctor. There must certainly be a necessary therapeutic disassociation, but always combined with empathy; certainly an unavoidable objectivity, but always sustained by human concern - even to the point of dying.
All of this is something that corporate medicine totally rejects, Hans Kung may not have stressed it in 1982 Germany, but in the United States and elsewhere, what he warned about as a result of a purely physical, physiological, technical and scientific treatment of human persons is even more dangerous when the basis of doing that is profit. In the United States in 2020 and for the entire period, the greatest danger isn't that sick people will be treated as physical objects without minds and souls under a regime of scientism, it is that they will not become patients or won't in time to help them because they cannot pay.
Capitalism has always had that tendency, it is a product of the same scientism that gave rise to materialist-atheist-scientism. As Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out in The Irony of American History
On the other hand, the liberal society never achieved the perfect harmony of which it dreamed because it overestimated the reciprocity of the free market and also equated economic competition with all encounters in society. It overestimated the reciprocity of the market because it was oblivious both to the elements of power in society, and to the disproportions of power in economic life. Power, in the thought of the typically bourgeois man, is political. He believes that it must be reduced to a minimum. The earlier bourgeois man wanted to eliminate political power because it represented the special advantages which the old aristocracy had over him. The present bourgeois man wants to reduce it to a minimum because it represents the effort of a democratic society to bring disproportions of economic power under control. In the shift of motive from earlier to later bourgeois man lies the inevitable degradation of the liberal dogma. Marxism was bound to challenge the dogma, and to find the later form particularly vulnerable.
The reciprocity of the market was too simply equated with the social harmony of the community because self-interest was restricted to the economic motive. The false abstraction of "economic man" remains a permanent defect in all bourgeois-liberal ideology.
Two things to remember in that is when Niebuhr talked about "liberal society" he didn't mean in terms of traditional American style liberalism, he mean in the later European meaning of the terms of laissez-faire libertarian economic activity. The assumptions he refers to in this passage are not those of reality but of academic and philosophical abstraction, the reality was anything but admittedly a matter of free reciprocity.
There are a number of extreme circumstances in which the things pretended in order to uphold that view of society vanish, being arrested, being the victim of a crime, being the victim of an official injustice, being a social outcast, being seriously ill and in need of medical care ESPECIALLY IF THEY CANNOT AFFORD IT!, or being a witness to those or someone who is driven to stop pretending what is the required pretense to retain your passive acceptance in the general society. Being a member of a beleaguered minority is also such an extreme circumstance in the United States which accounts for why members of minorities in such large numbers are not deceived as are privileged white people, especially white men. Though women, members of beleaguered minorities, even the imprisoned and sick and dying can choose to uphold the pretense and cling to it in hopes of improving their lot.
What Hans Kung has said in the excerpts I've posted in the past few days is saying is that none of that is consistent with the absolute requirements for believing in the understanding of God of Abraham, Isaac, Moses, the later Prophets, Jesus, James, Paul, etc. If you really believe in their descriptions of God, you cannot possibly make that consistent with the alternatives to those things Kung presented as a necessary consequence of that belief in regard to sickness.
Without that framing, the framing of the Jewish-Christian understanding of God, all of that which should have always been seen and practiced as required becomes merely optional, arguments against it as have been made since before Malthus declared war on the poor and even before then as the Tudors made poverty a crime and which have become only steadily worse as a pretense of Christianity has given way to scientistic modern Mammonism.
Oh, and I forgot, someone wanted to know if the post about Morse code and extremely cheap transceivers were related to the ones about do-it-yourself audio-theater and cheap recording equipment. I hadn't intended it as such but anything that gives relief from the pandemic in a safe setting is worth suggesting. You can read for only so long and if you watch TV and cooking videos, you're going to get a lot fatter and depressed and stupid, you know, like my typical former trolls. Who knows, maybe the Morse might come in handy if we need to go to war against the Republican-fascists.
Blogger Seems To Have Reset My Settings When I De-Crapified My Computer - Didn't know that happened
Being surprised at being notified comments were posted here, apparently someone doesn't like that I advocated an inexpensive hobby that people might enjoy as they communicated with people they don't know in a context which could't transmit a virus. And which might motivate them to learn something about simple electronics. What an odd thing to feign offense at. I think as I smirk.
I guess snobs are offended when grown-ups won't share in their snobbery. Well, living in the same town I grew up in, seeing many of the people I went through school with, it's the kew-el kids who seem the least happy in later life. Once you get out of high school, you're free of that bull shit unless you miss it.
Snobbery is a sure sign of a lesser mind. Especially when it's over the price of something. I'm a lot more impressed with someone who can maximize their use of a transceiver of less than a watt than with someone who spends thousands on flashy junk.
Apparently someone who bothered to listen to some of the video didn't understand his joke about clergymen lying as compared to vocational occupations, something the audience got. The talk was given by The Late Reverend George Dobbs. It's a good example of the good natured anti-snobbery I was talking about being typical of those radio bugs I've encountered.
And now I've got to go reset my preferences.
Friday, May 15, 2020
"As Long As You Can Do One Useless And Pointless Thing A Day Then Life Still Has Some Meaning"
To Lift Morale In A Time of Plague
I came across his old morse code key a week or two ago, we never transmitted with it, of course, not being licensed, the most we were allowed to do with it was to hook it up to a practice oscillator. I mostly used it along with the pitch control to imitate space creature movie music. That I never used it during my experiments with electronic music in the late 1960s strikes me as being kind of dim, now. I think my brother still has it but I suspect it ran on tubes so it probably needs to be repaired. Oh, and that's what inspired my allusions to long wave radio, counting stations and QSL cards in a recent post.
Anyway, seeing the key made me wonder how expensive it would be to get into CW. Over the years going with many of the other experimental temporary enthusiasms, I've learned can end up in buying stuff I shouldn't have. I've learned to check the cost of something before I take the plunge into spending money. It turned out that this hobby can be surprisingly inexpensive if you put together your own transceiver and stick to ultra low power. But before that I wondered what free sources there were to learn Morse code and found something I'd forgotten about the radio hobby, they tend to be the absolute opposite of exclusive in encouraging other people to get involved. I don't know of many other hobbies that are less prone to snobbery at the levels I'd be interested in.
Listening to this video wasn't my first discovery online but I think it has some valuable seeming advice. I think his advice to avoid using visual symbols because morse code is an audio experience is excellent. I think if people learned ear training in music before they started working with notation it would probably make their progress a lot faster.
There are a number of audio tutoring mp3s you can listen to.
I have been listening to the WD8LQB Morse Code Learning Podcast recordings and find it is a lot better than my first plan of trying to turn the duration of sound and spacing into music notation and playing it as an audio file.
These recordings from a radio club from Dallas are what I'm going to continue with.
I haven't really been looking into what it would take to get a license yet, I'd want to practice listening and using the key a lot before taking that step.
But I did find this video quite motivating, especially in that he goes into a lot of detail about people who do an enormous amount with home-built and very simple low-powered stations. Some of the schematics of those are simple enough so I can read them and I'm the exact opposite of a techie.
Part of the romance of it for me was coming across Morse transmissions when I was a DXer - someone who spent too much time looking for interesting sounding and exotic short-wave radio stations.
I have to say that the first picture in his illustrations of a one-tube station made me yearn for those long passed days of sitting in my father's workshop in the dark (he didn't need lights) the place lit only by the tubes in his radios filtered through the perforations in the casing,and the amber colored dial, smelling the dust burning off of the tubes - the place could have probably been heated from the heat those produced - hearing signals from as far away as the other side of the world. I don't know what it would take to make a one-tube rig like that, though I'd guess it's a lot easier than trying to fix one of his old radios would be. I'd have to get up a lot more courage than I've got to go with tubes but the little home made and kit transceivers wouldn't scare me too much.
Note: This was another of those pieces that got posted before the final draft, or as final as my drafts get. I revised it so it's a bit more readable.
I have to say that the first picture in his illustrations of a one-tube station made me yearn for those long passed days of sitting in my father's workshop in the dark (he didn't need lights) the place lit only by the tubes in his radios filtered through the perforations in the casing,and the amber colored dial, smelling the dust burning off of the tubes - the place could have probably been heated from the heat those produced - hearing signals from as far away as the other side of the world. I don't know what it would take to make a one-tube rig like that, though I'd guess it's a lot easier than trying to fix one of his old radios would be. I'd have to get up a lot more courage than I've got to go with tubes but the little home made and kit transceivers wouldn't scare me too much.
Note: This was another of those pieces that got posted before the final draft, or as final as my drafts get. I revised it so it's a bit more readable.
More Consequences Of A Jewish-Christian-Islamic Understanding of God In How We Treat The Sick
One of the consequences of choosing to believe in the Jewish-Christian-Islamic* understanding of God is that what moral action is merely an optional lifestyle choice under secular-materialistic-atheist-agnostic assumes a far different and far more urgent character. Under atheist-materialism the choice to accept something which is a logical as well as moral understanding under that understanding of God might be considered anything from an eccentricity to a detested annoyance and more. Under Nazism it was one of the things they planned on wiping out as that understanding of God, indeed, despised as much for its moral consequences as for the fact that it originated in Jews. Under Brit style elite university-credentialed snobs, those who accept that understanding are called "God botherers"
But that understanding and the moral imperatives that it requires can be the source of problems when that morality impinges on what are rightly considered things that secular government should have no right to determine in regard to individual people, such as what a person chooses to do with their own body - their OWN body, when those choices impinge on another autonomous individual, then those choices can, in some instances become the necessary interest of the general society and making laws regulating that can be morally justified.
That is the reason that it is right that governors have the legal and moral authority to impose quarantines on the populations they govern when infectious diseases can be stopped or reduced through a stay-at-home order.** There are other instances when that is justifiable though that is the present most important one of them.
Continuing on with what Hans Kung pointed out about the requirements of the Jewish-Christian understanding of God:
2. A new approach to sickness: If - in accordance with Christian self-understanding - there is a God who does not leave man alone even i the experience of borderline situations, but sustains him in security, both doctor and patient can establish and indisputably justify a new approach to sickness,
- then in the first place the doctor would never regard sickness from a purely chemical or biological standpoint, never merely as an irregular condition of body or mind in need of repair, to be treated solely with a chemical, physical or surgical technique;
I will point out that Kung, in his habit of considering things in a broader context than is usually included notes that this new approach will be something requiring the effort of patients as well as doctors. I wonder which would find it harder to change their present habits.
- then he would be more inclined to see sickness as a reduction in efficiency, as a danger, as a threat to life of the whole, concrete, individual human being, affecting all spheres of human existence;
- the, since suffering of all kinds are part of human existence - times of sickness can be as important as working time to the process of learning of the human person, amounting to a path to human maturity by ready acceptance, endurance, resolution of conflicts and suffering, consciously accepting our finiteness.
Of course that understanding includes the understanding that our lives on Earth are not the end of us at death. What is finite is our present life in this body as was the life of Jesus in his body before his death, before his Resurrection. Which I'll talk about later.
I will point out something else about the Jewish-Christian-Islamic understanding of God, understanding that God wants us to do to others as we would want them to do to us, universal medical care in so far as any society can provide that is an absolute moral requirement of that conception of God. Far more of an imperative than the state nationalizing and regulating the bodies of women and the responsible sex lives of consenting adults. There is certainly nothing an opponent of universal health coverage keeps from someone who cannot be treated or who cannot pay for treatment that they would want denied to them.
Kung's conception of times of sickness as a learning time, a time to come to understandings you are unlikey to come to through other experiences is something I wouldn't have understood before I and two of my siblings had the entire care of our mother during her last terrible month.*** It took me several years after she died to understand the meaning behind what happened both to her and to us. That she had to learn that she could not continue living in her century old body even as she wanted to stay with us. And we had to learn that too as well as lots of other things. It was terrible while it was going on, especially the periods when she was not lucid, when she remembered obscure incidents in her life that none of us had ever heard of - including that she had played baseball in games a boy her age - who she'd never talked about before- organized. I'd never heard her talk about playing sports which she had no interest in.
When I read about near death experiencers talk about a life review, I recognized that as being part of what she was going through that whole month. And there were other things we all learned from that experience. I would certainly not have chosen to go through that or had her go through that, though the final day when she was entirely lucid after a month of deep confusion and fear was a totally unexpected blessing to us even as the end was terrible and dramatic. I won't go into any more detail but this hardly covers it. I think she needed the month she got even though it was painful and terrible in many ways. I don't know if my sisters and brothers would see it that way but it's what I got from it.
* I think that Kung would certainly generally include Islamic understanding of God in his text if he rewrote it today. That isn't to say that everyone who professes to believe in that understanding of God means the same thing by it but the general tradition as that is understood by people of good will. I certainly don't think the interpretation of God the Phelps clan or the KKK hold, that Menachem Schneerson or the leaders of ISIS are covered under that understanding of God.
** But it is not justified when the government bans birth control or abortion because in that case there is no overriding societal interest that supersedes the right of women to decide if they are going to be pregnant or men and women when they need or want to prevent a pregnancy. For those who are opposed to abortion and believe the state rightfully can nationalize a woman's body - something none of the men and many of the women who are anti-abortion fanatics would never choose for themselves if their personal necessity or convenience were proposed to be regulated by the state - the fact is that the most effective means of stopping abortions is the correct use of effective birth control. Even their rightly made advocacy that women choose to carry a pregnancy to term, the limits of their justifiable anti-abortion activity, is not as effective as people knowing how to prevent unwanted or catastrophic pregnancies using contraception and having ready access to it - the entertainment media which encourages irresponsible sex so strongly should be coersed into making it socially unacceptable for men and women to have sex without preventing an unwanted pregnancy AND SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES.
Those who want the law to ban abortion are, ironically, not going to stop abortions, those were common when the ban on legal abortion was at its most absolute. There is nothing more immoral in striking a moral stand than to ignore or deny or pretend that the entire consequences of that stand are completely relevant in judging the morality of what they demand.
What they are doing isn't stopping abortions, it is making them extremely dangerous and, if, as so often, their anti-abortion activity seeks to ban or reduce the use of contraception in an idiotic fantasy that they will stop people they don't think should be having sex from having sex, they are actually guaranteeing there will be MORE ABORTIONS, NOT FEWER ONES. And, even more ironically as I suspect we will soon catastrophically discover, the consequences of their dream come true will be to make more people demand that abortion be made legal. The most effective argument against the abortion ban were the women who died or were seriously and often permanently injured through illegal abortions. Added on that there were the prosecutions against women who were suspected to have had abortions or doctors who provided safe abortions.
*** She had been dumped from a local hospital whose trustees had sold off to a larger corporation, a decision by a new class of doctors called "hospitalists" which I took to mean someone who was there to dump patients out of the hospital if their treatment wasn't going to be maximally profitable for the company. U.S. healthcare is run like a company under a completely acceptable scheme of secular professional "ethics" - you can construct one to come out pretty much anywhere you want it to come out.
Just as you can in law, especially when you don't have to try to find some tenuous excuse for coming out wherever you want to in the law. I'm sure William Barr will do that in a way that Republican-fascists will nod to, even those who have been to Catholic prep-schools.
The American medical-insurance corporate system, I suspect hated as widely among doctors and nurses as with patients, is definitely not covered by under the Jewish-Christian-Islamic understanding of God Kung is talking about.
But that understanding and the moral imperatives that it requires can be the source of problems when that morality impinges on what are rightly considered things that secular government should have no right to determine in regard to individual people, such as what a person chooses to do with their own body - their OWN body, when those choices impinge on another autonomous individual, then those choices can, in some instances become the necessary interest of the general society and making laws regulating that can be morally justified.
That is the reason that it is right that governors have the legal and moral authority to impose quarantines on the populations they govern when infectious diseases can be stopped or reduced through a stay-at-home order.** There are other instances when that is justifiable though that is the present most important one of them.
Continuing on with what Hans Kung pointed out about the requirements of the Jewish-Christian understanding of God:
2. A new approach to sickness: If - in accordance with Christian self-understanding - there is a God who does not leave man alone even i the experience of borderline situations, but sustains him in security, both doctor and patient can establish and indisputably justify a new approach to sickness,
- then in the first place the doctor would never regard sickness from a purely chemical or biological standpoint, never merely as an irregular condition of body or mind in need of repair, to be treated solely with a chemical, physical or surgical technique;
I will point out that Kung, in his habit of considering things in a broader context than is usually included notes that this new approach will be something requiring the effort of patients as well as doctors. I wonder which would find it harder to change their present habits.
- then he would be more inclined to see sickness as a reduction in efficiency, as a danger, as a threat to life of the whole, concrete, individual human being, affecting all spheres of human existence;
- the, since suffering of all kinds are part of human existence - times of sickness can be as important as working time to the process of learning of the human person, amounting to a path to human maturity by ready acceptance, endurance, resolution of conflicts and suffering, consciously accepting our finiteness.
Of course that understanding includes the understanding that our lives on Earth are not the end of us at death. What is finite is our present life in this body as was the life of Jesus in his body before his death, before his Resurrection. Which I'll talk about later.
I will point out something else about the Jewish-Christian-Islamic understanding of God, understanding that God wants us to do to others as we would want them to do to us, universal medical care in so far as any society can provide that is an absolute moral requirement of that conception of God. Far more of an imperative than the state nationalizing and regulating the bodies of women and the responsible sex lives of consenting adults. There is certainly nothing an opponent of universal health coverage keeps from someone who cannot be treated or who cannot pay for treatment that they would want denied to them.
Kung's conception of times of sickness as a learning time, a time to come to understandings you are unlikey to come to through other experiences is something I wouldn't have understood before I and two of my siblings had the entire care of our mother during her last terrible month.*** It took me several years after she died to understand the meaning behind what happened both to her and to us. That she had to learn that she could not continue living in her century old body even as she wanted to stay with us. And we had to learn that too as well as lots of other things. It was terrible while it was going on, especially the periods when she was not lucid, when she remembered obscure incidents in her life that none of us had ever heard of - including that she had played baseball in games a boy her age - who she'd never talked about before- organized. I'd never heard her talk about playing sports which she had no interest in.
When I read about near death experiencers talk about a life review, I recognized that as being part of what she was going through that whole month. And there were other things we all learned from that experience. I would certainly not have chosen to go through that or had her go through that, though the final day when she was entirely lucid after a month of deep confusion and fear was a totally unexpected blessing to us even as the end was terrible and dramatic. I won't go into any more detail but this hardly covers it. I think she needed the month she got even though it was painful and terrible in many ways. I don't know if my sisters and brothers would see it that way but it's what I got from it.
* I think that Kung would certainly generally include Islamic understanding of God in his text if he rewrote it today. That isn't to say that everyone who professes to believe in that understanding of God means the same thing by it but the general tradition as that is understood by people of good will. I certainly don't think the interpretation of God the Phelps clan or the KKK hold, that Menachem Schneerson or the leaders of ISIS are covered under that understanding of God.
** But it is not justified when the government bans birth control or abortion because in that case there is no overriding societal interest that supersedes the right of women to decide if they are going to be pregnant or men and women when they need or want to prevent a pregnancy. For those who are opposed to abortion and believe the state rightfully can nationalize a woman's body - something none of the men and many of the women who are anti-abortion fanatics would never choose for themselves if their personal necessity or convenience were proposed to be regulated by the state - the fact is that the most effective means of stopping abortions is the correct use of effective birth control. Even their rightly made advocacy that women choose to carry a pregnancy to term, the limits of their justifiable anti-abortion activity, is not as effective as people knowing how to prevent unwanted or catastrophic pregnancies using contraception and having ready access to it - the entertainment media which encourages irresponsible sex so strongly should be coersed into making it socially unacceptable for men and women to have sex without preventing an unwanted pregnancy AND SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES.
Those who want the law to ban abortion are, ironically, not going to stop abortions, those were common when the ban on legal abortion was at its most absolute. There is nothing more immoral in striking a moral stand than to ignore or deny or pretend that the entire consequences of that stand are completely relevant in judging the morality of what they demand.
What they are doing isn't stopping abortions, it is making them extremely dangerous and, if, as so often, their anti-abortion activity seeks to ban or reduce the use of contraception in an idiotic fantasy that they will stop people they don't think should be having sex from having sex, they are actually guaranteeing there will be MORE ABORTIONS, NOT FEWER ONES. And, even more ironically as I suspect we will soon catastrophically discover, the consequences of their dream come true will be to make more people demand that abortion be made legal. The most effective argument against the abortion ban were the women who died or were seriously and often permanently injured through illegal abortions. Added on that there were the prosecutions against women who were suspected to have had abortions or doctors who provided safe abortions.
*** She had been dumped from a local hospital whose trustees had sold off to a larger corporation, a decision by a new class of doctors called "hospitalists" which I took to mean someone who was there to dump patients out of the hospital if their treatment wasn't going to be maximally profitable for the company. U.S. healthcare is run like a company under a completely acceptable scheme of secular professional "ethics" - you can construct one to come out pretty much anywhere you want it to come out.
Just as you can in law, especially when you don't have to try to find some tenuous excuse for coming out wherever you want to in the law. I'm sure William Barr will do that in a way that Republican-fascists will nod to, even those who have been to Catholic prep-schools.
The American medical-insurance corporate system, I suspect hated as widely among doctors and nurses as with patients, is definitely not covered by under the Jewish-Christian-Islamic understanding of God Kung is talking about.
Thursday, May 14, 2020
Two Matters
I found out that part of what I wanted to say got lost in editing yesterday's post about when it's not justified to slam the cops.
All of that said, it pisses me off to no end how journalists, newspaper and online scribblers, online, broadcast and cabloid babblers never, ever consider that they are not helping things when they go down that well-trodden path of journalistic slamming of the police when, with absolutely no surprise to anyone who has ever really thought about it - in the absence of criminality or even a suggestion of it, they fail to do what is demanded that they do on those occasions when the journalists or babblers approve of what they demand. Which is often quite arbitrarily decided.
The demand is made that before someone is formally investigated before they have been credibly believed to have ALREADY committed a crime, such an investigation be:
- in accord with the limits placed on police investigating and finding evidence,
- under the rules of how evidence admissible in court can be obtained and when those haven't been met,
- when any accusation made without evidence being presented COULD BE FALSE AND MOTIVATED BY A GRUDGE OR PREJUDICE,
- when any lawyer or judge can claim or decide, arbitrarily that the police have failed to meet those bars,
- when individual police can get into very hot water when the media or a lawyer or a judge can accuse them of breaking the rules,
- any number of other factors,
slamming the police when they act within those limits and a crime occurs is typical of the media who are even more arbitrary in that than a lot of judges are.
Those restrictions are there for reasons, SOME police have abused the rights of people and courts have too in the absence of those restrictions.
Injustice happened in their absence. Some police forces have done that as a body, often with the full cooperation of lawyers and judges and legislators. AND JURIES, TOO. That those are injustices committed by arms of the government means that remedies to that were in the hands of government, the legal system and by the police.
Those are not the only injustices, they aren't even a majority of them in North America.
But the advantages to honest people gained by those restrictions as well can be to the benefit of criminals and those who would be criminals who until they break the laws, aren't even subject to be investigated criminally.
If you want to really make things better it is absolutely necessary to consider that when we talk about "injustice" that injustices, those are probably in the majority of cases more dangerously are committed by criminals.
All crimes against people are acts of injustice. That injustice is completely in the hands of the criminals and the police are not ever going to be able to prevent all of it or perhaps even a majority of it. That's the reason we have police, laws, courts, etc.
It's not particularly difficult to see the problems with what the journalists are doing. They are acting like brats demanding the the police do the impossible while insisting on the things that make the impossible impossible as well.
Journalists, writers get rewarded for doing that. They thrive on presenting those most vicious of committing injustices, criminals as heroes. It is remarkable how much of popular writing, both non-fiction and fiction, gives a romanticized, positive view of even real gangsters and criminals whose lives were devoted to committing injustice, generally and mostly against those with less of an ability to defend themselves than others. That has been a practice of scribblers, pop song writers, poets, even "journalists" from time immemorial.
Writing this I remember that one of Norman Mailer's greatest successes was his use of the criminal Gary Gilmore as a hero in The Executioner's Song for which he got a Pulitzer and, no doubt the even greater reward of a Hollywood movie that got Tommy Lee Jones an Emmy. And he was joined on the death-row gravy train by his frenemy Gore Vidal who did the same with the mass murderer, Timothy McVeigh. If you want to consider how degenerate that practice is consider this from the then and still now "lefty" icon about the literal neo-Nazi McVeigh
Vidal maintained this was because "McVeigh saw himself as John Brown of Kansas", the anti-slavery campaigner who was executed after leading a raid into the south which sparked the American civil war.
Read the entire article at The Guardian, it's a good example of what I'm talking about.
Yet people wonder why the public have such a screwed up view of justice. No wonder good police can't do their jobs the way they probably want to, no wonder bad ones can rig things to get away with murder.
-------------------
I am being trolled at other places I make comments by one of the people who cannot now troll me here. Why they're bothering, I don't know, it's not as if after all of these years I couldn't guess which of the tiny grab bag of atheist-scientistic bromides they'll pull out. If I haven't long ago answered all of those them raising a new one might possibly be a fatal shock (I say to encourage them to at least come up with a new line, something which I've more or less given up hope on).
I found that out that what they don't want most of all is an answer as they raised the same question I'd answered, fully, with historically irrefutable quotations, material cited by him to back up his claims, the testimony of his professional colleagues, correspondents, fellow scientists AND HIS OWN CHILDREN WHO KNEW HIM BETTER THAN ANYONE THEN OR NOW, the post-war lies about Charles Darwin's eugenics advocacy, of his direct link to genocide and links to Nazi ideology and those most infamous of genocides. I proved that as absolutely as any claims made about him can be made.
They aren't much better at defending their other positions, I can guess what they will say, I can address those without bothering to read what they'll say. You would think if the idiots thought they could intimidate me into silence fourteen years of their failure to do that would have taught them that's not going to happen, though they don't seem to learn much of anything, which is the difference between us, I guess. I have learned an enormous amount through these brawls and have changed, fundamentally many ideas I had held to. I would think that's the difference between thought and rote repetition. In no way is it more evident that the atheist-materialist-scientistic claims to be "free thinkers" is a phony trademark. They don't even think.
All of that said, it pisses me off to no end how journalists, newspaper and online scribblers, online, broadcast and cabloid babblers never, ever consider that they are not helping things when they go down that well-trodden path of journalistic slamming of the police when, with absolutely no surprise to anyone who has ever really thought about it - in the absence of criminality or even a suggestion of it, they fail to do what is demanded that they do on those occasions when the journalists or babblers approve of what they demand. Which is often quite arbitrarily decided.
The demand is made that before someone is formally investigated before they have been credibly believed to have ALREADY committed a crime, such an investigation be:
- in accord with the limits placed on police investigating and finding evidence,
- under the rules of how evidence admissible in court can be obtained and when those haven't been met,
- when any accusation made without evidence being presented COULD BE FALSE AND MOTIVATED BY A GRUDGE OR PREJUDICE,
- when any lawyer or judge can claim or decide, arbitrarily that the police have failed to meet those bars,
- when individual police can get into very hot water when the media or a lawyer or a judge can accuse them of breaking the rules,
- any number of other factors,
slamming the police when they act within those limits and a crime occurs is typical of the media who are even more arbitrary in that than a lot of judges are.
Those restrictions are there for reasons, SOME police have abused the rights of people and courts have too in the absence of those restrictions.
Injustice happened in their absence. Some police forces have done that as a body, often with the full cooperation of lawyers and judges and legislators. AND JURIES, TOO. That those are injustices committed by arms of the government means that remedies to that were in the hands of government, the legal system and by the police.
Those are not the only injustices, they aren't even a majority of them in North America.
But the advantages to honest people gained by those restrictions as well can be to the benefit of criminals and those who would be criminals who until they break the laws, aren't even subject to be investigated criminally.
If you want to really make things better it is absolutely necessary to consider that when we talk about "injustice" that injustices, those are probably in the majority of cases more dangerously are committed by criminals.
All crimes against people are acts of injustice. That injustice is completely in the hands of the criminals and the police are not ever going to be able to prevent all of it or perhaps even a majority of it. That's the reason we have police, laws, courts, etc.
It's not particularly difficult to see the problems with what the journalists are doing. They are acting like brats demanding the the police do the impossible while insisting on the things that make the impossible impossible as well.
Journalists, writers get rewarded for doing that. They thrive on presenting those most vicious of committing injustices, criminals as heroes. It is remarkable how much of popular writing, both non-fiction and fiction, gives a romanticized, positive view of even real gangsters and criminals whose lives were devoted to committing injustice, generally and mostly against those with less of an ability to defend themselves than others. That has been a practice of scribblers, pop song writers, poets, even "journalists" from time immemorial.
Writing this I remember that one of Norman Mailer's greatest successes was his use of the criminal Gary Gilmore as a hero in The Executioner's Song for which he got a Pulitzer and, no doubt the even greater reward of a Hollywood movie that got Tommy Lee Jones an Emmy. And he was joined on the death-row gravy train by his frenemy Gore Vidal who did the same with the mass murderer, Timothy McVeigh. If you want to consider how degenerate that practice is consider this from the then and still now "lefty" icon about the literal neo-Nazi McVeigh
Vidal maintained this was because "McVeigh saw himself as John Brown of Kansas", the anti-slavery campaigner who was executed after leading a raid into the south which sparked the American civil war.
Read the entire article at The Guardian, it's a good example of what I'm talking about.
Yet people wonder why the public have such a screwed up view of justice. No wonder good police can't do their jobs the way they probably want to, no wonder bad ones can rig things to get away with murder.
-------------------
I am being trolled at other places I make comments by one of the people who cannot now troll me here. Why they're bothering, I don't know, it's not as if after all of these years I couldn't guess which of the tiny grab bag of atheist-scientistic bromides they'll pull out. If I haven't long ago answered all of those them raising a new one might possibly be a fatal shock (I say to encourage them to at least come up with a new line, something which I've more or less given up hope on).
I found that out that what they don't want most of all is an answer as they raised the same question I'd answered, fully, with historically irrefutable quotations, material cited by him to back up his claims, the testimony of his professional colleagues, correspondents, fellow scientists AND HIS OWN CHILDREN WHO KNEW HIM BETTER THAN ANYONE THEN OR NOW, the post-war lies about Charles Darwin's eugenics advocacy, of his direct link to genocide and links to Nazi ideology and those most infamous of genocides. I proved that as absolutely as any claims made about him can be made.
They aren't much better at defending their other positions, I can guess what they will say, I can address those without bothering to read what they'll say. You would think if the idiots thought they could intimidate me into silence fourteen years of their failure to do that would have taught them that's not going to happen, though they don't seem to learn much of anything, which is the difference between us, I guess. I have learned an enormous amount through these brawls and have changed, fundamentally many ideas I had held to. I would think that's the difference between thought and rote repetition. In no way is it more evident that the atheist-materialist-scientistic claims to be "free thinkers" is a phony trademark. They don't even think.
If - in accordance with Christian self-understanding - there is a God who wills to be man's partner, human dignity is not an inconsequential postulate or a mere political slogan
Before I restart my Easter season posts [yes, we are still in the Easter season until the end of the month] I will agree that there is an abundance of false profession of Christianity around. If you can believe the TV and radio, the secular press, a lot of the nominal "Christian" media, that false profession might count for all of Christian identification. That phenomenon isn't relegated to "white evangelicals" even when you include white Pentecostals under that often wrongly used umbrella.
There are a large number of Catholics whose actions, especially their political actions, are not only NOT in line with the teachings of Jesus - which are definitive for anything that can logically be considered to be authentic Christianity - many of the core beliefs, values and stated positions of many of those who most strongly identify as Catholic or Christian, many of the clergy of those denominations, is more rationally considered anti-Christian, their interpretation of Jesus (who they largely ignore) the anti-Christ. These days their lives and actions prove that they have replaced Jesus with Donald Trump as so many of them replaced him with George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan or whoever else their TV and hate-talk radio present them in that henotheistic pantheon of eutrophic capitalist Mammonism.
And what we see here is certainly true in many of the other countries where something called "Christianity" is a significant phenomenon. It is and has not been uncommon for "Christianity" to be all about a love of money, which Paul noted was a root of evil, all about NOT doing to the least among them as they would have done to them (which Jesus in one of his few allusions to something like hell, said was what led there) such Christianity is populated with would be and actual rich men who leave the starving and desperate to die on their very doorsteps, if they can't have the authorities remove them to die elsewhere.
If such Christians want to complain as to why Christianity is despised and disrespected, their profession of it while they live the lives of through Mammonists in line with what the entire Scriptures that Christianity and Judaism rest on condemned and noted leads to downfall, plagues, famines, pestilence - something I once took as more or less metaphorical but in the post-democratic United States, I see were actual observations of what results from injustice, they share in as much if not more blame than the professed atheist haters of Christianity and its moral teachings (not all do profess hatred of its moral teachings, some adopt a truncated version of those teachings, which I guess is sort of to their credit). If Christians wanted to make a better name for their ideology, their history of holding worldly power in Europe and the Americas, exercising power through imperialism in the world was certainly not the way to do it. That anti-Christian history has rotted out the reputation and cemented over what is the only legitimate identification of Christianity which is centered in The Gospel, the Epistles, the Law and the Prophets as understood in light of the teachings of Jesus. The harshness of Christianity took all of the most dubious aspects of The Law, the death penalties, most of all, and jettisoned all of the rejection of that in mercy and justice and love that Jesus interpreted the Law by. If you want to know how male, white "Christians" in such large numbers voted for Trump, that vote was an expression of fury at the loss of a privilege that was enjoyed under anti-Christian history, privilege that would never have been unequally distributed if the words of Jesus really ruled their minds and hearts.
In discussing Dying with human dignity, Hans Kung relates that to the right to medical care throughout life, which would, in political terms in the United States, require universal healthcare of the kind that is rejected by Republicans and others.
New Approach to Sickness and Therapy
In the light of the reality of God it is possible to substantiate what could certainly be defended in regard to sickness and therapy even without God, but would scarcely be justified without God beyond doubt, unconditionally and as universally binding; imperatives of humanity. Requirements, demands, invitations, not only for the sick but also for the healthy, not only for the patients but also and primarily for the doctors. Imperatives of humanity as they are thrust upon us particularly in light of the God who we have come to know from the Jewish-Christian tradition.
Note that Kung says "it is possible to substantiate what could certainly be defended in regard to sickness and therapy" which is to point out that what becomes a mere possibility, one option among others without framing the issue in the Jewish-Christian understanding of God, becomes an imperative if you take the Jewish God, interpreted in the teachings of Jesus, seriously.
It is often said that atheists can act morally without God, lists of atheist saints can be made and some of those lists are very impressive. No one can deny many people who have professed atheism, who have denied the reality of God have been fine people - my observation would be that in most of the cases I find most convincing, their atheism was more passive than aggressively and viciously expressed. The trouble is that atheism, taken as an intellectual stand, is far more useful for denying the "requirements, demands, invitations" to act, to make real the requirements of humanity beyond doubt, unconditionally and universally binding. Atheism is far better at doubting than it is finding a commandment of a universal right to humane treatment. So is agnosticism deficient in that. Any "Christian" who denies that requirement is adopting a position more suited to materialistic, scientistic atheism than to someone who professes to believe Jesus spoke with divine authority.
Kung develops this, beginning:
1. A new humanity: If - in accordance with Christian self-understanding - there is a God who wills to be man's partner, human dignity is not an inconsequential postulate or a mere political slogan, but - in the process of finding scientific expression and objectifying - a reality founded in God himself, one which for every human being is unrenouceable, never to be forfeited:
- humanity then means respect for the value of each and every human being as a person, whose dignity remains independent of his role in society, his proficiency or usefulness.
- humanity then is never - as extremists on the right or the left think, a weakness, but man's great task for man - whether healthy or sick, strong or weak, young or old, female or male, all of whom as creatures and partners of God possess an inalienable dignity which must be respected particularly at times of sickness.
- humanity then holds particularly for the sick person, who must never be degraded in the process of medical care to an object - an object of research or treatment - but must always be taken seriously as a subject and articulate partner in the healing process, thus contributing to the humanizing of medicine in the process of humanizing men.
It has been one of the things I've noted in reading more deeply in modern theology and in much of the theology of the past, is that many theologians, far from being narrowly focused, have some of the most expansive views of the topics they discuss which I have found. I have, in most cases, found them to be far more comprehensive in their treatment of things than secular and, in almost all cases, modern atheist and agnostic writers are. That is in no small part due to their interest in apologetics which force them to take the best arguments of their ideological opponents seriously, which they generally do with far more rigor than their opponents. Thought, considering the scope with which people like Kung and Niebuhr, Brueggemann and others treat their non-opponents' thinking, I don't think they engage with atheist thinking in such depth reluctantly. I say that to honor the intellectual rigor with which they treat what they address. They clearly value honesty and the truth in ways that are unusual in even academic writing which is allegedly a pursuit of the truth.
As a mere political blogger, I am pointed in a direction that is far more likely to find enduring ground to stand on through what Kung points out.
Jefferson (Adams, Franklin, etc. his revisers) in their formulation that approaches what Kung starts to state
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
which are words of the Declaration of Independence were proved to be emptied of much of their meaning in the de-deified, secularized framing of the subsequent Constitution that has governed us in such inequality, rights and dignity never treated as universal endowments. The Constitution which has failed us in so many ways but which is still a required object of worship in the "civic religion" (to use Sandra Day O'Conner's putrid phrase) that is the cultural requirement for respectability or even someone allowed in the discussion, left or right, in the United States. No Constitution which denies the character of total equality to not only abstract "rights" but the very real economic necessities of a good and decent life will be durable in protecting even the unequal rights sought by the better sort of conservatives today. Neither will it endure under the regime of secular, 18th century style liberalism secularized out considering the matter of equal endowment of rights which are only durably and absolutely addressed as a gift of God.
You don't have to resort to just the very good examples of the monarchies, the despotism and the inequality that abounded in them as they professed their "most Christian" identity even as their very existence negated the Gospel, the Epistles, the Law and the Prophets in looking at what happens when the assumptions that Kung's arguments rest in are denied or ignored. You can find a very good example of it in Jefferson, the author of the Declaration quoted above, who cut up the Gospels to deny anything divine in them as he expounded truths that are only durably established in that framing, in his fellow founders who, like him, clearly never intended anything like equally endowed rights and dignity and a right to happiness to really govern the new order of the ages.
I don't think medicare for all will ever succeed unless its foundation is as secure as that stated by Kung, above. I don't think secularism will ever produce such a secure statement of rights. It certainly hasn't in Britain or the Soviet Union or China. I am increasingly unimpressed with it in that imaginary paradise of socialism, Sweden which relies on enough people dying off in the Covid pandemic as a sacrifice to the atheist god of statistical averages. Such examples are warnings of what to expect under the best outcomes without God, even as the United States is one under the effective rule of Mammon.
There are a large number of Catholics whose actions, especially their political actions, are not only NOT in line with the teachings of Jesus - which are definitive for anything that can logically be considered to be authentic Christianity - many of the core beliefs, values and stated positions of many of those who most strongly identify as Catholic or Christian, many of the clergy of those denominations, is more rationally considered anti-Christian, their interpretation of Jesus (who they largely ignore) the anti-Christ. These days their lives and actions prove that they have replaced Jesus with Donald Trump as so many of them replaced him with George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan or whoever else their TV and hate-talk radio present them in that henotheistic pantheon of eutrophic capitalist Mammonism.
And what we see here is certainly true in many of the other countries where something called "Christianity" is a significant phenomenon. It is and has not been uncommon for "Christianity" to be all about a love of money, which Paul noted was a root of evil, all about NOT doing to the least among them as they would have done to them (which Jesus in one of his few allusions to something like hell, said was what led there) such Christianity is populated with would be and actual rich men who leave the starving and desperate to die on their very doorsteps, if they can't have the authorities remove them to die elsewhere.
If such Christians want to complain as to why Christianity is despised and disrespected, their profession of it while they live the lives of through Mammonists in line with what the entire Scriptures that Christianity and Judaism rest on condemned and noted leads to downfall, plagues, famines, pestilence - something I once took as more or less metaphorical but in the post-democratic United States, I see were actual observations of what results from injustice, they share in as much if not more blame than the professed atheist haters of Christianity and its moral teachings (not all do profess hatred of its moral teachings, some adopt a truncated version of those teachings, which I guess is sort of to their credit). If Christians wanted to make a better name for their ideology, their history of holding worldly power in Europe and the Americas, exercising power through imperialism in the world was certainly not the way to do it. That anti-Christian history has rotted out the reputation and cemented over what is the only legitimate identification of Christianity which is centered in The Gospel, the Epistles, the Law and the Prophets as understood in light of the teachings of Jesus. The harshness of Christianity took all of the most dubious aspects of The Law, the death penalties, most of all, and jettisoned all of the rejection of that in mercy and justice and love that Jesus interpreted the Law by. If you want to know how male, white "Christians" in such large numbers voted for Trump, that vote was an expression of fury at the loss of a privilege that was enjoyed under anti-Christian history, privilege that would never have been unequally distributed if the words of Jesus really ruled their minds and hearts.
In discussing Dying with human dignity, Hans Kung relates that to the right to medical care throughout life, which would, in political terms in the United States, require universal healthcare of the kind that is rejected by Republicans and others.
New Approach to Sickness and Therapy
In the light of the reality of God it is possible to substantiate what could certainly be defended in regard to sickness and therapy even without God, but would scarcely be justified without God beyond doubt, unconditionally and as universally binding; imperatives of humanity. Requirements, demands, invitations, not only for the sick but also for the healthy, not only for the patients but also and primarily for the doctors. Imperatives of humanity as they are thrust upon us particularly in light of the God who we have come to know from the Jewish-Christian tradition.
Note that Kung says "it is possible to substantiate what could certainly be defended in regard to sickness and therapy" which is to point out that what becomes a mere possibility, one option among others without framing the issue in the Jewish-Christian understanding of God, becomes an imperative if you take the Jewish God, interpreted in the teachings of Jesus, seriously.
It is often said that atheists can act morally without God, lists of atheist saints can be made and some of those lists are very impressive. No one can deny many people who have professed atheism, who have denied the reality of God have been fine people - my observation would be that in most of the cases I find most convincing, their atheism was more passive than aggressively and viciously expressed. The trouble is that atheism, taken as an intellectual stand, is far more useful for denying the "requirements, demands, invitations" to act, to make real the requirements of humanity beyond doubt, unconditionally and universally binding. Atheism is far better at doubting than it is finding a commandment of a universal right to humane treatment. So is agnosticism deficient in that. Any "Christian" who denies that requirement is adopting a position more suited to materialistic, scientistic atheism than to someone who professes to believe Jesus spoke with divine authority.
Kung develops this, beginning:
1. A new humanity: If - in accordance with Christian self-understanding - there is a God who wills to be man's partner, human dignity is not an inconsequential postulate or a mere political slogan, but - in the process of finding scientific expression and objectifying - a reality founded in God himself, one which for every human being is unrenouceable, never to be forfeited:
- humanity then means respect for the value of each and every human being as a person, whose dignity remains independent of his role in society, his proficiency or usefulness.
- humanity then is never - as extremists on the right or the left think, a weakness, but man's great task for man - whether healthy or sick, strong or weak, young or old, female or male, all of whom as creatures and partners of God possess an inalienable dignity which must be respected particularly at times of sickness.
- humanity then holds particularly for the sick person, who must never be degraded in the process of medical care to an object - an object of research or treatment - but must always be taken seriously as a subject and articulate partner in the healing process, thus contributing to the humanizing of medicine in the process of humanizing men.
It has been one of the things I've noted in reading more deeply in modern theology and in much of the theology of the past, is that many theologians, far from being narrowly focused, have some of the most expansive views of the topics they discuss which I have found. I have, in most cases, found them to be far more comprehensive in their treatment of things than secular and, in almost all cases, modern atheist and agnostic writers are. That is in no small part due to their interest in apologetics which force them to take the best arguments of their ideological opponents seriously, which they generally do with far more rigor than their opponents. Thought, considering the scope with which people like Kung and Niebuhr, Brueggemann and others treat their non-opponents' thinking, I don't think they engage with atheist thinking in such depth reluctantly. I say that to honor the intellectual rigor with which they treat what they address. They clearly value honesty and the truth in ways that are unusual in even academic writing which is allegedly a pursuit of the truth.
As a mere political blogger, I am pointed in a direction that is far more likely to find enduring ground to stand on through what Kung points out.
Jefferson (Adams, Franklin, etc. his revisers) in their formulation that approaches what Kung starts to state
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
which are words of the Declaration of Independence were proved to be emptied of much of their meaning in the de-deified, secularized framing of the subsequent Constitution that has governed us in such inequality, rights and dignity never treated as universal endowments. The Constitution which has failed us in so many ways but which is still a required object of worship in the "civic religion" (to use Sandra Day O'Conner's putrid phrase) that is the cultural requirement for respectability or even someone allowed in the discussion, left or right, in the United States. No Constitution which denies the character of total equality to not only abstract "rights" but the very real economic necessities of a good and decent life will be durable in protecting even the unequal rights sought by the better sort of conservatives today. Neither will it endure under the regime of secular, 18th century style liberalism secularized out considering the matter of equal endowment of rights which are only durably and absolutely addressed as a gift of God.
You don't have to resort to just the very good examples of the monarchies, the despotism and the inequality that abounded in them as they professed their "most Christian" identity even as their very existence negated the Gospel, the Epistles, the Law and the Prophets in looking at what happens when the assumptions that Kung's arguments rest in are denied or ignored. You can find a very good example of it in Jefferson, the author of the Declaration quoted above, who cut up the Gospels to deny anything divine in them as he expounded truths that are only durably established in that framing, in his fellow founders who, like him, clearly never intended anything like equally endowed rights and dignity and a right to happiness to really govern the new order of the ages.
I don't think medicare for all will ever succeed unless its foundation is as secure as that stated by Kung, above. I don't think secularism will ever produce such a secure statement of rights. It certainly hasn't in Britain or the Soviet Union or China. I am increasingly unimpressed with it in that imaginary paradise of socialism, Sweden which relies on enough people dying off in the Covid pandemic as a sacrifice to the atheist god of statistical averages. Such examples are warnings of what to expect under the best outcomes without God, even as the United States is one under the effective rule of Mammon.
When I First Heard His Name "Elon Musk" Sounded Like Men's Perfume That Smells Like Silicone Lube.
Have to admit that I didn't know who Elon Musk was for most of the time he's allegedly been a celebrity. For the longest time I heard his name without thinking he sounded interesting enough to google him. In the period during which I've known who he was I've thought he was a putz addicted to publicity and otherwise a total a-hole. The attraction to these kinds of techie-sci-ranger pseudo-celebrities has always been a sure sign that those who have them as their heros are delta level putzes.
When I read that American idiots had been convinced that civit-shit coffee was some kind of delicacy I knew you could literally sell people shit with even the dumbest levels of PR. Elon Musk is the civit-shit coffee of celebrities. There were guys I saw selling storm windows on Saturday afternoon TV who had more class.
He's a good example of why billionaires should be leveled out of existence.
When I read that American idiots had been convinced that civit-shit coffee was some kind of delicacy I knew you could literally sell people shit with even the dumbest levels of PR. Elon Musk is the civit-shit coffee of celebrities. There were guys I saw selling storm windows on Saturday afternoon TV who had more class.
He's a good example of why billionaires should be leveled out of existence.
The College-Credentialed Population Who Would Never Consider A Career In Law Enforcement Have A Really Bad Habit Of Both Demanding Doing the Impossible And Making It Impossible To Do What They Demand
I have been telling people that the police in the United States had way too many officers whose political beliefs were fascistic since at least the late 1960s and that they seriously needed to be de-Nazified for the safety of the population. So I'm not in favor of going easy on the police when they do wrong. And neither should they be. If you are going to take on a responsibility that includes the ability to get people locked up for long periods of time, not that infrequently unjustly and the ability to shoot people, even killing them on the basis of your judgement, you shouldn't expect that doesn't come with the responsibility to do it well. I think in too many cases in the United States policemen and individual police departments, especially where police unions have become quasi-fascist political entities, the cops can get away with murder, literally doing what they're paid to prevent.
In other cases, when it isn't a matter of intentional wrongdoing, the placement of responsibility might not always be as clear cut but there is also wrongdoing by the police based on incompetence. Incompetence in this case should be either not thinking through a situation, not taking clearly needed action, not using what resources they had effectively or any number of other things. The police should be answerable for that if bad outcomes are a result of not doing what they should have done well.
But I am entirely against going hard on them when what happened is not their fault. Someone I e-mail sent me a link to a piece critical of the RCMP for its handling of the terrible mass killing in Nova Scotia on April 19th. The headline - which is all so many people read - goes very hard on the RCMP,
A former resident of Portapique says she called the RCMP to tell them the future gunman assaulted his domestic partner and that he had illegal weapons. The police took no action.
which is the fashion in the Canadian media but the substance of the article doesn't support the headline. It's a lot less cut and dried. I don't think the RCMP's failure to have prevented the mass shootings in Nova Scotia in April was their fault, I think those were a result of a number of things including the failure of the killer's girlfriend, one of his victims, to press charges against him. The police couldn't do much unless she or someone else were willing to do that. Even if someone in the public tipped them off that someone was dangerous and had illegal weapons, they would have needed a legal reason to investigate.
It's the easiest thing in the world for an anonymous tipster to give them false information that could read to them doing things that the journalists would then call harassment. Read the article and notice that though the headline faults the RCMP for taking "no action" over and over again, the civilians, other than the person who is anonymously narrating her story to the reporter, took no action, either. What the hell were the cops supposed to do with what they were given? Sometimes "the public" is the source of the inability to act.
I think there are three very serious problems with the police, one is the incredibly low level of training and education given to them before they are given the responsibility of enforcing the law and their even more serious responsibilities of protecting people and keeping the peace. I don't think even the legendarily rigorous training of the RCMP is enough to equip them for what they are expected to do. That's even with the on-the-job training that I would guess would theoretically be considered to be part of their training.
It's insane to give someone an effective license to judge when they have to shoot someone and to do that without them having the amount of training that you need to become a dental hygienist or veterinary assistant. That's putting an incredible burden on them without giving them what they need to just get into the entry level of on-the-job learning. No one should be able to become a cop who wears a gun without at least two years of college-equivalent level training, it would be better if a four-year post-high school level of education and training were required.
That, of course, would mean that a lot of those who should never even have the idea of becoming policemen would be weeded out of the profession. There are lots of good people who go into police work but the percentage of good ones to mediocre or bad ones are more or less on a hit-or-miss basis. Four or even two years of training would go a long way to giving those who weren't really suitable for it to either be discovered or to come to that conclusion on their own. I would expect it would weed out the worst of the ones who were in it for personal power and sadism. It might also include a lot more training in how to handle the stress of the work.
I've also said that making it more of a service profession than a para-military entity would make it a lot better and a lot safer. Some of that might be inevitalbe, considering that the police, like the military, carry weapons and are expected to use them if they have to. Otherwise, in 2020 the police still being modeled on the military is quite insane. It's also insane that given what they're expected to do, that they are burdened with non-essential responsibilities that pale in comparison to their public safety and crime prevention functions. Like the public schools, the police are given an impossible range of things they're supposed to do. If they had the resources and numbers of professionals that would be needed to really do everything that is demanded of them, the police force would have to be a lot bigger with far more resources than people want to support.
That the police in many places CAN'T POSSIBLY do what is asked of them, what is demanded of them is a direct result of demanding that they do what is demanded with inadequate training of inadequate numbers of professionals who have the equipment that they would need to do it.
The police, as presently constituted in North America are set up to dissatisfy the needs and demands of the public which they are supposed to serve. It should be no shock to anyone that they don't do it well and that there are enormous problems that flow from the results of that lack of training, the extreme range that runs from admirably conscientious professionalism and public service to sadistic and homicidal criminality.
All of that said, it pisses me off to no end how journalists, newspaper and online scribblers, online, broadcast and cabloid babblers never, ever consider that they are not helping things when they go down that well-trodden path of journalistic slamming of the police when, with absolutely no surprise to anyone who has ever really thought about it - in the absence of criminality or even a suggestion of it, they fail to do what is demanded that they do on those occasions when the journalists or babblers approve of what they demand. Which is often quite arbitrarily decided.
The police failed to prevent a crime such as the one which rocked Nova Scotia on April 19th. The RCMP is being slammed for not having stopped a guy because legally they couldn't have stopped him before he went on a mass murder rampage. If they had acted in the way that the journalists type out from their keyboards or babble on TV, or lawyers of the civil liberties industry, the same journalists would slam them for taking action WHEN NO CRIME HAD BEEN COMMITTED.
One of the things that makes it impossible to prevent crimes, even among those who the police know about, are the laws and legal rulings that set up very high bars for the police to do anything to people who have not broken any laws that the police are allowed to investigate fully. The extent to which the law prevents the police from taking preventative action is the extent to which they are powerless to stop SOME crimes that might have been prevented. Even some of them terrible crimes which have terrible body counts.
In many cases, by law, the timing of when a person becomes the legitimate target of police surveillance or action is in the hands of the person who commits a crime, either one that won't get into even the local press or a mass murderer who goes on a rampage that will be covered world-wide.
And those laws that prevent that are sometimes good because they are there to protect the rights of people to privacy. The police could probably prevent a lot of crimes if they could do things that no one in a democracy would want them to do.
This reminds me of Barney Frank talking about why politics in the United States has gone to hell, he said something that I think surprised a lot of people, talking about how bad politicians could be he said, "And sometimes the voters are no bargain, either." Which is a dangerous admission for a politician to make. But it's true in more ways than Barney Frank meant to say. We The People are implicated in the failures of government and its different functions, including law enforcement. And there is no part of the public which is less of a bargain in that than journalists who report on the nonfeasance of the public and then blames the results on the police. "Nonfeasance" isn't technically the right word for it because the public acting responsibly isn't codified by law but if they want the police to do their job better, that's not going to happen unless they do the right thing, too. That goes for journalists, especially.
In other cases, when it isn't a matter of intentional wrongdoing, the placement of responsibility might not always be as clear cut but there is also wrongdoing by the police based on incompetence. Incompetence in this case should be either not thinking through a situation, not taking clearly needed action, not using what resources they had effectively or any number of other things. The police should be answerable for that if bad outcomes are a result of not doing what they should have done well.
But I am entirely against going hard on them when what happened is not their fault. Someone I e-mail sent me a link to a piece critical of the RCMP for its handling of the terrible mass killing in Nova Scotia on April 19th. The headline - which is all so many people read - goes very hard on the RCMP,
A former resident of Portapique says she called the RCMP to tell them the future gunman assaulted his domestic partner and that he had illegal weapons. The police took no action.
which is the fashion in the Canadian media but the substance of the article doesn't support the headline. It's a lot less cut and dried. I don't think the RCMP's failure to have prevented the mass shootings in Nova Scotia in April was their fault, I think those were a result of a number of things including the failure of the killer's girlfriend, one of his victims, to press charges against him. The police couldn't do much unless she or someone else were willing to do that. Even if someone in the public tipped them off that someone was dangerous and had illegal weapons, they would have needed a legal reason to investigate.
It's the easiest thing in the world for an anonymous tipster to give them false information that could read to them doing things that the journalists would then call harassment. Read the article and notice that though the headline faults the RCMP for taking "no action" over and over again, the civilians, other than the person who is anonymously narrating her story to the reporter, took no action, either. What the hell were the cops supposed to do with what they were given? Sometimes "the public" is the source of the inability to act.
I think there are three very serious problems with the police, one is the incredibly low level of training and education given to them before they are given the responsibility of enforcing the law and their even more serious responsibilities of protecting people and keeping the peace. I don't think even the legendarily rigorous training of the RCMP is enough to equip them for what they are expected to do. That's even with the on-the-job training that I would guess would theoretically be considered to be part of their training.
It's insane to give someone an effective license to judge when they have to shoot someone and to do that without them having the amount of training that you need to become a dental hygienist or veterinary assistant. That's putting an incredible burden on them without giving them what they need to just get into the entry level of on-the-job learning. No one should be able to become a cop who wears a gun without at least two years of college-equivalent level training, it would be better if a four-year post-high school level of education and training were required.
That, of course, would mean that a lot of those who should never even have the idea of becoming policemen would be weeded out of the profession. There are lots of good people who go into police work but the percentage of good ones to mediocre or bad ones are more or less on a hit-or-miss basis. Four or even two years of training would go a long way to giving those who weren't really suitable for it to either be discovered or to come to that conclusion on their own. I would expect it would weed out the worst of the ones who were in it for personal power and sadism. It might also include a lot more training in how to handle the stress of the work.
I've also said that making it more of a service profession than a para-military entity would make it a lot better and a lot safer. Some of that might be inevitalbe, considering that the police, like the military, carry weapons and are expected to use them if they have to. Otherwise, in 2020 the police still being modeled on the military is quite insane. It's also insane that given what they're expected to do, that they are burdened with non-essential responsibilities that pale in comparison to their public safety and crime prevention functions. Like the public schools, the police are given an impossible range of things they're supposed to do. If they had the resources and numbers of professionals that would be needed to really do everything that is demanded of them, the police force would have to be a lot bigger with far more resources than people want to support.
That the police in many places CAN'T POSSIBLY do what is asked of them, what is demanded of them is a direct result of demanding that they do what is demanded with inadequate training of inadequate numbers of professionals who have the equipment that they would need to do it.
The police, as presently constituted in North America are set up to dissatisfy the needs and demands of the public which they are supposed to serve. It should be no shock to anyone that they don't do it well and that there are enormous problems that flow from the results of that lack of training, the extreme range that runs from admirably conscientious professionalism and public service to sadistic and homicidal criminality.
All of that said, it pisses me off to no end how journalists, newspaper and online scribblers, online, broadcast and cabloid babblers never, ever consider that they are not helping things when they go down that well-trodden path of journalistic slamming of the police when, with absolutely no surprise to anyone who has ever really thought about it - in the absence of criminality or even a suggestion of it, they fail to do what is demanded that they do on those occasions when the journalists or babblers approve of what they demand. Which is often quite arbitrarily decided.
The police failed to prevent a crime such as the one which rocked Nova Scotia on April 19th. The RCMP is being slammed for not having stopped a guy because legally they couldn't have stopped him before he went on a mass murder rampage. If they had acted in the way that the journalists type out from their keyboards or babble on TV, or lawyers of the civil liberties industry, the same journalists would slam them for taking action WHEN NO CRIME HAD BEEN COMMITTED.
One of the things that makes it impossible to prevent crimes, even among those who the police know about, are the laws and legal rulings that set up very high bars for the police to do anything to people who have not broken any laws that the police are allowed to investigate fully. The extent to which the law prevents the police from taking preventative action is the extent to which they are powerless to stop SOME crimes that might have been prevented. Even some of them terrible crimes which have terrible body counts.
In many cases, by law, the timing of when a person becomes the legitimate target of police surveillance or action is in the hands of the person who commits a crime, either one that won't get into even the local press or a mass murderer who goes on a rampage that will be covered world-wide.
And those laws that prevent that are sometimes good because they are there to protect the rights of people to privacy. The police could probably prevent a lot of crimes if they could do things that no one in a democracy would want them to do.
This reminds me of Barney Frank talking about why politics in the United States has gone to hell, he said something that I think surprised a lot of people, talking about how bad politicians could be he said, "And sometimes the voters are no bargain, either." Which is a dangerous admission for a politician to make. But it's true in more ways than Barney Frank meant to say. We The People are implicated in the failures of government and its different functions, including law enforcement. And there is no part of the public which is less of a bargain in that than journalists who report on the nonfeasance of the public and then blames the results on the police. "Nonfeasance" isn't technically the right word for it because the public acting responsibly isn't codified by law but if they want the police to do their job better, that's not going to happen unless they do the right thing, too. That goes for journalists, especially.
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
A Real Life Example of Psalm 12 - "I don't understand how these guys aren't in jail" - I can tell you why, Sullivan v. NYT
Trump Supporters Paid Woman To Say Dr. Fauci Assaulted Her
"With our words we get what we want We will say what we wish, and no one can stop us" After Listening To The News This Morning, We Need A Little Psalm 12
Help us, Lord!
There is not a good person left;
honest people can no longer be found.
All of them lie to one another;
they deceive each other with flattery.
Silence those flattering tongues, O Lord!
Close those boastful mouths that say,
“With our words we get what we want.
We will say what we wish,
and no one can stop us.”
“But now I will come,” says the Lord,
“because the needy are oppressed
and the persecuted groan in pain.
I will give them the security they long for.”
The promises of the Lord can be trusted;
they are as genuine as silver
refined seven times in the furnace.
The wicked are everywhere,
and everyone praises what is evil.
Keep us always safe, O Lord,
and preserve us from such people.
One thing's for certain, all of that secular "more speech" stuff hasn't worked.
There is not a good person left;
honest people can no longer be found.
All of them lie to one another;
they deceive each other with flattery.
Silence those flattering tongues, O Lord!
Close those boastful mouths that say,
“With our words we get what we want.
We will say what we wish,
and no one can stop us.”
“But now I will come,” says the Lord,
“because the needy are oppressed
and the persecuted groan in pain.
I will give them the security they long for.”
The promises of the Lord can be trusted;
they are as genuine as silver
refined seven times in the furnace.
The wicked are everywhere,
and everyone praises what is evil.
Keep us always safe, O Lord,
and preserve us from such people.
One thing's for certain, all of that secular "more speech" stuff hasn't worked.
Monday, May 11, 2020
Elizabeth Warren Calls an Essential Worker in Construction to Say Thanks
What a great president she'd make.
Didn't sleep at all last night, overwhelmed with pandemic news. These latest things about what it's doing to young people has really shaken me. And every indication is that it's going to not be over for a long time, if it can come back once (the resurgence in Wuhan, for example) , it can come back again. And the US didn't even take the necessary steps for this first wave of it.
I'm going to try to get some sleep because I'm wiped out.
I have decided I'm going to go back to the theology posts because they help and because they show a way out of the disaster vulgar materialism and the ideological variety have led us into. One thing is clear, we can't rely on the American Constitution to protect us because it is the very thing which imposed Trump on us, both through federalism, through the electoral college and through the permission the media was given to lie about Democrats for the profit of its owners through the badly written First Amendment. And the civic religion, the false religion of the law, won't allow that to be said. Anything which disallows the truth to be said is the way of death. We are on that way.
I'm going to try to get some sleep because I'm wiped out.
I have decided I'm going to go back to the theology posts because they help and because they show a way out of the disaster vulgar materialism and the ideological variety have led us into. One thing is clear, we can't rely on the American Constitution to protect us because it is the very thing which imposed Trump on us, both through federalism, through the electoral college and through the permission the media was given to lie about Democrats for the profit of its owners through the badly written First Amendment. And the civic religion, the false religion of the law, won't allow that to be said. Anything which disallows the truth to be said is the way of death. We are on that way.
Sunday, May 10, 2020
A Curse
At this point, every victim of Covid-19 in the United States is rightfully put on the hands of the authorities who were criminally irresponsible, stupid and opportunistic in January and February up till today. In the future all of those who get it will be held against the governors who either never issued stay at home orders or lifted them too soon or did other things to help the virus spread and kill people.
The Republican Party, FOX, various right-wing pundits, the radio stations, TV stations, hosting services, etc who allowed them to spread their lies, the millionaires and billionaires who funded the phony new astro-turf demonstrations, the TV and radio that covered those as if they were large or significant so as to help them spread all have blood on their hands. They all deserve to be abolished and fined and sued into the flames of hell.
The Republican Party, FOX, various right-wing pundits, the radio stations, TV stations, hosting services, etc who allowed them to spread their lies, the millionaires and billionaires who funded the phony new astro-turf demonstrations, the TV and radio that covered those as if they were large or significant so as to help them spread all have blood on their hands. They all deserve to be abolished and fined and sued into the flames of hell.
Getting The Date Of An Anniversary Wrong
It might have been good that I never got the chance to marry the man I wanted to marry because I'm really terrible at remembering anniversaries. Though I think he'd have been as bad at that as I am. I'd thought the 10th of May was the date of the first blog post I posted but it was only the day that I put up my first blog, I didn't get the nerve to post to it for several days after. Not that I expect anyone would think that was a banner day in amateur publishing, I certainly don't which is why I probably don't bother to get the date right.
In deciding to no longer take comments here, comments which far more fill the spam file than are suitable for posting, I looked at the statistics that Blogger keeps on what I do here, don't know when the last time I looked at those was.
On this blog I've posted more than 9000 posts, most of which are actual writing by me but a fair few are videos and links to music and other things I've posted. It would be a very minor sort of fun to claim that I've written 10,000 pieces and I may have because the statistics show that I have more than 1,000 drafts that I never chose to post or got around to posting. I don't know how many posts are at my original blog because I lost control of its dashboard way back when either the e-mail I used then or Blogger changed something that I never figured out. I also don't know how many pieces I posted at Echidne of the Snakes when I was asked to be the weekend writer there, most of which I didn't cross post to my own blogs.
This little trip down a path you're probably not interested in, my memory lane - though when I look back there are things I don't remember having written - isn't going to end up begging you for money. At least not yet. I know the large majority of people are facing hard times, being from the blue collar class, brought up to constantly remember there are those worse off than I am, I'd encourage you to give to those people. That's the difference between someone like me and a white-collar, trust-fund type of blogger. I find blue-collar types are far less likely to expect someone to give them money than the rich are.
I've mentioned here before that in the theme I chose for my blogging, why the left so consistently lost out to conservatives, led me in a number of directions and to conclusions that I'd never have guessed I'd come to twenty years ago, even more so if I could go back to thinking the way I did forty years ago.
One of the things I've learned since I first went online and started reading the thinking of the non-journalist-non-writers of the college credentialed of the English speaking world and others is that modernism has in most cases devolved into the kind of adolescent mindset that you see on display in old Dr. Who scripts. At least the ones I watched from the 60s and 70s. I have no idea what they've been like since then. But also George Carlin's shtick, others who turned atheism into a substitute for substance.
Rather shockingly, the atheist mindset which loves to bill itself as "skeptical" and "rational" seldom applies those skillfully to ideas they oppose or to those they favor at all. Far from being an emblem of intellectual rigor and sophistication, I've come to conclude that "skepticism" which is really just a cover for atheist materialism is a certain sign of uncritical thinking, atheism as well, in so far as it become ideological and scientism an outright form of severe intellectual dishonesty.
Contrary to common credulity, they are also far more likely to lead to vulgar materialism than to actual, traditional American style liberalism. They are more likely to lead to juvenile libertarianism, another thing which is also wrongly associated with any liberalism worth caring about.
My exercise in personal nostalgia has also led me to look into the soon to be emptied spam files of this blog to see what issues I might have answered but didn't at the time. One of the recent ones mocking my series going through Hans Kung's thinking about the Resurrection and eternal life gleefully anticipates me, at the point of death, being enormously disappointed that I was wrong, that there is no God, that there was no Jesus and that when we die we rot back into the molecules that were the only real thing about us. Gleefully anticipating my horror, facing the void.
I could come up with a few incidents of that in C-level popular TV and movie scripting and novels rehearsing that atheist's glee, it's not one of the most often repeated and copied scenarios but it would seem to be one that atheists love to imagine.
My answer to that is that until we die we have no way to know that but it's clear that belief in God and an afterlife and in Jesus, too, affords fewer chances of being disappointed and if I will be disappointed in the way the atheist gleefully anticipates, it won't last for long.
But an atheist who holds that position doesn't seem to be able to imagine that he (it's generally a he, in my experience, men being more prone to shooting their mouths off) may as well have a surprise coming for him. He may at the point of death:
A. find that he fears his own possible extinction far more than he now pretends in his tough-guy, macho, cynical self image of his, usually, soft-handed, white-collared self. In which case he has as good a chance of being disappointed, dying in terror of his own imminent obliteration as anyone who believed in eternal life.
B. He may find that he was wrong and their is an afterlife which could lead to several opportunities for disappointment,
1. He may be humiliated for being such a chump of atheism his entire life, being cynical and arrogantly certain of possessing an intellectual correctness that was delusional.
2. He may not like the idea of eternal life,* especially if he finds that those who warned about eternal damnation or even a period of painful correction are in store. There are religious believers who would share in that disappointment, too, probably many who as stupidly believed in their virtue in this life as the atheist might in his intellectual superiority. But they didn't send me a spam to respond to.
3. He may hate heaven, all of that love and eternal being in God. Which will mean that he's made his own hell of it. The dope. Though if near death experiencers are right, it could certainly lead to an obliteration of their current selves - wouldn't they hate it if love conquers all, something I haven't thought of before because I don't lovingly dwell on anticipating their pain. I can't claim that about people like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Trump, Betsy de Vos, etc. I sort of wish there were a hell for someone like William Barr. Though I suspect I'll be disappointed.
I could go on. My point isn't that the atheist should live in trembling fear of either eternal damnation (don't believe in that myself but I suspect there is something more like purgatory which isn't something to hope for) or that they're going to have to put up with all of that love which they despise so much but my point is that the jerks should grow up and look as critically at their own claims as they demand others be looked at. I have never found an ideological atheist who did that. Not even someone as atypical as Stephen Jay Gould. They are as bad as the worst fundamentalists when it comes to facing the possibility that they are wrong.
When I wrote that first blog post about why liberals should stop allowing themselves to act to a standard that conservatives were never expected to, I never thought I'd spend so much of my time for the next 14 years criticizing atheism, secularism, anti-Christianity, Darwinism, multi-verse cosmology and other things like that. And modernism, in general, as bad as any reactionary demand that we return to the past. Modernism is as limited as those religious sects who want to remain in a lost past or which demand a return to one. Though these days they seldom have the same tendencies to violence and gangsterism that secular, materialistic, scientistic modernism does. I never thought I'd be going into that often but I have come to the conclusion that all of those contribute an enormous amount to why traditional American-style liberalism, a liberalism of egalitarian democracy, equally sharing in the good of life and the protection of the biological basis of life has failed so disastrously after the Warren Court took that modernist stand of moral even-handedness and allowed lies to flourish with impunity. I have come to the conclusion that the atheist scholar Jurgen Habermas did that Christianity, far from the Brit-atheist style pantomime entity, being a guaranteed reactionary force in opposition to freedom and equality and justice are, if not the exclusive source of that in terms of political life, its main source of sustenance. I certainly never expected to come to that conclusion early in May 2006 but that's what Ive found.
That's where 14 years of thinking hard about that has brought me.
* I do rather like the story of how, as he was dying at the age of 91, the Brit author Somerset Maugham asked one of the foremost atheist celebrities of the time A. J. Ayer, to come and reassure him that there was no afterlife. Ayer did so but apparently when Ayer almost choked to death when he was very old he had a near death experience that led him to tell the doctor who revived him that he was going to have to revise his life's work because he'd seen God. Though he later denied that the doctor steadfastly said that's what he told him and unlike Ayer, the doctor had nothing to lose by telling the truth about that. Reportedly his wife said Ayer was much less of a jerk after "he died" which is a common observation made about those who claim to have had a near death experience. I can imagine most of the atheists I have encountered, especially those online would just hate that with a passion. Being nice, that is.
Update: Anticipating someone being pissed off at the blasphemy against Dr. Who, I was thinking in particular of the character who cries out to Xoanon to save him before he dies. The Face of Evil written by the ideological atheist, Chris Boucher who is merely typical of the Brit atheist type who flourish in TV writing. Several of the Dr. Who writers I recall were of that type, Douglas Adams, certainly. It's rather funny how something that its adherents love to believe is a signal of intellectual superiority so frequently devolves into non-intellectual fandom. I liked those Dr. Who episodes 40 years ago but I grew out of them. Even the wonderful actor, the beauteous David Tennant couldn't bring me back to it.
In deciding to no longer take comments here, comments which far more fill the spam file than are suitable for posting, I looked at the statistics that Blogger keeps on what I do here, don't know when the last time I looked at those was.
On this blog I've posted more than 9000 posts, most of which are actual writing by me but a fair few are videos and links to music and other things I've posted. It would be a very minor sort of fun to claim that I've written 10,000 pieces and I may have because the statistics show that I have more than 1,000 drafts that I never chose to post or got around to posting. I don't know how many posts are at my original blog because I lost control of its dashboard way back when either the e-mail I used then or Blogger changed something that I never figured out. I also don't know how many pieces I posted at Echidne of the Snakes when I was asked to be the weekend writer there, most of which I didn't cross post to my own blogs.
This little trip down a path you're probably not interested in, my memory lane - though when I look back there are things I don't remember having written - isn't going to end up begging you for money. At least not yet. I know the large majority of people are facing hard times, being from the blue collar class, brought up to constantly remember there are those worse off than I am, I'd encourage you to give to those people. That's the difference between someone like me and a white-collar, trust-fund type of blogger. I find blue-collar types are far less likely to expect someone to give them money than the rich are.
I've mentioned here before that in the theme I chose for my blogging, why the left so consistently lost out to conservatives, led me in a number of directions and to conclusions that I'd never have guessed I'd come to twenty years ago, even more so if I could go back to thinking the way I did forty years ago.
One of the things I've learned since I first went online and started reading the thinking of the non-journalist-non-writers of the college credentialed of the English speaking world and others is that modernism has in most cases devolved into the kind of adolescent mindset that you see on display in old Dr. Who scripts. At least the ones I watched from the 60s and 70s. I have no idea what they've been like since then. But also George Carlin's shtick, others who turned atheism into a substitute for substance.
Rather shockingly, the atheist mindset which loves to bill itself as "skeptical" and "rational" seldom applies those skillfully to ideas they oppose or to those they favor at all. Far from being an emblem of intellectual rigor and sophistication, I've come to conclude that "skepticism" which is really just a cover for atheist materialism is a certain sign of uncritical thinking, atheism as well, in so far as it become ideological and scientism an outright form of severe intellectual dishonesty.
Contrary to common credulity, they are also far more likely to lead to vulgar materialism than to actual, traditional American style liberalism. They are more likely to lead to juvenile libertarianism, another thing which is also wrongly associated with any liberalism worth caring about.
My exercise in personal nostalgia has also led me to look into the soon to be emptied spam files of this blog to see what issues I might have answered but didn't at the time. One of the recent ones mocking my series going through Hans Kung's thinking about the Resurrection and eternal life gleefully anticipates me, at the point of death, being enormously disappointed that I was wrong, that there is no God, that there was no Jesus and that when we die we rot back into the molecules that were the only real thing about us. Gleefully anticipating my horror, facing the void.
I could come up with a few incidents of that in C-level popular TV and movie scripting and novels rehearsing that atheist's glee, it's not one of the most often repeated and copied scenarios but it would seem to be one that atheists love to imagine.
My answer to that is that until we die we have no way to know that but it's clear that belief in God and an afterlife and in Jesus, too, affords fewer chances of being disappointed and if I will be disappointed in the way the atheist gleefully anticipates, it won't last for long.
But an atheist who holds that position doesn't seem to be able to imagine that he (it's generally a he, in my experience, men being more prone to shooting their mouths off) may as well have a surprise coming for him. He may at the point of death:
A. find that he fears his own possible extinction far more than he now pretends in his tough-guy, macho, cynical self image of his, usually, soft-handed, white-collared self. In which case he has as good a chance of being disappointed, dying in terror of his own imminent obliteration as anyone who believed in eternal life.
B. He may find that he was wrong and their is an afterlife which could lead to several opportunities for disappointment,
1. He may be humiliated for being such a chump of atheism his entire life, being cynical and arrogantly certain of possessing an intellectual correctness that was delusional.
2. He may not like the idea of eternal life,* especially if he finds that those who warned about eternal damnation or even a period of painful correction are in store. There are religious believers who would share in that disappointment, too, probably many who as stupidly believed in their virtue in this life as the atheist might in his intellectual superiority. But they didn't send me a spam to respond to.
3. He may hate heaven, all of that love and eternal being in God. Which will mean that he's made his own hell of it. The dope. Though if near death experiencers are right, it could certainly lead to an obliteration of their current selves - wouldn't they hate it if love conquers all, something I haven't thought of before because I don't lovingly dwell on anticipating their pain. I can't claim that about people like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Trump, Betsy de Vos, etc. I sort of wish there were a hell for someone like William Barr. Though I suspect I'll be disappointed.
I could go on. My point isn't that the atheist should live in trembling fear of either eternal damnation (don't believe in that myself but I suspect there is something more like purgatory which isn't something to hope for) or that they're going to have to put up with all of that love which they despise so much but my point is that the jerks should grow up and look as critically at their own claims as they demand others be looked at. I have never found an ideological atheist who did that. Not even someone as atypical as Stephen Jay Gould. They are as bad as the worst fundamentalists when it comes to facing the possibility that they are wrong.
When I wrote that first blog post about why liberals should stop allowing themselves to act to a standard that conservatives were never expected to, I never thought I'd spend so much of my time for the next 14 years criticizing atheism, secularism, anti-Christianity, Darwinism, multi-verse cosmology and other things like that. And modernism, in general, as bad as any reactionary demand that we return to the past. Modernism is as limited as those religious sects who want to remain in a lost past or which demand a return to one. Though these days they seldom have the same tendencies to violence and gangsterism that secular, materialistic, scientistic modernism does. I never thought I'd be going into that often but I have come to the conclusion that all of those contribute an enormous amount to why traditional American-style liberalism, a liberalism of egalitarian democracy, equally sharing in the good of life and the protection of the biological basis of life has failed so disastrously after the Warren Court took that modernist stand of moral even-handedness and allowed lies to flourish with impunity. I have come to the conclusion that the atheist scholar Jurgen Habermas did that Christianity, far from the Brit-atheist style pantomime entity, being a guaranteed reactionary force in opposition to freedom and equality and justice are, if not the exclusive source of that in terms of political life, its main source of sustenance. I certainly never expected to come to that conclusion early in May 2006 but that's what Ive found.
That's where 14 years of thinking hard about that has brought me.
* I do rather like the story of how, as he was dying at the age of 91, the Brit author Somerset Maugham asked one of the foremost atheist celebrities of the time A. J. Ayer, to come and reassure him that there was no afterlife. Ayer did so but apparently when Ayer almost choked to death when he was very old he had a near death experience that led him to tell the doctor who revived him that he was going to have to revise his life's work because he'd seen God. Though he later denied that the doctor steadfastly said that's what he told him and unlike Ayer, the doctor had nothing to lose by telling the truth about that. Reportedly his wife said Ayer was much less of a jerk after "he died" which is a common observation made about those who claim to have had a near death experience. I can imagine most of the atheists I have encountered, especially those online would just hate that with a passion. Being nice, that is.
Update: Anticipating someone being pissed off at the blasphemy against Dr. Who, I was thinking in particular of the character who cries out to Xoanon to save him before he dies. The Face of Evil written by the ideological atheist, Chris Boucher who is merely typical of the Brit atheist type who flourish in TV writing. Several of the Dr. Who writers I recall were of that type, Douglas Adams, certainly. It's rather funny how something that its adherents love to believe is a signal of intellectual superiority so frequently devolves into non-intellectual fandom. I liked those Dr. Who episodes 40 years ago but I grew out of them. Even the wonderful actor, the beauteous David Tennant couldn't bring me back to it.