In lieu of posting a single drama I'm posting a link to the Hear Now Festival's 2020 Podcast Palooza with a large number of contenders for their prizes. Lots to choose from, lots to enjoy.
Saturday, June 27, 2020
Blackballed By The Blacklisted For The Sin Of Finding Determinacy
Quantum physics, like all of modern physics, is written in mathematical language that is way beyond what I can understand so, like just about everyone else, I am left dependent on the descriptions of it and its consequences as doled out by those who do know that language. And it is almost inevitable that anyone who does that has a personal self-interest involved in it.
I listened to this dialogue between the great biologist Rupert Sheldrake and one of his many lucky partners in dialogue, Mark Vernon with some understanding though I certainly have never read David Bohm's theory or much of what it flew in the face of in more conventionally acceptable interpretations of quantum mechanics but there are several issues that are relevant to things I've said here, mostly in regard to the atheist-materialist-scientistic god of random-chance and the insistence on indeterminacy and, if their atheist god were ever to be expressed in a trinitarian theory, the stupidity of nature.
I have read a very, very little about how his former mentor the atheist-secular saint of the play-left, Robert Oppenheimer got freaked out over the work of his student when some of his equations more than arrived at an implication of determinacy behind the workings of nature, so much so that he said, "If we cannot disprove Bohm, we must agree to ignore him." And he was hardly alone among eminent physicists, men of science, those who presented themselves as fearless followers of the truth no matter where the evidence brought them.
I wish I knew enough to be able to look into another famous statement about Bohm's theory and the setting of post-war physics in which it lay like a piece of sand in an oyster (perhaps) that of the iconoclastic critic as well as friend of science, Paul Feyerabend, in a quote that can be found in truncated form all over the internet.
The fact . . . that Bohm’s model was pushed aside while all sorts of weird ideas flourished is very interesting, and I hope that one fine day a historian or sociologist of science takes a close look at the matter.
Paul Feyerabend, 1993; letter to David Peat
I would assume that among the weird ideas that so flourished were the many varieties of multi-verse scenarios which I think are one of the most certain products of the decadence that science came to because of the materialist-atheist-scientistic ideological commitments of its main figures. The motive behind much of it has been, in fact, to prop up that ideological framing which made anything that implied determinacy poison to it. I have often quoted the biologist, one of the few dedicated materailist-atheists though not a devotee of scientism, Richard Lewontin saying that they chose to not let anything in that could be like the camel getting its nose under the tent to protect their ideological commitments.
I especially appreciate that Sheldrake, who seems to have known David Bohm personally and rather well, is critical of his determined avoidance of philosophy, as, in fact, Paul Feyerabend said had become common among eminent scientists of the post-war period. Even a figure who you want to praise will have his flaws. I wonder if the requirements of modern physics have become so stiff, if the learning curve has not become so steep that it is almost a guarantee of not having the time to learn much about such things, though a number of those who express such a disdain for philosophy have no problem with mastering some massively unserious and unimportant features of commercial pop-culture and celebrity. I think it's possible that the hatred of philosophy has similar motives to their hatred of religion, that it might challenge their ideological commitments which are, in turn, a reflection of their own personal preferences and hatreds. Not to mention what is de rigueur in their chosen milieu of academic and cultural life. I wonder if he were around, if Bohm would get on the talk and late-night shows. But I don't wonder hard.
And, considering what Sheldrake and Vernon discuss of Bohm's involvement with him, I will say there was a brief period when I read a bit of J. Krishnamurti's stuff and quickly stopped bothering with it because it just went in circles, not committing itself to anything except the unremarkable idea that you had to think for yourself. I don't know how that was something that escaped anyone's notice though it seems to be considered a remarkable idea, especially to many devotees of "eastern wisdom". I can't understand why anyone would remain committed to Krishnamurti unless they had a deep seated fear of making a commitment, ironically, enough. I was young and I will admit that the guy who tried to interest me in it was good looking. The relationship didn't go anywhere. I have no idea what he's up to now if he's still around.
I listened to this dialogue between the great biologist Rupert Sheldrake and one of his many lucky partners in dialogue, Mark Vernon with some understanding though I certainly have never read David Bohm's theory or much of what it flew in the face of in more conventionally acceptable interpretations of quantum mechanics but there are several issues that are relevant to things I've said here, mostly in regard to the atheist-materialist-scientistic god of random-chance and the insistence on indeterminacy and, if their atheist god were ever to be expressed in a trinitarian theory, the stupidity of nature.
I have read a very, very little about how his former mentor the atheist-secular saint of the play-left, Robert Oppenheimer got freaked out over the work of his student when some of his equations more than arrived at an implication of determinacy behind the workings of nature, so much so that he said, "If we cannot disprove Bohm, we must agree to ignore him." And he was hardly alone among eminent physicists, men of science, those who presented themselves as fearless followers of the truth no matter where the evidence brought them.
I wish I knew enough to be able to look into another famous statement about Bohm's theory and the setting of post-war physics in which it lay like a piece of sand in an oyster (perhaps) that of the iconoclastic critic as well as friend of science, Paul Feyerabend, in a quote that can be found in truncated form all over the internet.
The fact . . . that Bohm’s model was pushed aside while all sorts of weird ideas flourished is very interesting, and I hope that one fine day a historian or sociologist of science takes a close look at the matter.
Paul Feyerabend, 1993; letter to David Peat
I would assume that among the weird ideas that so flourished were the many varieties of multi-verse scenarios which I think are one of the most certain products of the decadence that science came to because of the materialist-atheist-scientistic ideological commitments of its main figures. The motive behind much of it has been, in fact, to prop up that ideological framing which made anything that implied determinacy poison to it. I have often quoted the biologist, one of the few dedicated materailist-atheists though not a devotee of scientism, Richard Lewontin saying that they chose to not let anything in that could be like the camel getting its nose under the tent to protect their ideological commitments.
I especially appreciate that Sheldrake, who seems to have known David Bohm personally and rather well, is critical of his determined avoidance of philosophy, as, in fact, Paul Feyerabend said had become common among eminent scientists of the post-war period. Even a figure who you want to praise will have his flaws. I wonder if the requirements of modern physics have become so stiff, if the learning curve has not become so steep that it is almost a guarantee of not having the time to learn much about such things, though a number of those who express such a disdain for philosophy have no problem with mastering some massively unserious and unimportant features of commercial pop-culture and celebrity. I think it's possible that the hatred of philosophy has similar motives to their hatred of religion, that it might challenge their ideological commitments which are, in turn, a reflection of their own personal preferences and hatreds. Not to mention what is de rigueur in their chosen milieu of academic and cultural life. I wonder if he were around, if Bohm would get on the talk and late-night shows. But I don't wonder hard.
And, considering what Sheldrake and Vernon discuss of Bohm's involvement with him, I will say there was a brief period when I read a bit of J. Krishnamurti's stuff and quickly stopped bothering with it because it just went in circles, not committing itself to anything except the unremarkable idea that you had to think for yourself. I don't know how that was something that escaped anyone's notice though it seems to be considered a remarkable idea, especially to many devotees of "eastern wisdom". I can't understand why anyone would remain committed to Krishnamurti unless they had a deep seated fear of making a commitment, ironically, enough. I was young and I will admit that the guy who tried to interest me in it was good looking. The relationship didn't go anywhere. I have no idea what he's up to now if he's still around.
When You Privilege Lies, People Die
Seeing the early non-response of the "red states" to the Covid 19 and that of the Trump crime regime and how that is, as was predicted, coming back to bite hard and mercilessly, I'm at a loss to how anyone could doubt the danger of lies freely told and transmitted through the mass media and how the judicial system cannot be allowed to aid and abet political and other lies without this being the result. What is happening in Florida, Texas, etc. is a direct result of the law of the United States permitting lies to be told by and through the "free press". Trump is a product of that media spreading lies.
The promotion of irresponsibility and selfishness, the core message of modern American conservatism was a permission granted to the mass media by the courts using the language of the First Amendment. That those lines are vague and don't account for the use of them by those of not only no morals but bad morals who gain power is only one of the hard truths about the defects built into the American Constitution and how in the United States - as probably everywhere - the legal profession benefits by telling the rich and amoral how to rig such language to allow them to do the most unjust and terrible things. Trump's life is the story of a rich creep whose lawyers and judges allowed him to constantly get away with things using the language of the American law held to conform to the Constitution. Whatever depravity that is allowed to stand as law in the United States must be held to be a result of a defect in that sacrosanct document. Even that we are afraid to change it for fear of billionaires and millionaires queering the process of reform through the Free Press in its deregulated mass media electonic form is a result of the Madisonian poetry of the First Amendment.
Democracy is going to depend on a rewrite. Probably Congress taking back the ability the Supreme Court granted itself in Marbury v Madison, too. Ironic isn't it that "Jemmy" Madison was one of the first people who must have regretted some of the language they put into the Constitution. I'll bet that slavery enabler wished they'd been more specific about the role and powers of the Supreme Court the day that ruling came down.
The promotion of irresponsibility and selfishness, the core message of modern American conservatism was a permission granted to the mass media by the courts using the language of the First Amendment. That those lines are vague and don't account for the use of them by those of not only no morals but bad morals who gain power is only one of the hard truths about the defects built into the American Constitution and how in the United States - as probably everywhere - the legal profession benefits by telling the rich and amoral how to rig such language to allow them to do the most unjust and terrible things. Trump's life is the story of a rich creep whose lawyers and judges allowed him to constantly get away with things using the language of the American law held to conform to the Constitution. Whatever depravity that is allowed to stand as law in the United States must be held to be a result of a defect in that sacrosanct document. Even that we are afraid to change it for fear of billionaires and millionaires queering the process of reform through the Free Press in its deregulated mass media electonic form is a result of the Madisonian poetry of the First Amendment.
Democracy is going to depend on a rewrite. Probably Congress taking back the ability the Supreme Court granted itself in Marbury v Madison, too. Ironic isn't it that "Jemmy" Madison was one of the first people who must have regretted some of the language they put into the Constitution. I'll bet that slavery enabler wished they'd been more specific about the role and powers of the Supreme Court the day that ruling came down.
Correction And Mocking Those Who Would Walk In The Footsteps of Bruno
I have gone through yesterday's post and corrected a quote I got wrong, I had to go digging for the video on which I saw it which is the problem of quoting people through transcription - there is no word-search function for audio that I'm aware of. As well as several other points.
Re-reading it for corrections, I left out two of the biggest reasons I think the criticism and debunkery racket is generally considered to be above criticism, other than the inefficiency of fact checking in the ink on paper era. I think one of those is the thing farthest from the truth, that such debunkery presents the best facts out of the diligence of the critic or debunker which is ironic when it is generally the shallowest of intellectual endeavors. It is a rare critic, as such, who is as careful as the constructive quasi or genuine scholar of a subject. I have said that in the period since I started reading theology that it has astonished me how many of them, and not only in the modern era, are among the most careful, the most wide reaching the most even handed and fair minded of academic writers I'm aware of. Hans Kung is only one of many such modern scholars and he is carrying on what is a long tradition of such expansive breath, depth of scope and rigorous and fair consideration of his intellectual opponents.
Related to the misrepresentation of the debunkery of modern criticism as rigorous scholars is the cowardice that is the most common response to a bully, which is the general character of these big, bold, iconoclasts who present themselves as brave in the footsteps of Giordano Bruno when they are not only in absolutely no danger from the modern establishment or even, really, from religious fanatics, they generally have great expectations of profiting from their writing, maybe even getting a teaching gig out of it, talk show invitations, at least. I think the force of cowardice should never be ignored in the culture of modernism which is generally the merely credentialed gulling the gullible that they are the biggest, boldest trash talkers there are. Much of the method of any era's peddlers of words and ideas is related to the kind of PR that is not unknown in the phony illusion of American or Japanese pro-wrestling. Only it's physically less rigorous and even less likely to injure those applying merely words of violence.
I have to say I read with pleasure Marilynne Robinson's take down of John Spong, who I've always thought was a jerk. I should mention that one of the reasons for the influence of the debunkery bunch is that it's a lot easier and breezier to read than real scholarship. It's easy, one of the greatest motives in corruption that plagues popular culture.
Re-reading it for corrections, I left out two of the biggest reasons I think the criticism and debunkery racket is generally considered to be above criticism, other than the inefficiency of fact checking in the ink on paper era. I think one of those is the thing farthest from the truth, that such debunkery presents the best facts out of the diligence of the critic or debunker which is ironic when it is generally the shallowest of intellectual endeavors. It is a rare critic, as such, who is as careful as the constructive quasi or genuine scholar of a subject. I have said that in the period since I started reading theology that it has astonished me how many of them, and not only in the modern era, are among the most careful, the most wide reaching the most even handed and fair minded of academic writers I'm aware of. Hans Kung is only one of many such modern scholars and he is carrying on what is a long tradition of such expansive breath, depth of scope and rigorous and fair consideration of his intellectual opponents.
Related to the misrepresentation of the debunkery of modern criticism as rigorous scholars is the cowardice that is the most common response to a bully, which is the general character of these big, bold, iconoclasts who present themselves as brave in the footsteps of Giordano Bruno when they are not only in absolutely no danger from the modern establishment or even, really, from religious fanatics, they generally have great expectations of profiting from their writing, maybe even getting a teaching gig out of it, talk show invitations, at least. I think the force of cowardice should never be ignored in the culture of modernism which is generally the merely credentialed gulling the gullible that they are the biggest, boldest trash talkers there are. Much of the method of any era's peddlers of words and ideas is related to the kind of PR that is not unknown in the phony illusion of American or Japanese pro-wrestling. Only it's physically less rigorous and even less likely to injure those applying merely words of violence.
I have to say I read with pleasure Marilynne Robinson's take down of John Spong, who I've always thought was a jerk. I should mention that one of the reasons for the influence of the debunkery bunch is that it's a lot easier and breezier to read than real scholarship. It's easy, one of the greatest motives in corruption that plagues popular culture.
Friday, June 26, 2020
After Re-Reading The Fate Of Ideas
Once you step out of the various ideological framings of reality, which we are presented for our adoption by the "failed project" of modern thought - I agree with that assessment of it as failed by Marilynne Robinson - you can see a lot of things that you won't see if you remain in them. One of the things you see is that though they present themselves in opposition to each other, even "dialectical" opposition, they share the same motivation if not point of view which make all of them toxic and all of them hostile to The Law, the Prophets, The Gospel of Jesus, The Letters of Paul and, I'd say especially James, and the various other parts of the Scriptures and to the religions that try to express those.
One of the most interesting proofs of the hypocrisy of the secularists who love to hate on the Old Testament is that in almost every other case of them waxing in theatrical outrage over the ancient wrongs of the Children of Israel, ascribed to the commands of the God who has become a cartoon in the secular non-reading or, more typically, shallow skimming of those old and very knotty texts, will inevitably excuse similar and far greater records of wrong done by contemporary forces and governments. That Biblican Fundamentalism shares the same cartoon image of God and the modern conception of how to read a text for literal meaning betrays the fact that Fundamentalism is, as well, a product of modernism.
Some specimens of the various ideological framings:
- A Richard Dawkins type will minimize the horrors wrought by the theory of natural selection, something which the eminent biologist of a century ago, a convinced Darwinist, himself, Vernon Kellogg warned of as he heard his scientific colleagues in the German military give that for their already rather developed plans for conquest, dominance and disposal of those lesser than them. What he learned from his pacifist mission to talk to the Germans before the US entered World War One, turned him from a pacifist to someone who said that that was something which it was inevitable we would have to go to war against. And, I'll remind you, that hadn't turned into Nazism until after World War One had ended. It is the major intellectual force which Hitler's second in command said Nazism was merely an application of when he declared National Socialism was "applied science, nothing else." Dawkins and a number of his neo-atheist colleagues are rather warm to the notion of eugenics, something which will be a recurring danger as long as natural selection is the required framing in which to think about evolution.
- A secular capitalist or, in fact, one who professes religious belief - will totally overlook the horrific violence done by capitalists, those not designated as capitalist, those who are, those who claim to do so from "democratic" countries, discrediting a good which they never had any intention of ever allowing to exist. A Christopher Hitchens will go from being a Trotskyite to being a neo-con, supporting the Bush - Cheney crime family disaster of the invasion of Iraq, overthrowing a secular despot and plunging the region into a regime of violence and upheaval which will be killing and maiming people, providing opportunities for terrorists and other thugs to gain power and impose gangster governance that makes Saddam Hussein's crime regime look relatively benign, it wasn't but what has succeeded it has been far worse.
- Most ironic of all are those secular, anti-religious Zionists who will join in the general modernist mockery and slamming of the Old Testament for the claimed subduing of the inhabitants of the lands Israel was established on thousands of years ago even as they will do anything to protect the present Israeli government from criticism for reenacting those things confessed to in the ancient Scriptures.
I have little doubt that some of the accounts of the wiping out of peoples by the Children of Israel are told with the typical exaggeration of such ancient accounts, perhaps especially around the Mediterranean, just as I have no doubt that God didn't need to tell any kings or local potentates to war against their enemies, people are all too able to do that all on their own informed of nothing more remote from their attention as their own perceived self-interest. I have every confidence that the present day reporting of the crimes against the Palestinians of the secular Israeli government, its other crimes are more reliably taken as accurate. One of the few things I appreciate about modern culture are those rare instances where facts get checked and reported fairly, not that that isn't always easy to separate from propaganda. If you have to read the present day record carefully and, often, not thinking that things are as they say on the surface, reading the Scripture accounts of such things is even less reliably done as if they are reporting an unvarnished accurate record of the facts.
- And there is that other great category of the Marxists who have supported some of the bloodiest. most oppressive, most murderous and enslaving regimes in human history, knowing how their favorite Communist regime, their heroes, were oppressing and murdering, at times issuing manifestos and letters of support for show trials, executions even of their fellow Communists, their fellow writers or artists or academics, even their fellow scientists - the non-famous victims in their millions and tens of millions known but not much considered to count among the generally elite or at least college-credentialed Marxist champions of "the workers" "The Masses".
I was never a Communist but I was their dupe which is one of the reasons I have such unending contempt for them. It wasn't until I realized that to reject them and oppose them was not to accept their "other side" that I could really be free of that stupid habit cultivated as "anti-anti-communism". I could be anti-the antis for their own, particular evils. I should note the irony that some of those Commies pose as champions of the Palestinians, who I pity if they are so desperate that they might accept that bunch of bumbling hypocrites professed support of them.
Those are only a few of the major framings of modernism, each of them could certainly be listed with subheadings and you might find exceptions to most of them, though not all of them. Nazis, white supremacists never come in any variety except murderous, racist, homicidal evil.
It can be pointed out that the crimes of the Children of Israel, of Christians, of Muslims are generally opposed by major statements of morality contained in their Scriptures, you can't say the same thing about the foundations of modern secularism for the most part, especially the more developed parts of modernist thought. Modernism, as it develops, tends to go from the morally relative to the morally depraved to the homicidal. The luke-warm "socialism" of Fabianism was capacious enough to contain the proto-Nazi antisemtism and hatred of the disabled and congenitally ill of Karl Pearson to the early calls by another of its stars, George Bernard Shaw, even before the Nazis existed before Stalin or even Lenin came to power, to advocate constructing and using the gas chambers the Nazis did to dispatch many of the same categories of people they would going on in Shaw's lifetime to his open and flagrant adoration of Hitler and Stalin praising their murderous brutality in terms of economic efficency even as they were engaged in murdering people - still being produced as a daring and fashionable figure in the latest thing, a hero to many a bright young thing as he wrote exactly what I just said he said.
It is one of the more tellingly strange things about modernism that even someone like Shaw is to be taken as a normal, respectable figure within it, others who are even more obviously a friend of if not an actual collaborator with even the Hitler and Stalin regimes, or Mao's later can be quite respectable. That is true while someone who believes in, for example, the Resurrection of Jesus will be considered quite outré.
I respect the Jewish tradition of which Christianity and Islam are certainly a part. I have come to see that it has been the primary force in producing that other strain in contemporary thought that leads to egalitarianism and real democracy and whatever measure of decency we are ever to achieve as a society. I can see no other competing candidate for having produced what of it that we have or, perhaps, had than that. That it comes from a people enormously self-conscious of themselves as escapees from slavery, saved from that by divine help is not shocking to anyone seeing the general character of Black Americans. As one outraged woman said in the wake of the George Floyd murder, "White people are lucky that we want equality, not revenge."
I think huge parts of the Old Testament are confessions of crimes and wrongs and shortcomings - especially short comings in the wake of them receiving The Law that they and their governments found difficult to keep - and I think that huge parts of that confessional history are done in some of the most impressive self-criticism I'm aware of in any large collection of writings or in any culture.
I trust the Jewish prophetic tradition far more than I trust modernism, an impressive number of modernism's major figures - people in the arts, in literature, in popular culture, in academic and legal and political life who we were all taught to respect - were supporters of fascism, Nazism and Marxim even as they were known to be piling up mountains of bodies in their scientific regimes. And the atheist haters of the Jewish tradition were some of those most enthusiastic in their support of those well-documented murders.
And I think that most of what maintains that among people who are not supposed to be vulgar materialists looking for personal gain is the kind of learned respectability that is expected of people to maintain their place in the better ranks of life, academia, the media, among those in daily life who have bought into that on an unthinking level and those who merely sense that they'd better go along with it if they want what's good for them. I think there is no one around who has a deeper feeling for that than Marilynne Robinson as can be read in the first paragraphs of that article which I linked to yesterday. If you haven't read it, you really are missing out on a spectacular experience. Notice her critique of criticism and its sacrosanct position that we have been suckered into granting it. I think a lot of that was due to fact checking in paper-based culture to be difficult when not impossible. I'm hoping a lot of that fades as paper gives way to computer and internet based scholarship where documents can be easily had and searched and used. Even the Bible which so few have actually read along with the commentaries on it. I've learned an enormous amount that modernism wasn't about to tell me, it has astonished me how much of what I was never told was known in, for example. the 4th century. Modernism is hardly an advance of the kind we were sold it as being.
One of the most interesting proofs of the hypocrisy of the secularists who love to hate on the Old Testament is that in almost every other case of them waxing in theatrical outrage over the ancient wrongs of the Children of Israel, ascribed to the commands of the God who has become a cartoon in the secular non-reading or, more typically, shallow skimming of those old and very knotty texts, will inevitably excuse similar and far greater records of wrong done by contemporary forces and governments. That Biblican Fundamentalism shares the same cartoon image of God and the modern conception of how to read a text for literal meaning betrays the fact that Fundamentalism is, as well, a product of modernism.
Some specimens of the various ideological framings:
- A Richard Dawkins type will minimize the horrors wrought by the theory of natural selection, something which the eminent biologist of a century ago, a convinced Darwinist, himself, Vernon Kellogg warned of as he heard his scientific colleagues in the German military give that for their already rather developed plans for conquest, dominance and disposal of those lesser than them. What he learned from his pacifist mission to talk to the Germans before the US entered World War One, turned him from a pacifist to someone who said that that was something which it was inevitable we would have to go to war against. And, I'll remind you, that hadn't turned into Nazism until after World War One had ended. It is the major intellectual force which Hitler's second in command said Nazism was merely an application of when he declared National Socialism was "applied science, nothing else." Dawkins and a number of his neo-atheist colleagues are rather warm to the notion of eugenics, something which will be a recurring danger as long as natural selection is the required framing in which to think about evolution.
- A secular capitalist or, in fact, one who professes religious belief - will totally overlook the horrific violence done by capitalists, those not designated as capitalist, those who are, those who claim to do so from "democratic" countries, discrediting a good which they never had any intention of ever allowing to exist. A Christopher Hitchens will go from being a Trotskyite to being a neo-con, supporting the Bush - Cheney crime family disaster of the invasion of Iraq, overthrowing a secular despot and plunging the region into a regime of violence and upheaval which will be killing and maiming people, providing opportunities for terrorists and other thugs to gain power and impose gangster governance that makes Saddam Hussein's crime regime look relatively benign, it wasn't but what has succeeded it has been far worse.
- Most ironic of all are those secular, anti-religious Zionists who will join in the general modernist mockery and slamming of the Old Testament for the claimed subduing of the inhabitants of the lands Israel was established on thousands of years ago even as they will do anything to protect the present Israeli government from criticism for reenacting those things confessed to in the ancient Scriptures.
I have little doubt that some of the accounts of the wiping out of peoples by the Children of Israel are told with the typical exaggeration of such ancient accounts, perhaps especially around the Mediterranean, just as I have no doubt that God didn't need to tell any kings or local potentates to war against their enemies, people are all too able to do that all on their own informed of nothing more remote from their attention as their own perceived self-interest. I have every confidence that the present day reporting of the crimes against the Palestinians of the secular Israeli government, its other crimes are more reliably taken as accurate. One of the few things I appreciate about modern culture are those rare instances where facts get checked and reported fairly, not that that isn't always easy to separate from propaganda. If you have to read the present day record carefully and, often, not thinking that things are as they say on the surface, reading the Scripture accounts of such things is even less reliably done as if they are reporting an unvarnished accurate record of the facts.
- And there is that other great category of the Marxists who have supported some of the bloodiest. most oppressive, most murderous and enslaving regimes in human history, knowing how their favorite Communist regime, their heroes, were oppressing and murdering, at times issuing manifestos and letters of support for show trials, executions even of their fellow Communists, their fellow writers or artists or academics, even their fellow scientists - the non-famous victims in their millions and tens of millions known but not much considered to count among the generally elite or at least college-credentialed Marxist champions of "the workers" "The Masses".
I was never a Communist but I was their dupe which is one of the reasons I have such unending contempt for them. It wasn't until I realized that to reject them and oppose them was not to accept their "other side" that I could really be free of that stupid habit cultivated as "anti-anti-communism". I could be anti-the antis for their own, particular evils. I should note the irony that some of those Commies pose as champions of the Palestinians, who I pity if they are so desperate that they might accept that bunch of bumbling hypocrites professed support of them.
Those are only a few of the major framings of modernism, each of them could certainly be listed with subheadings and you might find exceptions to most of them, though not all of them. Nazis, white supremacists never come in any variety except murderous, racist, homicidal evil.
It can be pointed out that the crimes of the Children of Israel, of Christians, of Muslims are generally opposed by major statements of morality contained in their Scriptures, you can't say the same thing about the foundations of modern secularism for the most part, especially the more developed parts of modernist thought. Modernism, as it develops, tends to go from the morally relative to the morally depraved to the homicidal. The luke-warm "socialism" of Fabianism was capacious enough to contain the proto-Nazi antisemtism and hatred of the disabled and congenitally ill of Karl Pearson to the early calls by another of its stars, George Bernard Shaw, even before the Nazis existed before Stalin or even Lenin came to power, to advocate constructing and using the gas chambers the Nazis did to dispatch many of the same categories of people they would going on in Shaw's lifetime to his open and flagrant adoration of Hitler and Stalin praising their murderous brutality in terms of economic efficency even as they were engaged in murdering people - still being produced as a daring and fashionable figure in the latest thing, a hero to many a bright young thing as he wrote exactly what I just said he said.
It is one of the more tellingly strange things about modernism that even someone like Shaw is to be taken as a normal, respectable figure within it, others who are even more obviously a friend of if not an actual collaborator with even the Hitler and Stalin regimes, or Mao's later can be quite respectable. That is true while someone who believes in, for example, the Resurrection of Jesus will be considered quite outré.
I respect the Jewish tradition of which Christianity and Islam are certainly a part. I have come to see that it has been the primary force in producing that other strain in contemporary thought that leads to egalitarianism and real democracy and whatever measure of decency we are ever to achieve as a society. I can see no other competing candidate for having produced what of it that we have or, perhaps, had than that. That it comes from a people enormously self-conscious of themselves as escapees from slavery, saved from that by divine help is not shocking to anyone seeing the general character of Black Americans. As one outraged woman said in the wake of the George Floyd murder, "White people are lucky that we want equality, not revenge."
I think huge parts of the Old Testament are confessions of crimes and wrongs and shortcomings - especially short comings in the wake of them receiving The Law that they and their governments found difficult to keep - and I think that huge parts of that confessional history are done in some of the most impressive self-criticism I'm aware of in any large collection of writings or in any culture.
I trust the Jewish prophetic tradition far more than I trust modernism, an impressive number of modernism's major figures - people in the arts, in literature, in popular culture, in academic and legal and political life who we were all taught to respect - were supporters of fascism, Nazism and Marxim even as they were known to be piling up mountains of bodies in their scientific regimes. And the atheist haters of the Jewish tradition were some of those most enthusiastic in their support of those well-documented murders.
And I think that most of what maintains that among people who are not supposed to be vulgar materialists looking for personal gain is the kind of learned respectability that is expected of people to maintain their place in the better ranks of life, academia, the media, among those in daily life who have bought into that on an unthinking level and those who merely sense that they'd better go along with it if they want what's good for them. I think there is no one around who has a deeper feeling for that than Marilynne Robinson as can be read in the first paragraphs of that article which I linked to yesterday. If you haven't read it, you really are missing out on a spectacular experience. Notice her critique of criticism and its sacrosanct position that we have been suckered into granting it. I think a lot of that was due to fact checking in paper-based culture to be difficult when not impossible. I'm hoping a lot of that fades as paper gives way to computer and internet based scholarship where documents can be easily had and searched and used. Even the Bible which so few have actually read along with the commentaries on it. I've learned an enormous amount that modernism wasn't about to tell me, it has astonished me how much of what I was never told was known in, for example. the 4th century. Modernism is hardly an advance of the kind we were sold it as being.
An Explanation
It is coming clear to me that I need to explain that for a while now I have had a medical condition that is going to eventually lead me to stop this, Unanticipated extraordinary events not withstanding. This year it has taken a turn for the worse and it could not have happened at a worse time, the time of pandemic criminal irresponsibility and other Republican-fascist crises. That is why there has been a lapse in the writing the past few weeks. It has, perhaps, also made me a little cranky. Though, perhaps, I was not entirely lacking crank before.
For politicians, judges, legislators, bureaucrats, especially those who work in the executive branch, there should be a felony of criminal irresponsibility that is more uniformly severe and precisian in its application to the people who want such power. There will have to be a special part of government created, a special court which is apart from the other one, with an absolute wall between them - no good buddies such as William Barr's good buddy Robert Mueller can be allowed in it - charged with its application because, given things like those right-wing judges trying, perhaps succeeding in giving Barr and Trump what they want in throwing Flynn's conviction out the window, I don't trust the American legal system at all. The fascists have succeeded in corrupting the courts and the Supreme Court, they can't be trusted to deliver even uneven justice - doing worse than that injustice will increasingly something which we will either deal with or be tyrannized through.
For politicians, judges, legislators, bureaucrats, especially those who work in the executive branch, there should be a felony of criminal irresponsibility that is more uniformly severe and precisian in its application to the people who want such power. There will have to be a special part of government created, a special court which is apart from the other one, with an absolute wall between them - no good buddies such as William Barr's good buddy Robert Mueller can be allowed in it - charged with its application because, given things like those right-wing judges trying, perhaps succeeding in giving Barr and Trump what they want in throwing Flynn's conviction out the window, I don't trust the American legal system at all. The fascists have succeeded in corrupting the courts and the Supreme Court, they can't be trusted to deliver even uneven justice - doing worse than that injustice will increasingly something which we will either deal with or be tyrannized through.
Thursday, June 25, 2020
The Motive Of Privilege And Snobbery In The Rejection Of The Jewish Tradition, Both As Judaism And Christianity
Continuing on with the three ways Hans Kung listed as to "how far love goes particularly in ordinary life" as taught by Jesus:
b. Love means service; humility, having the courage to serve,is the way to true greatness. This is the meaning of the parable of the wedding feast; abasement follows self-exaltation - the embarrassment of demotion - and exaltation follows self-abasement - the honor of promotion.
It is typical of Jesus to demand self-denying service, regardless of rank. It is significant that the same saying of Jesus on service is recorded in a variety of forms (at the dispute among the disciples, at the Last Supper, at the feet-washing): the highest should be the servant (waiter at table) of all. Hence, among Jesus' disciples, there can be no offices as established merely by law and power and corresponding to the office of those who hold power in the state; nor can tere be an office established simply on the basis of knowledge or worth, corresponding to the office of the scribes.
Jesus' requirement of service is not to be understood as a law forbidding any super- or subordination among his followers. It is however a decisive appeal for service even on the part of superiors toward subordinates, that is, for reciprocal services on the part of all.
It has been one of the most useful means of understanding of the modernist hostility to Christianity to consider that modernism is a product of an educated elite, either those born to wealth and, so, power or those who hoped to gain it through education and credentialing, that such people are generally not very open to sharing their resources and power, held by them as privileges of rank and legalized hoarding with those without wealth, talent or luck, even when those people need what is so hoarded to live a decent life or even a miserable one. I think that, certainly more than the spotty history of official, organized churches, political-legal establishments doing terrible things accounts for the hostility towards Christianity as the teachings of Jesus. There is some hostility that arises out of the animosity of some Jews in academia and the writing professions due to their traditional rejection of the messianic theory of the identity of Jesus. But in my experience believing, observant Jews are generally far less hostile to Christianity than those who have, as well, rejected the religion of Judaism. I think that rejection of the radical egalitarianism of the Mosaic law, of which the interpretation of it by Jesus is the most radical of all interpretations of it, among such secularized Jews is exactly the same manifestation as the rejection of Christianity by the secular descendants of professed Christians under modernism, due to similar rejections of the egalitarianism of both forms of Mosaic economic, social and personal justice. It is no accident that the Christianity so mocked and rejected accounts for, by far, the largest percentage of the human population who take the Jewish Law seriously. I think it is also no accident that the professed Christian rejection of Moses, documented so brilliantly and analyzed so well by Marilynne Robinson in her great essay The Fate of Ideas: Moses, is done under the corroding effects of modernist academic culture.
In fact, she wrote it so well that instead of continuing with this today, I am going to recommend you follow that link and read it, instead. I would, as well, recommend the wonderfully insightful treatment of Christianity and particularly Paul by the great Jewish scholar Susanna Heschel. I will continue with this tomorrow, if I am able.
b. Love means service; humility, having the courage to serve,is the way to true greatness. This is the meaning of the parable of the wedding feast; abasement follows self-exaltation - the embarrassment of demotion - and exaltation follows self-abasement - the honor of promotion.
It is typical of Jesus to demand self-denying service, regardless of rank. It is significant that the same saying of Jesus on service is recorded in a variety of forms (at the dispute among the disciples, at the Last Supper, at the feet-washing): the highest should be the servant (waiter at table) of all. Hence, among Jesus' disciples, there can be no offices as established merely by law and power and corresponding to the office of those who hold power in the state; nor can tere be an office established simply on the basis of knowledge or worth, corresponding to the office of the scribes.
Jesus' requirement of service is not to be understood as a law forbidding any super- or subordination among his followers. It is however a decisive appeal for service even on the part of superiors toward subordinates, that is, for reciprocal services on the part of all.
It has been one of the most useful means of understanding of the modernist hostility to Christianity to consider that modernism is a product of an educated elite, either those born to wealth and, so, power or those who hoped to gain it through education and credentialing, that such people are generally not very open to sharing their resources and power, held by them as privileges of rank and legalized hoarding with those without wealth, talent or luck, even when those people need what is so hoarded to live a decent life or even a miserable one. I think that, certainly more than the spotty history of official, organized churches, political-legal establishments doing terrible things accounts for the hostility towards Christianity as the teachings of Jesus. There is some hostility that arises out of the animosity of some Jews in academia and the writing professions due to their traditional rejection of the messianic theory of the identity of Jesus. But in my experience believing, observant Jews are generally far less hostile to Christianity than those who have, as well, rejected the religion of Judaism. I think that rejection of the radical egalitarianism of the Mosaic law, of which the interpretation of it by Jesus is the most radical of all interpretations of it, among such secularized Jews is exactly the same manifestation as the rejection of Christianity by the secular descendants of professed Christians under modernism, due to similar rejections of the egalitarianism of both forms of Mosaic economic, social and personal justice. It is no accident that the Christianity so mocked and rejected accounts for, by far, the largest percentage of the human population who take the Jewish Law seriously. I think it is also no accident that the professed Christian rejection of Moses, documented so brilliantly and analyzed so well by Marilynne Robinson in her great essay The Fate of Ideas: Moses, is done under the corroding effects of modernist academic culture.
In fact, she wrote it so well that instead of continuing with this today, I am going to recommend you follow that link and read it, instead. I would, as well, recommend the wonderfully insightful treatment of Christianity and particularly Paul by the great Jewish scholar Susanna Heschel. I will continue with this tomorrow, if I am able.
Trump Amps Up the Racism Because He’s Failed at Everything Else
I would have posted this for no other reason that Seth Meyer's rendition of Susan Collins is brilliant. So is the rest of it. I respect all of the late night hosts trying to do their show from home but I think he's done it the best.
FOX is the most destructive force in America, today and they're pulling out all of the lies to try to save Republican-fascists. It is sociopathy as an intentional means to steal and keep power for the worst person to have ever been put into the presidency by illegitimate means, in this case the Electoral College instead of the Supreme Court Republicans doing it in 2000.
Wednesday, June 24, 2020
John Bolton Is Still A Republican-Fascist Liar
He is lying on behalf of the Congressional Republicans, Stephen Colbert clearly knows that he was lying his ass off but he wasn't going to risk the interview to go as far honesty requires.
I hope John Bolton ends up making no money out of this book because he is a lying, partisan scumbag.
You're Trying To Sell Me The Same Old Play-Lefty Whine In A Newer Bottle
I have had to point this out before, either you believe in egalitarian democracy or you favor some form of gangster government, mildly bad to the worst humans are capable of forming, those are the two alternatives. Any "democratic" scheme which is non or anti-egalitarian is merely a somewhat tempered form of gangsterism, the original Athenian "democracy" was, in fact, an oligarchic gangster government under which women and slaves and foreigners were excluded and treated as the chattels of the ruling class of male Athenian citizens, the only ones who got to vote and decide things. That is what the original Constitution of the United States tried to impose here, the extent to which the wealthy, aristocratic Founders dared under those circumstances I noted here the other day. Too many poor white men had been gulled into fighting their revolution with promises of equality - many of them trained as soldiers - for the aristocrats to try to totally stiff them. That is an insight that it took me many years to see past, getting past the framing of such issues around ideologies that pretend that their preferences are not anything from mildly bad to the worst humans can do. That the farming of the ideologies makes understanding how they harm egalitarian democracy a little or completely essential to understanding what we face, though as we have all been gulled into looking at things through them, it is hard to break out of the "which side are you on" stupidity.
Marxism, sold to the materialist-scientistic 19th-21st century mindset as the best turned out to be among the worst in human history, not that those tens of millions of murder victims and the hundreds of millions, billions oppressed, terrorized, enslaved and maintained poorly as a resource by the gangster class have much bothered western academics and writers and journalists and movie makers who chose, so notably, NOT to live under it.
And, well, that's Marxism. The other extremes run from Nazism, the announced murderers whose explicit intent was their choice to replace their selection for what of "natural selection" they assert civilization inhibits Their nightmare scenario of people and institutions, religious organizations and - worst of all in their thinking - governments keep the "unfit" alive.
It's worth pointing out that the Nazis embodying all that is morally depraved is based directly and logically in their conception of natural selection. That imagined inhibition of "natural selection" consists of pretty much every truly moral act, doing to others as they would have done unto them, feeding the poor, clothing the naked, treating the imprisoned with decency and - worst of the worst- caring for and treating the sick and disabled. Not to mention killing those they designated as "the stranger" among them.
Trumpian Repubican-fascism is merely somewhat diluted form of that, diluted for at least as long as they figure they can't get away with going farther. Most in the news these days is a pretty shocking example of how far they are willing to take it, his and Republicans's determination to not only not treat the sick and disabled, it is to actively PROMOTE the spread of pandemic illness, choosing to treat it by not diagnosing and counting the numbers of them as they become sick and die. Those in nursing homes and other such institutions and in prisons among the worst hit, Black, Native American and other "strangers" among the affluent white among those left to die in far higher percentages. This pandemic could be suspected to be a divinely provided preview of how the worst could happen here under an elected fascist as it did in Central Europe within the just barely living memory of some dying of Trump's pandemic.
Scientism, the framing which produced both Marxism and Nazism, will inevitably harm egalitarian democracy, though that's more an accident of culture - the manditory adoption of Darwinism to be respectable - than it is a direct consequence of science. The extent to which "science" upholds the myth of natural selection, to that extent it is a danger to egalitarian democracy. As Ernst Haeckel said in a book translated by one of his earliest followers, prefaced by his "bull dog" Thomas Huxley and which Charles Darwin, himself, endorsed completely, Darwin's foremost champion in Germany, Ernst Haeckel made the obviously true conclusion you have to draw if you believe in natural selection:
Darwinism, I say, is anything rather than socialist! If this English hypothesis is to be compared to any definite political tendency—as is, no doubt, possible—that tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist. The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in animal and plant life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably and more or less prematurely. The germs of every species of animal and plant and the young individuals which spring from them are innumerable, while the number of those fortunate individuals which develop to maturity and actually reach their hardly-won life's goal is out of all proportion trifling. The cruel and merciless struggle for existence which rages throughout all living nature, and in the course of nature must rage, this unceasing and inexorable competition of all living creatures, is an incontestable fact; only the picked minority of the qualified "fittest" is in a position to resist it successfully, while the great majority of the competitors must necessarily perish miserably. We may profoundly lament this tragical state of things, but we can neither controvert it nor alter it. "Many are called but few are chosen." The selection, the picking out of these "chosen ones," is inevitably connected with the arrest and destruction of the remaining majority. Another English naturalist, therefore, designates the kernel of Darwinism very frankly as the "survival of the fittest," as the "victory of the best." At any rate, this principle of selection is nothing less than democratic, on the contrary, it is aristocratic in the strictest sense of the word. If, therefore, Darwinism, logically carried out, has, according to Virchow, "an uncommonly suspicious aspect," this can only be found in the idea that it offers a helping hand to the efforts of the aristocrats.
The extent to which scientism adopts the ideology of materialism, and it pretty much all does, that, itself poses as basic a danger to egalitarian democracy as natural selection does because materialism inevitably must insist that freedom of thought and freedom of conscience are illusory, that material causation governs what we experience of our minds, that any equality of people is as illusory and, inevitably, some form of economic valuation will unequally sort the human population on pretty much the same lines as that quintessential proponent of scientistic materialism, Haeckel, asserted in that anti-democratic passage which Darwin endorsed completely. Anyone who believes in natural selection holds any notions of democracy as an internal contradiction as much as any Biblical fundamentalist holds notions compatible with it in contradiction, as well. I've noted that many of the greatest political exponents of Darwinism in practice are, for the record, haters of the idea of evolution which he has been made the figure-head of.
That you can believe in evolution while rejecting natural selection, that's always been quite possible, should be mentioned, since in the muddled thinking of, especially, the college credentialed, seeing that they are not the same is an unimaginable truth. But that's a longer issue.
That's just the background for your complaint that I'm being unfair to those trolling atheists the other night who insisted on inserting their, not only entirely irrelevant anti-Christian, anti-religion shtick into a discussion of how to defeat Republican-fascism, but visably turning off others discussing how to defeat fascism with their self-indulgence in their own personal hatred. And on top of that the total cluelessness as to how their insisted on ballot-box poison issue - most people in the United States rejecting atheism and, in fact, most of them if not actual Christians, not hostile to it - helps the fascists at the ballot box THE REASON THAT THE ANTICHRIST, HIMSELF, TRUMP AND THE WHORE OF THE DOJ, BARR ARE TRYING TO CLAIM THE ISSUE FOR THEMSELVES.
I have looked very hard at the role that atheists have played in American politics and it's clear that they have been one of the most damaging forces on the American left. Whether in the form of Marxists or the non-Marxist materialists and those whose faith isn't science but scientism - they generally choosing not to learn enough math to do any science - have consistently, especially in the post-war period, been the most useful means of the fascists to discredit Democrats and that's when the Marxists, Greens, etc. haven't been joining with the Republican-fascists to defeat Democrats, at times taking Republican-fascist money to do it. And when it wasn't Republican money they were taking, it was sometimes directly from the gangsters in the Kremlin or other such foreign funders. That Putin is encouraging them in the last election and this one is no shock to anyone who has looked at the actual history of the losing lefties of secular materialism.
And, as can be seen from the last week or more of posts here, the actual morality as taught by Jesus and his earliest followers as recorded in the Gospels and the Letters is not only consistent with egalitarian democracy, it is the most radical expression of what it consists of and aspires to ever recorded. To attack Christianity instead of pointing out to those who profess Christianity what the actual teachings of Jesus are and what those mean is to do the gangsters work for them. No, atheists are not only no help to those who want a decent life for all under democracy, they are one of the most damaging faction to it around. They don't belong on any real left, they belong to and of the play-left that will never govern the United States, though they have been mighty helpful to the fascists.
Marxism, sold to the materialist-scientistic 19th-21st century mindset as the best turned out to be among the worst in human history, not that those tens of millions of murder victims and the hundreds of millions, billions oppressed, terrorized, enslaved and maintained poorly as a resource by the gangster class have much bothered western academics and writers and journalists and movie makers who chose, so notably, NOT to live under it.
And, well, that's Marxism. The other extremes run from Nazism, the announced murderers whose explicit intent was their choice to replace their selection for what of "natural selection" they assert civilization inhibits Their nightmare scenario of people and institutions, religious organizations and - worst of all in their thinking - governments keep the "unfit" alive.
It's worth pointing out that the Nazis embodying all that is morally depraved is based directly and logically in their conception of natural selection. That imagined inhibition of "natural selection" consists of pretty much every truly moral act, doing to others as they would have done unto them, feeding the poor, clothing the naked, treating the imprisoned with decency and - worst of the worst- caring for and treating the sick and disabled. Not to mention killing those they designated as "the stranger" among them.
Trumpian Repubican-fascism is merely somewhat diluted form of that, diluted for at least as long as they figure they can't get away with going farther. Most in the news these days is a pretty shocking example of how far they are willing to take it, his and Republicans's determination to not only not treat the sick and disabled, it is to actively PROMOTE the spread of pandemic illness, choosing to treat it by not diagnosing and counting the numbers of them as they become sick and die. Those in nursing homes and other such institutions and in prisons among the worst hit, Black, Native American and other "strangers" among the affluent white among those left to die in far higher percentages. This pandemic could be suspected to be a divinely provided preview of how the worst could happen here under an elected fascist as it did in Central Europe within the just barely living memory of some dying of Trump's pandemic.
Scientism, the framing which produced both Marxism and Nazism, will inevitably harm egalitarian democracy, though that's more an accident of culture - the manditory adoption of Darwinism to be respectable - than it is a direct consequence of science. The extent to which "science" upholds the myth of natural selection, to that extent it is a danger to egalitarian democracy. As Ernst Haeckel said in a book translated by one of his earliest followers, prefaced by his "bull dog" Thomas Huxley and which Charles Darwin, himself, endorsed completely, Darwin's foremost champion in Germany, Ernst Haeckel made the obviously true conclusion you have to draw if you believe in natural selection:
Darwinism, I say, is anything rather than socialist! If this English hypothesis is to be compared to any definite political tendency—as is, no doubt, possible—that tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist. The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in animal and plant life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably and more or less prematurely. The germs of every species of animal and plant and the young individuals which spring from them are innumerable, while the number of those fortunate individuals which develop to maturity and actually reach their hardly-won life's goal is out of all proportion trifling. The cruel and merciless struggle for existence which rages throughout all living nature, and in the course of nature must rage, this unceasing and inexorable competition of all living creatures, is an incontestable fact; only the picked minority of the qualified "fittest" is in a position to resist it successfully, while the great majority of the competitors must necessarily perish miserably. We may profoundly lament this tragical state of things, but we can neither controvert it nor alter it. "Many are called but few are chosen." The selection, the picking out of these "chosen ones," is inevitably connected with the arrest and destruction of the remaining majority. Another English naturalist, therefore, designates the kernel of Darwinism very frankly as the "survival of the fittest," as the "victory of the best." At any rate, this principle of selection is nothing less than democratic, on the contrary, it is aristocratic in the strictest sense of the word. If, therefore, Darwinism, logically carried out, has, according to Virchow, "an uncommonly suspicious aspect," this can only be found in the idea that it offers a helping hand to the efforts of the aristocrats.
The extent to which scientism adopts the ideology of materialism, and it pretty much all does, that, itself poses as basic a danger to egalitarian democracy as natural selection does because materialism inevitably must insist that freedom of thought and freedom of conscience are illusory, that material causation governs what we experience of our minds, that any equality of people is as illusory and, inevitably, some form of economic valuation will unequally sort the human population on pretty much the same lines as that quintessential proponent of scientistic materialism, Haeckel, asserted in that anti-democratic passage which Darwin endorsed completely. Anyone who believes in natural selection holds any notions of democracy as an internal contradiction as much as any Biblical fundamentalist holds notions compatible with it in contradiction, as well. I've noted that many of the greatest political exponents of Darwinism in practice are, for the record, haters of the idea of evolution which he has been made the figure-head of.
That you can believe in evolution while rejecting natural selection, that's always been quite possible, should be mentioned, since in the muddled thinking of, especially, the college credentialed, seeing that they are not the same is an unimaginable truth. But that's a longer issue.
That's just the background for your complaint that I'm being unfair to those trolling atheists the other night who insisted on inserting their, not only entirely irrelevant anti-Christian, anti-religion shtick into a discussion of how to defeat Republican-fascism, but visably turning off others discussing how to defeat fascism with their self-indulgence in their own personal hatred. And on top of that the total cluelessness as to how their insisted on ballot-box poison issue - most people in the United States rejecting atheism and, in fact, most of them if not actual Christians, not hostile to it - helps the fascists at the ballot box THE REASON THAT THE ANTICHRIST, HIMSELF, TRUMP AND THE WHORE OF THE DOJ, BARR ARE TRYING TO CLAIM THE ISSUE FOR THEMSELVES.
I have looked very hard at the role that atheists have played in American politics and it's clear that they have been one of the most damaging forces on the American left. Whether in the form of Marxists or the non-Marxist materialists and those whose faith isn't science but scientism - they generally choosing not to learn enough math to do any science - have consistently, especially in the post-war period, been the most useful means of the fascists to discredit Democrats and that's when the Marxists, Greens, etc. haven't been joining with the Republican-fascists to defeat Democrats, at times taking Republican-fascist money to do it. And when it wasn't Republican money they were taking, it was sometimes directly from the gangsters in the Kremlin or other such foreign funders. That Putin is encouraging them in the last election and this one is no shock to anyone who has looked at the actual history of the losing lefties of secular materialism.
And, as can be seen from the last week or more of posts here, the actual morality as taught by Jesus and his earliest followers as recorded in the Gospels and the Letters is not only consistent with egalitarian democracy, it is the most radical expression of what it consists of and aspires to ever recorded. To attack Christianity instead of pointing out to those who profess Christianity what the actual teachings of Jesus are and what those mean is to do the gangsters work for them. No, atheists are not only no help to those who want a decent life for all under democracy, they are one of the most damaging faction to it around. They don't belong on any real left, they belong to and of the play-left that will never govern the United States, though they have been mighty helpful to the fascists.
Tuesday, June 23, 2020
No President Should Be Able To Pardon Those Who Commit Crimes On Their Behalf
It must be noted that forgiveness of personal wrongs is not the same thing as allowing a criminal chief executive to pardon those who commit crimes to put and keep him in power. Considering the character of the Founders when it came to things like punishing slaves and meting out rough justice to petty criminals, it is amazing that their framing of the pardoning power of the president is so glaringly stupid as to allow him to pardon people in his own administration and campaign - as clear an invitation to despotism as was ever enjoyed by a monarch of the type they wanted to be rid of. Scripture has God warning of the consequences of having kings as soon as the Children of Israel start hankering after one, that list of evils as recounted to Samuel is the story of such power, even when they are quasi-elected presidents. And about that "quasi", the Electoral College must be on the list of things to abolish.
There are a number of serious Constitutional amendments that should be adopted as fast as possible in the wake of the Trump-McConnell attempt to destroy egalitarian democracy, the rule of law instead of thugs, one of the most serious is to reign in the power of presidential pardon so they can never again pardon members of their own administration as George H.W. Bush did - with the drafting of William Barr, to protect himself from being charged with crimes he certainly committed, as has been used by subsequent presidents to shield law-breakers working on their orders or in their interests as Trump is doing, no doubt Barr expecting a pardon to shield him from his florid criminality as well as the others, Pence, Mnuchin, Voss, you can go down the list, I would bet that you as well as I could come up with at least a dozen off the top of our heads.
Presidents should be barred from ever pardoning members of their own administration, their appointees, members of their campaigns from having to face prosecution and conviction for their crimes. Those who accept pardons should face a life-time bar on ever being part of not only an administration or an employee of the government or in congress or the courts, their acceptance of a pardon should be considered the equivalent of an admission of guilt to the crimes they have been pardoned for, those known at the time, those that come to light later. They and their estates should never be shielded from recovery of funds gotten through their criminality while working as part of government.
The things that the Founders depended on the honors system for are clearly not working to an unacceptable level, now. The Federalist Society and other criminal encouraging anti-democratic syndicates have brought up a large number of legal types whose main work in life is to tell mobsters and gangsters with political power how to rig things so they can commit crimes and get away with them.
There are a number of serious Constitutional amendments that should be adopted as fast as possible in the wake of the Trump-McConnell attempt to destroy egalitarian democracy, the rule of law instead of thugs, one of the most serious is to reign in the power of presidential pardon so they can never again pardon members of their own administration as George H.W. Bush did - with the drafting of William Barr, to protect himself from being charged with crimes he certainly committed, as has been used by subsequent presidents to shield law-breakers working on their orders or in their interests as Trump is doing, no doubt Barr expecting a pardon to shield him from his florid criminality as well as the others, Pence, Mnuchin, Voss, you can go down the list, I would bet that you as well as I could come up with at least a dozen off the top of our heads.
Presidents should be barred from ever pardoning members of their own administration, their appointees, members of their campaigns from having to face prosecution and conviction for their crimes. Those who accept pardons should face a life-time bar on ever being part of not only an administration or an employee of the government or in congress or the courts, their acceptance of a pardon should be considered the equivalent of an admission of guilt to the crimes they have been pardoned for, those known at the time, those that come to light later. They and their estates should never be shielded from recovery of funds gotten through their criminality while working as part of government.
The things that the Founders depended on the honors system for are clearly not working to an unacceptable level, now. The Federalist Society and other criminal encouraging anti-democratic syndicates have brought up a large number of legal types whose main work in life is to tell mobsters and gangsters with political power how to rig things so they can commit crimes and get away with them.
True Radicalism
True radicalism
In equating God's cause and man's cause, God's will and man's well-being, service of God and service of man, and in the resultant relativizing of law and cult, of sacred traditions, institutions, hierarchs, it becomes clear where Jesus stands within the quadrilaterial of establishment, revolution, emigration and compromise. It becomes clear why he cannot be classified either with the ruling classes or with the political rebel, either with the moralizers or those who have opted for silence and solitude. He belongs either to right nor left, nor does he simply mediate between them. He really rises above them; above all alternatives, all of which he plucks up from the roots. This is his radicalism; the radicalism of love which, in its blunt realism, is fundamentally different from the radicalism of ideology.
It would be completely false to connect this love only with great deeds and great sacrifices; for example, in particular cases, a necessary break with relatives, renunciation of possessions in particular circumstances, even perhaps a call to martyrdom. In the first place and for the most part it is a question of behavior in ordinary life; who is first to greet the other, what place we are to seek at a feast, whether we are quick to condemn or judge compassionately, whether we strive for absolute truthfulness. Just how far love goes particularly in ordinary life can be seen under three headings which serve to define this radical love in a very concrete way, as it exists between individuals or between social groups, nations, races, classes parties, Churches.
a. Love means forgiving; reconciliation with one's brother comes before worship of God. There is no reconciliation with God without reconciliation with one's brother. Hence the petition of the Our Father; forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us [That's the Catholic translation from the Greek, the general translation is "forgive us our debts . . ." if I'm not mistaken. though I doubt we are supposed to interpret that in strictly economic terms.] This does not mean that God expects special efforts from man to obtain forgiveness. It is sufficient for man to turn confidently to God, to believe and accept the consequences for his belief. Fir if he himself is dependent on forgiveness and has received it, he should be a witness of this forgiveness by passing it on. He cannot receive God's abundant forgiveness and for his own part refuse a slight forgiveness to his fellow man, as the parable of the magnanimous king and his unmerciful servant clearly explains.
It is typical of Jesus that readiness to forgive has no limits; not seven times, but seventy-seven times, that is, constantly, endlessly. And it is for everyone, without exception. In this context likewise the prohibition on judging is typical of Jesus, again in contrast to the general Jewish theory and practice. The other person is not subject to my judgment. All are subject to God's judgment.
Jesus' requirement that we should forgive is not to be interpreted judicially. Jesus does not mean that there is a law requiring us to forgive seventy-seven times but not the seventy-eighth time. It is an appeal to man's love; to forgive from the beginning and constantly anew.
I got banned from a Youtube comment stream on the pirated posting of the Rachel Maddow show last night when in response to some totally off topic atheist anti-Christian blather by some typical "Freedom from Religion" barroom atheist types. I said something like, "Do to others what you want to be done to you, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, heal the sick, etc. What's not to love about that?" before speculating that they were Putin style trolls who were trying to gin-up one of the things that makes "the left" so unpopular to the loss of "the left" in American politics. What they push is proven ballot-box poison. I think the moderator was confused, so may of them are suckers for the ideology of the play-left instead of real thinkers about reality.
As Hans Kung says, the radicalism of Jesus is true radicalism, not just a recasting of the vulgar materialism of the wealth and power establishment with a little blather about a future worker's paradise to gull the susceptible and to get them onside. Sort of like how the wealthy slave-owners, rich merchants and lawyers talked about All men are created equal and endowed with certain rights to get poor men to fight their revolutionary war before they pulled back on those egalitarian notions in so far as they dared to pull them back. It was by no means certain that the poor men who had just thrown off British rule would not realize that they could impose full equality on the wealthy class at that time. I think that accounts for any reason that the notions of God-given equality and rights in the Declaration of Independence, the foremost document in the consciousness of Americans, as Americans, at that point, are retained at all in the Constitution. And most of that notion is steeped in the common assumptions contained in the Mosaic Law and the Gospel of Jesus. Deism may have been all the rage in the late 18th century wealthy, educated elite*(though I think that is exaggerated enormously by later anti-Christian propaganda) but it's clear that Christianity was a stronger force in the more general population.
---------
Constant and universal forgiveness, I told you the Gospel becomes ever more radically a program the more you really listen to the words of Jesus and those who listened to him, it is almost impossible to imagine actually being able to carry out that commandment in the terms it obviously was meant to be taken, as a real obligation to do that in daily, human life. Though it is clear that the rain falls on the bad as well as on the good (contrary to what many contemporary people unassociated with agrarian life might read that as, the rain was a good thing, I note as I am praying for enough of it on my garden, right now) that God doesn't withdraw the breath of life from those who are engaged in evil, not even as they do so, in most cases. The radicalism of Jesus seems to me to be the ultimate radicalism that no ideological construction can approach. It is too radical, not a rejection or failure of radicalism. It may be too radical to be put in terms of human governments - "my kingdom is not of the Earth" - but if you reject it you are cutting egalitarian democracy, any political ideology that aspires to be good, to produce a decent life for all, off from not only its most potent source, the thing that can really power it, in view of the impressive failure of other framings of reality from even producing much in the way of that good, I think it's quite probably it is the only place we're ever going to get it from.
And we've got two more of Kung's headings of how far this radical love taught by Jesus goes.
* Getting shut of the requirement to provide for the least among them certainly among the strongest motives for them to get rid of Christianity, then as, no doubt,in the generally affluent modern atheists who found my question on Youtube unacceptable. Though the nominally "Christian" establishment has always been at pains to distract or cover up those far more obviously made requirements on their wealth, probably since the time when Constantine co-oped the radical Jesus movement.
In equating God's cause and man's cause, God's will and man's well-being, service of God and service of man, and in the resultant relativizing of law and cult, of sacred traditions, institutions, hierarchs, it becomes clear where Jesus stands within the quadrilaterial of establishment, revolution, emigration and compromise. It becomes clear why he cannot be classified either with the ruling classes or with the political rebel, either with the moralizers or those who have opted for silence and solitude. He belongs either to right nor left, nor does he simply mediate between them. He really rises above them; above all alternatives, all of which he plucks up from the roots. This is his radicalism; the radicalism of love which, in its blunt realism, is fundamentally different from the radicalism of ideology.
It would be completely false to connect this love only with great deeds and great sacrifices; for example, in particular cases, a necessary break with relatives, renunciation of possessions in particular circumstances, even perhaps a call to martyrdom. In the first place and for the most part it is a question of behavior in ordinary life; who is first to greet the other, what place we are to seek at a feast, whether we are quick to condemn or judge compassionately, whether we strive for absolute truthfulness. Just how far love goes particularly in ordinary life can be seen under three headings which serve to define this radical love in a very concrete way, as it exists between individuals or between social groups, nations, races, classes parties, Churches.
a. Love means forgiving; reconciliation with one's brother comes before worship of God. There is no reconciliation with God without reconciliation with one's brother. Hence the petition of the Our Father; forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us [That's the Catholic translation from the Greek, the general translation is "forgive us our debts . . ." if I'm not mistaken. though I doubt we are supposed to interpret that in strictly economic terms.] This does not mean that God expects special efforts from man to obtain forgiveness. It is sufficient for man to turn confidently to God, to believe and accept the consequences for his belief. Fir if he himself is dependent on forgiveness and has received it, he should be a witness of this forgiveness by passing it on. He cannot receive God's abundant forgiveness and for his own part refuse a slight forgiveness to his fellow man, as the parable of the magnanimous king and his unmerciful servant clearly explains.
It is typical of Jesus that readiness to forgive has no limits; not seven times, but seventy-seven times, that is, constantly, endlessly. And it is for everyone, without exception. In this context likewise the prohibition on judging is typical of Jesus, again in contrast to the general Jewish theory and practice. The other person is not subject to my judgment. All are subject to God's judgment.
Jesus' requirement that we should forgive is not to be interpreted judicially. Jesus does not mean that there is a law requiring us to forgive seventy-seven times but not the seventy-eighth time. It is an appeal to man's love; to forgive from the beginning and constantly anew.
I got banned from a Youtube comment stream on the pirated posting of the Rachel Maddow show last night when in response to some totally off topic atheist anti-Christian blather by some typical "Freedom from Religion" barroom atheist types. I said something like, "Do to others what you want to be done to you, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, heal the sick, etc. What's not to love about that?" before speculating that they were Putin style trolls who were trying to gin-up one of the things that makes "the left" so unpopular to the loss of "the left" in American politics. What they push is proven ballot-box poison. I think the moderator was confused, so may of them are suckers for the ideology of the play-left instead of real thinkers about reality.
As Hans Kung says, the radicalism of Jesus is true radicalism, not just a recasting of the vulgar materialism of the wealth and power establishment with a little blather about a future worker's paradise to gull the susceptible and to get them onside. Sort of like how the wealthy slave-owners, rich merchants and lawyers talked about All men are created equal and endowed with certain rights to get poor men to fight their revolutionary war before they pulled back on those egalitarian notions in so far as they dared to pull them back. It was by no means certain that the poor men who had just thrown off British rule would not realize that they could impose full equality on the wealthy class at that time. I think that accounts for any reason that the notions of God-given equality and rights in the Declaration of Independence, the foremost document in the consciousness of Americans, as Americans, at that point, are retained at all in the Constitution. And most of that notion is steeped in the common assumptions contained in the Mosaic Law and the Gospel of Jesus. Deism may have been all the rage in the late 18th century wealthy, educated elite*(though I think that is exaggerated enormously by later anti-Christian propaganda) but it's clear that Christianity was a stronger force in the more general population.
---------
Constant and universal forgiveness, I told you the Gospel becomes ever more radically a program the more you really listen to the words of Jesus and those who listened to him, it is almost impossible to imagine actually being able to carry out that commandment in the terms it obviously was meant to be taken, as a real obligation to do that in daily, human life. Though it is clear that the rain falls on the bad as well as on the good (contrary to what many contemporary people unassociated with agrarian life might read that as, the rain was a good thing, I note as I am praying for enough of it on my garden, right now) that God doesn't withdraw the breath of life from those who are engaged in evil, not even as they do so, in most cases. The radicalism of Jesus seems to me to be the ultimate radicalism that no ideological construction can approach. It is too radical, not a rejection or failure of radicalism. It may be too radical to be put in terms of human governments - "my kingdom is not of the Earth" - but if you reject it you are cutting egalitarian democracy, any political ideology that aspires to be good, to produce a decent life for all, off from not only its most potent source, the thing that can really power it, in view of the impressive failure of other framings of reality from even producing much in the way of that good, I think it's quite probably it is the only place we're ever going to get it from.
And we've got two more of Kung's headings of how far this radical love taught by Jesus goes.
* Getting shut of the requirement to provide for the least among them certainly among the strongest motives for them to get rid of Christianity, then as, no doubt,in the generally affluent modern atheists who found my question on Youtube unacceptable. Though the nominally "Christian" establishment has always been at pains to distract or cover up those far more obviously made requirements on their wealth, probably since the time when Constantine co-oped the radical Jesus movement.
Monday, June 22, 2020
Persistent Atheist Hate Mailer Says What?
The "Christianity" of such "traditionalists" as are found in the Trump majority of white evangelicals (Black and Latino evangelicals, not so much), the conservative Catholics, etc. is not based in the teachings and doings of Jesus anymore than the "patriotism" of the American Republican-fascist, Hollywood and TV informed Trumpian right has anything to do with the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address and other expressions of egalitarian democracy, remarkably rare and in legally impotent forms in the literature of American political discourse.
I'm no more advocating that pseudo-Christian religion than I would the costume and make up Disney-celluloid "western and pioneer" view of "democracy", which is distinctly a non-egalitarian democracy and the phony cinematic "American tradition". It is no accident that that is set, in the cultivated imagination of susceptible Americans, in the period before women voted and before any effective campaign of equality or even fair wages happened. Most of it, indeed, is set in the period before slavery was made legally forbidden - though it certainly continues. In the United States, even in the bizarre melding of that movie-TV based patrieroticism (ironically, enough, steeped in adoration of the treason of the original and neo-Confederacies) and such stuff as Euro-fascist "Catholic" integralism by the likes of Cardinal Dolan, Tim Busch and William Barr, that stuff is an expression of the Antichrist right there to be seen.
I think one of the problems of the United States is that the Republicanism of the Founders clearly was at odds with the egalitarian democracy that was desired by, at least at most times, most of the American People. It think the country imagined by most of the Founders, perhaps all of them, saw an unequal country in which the rich, white males of property would rule, it was an eqality only among them as governors, not The People. And they are the ones who set the form of our government. It was not conceived of as a government of, by and for The People, certainly not if you included the majority of The People, Women, People of Color, not the slaves or the native inhabitants of the land who they were clearly intent on displacing, killing them as needed or desired. And that doesn't get to poor white men who were hardly immediately enfranchised by the adoption of the Constitution. It was, perhaps, the Founders mistake that they expressed their desire to be free from England to do that in terms of the equality of all people and rights of all people because that's what the majority heard. Though the first recourse of the slaves in expounding their right to freedom was Exodus and not Jefferson, the hypocrisy of his most famous sentences was noted by them quite often. In the most stirring part of our history, it was people going with that unintentional and atypical expression of universalism that has been responsible for any reason that the United States has had anything admirable in its history, the things unadmirable about us, uniformly an expression of inequality.
No, Gospel equality is the most potent potential source material out of which to make an egalitarian democracy, the attempt to do that through Marxism has flopped everywhere it was installed. No one who had any experience of it wants it back once they've gotten shut of it.
------------
I'm not sure what I'm going to do when Blogger changes later this month, I might keep on, working around whatever they do or I might change hosting or I might stop doing this in this form. I will NOT go to Facebook, I will certainly not do Twitter - as if what I write about could be done on in tweets. We will see what I do, me included in that waiting.
Update: I'm putting this here at the top because it is true, the overseers at Amazon warehouses, using computers and those "algorithms" so beloved of the smart set and other maximizers of "efficency" (you can read profitability) have absolutely no regard for the human needs or dignity or health or well-being of those who work there.
Working at an Amazon warehouse in the U.K., James Bloodworth came across a bottle of straw-colored liquid on a shelf. It looked like pee.
How could he be sure? “I smelt it,” said the 35-year-old British journalist and author, talking about his new book “Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain.” It was definitely pee, he said.
As he tells it, urinating into a bottle is the kind of desperation Amazon forces its warehouse workers into as they try to avoid accusations of “idling” and failing to meet impossibly high productivity targets — ones they are continually measured against by Big Brother-ish type surveillance.
It didn’t help that the nearest bathroom to where he worked was four flights of stairs below.
and more
Bloodworth said he spent several weeks at Amazon in early 2016 working the requisite 10-hour shifts, four days a week, at a warehouse in the West Midlands countryside. Seeking to write about the plight of the working class, he also worked at a call center, as an Uber driver, on a building site and as a home aide caring for the elderly.
“Amazon was the worst employer, easily,” the author said by phone.
When he took a day off sick, he received a “point.” Earn six and you’re fired, he said.
Bloodworth said he heard of one person getting a point because she had to leave early to see her child in the hospital, and he talked to another who got a point for failing to hit her rate.
At the warehouse where he worked, Amazon monitored everbody’s rate through a handheld device — tracking “our every move as if we were convicts out on house arrest,” he writes.
The device carried messages to workers and recorded how quickly they were picking or packing goods. “Your rates are down this hour, please speed up,” a message might say, according to Bloodworth.
It's clear from the way Amazon has behaved during this pandemic that any improvement in the wage-slave conditions that allow for it to operate as it does is done on a piecemeal basis and, I suspect, temporarily done for PR purposes.
I won't buy from them, they are a manifestation of modern-day minimum-wage slavery.
I'm no more advocating that pseudo-Christian religion than I would the costume and make up Disney-celluloid "western and pioneer" view of "democracy", which is distinctly a non-egalitarian democracy and the phony cinematic "American tradition". It is no accident that that is set, in the cultivated imagination of susceptible Americans, in the period before women voted and before any effective campaign of equality or even fair wages happened. Most of it, indeed, is set in the period before slavery was made legally forbidden - though it certainly continues. In the United States, even in the bizarre melding of that movie-TV based patrieroticism (ironically, enough, steeped in adoration of the treason of the original and neo-Confederacies) and such stuff as Euro-fascist "Catholic" integralism by the likes of Cardinal Dolan, Tim Busch and William Barr, that stuff is an expression of the Antichrist right there to be seen.
I think one of the problems of the United States is that the Republicanism of the Founders clearly was at odds with the egalitarian democracy that was desired by, at least at most times, most of the American People. It think the country imagined by most of the Founders, perhaps all of them, saw an unequal country in which the rich, white males of property would rule, it was an eqality only among them as governors, not The People. And they are the ones who set the form of our government. It was not conceived of as a government of, by and for The People, certainly not if you included the majority of The People, Women, People of Color, not the slaves or the native inhabitants of the land who they were clearly intent on displacing, killing them as needed or desired. And that doesn't get to poor white men who were hardly immediately enfranchised by the adoption of the Constitution. It was, perhaps, the Founders mistake that they expressed their desire to be free from England to do that in terms of the equality of all people and rights of all people because that's what the majority heard. Though the first recourse of the slaves in expounding their right to freedom was Exodus and not Jefferson, the hypocrisy of his most famous sentences was noted by them quite often. In the most stirring part of our history, it was people going with that unintentional and atypical expression of universalism that has been responsible for any reason that the United States has had anything admirable in its history, the things unadmirable about us, uniformly an expression of inequality.
No, Gospel equality is the most potent potential source material out of which to make an egalitarian democracy, the attempt to do that through Marxism has flopped everywhere it was installed. No one who had any experience of it wants it back once they've gotten shut of it.
------------
I'm not sure what I'm going to do when Blogger changes later this month, I might keep on, working around whatever they do or I might change hosting or I might stop doing this in this form. I will NOT go to Facebook, I will certainly not do Twitter - as if what I write about could be done on in tweets. We will see what I do, me included in that waiting.
Update: I'm putting this here at the top because it is true, the overseers at Amazon warehouses, using computers and those "algorithms" so beloved of the smart set and other maximizers of "efficency" (you can read profitability) have absolutely no regard for the human needs or dignity or health or well-being of those who work there.
Working at an Amazon warehouse in the U.K., James Bloodworth came across a bottle of straw-colored liquid on a shelf. It looked like pee.
How could he be sure? “I smelt it,” said the 35-year-old British journalist and author, talking about his new book “Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain.” It was definitely pee, he said.
As he tells it, urinating into a bottle is the kind of desperation Amazon forces its warehouse workers into as they try to avoid accusations of “idling” and failing to meet impossibly high productivity targets — ones they are continually measured against by Big Brother-ish type surveillance.
It didn’t help that the nearest bathroom to where he worked was four flights of stairs below.
and more
Bloodworth said he spent several weeks at Amazon in early 2016 working the requisite 10-hour shifts, four days a week, at a warehouse in the West Midlands countryside. Seeking to write about the plight of the working class, he also worked at a call center, as an Uber driver, on a building site and as a home aide caring for the elderly.
“Amazon was the worst employer, easily,” the author said by phone.
When he took a day off sick, he received a “point.” Earn six and you’re fired, he said.
Bloodworth said he heard of one person getting a point because she had to leave early to see her child in the hospital, and he talked to another who got a point for failing to hit her rate.
At the warehouse where he worked, Amazon monitored everbody’s rate through a handheld device — tracking “our every move as if we were convicts out on house arrest,” he writes.
The device carried messages to workers and recorded how quickly they were picking or packing goods. “Your rates are down this hour, please speed up,” a message might say, according to Bloodworth.
It's clear from the way Amazon has behaved during this pandemic that any improvement in the wage-slave conditions that allow for it to operate as it does is done on a piecemeal basis and, I suspect, temporarily done for PR purposes.
I won't buy from them, they are a manifestation of modern-day minimum-wage slavery.
not to possession but to giving
It is striking that the Greek Old Testament speaks quite naturally of a husband's agapan for his wire and of husband and wife for their children. And Jesus, according to the Greek New Testament, uses the same verb for the love of friends and the love of enemies. Jesus in the Gospels appears as wholly and entirely human., cuddling children, allowing women to anoint him, aware of a bond of "love" between himself and Lazarus and his sisters, evidently this "love" does not exclude eros. Jesus calls his disciples, "friends." Obviously neither the Old nor the New Testament is interested in the distinction between a "heavenly" and an "earthly "love. God's love is described in a pleasantly human way and elemental human love is in no way denigrated. Genuinely human love of husband and wife, father, mother, child, is not opposed to love of God but set within the context of that love. But when eros and agapan are regarded not only as distinct, but as mutually exclusive, this is at the expense of both eros and agape.
Then eros is devalued and condemned. Passionate love desiring the other for oneself is restricted to sex and thus both eroticism and sexuality are depricated. Eros is then regarded with suspicion even when it appears not simply as uncanny, overpowering, blind, sensual passion, but - as for instance in Plato's Symposium - as a drive toward the beautiful and as creative force, which becomes a pointer to the supreme, divine Good (in Plotinus a longing for reunion with the One). Education hostile to eros and more especially religious attitudes opposed to eros and sexuality have caused an enormous amount of harm. But why should loving desire and loving service, the game of love and the fidelity of love, be mutually exclusive?
When eros is depreciated, however, agape is overvalued and dehumanized. It is desensualized and spritualized (then falsely called "Platonic love"). Vitality, emotion, affectivity are forcibly excluded, leaving a love that its totally unattractive. When love is merely a decision of the will and not also a venture of the heart, it lacks genuine humanity. It lacks depth, warmth, intimacy, tenderness, cordiality. Christian charity often makes little impression just because it had so little humanity.
Should not all that is human be echoed in all love of man, love of neighbor and even love of enemies? This sort of love does not become selfish, seeking only its own, but strong, truly human, seeking with body and soul, word and deed, what is for the good of the other. In true love all desire turns, not to possession but to giving.
I will give a little preview of here this is going by pointing out that in the distinction between political and social good and evil, probably a majority of that distinction is based in the difference between possession and giving. In the most extreme forms of that there is the complete difference between the possession of other human beings, generally by a man or a woman of property and wealth over slaves, wage-slaves*, children - especially daughters - wives and the practice of egalitarianism - which I would assert is an expression of love or it is merely an optional legalism which can easily be withdrawn without cost to the one withdrawing it - and the actual distribution of material goods. In the most extreme difference can be seen such things as Jeff Bezos making 24 million dollars during the current pandemic as the wage-slaves in his warehouses are not only worked more sedulously than field-slaves, but their lives endangered as Amazon takes back the measly 2 dollars in "hazard pay" they announced for PR purposes. Or as can be seen in just the most recently "honor killing" to make the international news as well as the myriad of others that don't.
This is one of the ways in which the teachings of Jesus are as radical as can be as seen in one of the most fraught areas of human life, one which is far more complex and difficult in our conduct of our lives than it is in even this kind of in depth expression of it. The difference between wanting or expressing possession of the life of another person and loving them in a way that rejects that kind of possession is in no way an easy thing to even put into words, practicing it is far more complex than that. I am tempted to go into, for example, the complication that sexual infidelity among those in a committed relationship plays into this, that complex that plays off notions of possession and permission to break promises of support, the irresponsibility of the possible production of a pregnancy and child outside of a stable family, the dangers of contracting and passing on sexually transmitted diseases, the abandonment of a wife and children or a husband and children, etc. are in every way related to not only the giving or withdrawal of material support but also of emotional support and guidance that parents owe to their children.
This is the crux of why The Law, the Prophets, the Gospel and the apostolic teachings were and are so despised, because they all come down with a preference for giving instead of possession, of moral responsibility instead of selfishness - no matter how imperfectly expressed in such legalisms as The Law's dealing with adultery, so decisively interpreted against tradition in John's Gospel.
I think the spectacle of the Trump regime is, if not the perfect, quite an adequate view of the antithesis of the Gospel to be getting on with. And the impotence of the atheist-materialist-secular "left" in opposing it is clear, too. To the extent that that "left" adopts the components of the depravity of which Trump is merely a developed example, to that extent they participate in elevating it to power. Even in their opposition to it, they have had such a tendency to aid it in the past century, as, indeed, so many in the "Christian" churches. Jesus is too radical for such "Christianity" so they don't much talk about what he said.
In this the absolute radicalism of the sayings and doings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels, as taught by Paul and James and the others and how subsequent accommodation of Christian authorities with worldly power was a distortion and rejection of that radicalism becomes clearer.
Then eros is devalued and condemned. Passionate love desiring the other for oneself is restricted to sex and thus both eroticism and sexuality are depricated. Eros is then regarded with suspicion even when it appears not simply as uncanny, overpowering, blind, sensual passion, but - as for instance in Plato's Symposium - as a drive toward the beautiful and as creative force, which becomes a pointer to the supreme, divine Good (in Plotinus a longing for reunion with the One). Education hostile to eros and more especially religious attitudes opposed to eros and sexuality have caused an enormous amount of harm. But why should loving desire and loving service, the game of love and the fidelity of love, be mutually exclusive?
When eros is depreciated, however, agape is overvalued and dehumanized. It is desensualized and spritualized (then falsely called "Platonic love"). Vitality, emotion, affectivity are forcibly excluded, leaving a love that its totally unattractive. When love is merely a decision of the will and not also a venture of the heart, it lacks genuine humanity. It lacks depth, warmth, intimacy, tenderness, cordiality. Christian charity often makes little impression just because it had so little humanity.
Should not all that is human be echoed in all love of man, love of neighbor and even love of enemies? This sort of love does not become selfish, seeking only its own, but strong, truly human, seeking with body and soul, word and deed, what is for the good of the other. In true love all desire turns, not to possession but to giving.
I will give a little preview of here this is going by pointing out that in the distinction between political and social good and evil, probably a majority of that distinction is based in the difference between possession and giving. In the most extreme forms of that there is the complete difference between the possession of other human beings, generally by a man or a woman of property and wealth over slaves, wage-slaves*, children - especially daughters - wives and the practice of egalitarianism - which I would assert is an expression of love or it is merely an optional legalism which can easily be withdrawn without cost to the one withdrawing it - and the actual distribution of material goods. In the most extreme difference can be seen such things as Jeff Bezos making 24 million dollars during the current pandemic as the wage-slaves in his warehouses are not only worked more sedulously than field-slaves, but their lives endangered as Amazon takes back the measly 2 dollars in "hazard pay" they announced for PR purposes. Or as can be seen in just the most recently "honor killing" to make the international news as well as the myriad of others that don't.
This is one of the ways in which the teachings of Jesus are as radical as can be as seen in one of the most fraught areas of human life, one which is far more complex and difficult in our conduct of our lives than it is in even this kind of in depth expression of it. The difference between wanting or expressing possession of the life of another person and loving them in a way that rejects that kind of possession is in no way an easy thing to even put into words, practicing it is far more complex than that. I am tempted to go into, for example, the complication that sexual infidelity among those in a committed relationship plays into this, that complex that plays off notions of possession and permission to break promises of support, the irresponsibility of the possible production of a pregnancy and child outside of a stable family, the dangers of contracting and passing on sexually transmitted diseases, the abandonment of a wife and children or a husband and children, etc. are in every way related to not only the giving or withdrawal of material support but also of emotional support and guidance that parents owe to their children.
This is the crux of why The Law, the Prophets, the Gospel and the apostolic teachings were and are so despised, because they all come down with a preference for giving instead of possession, of moral responsibility instead of selfishness - no matter how imperfectly expressed in such legalisms as The Law's dealing with adultery, so decisively interpreted against tradition in John's Gospel.
I think the spectacle of the Trump regime is, if not the perfect, quite an adequate view of the antithesis of the Gospel to be getting on with. And the impotence of the atheist-materialist-secular "left" in opposing it is clear, too. To the extent that that "left" adopts the components of the depravity of which Trump is merely a developed example, to that extent they participate in elevating it to power. Even in their opposition to it, they have had such a tendency to aid it in the past century, as, indeed, so many in the "Christian" churches. Jesus is too radical for such "Christianity" so they don't much talk about what he said.
In this the absolute radicalism of the sayings and doings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels, as taught by Paul and James and the others and how subsequent accommodation of Christian authorities with worldly power was a distortion and rejection of that radicalism becomes clearer.
Sunday, June 21, 2020
Stevie Wonder - I Was Made To Love Her
Great song from a great artist. I just felt like listening to it and share it. That's all.
"Illiterate Goat-herders"
Geesh! Will you guys come up with a new line? I have, I'll bet unlike any of you comment thread atheists, known "goat-herders" you aren't smart enough to do their job.
Now that that issue has been taken care of, the idea that those who composed the texts of the Bible were illiterate only makes their texts more impressive, not less impressive. That is especially true of the often made speculation that someone like Paul was illiterate and that he dictated his epistles to a scribe who wrote them down - though I could say that the place in Romans that might indicate it could, as easily, have been a person who was making a copy of it, at least in my reading of a number of the English and other translations from the Greek.
Romans is an extremely complex document full to the brim of literary, Scriptural references, closely and intricately detailed arguments that, I'd think, would anticipate a literate readership and with astonishing insights into a number of issues. There are atheists and non-Christians who have been impressed with it, there is one fairly recent commentary on that one letter that took some very careful scholars twelve years to conclude and that commentary is only one of a myriad of commentaries on it.
If Paul was illiterate, unable to write, perhaps to read, as well, THAT MAKES HIS INTELLECTUAL ACCOMPLISHMENT ALMOST UNIMAGINABLY MORE IMPRESSIVE IN COMPOSING ROMANS. I'm sure I couldn't do it and I can't think of many academics of today who could. Romans is a far more impressive intellectual document than the works of the legendarily blind Homer or the known to be blind Milton who I strongly suspect would put himself behind Paul in terms such as those I've addressed here. There is not a single one of the heroes of pop-atheism who could begin to hold a candle to him in terms of intellectual achievement and depth, if human history continues, in several hundred years commentaries on Paul will still be being written, still taking serious, careful scholars years to write and compile when Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, the Keystone-CSICOPs and their allies and the Britatheists are a sideline of minor academic curiosity about an intellectually degenerate epoch in the history of insular "Western thought." I would guess that the antisemtic motives of that movement will figure highly into it by that time.
And I'm sure Paul would never stop reminding his admirers that he is merely setting out and elucidating the teachings, the understanding of The Law and much more than that of Jesus. The more I go into the actual teachings of Jesus, the more profound it is clear that they are. Intellectually, yes, in terms of insight into human character and human history and the nature of reality, yes, but ever more than that.
Now that that issue has been taken care of, the idea that those who composed the texts of the Bible were illiterate only makes their texts more impressive, not less impressive. That is especially true of the often made speculation that someone like Paul was illiterate and that he dictated his epistles to a scribe who wrote them down - though I could say that the place in Romans that might indicate it could, as easily, have been a person who was making a copy of it, at least in my reading of a number of the English and other translations from the Greek.
Romans is an extremely complex document full to the brim of literary, Scriptural references, closely and intricately detailed arguments that, I'd think, would anticipate a literate readership and with astonishing insights into a number of issues. There are atheists and non-Christians who have been impressed with it, there is one fairly recent commentary on that one letter that took some very careful scholars twelve years to conclude and that commentary is only one of a myriad of commentaries on it.
If Paul was illiterate, unable to write, perhaps to read, as well, THAT MAKES HIS INTELLECTUAL ACCOMPLISHMENT ALMOST UNIMAGINABLY MORE IMPRESSIVE IN COMPOSING ROMANS. I'm sure I couldn't do it and I can't think of many academics of today who could. Romans is a far more impressive intellectual document than the works of the legendarily blind Homer or the known to be blind Milton who I strongly suspect would put himself behind Paul in terms such as those I've addressed here. There is not a single one of the heroes of pop-atheism who could begin to hold a candle to him in terms of intellectual achievement and depth, if human history continues, in several hundred years commentaries on Paul will still be being written, still taking serious, careful scholars years to write and compile when Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, the Keystone-CSICOPs and their allies and the Britatheists are a sideline of minor academic curiosity about an intellectually degenerate epoch in the history of insular "Western thought." I would guess that the antisemtic motives of that movement will figure highly into it by that time.
And I'm sure Paul would never stop reminding his admirers that he is merely setting out and elucidating the teachings, the understanding of The Law and much more than that of Jesus. The more I go into the actual teachings of Jesus, the more profound it is clear that they are. Intellectually, yes, in terms of insight into human character and human history and the nature of reality, yes, but ever more than that.
"Christianity is propaganda to make people passive"
Like the appeals to hatred and thrilling violence have worked so well for the left. Somehow I have a feeling that most such encouragement online comes from people who are well insulated from actual danger of violence in their personal lives, those at the front of that line as they encourage others to go to a far different front.
It's not a distraction from the resistance to the Republican-fascists, Trump, FOX-Sinclair-hate-talk-media to present the antithesis of their content and method. It's an act of resistance and since it is resistance through the actual teachings of Jesus, what are the only legitimate bases to the Christianity that that Anti-Christ has hijacked it strikes me as particularly subversive, undermining them from at least two directions.
So, yeah, I am going to continue. If it drives down readership, that's out of my control. Maybe if I keep appealing to what's potentially best in people, they'll hesitate before taking the encouragement to the worst in them.
If you want to see distraction, go look at the past programs of the Left Forum,the archives of the various radical magazines, generally penned by the trust-fund class left.
And, oh, yeah, pornography for the most part is the promotion of fascistic depravity as sex to sell itself. It is no coincidence that Rupert Murdoch's fascist media was floated on soft porn images of women and that he is a smut merchant as well as one of the most effective destroyers of democracy in the history of the world. The two are more than just intimately related, they are the same thing.
It's not a distraction from the resistance to the Republican-fascists, Trump, FOX-Sinclair-hate-talk-media to present the antithesis of their content and method. It's an act of resistance and since it is resistance through the actual teachings of Jesus, what are the only legitimate bases to the Christianity that that Anti-Christ has hijacked it strikes me as particularly subversive, undermining them from at least two directions.
So, yeah, I am going to continue. If it drives down readership, that's out of my control. Maybe if I keep appealing to what's potentially best in people, they'll hesitate before taking the encouragement to the worst in them.
If you want to see distraction, go look at the past programs of the Left Forum,the archives of the various radical magazines, generally penned by the trust-fund class left.
And, oh, yeah, pornography for the most part is the promotion of fascistic depravity as sex to sell itself. It is no coincidence that Rupert Murdoch's fascist media was floated on soft porn images of women and that he is a smut merchant as well as one of the most effective destroyers of democracy in the history of the world. The two are more than just intimately related, they are the same thing.
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