Stupy Watched A Movie About Klassical Music

I ASSUME HE MEANS the redone Fantasia of 2000, the one that the disgraced James Levine arranged and conducted.  No, never saw it.  It's a kiddie movie.   I don't watch kiddie movies anymore.  Or many other movies.  I preferred to grow up.  Who needs the cartoons when you can listen to the real thing? You say a bunch of the Eschatots upvoted his comment?   Well, there's a reason I call them "tots."  I am not greatly bothered that they don't like me, I don't want their good opinion, it's not worth the price in saying stupid stuff to get it.

James Levine who I took my hat off to as a great conductor is someone who, when I learned what he was really like, not only in his abuse of young musicians and, especially students but, also, with others I put my hat back on a thousand times.  He's dead and gone now.   May his victims find peace.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Rex Stout - Adventures Of Nero Wolfe - Stamped For Murder

 

 

Another Riverside Township Players re-performance.  I'd love to know that there were more of these kinds of companies coming together.  While this can't compete with the CBC's 1980s Nero Wolfe Series or the great TV ones with the great Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton and some of the best and most flexible actors of their generations, it is fun and shows possibilities of what might be done.  If they did it on recordings with chances for editing and inserting corrections the results would be more polished.  If Covid were over I'd certainly pay to hear them do it on stage, though.

Nature Again Nurtures Ideological Contamination Of Science

WHILE DOING THE READING that led to my earlier post this morning, looking at things from Scientific American, scientific journals, etc.  I came across something at Retraction Watch about a study allegedly concerning religion published in Nature which has now been retracted, sort of.  The original study was one I remembered because as it says in the piece:

A  widely-touted 2019 study in Nature which argued that large societies gave rise to belief in fire-and-brimstone gods — and not the other way around — has been retracted by the authors after their reanalysis of the data in the wake of criticism diluted the strength of their conclusions.

The article, “Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history,” came from a group of scholars in the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere, and was led by Harvey Whitehouse, an anthropologist and the the director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford.

The study prompted a significant amount of interest on social media and in the global press, according to Altmetric, with articles in Scientific American, Yahoo! News, PBS, El Pais and many other publications worldwide. As Scientific American put it, Whitehouse’s group found that the advent of moralizing gods did not lead to the formation of complex societies. [Note, you can see the links to the popular press coverage at the link.]

And the media-social media coverage - they're always quick to cover anything that could discredit religion - led to the certainly anticipated and expected comment thread babblage by the God haters, the Christian bashers are the primary audience for this kind of audience-pleasing science.  And that popularity isn't found only on the popular level but among other scientists one expects from allied fields:

The paper, which has been cited 49 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science — giving it a Highly Cited Paper designation among papers of the same age.

Well, typical for the social sciences, entirely expectable for anyone of any experience of them, their methodology was dodgy and so their results were:

[The paper]  also met with skepticism. Immediately after publication, a group led by Bret Beheim, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, submitted a response to the journal questioning the validity of the results. Beheim and his colleagues posted a preprint of their argument on PsyArXiv in early May 2019. Nature accepted the article on Feb. 18, 2021, roughly 21 months later.

The core challenge from Beheim et al. is rather that the original paper treats absence of evidence for moralizing gods as evidence of their absence. It changes all N/A (not available) values to absent. In other words, the original paper considers that if there is no information on the presence of moralizing gods in a certain region at a certain time, there is no moralizing god.

After reanalyzing their results in light of the challenge, Whitehouse’s group agreed that the findings weren’t quite as robust as they’d initially claimed.

I have to wonder what would happen to a student taking an introduction to statistics course at any of the universities that employ these researchers who made that kind of an obvious error in their analysis of and misapplication of data. I wonder if some statistics teacher catching such an error would write the old rule of thumb popularized by the Milton Berle of such aphorisms, Carl Sagan, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  I would imagine a lot of those guys who did that had said that, themselves.

What might be most telling in this is not only did that most august of science journals, Nature accept the original obviously flawed study (you do have to wonder about the review process that did not catch the flaws) but in how they dragged their feet in publishing the critique of it once that was pre-published. 

Beheim told us his group was surprised by the long delay between the submission of their article and publication:
 

[It] took nearly two years from submission to acceptance, with only clarifying revisions made to the analysis. Our three referees were excellent, but the journal was not forthcoming about anything for over a year. Thank god we posted a preprint at submission.
 

I look forward to reading the … revised argument. The objection I had to the original analysis wasn’t so much their conclusion, but that they weren’t transparent about the amount of missing data involved. If our critique can help them nail that problem down, I think the field will progress.

It being anthropology I wouldn't count on that.  Anthropology as in all the sciences allegedly dealing with human minds is never going to actually practice rigorous science because rigorous science cannot be done on the object of its supposed study.  It can, though, make up stuff that is a simulation of science, in which case their imitation should be held to a higher standard of pretense than Nature let them get away with.   As he admitted, even the anthropologist who led the criticism wasn't bothered by the result but in the way they got to it.  

Nature's excuse for the long delay in allowing such a frequently cited, much followed in pop-sci followage is pretty telling in a way that made me decide to write about this.

Matters Arising submissions that meet Nature‘s initial selection criteria are sent to the authors of the original paper for a formal response. The comments and formal response may then be sent to independent referees for peer review, as was the case in this instance. As with primary research papers, the period between submission and acceptance for Matters Arising can vary, as it incorporates peer review, careful consideration and evaluation by the editors of the issues raised, and author revisions. In addition, the consideration of the Matters Arising in this case was associated with the retraction of the original paper, which added complexity to the process.

I strongly suspect that the comparative speed and obvious lack of adequate publishing of the original paper was due to its ideological usefulness for the dominating ideology of Nature and of British-English language scientific establishment.  A part of that general establishment such as gave it all of those popular-press citations.  All of which are supposedly cleansed out by the rigorous application of the scientific method.  Though, clearly, that gets out far less than 100% of that kind of pollution when it's of use to that ideology.

Hate Mail - Useful Lies, Suppressed Truths and Prison Bitches Of Billionaires

PRESIDENT BIDEN SAID IT,  Facebook's libertarian actions allowing Covid-19 liars to say what they want to is getting people killed.  As mentioned yesterday in the grim and often vulgar debate over just how many millions Hitler or Stalin or others had murdered, how many hundreds of thousands of those who died under the Trump-Facebook-Twitter-FOX reign of lies, how many deaths those lies were responsible for will be vulgarly argued, those supporting Trump-Facebook etc merely arguing just how many scores or hundreds of millions, not any with any attachment to the truth denying that the lies killed people.  

The fact is that lies kill people, lies permitted by the First Amendment, especially as interpreted under the fashion of "free speech-press absolutism" will be responsible for an increasing proportion of the further death tole of Covid-19 in just this one instance of a pandemic of this potential, I'd say that today that percentage is close to if not 100% of those dying in the United States right now.  The liberals and libertarians who say that must continue must be held responsible for their part in that carnage.  It is that sloppy, generalized language, as made worse by the courts in the last half of the 20th century which has given rise to the insanity that because Madison and the First Congress reluctantly took up a Bill of Rights because he had promised to do so as a condition for Virginia adopting his Constitution and they wished to avoid hard thinking and, no doubt, a protracted debate over it, which has given those who empower Facebook, FOX, Twitter, etc the excuse for not looking at the complexity of this situation as it really is EVEN AS IT IS GETTING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF US KILLED, GOING ON TO A MILLION. 

I'll forgo mentioning the position of Hamilton because that's for another day.

That is not sustainable, if we do not learn from this hard experience of these hundreds of thousands, perhaps in the end millions of deaths, things will end far more badly than they need to.   We have to the hard work of thinking and working our way out of this, to see that we may be able to  have a measure of freedom but not every possible free expression of every possible lie designed (often now with entirely amoral expert advice) for no good purpose.  If we fail to change things  then we will have the choice between a dictator who has the power to order all people to be vaccinated (as I believe one of Trump's admired thugs, the dictator of the Philippines is moving to) or the reign of death we are just beginning to get a fuller picture of in low-vaccination - REPUBLICAN-FASCIST RULED STATES.

As Einstein is frequently said to have said, everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.   The problem is that the First Amendment is too simple, it doesn't begin to match the complexity of the use of propaganda and lies and their planned use as under the Cambridge Analyitica - billionaire, Mercer - Putin, Koch, Murdoch-FOX, etc. use of a simplistic notion of free-speech, free press to not only destroy equality, not only destroy democracy but to get millions killed so the Republican-fascists can use a pandemic to try to get electoral victory.  The idiot judges and sleazy Republican-fascist "justices" on the Supreme Court can rule the remainder of the population and so hand everything over to the billionaires, oligarchs and plutocrats.   There's a reason that the Repuiblican-fascists applauded when at their recent  gathering the failure to meet vaccination goals was announced, it's because they plan on using that planned, Facebook-FOX fueled failure to win elections.  That's their plan, that was Trump's plan, the reason for his use of the pandemic through his lies and his failure to protect the American People by telling the truth about it.

Anyone who doesn't learn from this experience that "free speech" and especially "free press" as it is now practiced cannot be allowed to continue, that while all truth has a right to be told, lies have no right to be and that what we have now is seriously in need of change is too stupid or irresponsibly insouciant to have any say in how the law is going to proceed from the wreckage.  But our legal minds and jurists are just that stupid, seemingly trained to be, they have been as bad in addressing other terrible defects in the Constitution from the earliest days when the Supreme Court empowered the Slave Power that most of its members were members of, even as most of them, today, are Republican-fascists.  Liberals who don't see the problem with their position are their cowardly prison bitches.

Hate Mail

THE FIRST "FREE SPEECH" ABSOLUTIST load of crap that I saw for the transparently obvious load of crap it was was in the wake of the ACLU championing the "right" of Nazis to parade in Skokie, Illinois said to be the home of the largest concentration of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel at the time.  The idea that Nazis had "a right of free speech" that overrode the right of the victims of Nazis to not be re-victimized by Nazis was only the start of it.  The idea that in 1977, a mere 32 years after Hitler shot himself and was burned in a Berlin gutter THAT ANY NAZI ANYWHERE, ANY TRUE BELIEVER IN HITLER'S INSANE, GENOCIDAL IDEOLOGY HAD THE RIGHT TO A CHANCE TO TRY TO DO IT AGAIN WAS COMPLETE AND UTTER AND IRRESPONSIBLE INSANITY.  It was only obviously anything else to idiots who didn't believe what had happened once could happen again or, which I believe was the case, that they didn't happen to believe that THEY AND THEIR LOVED ONES were the ones who would be taking the chance on them being wrong. Clearly, the ACLU lawyers who argued the case never for a second believed they and their loved ones might be targeted as a result of their advocacy, those idiots never do, though they are clearly not much bothered by those who are put in danger by their clients.

I never sent another cent to the goddamned ACLU after that, I never said anything good about them, I found out that not only their past but their present and, with time, future, was far from pure and pristine and in line with egalitarian democracy and the quest for a universally decent life for all.  Nor was it anything like entirely distanced from mercenary motives.  

As a reluctant further student of genocidal, oppressive dictatorships, I have come to believe there are two forms of government, egalitarian democracy and government by gangsters, there only being a difference in degree as to the gangsterism of even relatively benign governments. 

The genocidal history of 20th century and now 21st century governments have produced not only the rivals of Nazism but its equals.  Stalinism, Leninism, Maoism, various other Marxist and fascist and other regimes have amassed mountains of murder victims and generations of people oppressed and enslaved.  The crimes of many of those are totally documented as having happened, merely the statistics of how many tens or scores of millions so murdered, how many billions oppressed being open to any rational or quasi-rational argument.

To pretend any ideology, Nazism, fascism, Stalinism, Leninism, Maoism, etc which have had their test of time SO WE KNOW THAT THEY ARE POSSIBILITIES and which have produced those murderous results, to pretend that in 2021 any of them or their adherents today have a right to try to do it again is the most irresponsible and irrational common received talking point of American liberals and the left and the center.  NONE OF THEM OR THEIR LIKE, APARTHEID IN WHITE SUPREMACIST SOUTH AFRICA OR THE SUPREME COURT SANCTIONED JIM CROW APARTHEID OF THE UNITED STATES HAS A RIGHT TO ANYTHING BUT SUPPRESSION AND EXTINCTION.

It remains to be seen how many Americans the Covid-19 Trumpian-Republican-fascist anti-vaxxers will kill but a body-count that can be avoided is a body count and they already have the record for one year premature death in American history.  For anyone to pretend that because some idiots in the First Congress didn't realize they should make a distinction between true speech and fucking lies we must allow them to lie us into another half million or tens or scores of millions of dead to make Jemmy Madison happy is total and complete insanity that matches anything Trump and his most fevered nutcases have said to get us this far.  

I'm not going to lie about that no matter how extreme people think it is and how unpleasant making they find it.

OLBERMANN VS...UNVACCINATED ATHLETES WHO THREATEN THE GAMES AND ENABLE ANTI-VAX COWARDS - GET. OUT.

 

 

I didn't know unvaccinated pro-athletes was a thing.  Considering how much they get paid, how much the owners have invested in the health of their players, how stupid are they to not require it?    And if some idiot state like Florida wants to make that requirement illegal, fine, their teams don't get to play with teams from sane states.   Same with everything else.  

It should be a felony for media figures to promote anti-vaxx lies.  They not only get those who believe their lies and suck up their advertising and pay their cable profits killed, they kill those who know they are fucking liars for fascism.   Any constitution, any law that allows that in a modern society is an 18th century, pre-Pasteur era hold over that should be scrapped for a constitutional and legal system that learns the hard lessons of history and mass death.  Our system, just such an 18th century holdover, refuses to learn "on principle" don't you know.

Considering How Relatively Rare They Are As Compared To Most Wars, Most Of Those Most College Credentialed People Can Name Are "Religious Wars" - Hate Mail

TODAY IS GOING to be an extremely busy day as yesterday unexpectedly was.  So I'll answer the same stupid claim George Carlin made part of his scolding atheist sermon as stand up comedy routine after that beatnik shtick failed him with a post where I answered it. 

Sunday, December 2, 2018

Why Let The Facts or Logical Coherence Get In The Way Of A Satisfying Prejudice?

As I said in passing in a short, impromptu post a few days ago, I increasingly don't listen to the CBC's Sunday Edition because its longtime host Michael Enright can get on my nerves.  That was on my mind because last week was one I opted not to listen.

That's too bad because the piece I wrote about the scummy product of too many elite Catholic schools in the United States could have benefited from his piece about the scandal plagued St. Michael's School, which he went to, which had its own, Canadian problems with jock culture and machismo.  It's a good essay which I certainly would have referenced.  Hockey culture can be as anti-Christian as football, though most of that is not an intrinsic part of the game, as it is in American football.   You could, conceivably, play a game of hockey without any violation of anything in the Gospel or epistles.  Though you can certainly violate those as typically they are in all sports.  But you violate everything up to and including the Golden Rule as soon as you start playing football, violence is an intrinsic part of the game, it is more than slightly and more than intentionally like the Roman gladiatorial spectacles that were eventually banned by Christianity in Rome. The presence of American football at any Catholic or supposedly Christian school is a sign that the moral character of the place is a facade covering moral decay.

But my reason for writing this was in the letters Enright read today, a letter writer who talks about the priest-coach who ran a sadistic sports program, him witnessing the priest kicking a player of Italian heritage and calling him a "yellow wop".  The letter writer said that witnessing that put him off "organized religion".  My question is why didn't it put him off organized sports, especially organized sports in schools, such incidents abound in entirely secular contexts, schools, universities, amateur and professional sports, youth sports (wonder what the guy said about the various sex scandals involving prominent coaches in Canadian Youth Hockey a decade or more back).

It comes the day after I heard a podcast in which the host cites GORE VIDAL! as an expert on the history of the culpability of "single-god religions" in producing the long history of warfare and bloodshed.  That someone could believe Gore Vidal on anything much is a head shaker.  The guy was an admitted pederast whose frequent trips to Thailand, rightly infamous as a center of pedophile sex slavery as well as a long and documented life of cruising, sometimes in company with other celebrity writers and celebrities of not even that accomplishment are well known.  Not to mention that his veracity on matters historical is documented to be spotty and suspected of being ideological if not just a reflection of his prejudices and personal preferences.

This isn't what I was looking for by way of citations on this and I'm still worn out from being sick so I'll just post this:

In his hilarious [I'll break in here to stipulate that I've never found a single thing he did "hilarious"] analysis of The 10 Commandments, George Carlin said to loud applause, “More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason,” and many take this idea as an historical fact. When I hear someone state that religion has caused most wars, though, I will often and ask the person to name these wars. The response is typically, “Come on! The Crusades, The Inquisition, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, 9/11. Need I name more?”  

Well, yes, we do need to name more, because while clearly there were wars that had religion as the prime cause, an objective look at history reveals that those killed in the name of religion have, in fact, been a tiny fraction in the bloody history of human conflict. In their recently published book, “Encyclopedia of Wars,” authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare, and from their list of 1763 wars only 123 have been classified to involve a religious cause, accounting for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare. While, for example, it is estimated that approximately one to three million people were tragically killed in the Crusades, and perhaps 3,000 in the Inquisition, nearly 35 million soldiers and civilians died in the senseless, and secular, slaughter of World War 1 alone.

History simply does not support the hypothesis that religion is the major cause of conflict. The wars of the ancient world were rarely, if ever, based on religion. These wars were for territorial conquest, to control borders, secure trade routes, or respond to an internal challenge to political authority. In fact, the ancient conquerors, whether Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, or Roman, openly welcomed the religious beliefs of those they conquered, and often added the new gods to their own pantheon. 

Medieval and Renaissance wars were also typically about control and wealth as city-states vied for power, often with the support, but rarely instigation, of the Church. And the Mongol Asian rampage, which is thought to have killed nearly 30 million people, had no religious component whatsoever. 

Most modern wars, including the Napoleonic Campaign, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, the Russia Revolution, World War II, and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, were not religious in nature or cause. While religious groups have been specifically targeted (most notably in World War II), to claim that religion was the cause is to blame the victim and to misunderstand the perpetrators’ motives, which were nationalistic and ethnic, not religious.

I think the reason that lazy-assed journalists, scribblers, babblers, go to that old saw about religion being to blame for everything is exactly that, they're lazy and they know that it's the easiest accusation in the world to make and, being easy, it will get the universal approval of the bigoted and superficial, risking little in the way of opposition.  And, as it notes in my immediate previous post, its total lack of veracity and documentation will not make the slightest bit of difference, even when the refutation of it is provided.

Hate Mail - How Would You Make One That's Better!

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of TRUE speech, or of the press TO PUBLISH THE TRUTH; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

To tell you the truth, considering how judges,"justices" etc. are fully capable of pretending they're too stupid to be able to do things like tell the truth from lies, religion from  hucksters gulling the marginally sane and stupid into not only giving them money but doing stupid and terrible things, the problems go a lot deeper than merely addressing the worst aspects of the Bill of Rights.  You'll have to entirely change the culture of the legal racket to get far in this.   I have absolutely no doubt that most judges and "justices" can tell the difference but so many of them are as capable of pretending not to for the most corrupt and base of reasons and the others know they're going to get overturned if they don't play that game that it will take removing those who either are that stupid or pretend to be, giving them that to worry about.  I'd start by removing Kavanaugh for lying through his teeth during his confirmation and go on from there.  As I recently pointed out every single person in the room at the Roberts and Alito hearings knew they were lying through their teeth as much so, just not as brazenly. 

If the Congress or other legislatures made liars vulnerable to civil action or loss of license or otherwise were driven out of business, I anticipate having far fewer problems with that than I do things as they stand now.   If liars were so removed from the media the quality of Congress and the state legislatures would improve enormously. 

I'd make religion prove that at least 75% of their intake goes to legitimate charitable purposes for the least among us, too.  There should be definitions of what is and what isn't religion.  You can start by excluding the grifters from that category. 

Update:  I really don't care what Simps listens to, if he likes it, good for him as long as I don't have to listen to it.  It's not immoral.  It's not like listening to Toby Keith.

The Same Founders And First Congress Members Who Wrote This Piece Of Crap Wrote The First Amendment That Lets The Fasicst Lie Us Into Perpetual Mass Shooting

 

David Fink Is My Current Hero - Trying To Rescue The Legal Profession From Itself Is Next To Impossible But Someone Has To Try To

 

Of course the liar-lawyers were nowhere near the most irresponsible, reckless, carriers of Trump's Big Lie, they weren't the major force in trying to destroy democracy even by inciting violent insurrection, that would be the media's role in this. 

Don't expect any journalist to try to rescue their profession in this way, they wouldn't even make the attempt  to get to this level.  Those who might want to would be inhibited into enabling by "The First Amendment," in the age when lies can be told with impunity from even civil court consequences.  Thanks to the First Congress as amended by the Warren and subsequent courts, that danger to democracy won't be removed but enabled to be even more dangerous in the future.

"Public Intellectualism" Is Largely A Whore House Supported By The Oligarchs Today - To Declare Yourself One Is Absurd, To Be Called One Should Be Insulting

THE SECTIONS OF THIS "PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL" BULLSHIT invoking things like "cognitive psychology" are things I'd very much like to go into but that would take background reading and analysis that there isn't time for.  I'd give some general advice to be on your guard when someone makes recourse to  the ideological sciences such as that or anythings with the prefixes "cog" or "neuro" unless what they are claiming is purely and demonstrably physiological - though, since they are very highly susceptible to manipulation to get the response desired, anything resorting to MRI in that area of speculation is probably unsafe.   That's especially true when it's a right-winger doing it for political or legalistic purposes.  I'm hard pressed to remember one of those who isn't a liar to start with.

Wehner: You were a key figure in the same-sex marriage debate in the 1990s. How did you see your role in the same-sex-marriage debate at the time?

I would jump in there and say that that isn't something I recall and I was reading and taking an active interest in that issue from before 1990.   I think both of these "public intellectuals" are highly devoted to the creation and promotion of their own personal mythology.  If either of them were "key figures" of anything it somehow escaped my notice. 

Rauch: One is that I thought I had the right answer. I realized right away that this was an issue for me because I was, by that point, a social conservative and said: This is a conservative movement. This is gay people saying, “We’ve had it with being isolated individuals who live in our own separate world and are alienated from norms like marriage and family. That failed us in the AIDS crisis.” And I said, Here’s a case where all my core beliefs come together—equality for gay people; better lives for young people, who need the prospect of marriage; and joining, upholding, and strengthening possibly society’s most important nonpolitical institution. So I saw myself as having something to say that only a few other people were saying, and doing it in a more systematic way.

Another thing I thought I was doing was just more political, which is helping the public understand that the case for gay marriage is a conservative case. That’s why progressive gay and lesbian people and leaders were at best ambivalent about marriage, especially at first. A lot of them were against it because they perceived it, rightly, to be an embrace of this bourgeois norm that they didn’t want. So I thought I could have a public and political role in explaining that this was a conservative movement.

This is absolute, ahistorical bullshit that starts in the assumption that marriage is properly the property of conservatives - look at who among which party remained married and whose marriages split among presidents and presidential candidates as an exercise.  

What is most outrageous of this statement for me is that I don't remember conservatives being the ones struggling for gay marriage, I remember them using the issue to attack Democrats - IN EVERY CASE IT WAS LIBERAL DEMOCRATS PUTTING THEMSELVES ON THE LINE FOR MARRIAGE EQUALITY IN THOSE YEARS - it was conservatives who wrote DOMA and it was Republicans and Democrats who knew how Republicans were setting up gay marriage as a wedge issue to use in elections against them who voted for it,  Bill Clinton, though having opposed it, signed it into law for that purpose IT WAS LIBERAL DEMOCRATS WHO OPPOSED IT.   The court cases, even the Windsor case that pointed out that the law violated the Constitution allowing states to nullify the same-sex marriages recognized in other states - all of those states in which gay marriage was early made legal were liberal states, with conservatives opposing those changes - Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia wrote or joined in dissents opposing even that clearly constitutional relief to those so denied their rights explicitly recognized by the Constitution.   That Roberts got cold feet or, more likely someone he knows or was related to him (or was him)  got to him and persuaded him that "people like them" had their rights violated by DOMA is all that accounts for it being overturned.

These two right-wingers are trying to change recent history so blatantly in the Atlantic magazine that it was going to be the entire focus of my dealing with it before I realized the whole thing was dishonest bullshit.  It is outrageous that any magazine that publishes such not only ahistorical nonsense but nonsense known by people who were paying attention to the issue those years and not suffer a complete loss of face.  The Atlantic should be mocked and ridiculed into publishing a retraction of this crap and firing the idiot who wrote it.  

I also co-founded a group call the Independent Gay Forum, which was a network of conservative, center-right, and libertarian writers and thinkers who are gay, and we wanted to take back at least the gay intellectual world from the monotonal progressives, extreme leftists in many cases who had basically commanded it to that point. These were people who thought if you were gay, it meant you had to be pro-choice and anti-capitalist. And we thought that was nonsense. Marriage was also a good way to open up a new front and take back the agenda from the left. And it succeeded in that, but unfortunately only for a while.

Just to show the kind of double-speak, two-faced intellectualism this is an example of.   While my preference for handling the issue would have been for the government to ONLY involve itself with civil union for any couple, leaving the question of marriage up to couples - whether or not churches wanted to "bless" them or not being a non-governmental thing, if that was not going to happen, as I knew it wasn't because straight people would never give up governmental recognition of their marriages,  to oppose marriage equality while gay was to accept inequality in every way.  

I will point out that the idea that he was making common cause against a woman's ownership of her body with "libertarians" in this way would be quite funny if that issue were not so fraught.  Is the state nationalizing a woman's body ever a position compatible with "libertarianism?"   Well, maybe for a white gay man of privilege. 

That is exactly what he is,  a white male faggot of privilege like all of those gay and lesbian and bisexual Republicans from those years till today, including Lindsay Graham, Denny Hastert, Larry Craig and others who supported and voted for DOMA and other anti-LGBTQ laws.   Not to mention the likes of Ken Mehlman.  It's been a common enough feature of LGBTQ history (Senator Joe McCarthy, likely, Roy Cohn, certainly was an example) that there are many such hypocritical scumbags in our midst.  Such people apparently can live in the billionaire-millionaire financed whore house that is the "public intellectualism" of raised-pinky magazine publishing, institutes, foundations, etc.  But I'll be damned if I'll let them lie like this over the record of who was publicly fighting for and who was against LGBTQ equality.   Get a load of this, remembering just who it was who finally overturned the right-wing, Republican ban on equality, including against LGBTQ members of the military remaining there AND WHO IT WAS NOT WHO DID THAT AND TOOK THE POLITICAL HIT FOR IT. 

Wehner: What do you mean by that? What’s happening now?

Rauch: For 15 or 20 years, the focus of gay and lesbian equality was more about responsibilities than rights. It was about service to our country in the military, service to each other in our communities in marriage, and service to children as mentors and parents. And that was a transformative thing for how the world saw gay and lesbian people. It allowed the flourishing of a gay center. But then we won all those things. And so people like me said, Okay, good, we can hang up our spurs and focus on something else. I went off and did polarization and now the epistemic crisis, and other people went off and did other things. And meanwhile, the progressives hadn’t gone anywhere. If anything, a lot of them got even more rabidly left-wing, and they just swooped down from the hills and retook all the villages. So unfortunately, with very important exceptions, intellectually speaking, the movement is now very left-wing and a lot of the people in the driver’s seats are gender radicals. Which is a very different point of view than gay and lesbian marriage advocates had. So it’s a different world now.

I've known lots of white, conservative gay men who were totally OK with leaving other people in the rainbow flag out of it, to which I say they are jerks and are idiots because without a united insistence on equality, there are not enough gay men to secure it for us.  Even if that were possible, I'd be with the ones who insisted on full equality on an equal basis because it is a moral imperative.   

Most of the section dealing with religion is banal and unremarkable but I will comment on this because it's another distortion of the history. 

Rauch: I would like Christians, especially evangelicals, to understand that we are not a threat to your moral order. That the Bible, properly understood, does not condemn the loving, permanent, binding commitment of two same-sex individuals to each other and to their community. I want them to understand that vast numbers of gay people are religious. I want them very much to come to grips honestly with the fact that the evangelical world and much of mainstream Christianity turned its back on gay people, not only condemned us and singled us out for condemnation as if homosexuality were the worst sin in the world—they did that, of course, for centuries—but when the AIDS crisis came, they turned away. We had to open our own churches in order to do the job of ministering to the spiritual and physical needs of the gay community. That’s disgraceful. And we still haven’t seen the Christian world face up to that. So I want them to look into their souls and do better.

Only a lot of them did, some of the hardest working, hardest caring were not from the gay community,  some of them were straight people or celibate religious from liberal and mainstream Protestant religious efforts, Catholic religious, even clergy.   A lot of the gay men I knew who died of AIDS had most of their care given to them by people from outside of what was called "the gay community" much of the solidarity in what would develop as LGBTQ came from Lesbians who took care of and advocated for gay men who were infected and died from AIDS.  Since these white boys seem to not think them worth considering, many of those I know of, especially one who I am sure would be one of this guys conservative buddies if he had lived till today, was cared for by People of Color who were not gay men or Lesbians.  I think his revision of history is self-serving and dishonest, in the same line with his revision of recent history generally.  Such is the way of such "public intellectualism."   

I have decided to let it go with this because most of what they say is tedious as it is odious and I've got things to do.  Wouldn't you really rather be listening to Brueggemann than this?  I know I would. 

Deep In The Hate Mail File

YOU CAN GET PEOPLE to buy nonsense and even entertainment junk, doesn't mean it signifies anything.  I remember when they successfully gulled more than a million people into buying . . . And Ladies of the Club because the old bat who wrote it was old and previously unpublished, but I'll bet almost no one read that massive pile of crap once they started.  

There's lots of crap that gets peddled, most of the big-name writers of my lifetime were heavily sold through promotion and discussion of their stuff while they were alive but most of them, including some of the biggest names with the biggest careers fell almost immediately into non-readership as soon as they dropped off the twig.  I once asked who reads John Updike or Gore Vidal unless some college teacher assigns them.  Most of the books published are in that category, including lots of NYT best sellers. No, most of publishing is as much PR as selling junk food or over-priced tech, it's no more elevated than that.

Update: More Hate:   No, I've never been fat, I used to be called scrawny then wiry and I've lost weight since then (tendency to hyperthyrodism).  If I weighed 500lb wouldn't make what I said about the asshole who snarked about the death of the Granados' by drowning less true.   He's an asshole.

I've known several very fat people who were among the most generous people I've known and I've known more than a few of my fellow thin men who were selfish, stingy uncaring assholes.  BMI has little to do with whether or not someone is a good person.  I'm hardly as nice as many of the fat people of my acquaintance, a number of them would not push back on this like I have and would be a lot more polite than I'm willing to be with such a total asshole as you are.  

"a resolution that will bring the argument right back where it began"

CONTINUING ON WITH the dissection of the article from the Atlantic that I started tearing up yesterday, there is some of this I think is correct though hardly all of it and hardly in the way that Rauch and Wehner consider it brilliant, much of it is so obviously true as to be obvious and the unremarkable spin put on it by them diminishes its usefulness as analysis.    And all over this is the studied refusal to address the role of racial discrimination and worse, racial genocide, racial enslavement, and disenfranchisement while raising up Madison who not only practiced all of those, the Constitution he and his fellow founders set up is still saturated with it, something which is becoming obvious under the mainstream of Republican politics and Republican domination of the Supreme Court.  And that is not something that started with Trump but has been a feature of Republican politics since 1964 when Goldwater used racism and racists to dominate the Republican convention.  Other than the double-speaking, two-faced efforts of the likes of Jack Kemp and George W. Bush, there has been little to use in denial of that.   Remember that as these two conservatives talk about a pluralism that leads them to ignore that mastodon in the room.  That use of racism, that harnessing of racism that was Goldwater and Nixon's Southern strategy preceded Trump and it will survive him, dominating the Republican power in states where they dominate, in their congressional caucus, in Republican presidencies and on the Roberts' court and as long as there are Republican-fascists on that court. 

Jonathan Rauch: What Trump has done to America

Wehner: Pluralism provides a context for how citizens can live together and even flourish amidst differences over priorities and values. So how does a nation like America cohere, when citizens are divided along the lines of truth and falsity, reality and unreality, and are living in different epistemic universes? How can a shared sense of reality be recovered?

See what I pointed out about their discussion of the Civil War and its causes yesterday for a sense of the "reality" they would like "recovered."  It is a "reality" that I have a feeling looks like the on-screen make-up of 1950s TV or, on its most "pluralistic" end, like the lily-white casting of Woody Allen's filmography. 

Rauch: At the theoretical level, James Madison had the answer to that problem, and he had the answer both in politics and in the epistemic realm, the realm of knowledge. The answer is that when you’ve got a large, diverse society, you have to harness that diversity by putting people into managed conflict with each other so that they’re forced to come to some kind of understanding in order to get anything done and no one group can dominate in the long term.

The U.S. Constitution is basically a mechanism that forces compromise and disperses power in order to make that happen, and it forces people to follow rules. That’s the only way you can run a large society with a lot of political diversity. It requires that individuals and institutions commit themselves to those rules and those values. If they don’t commit themselves to those rules and values, no paper constitution will defend them.

This "constitution of knowledge" business is his shtick, what I assume he hopes to ride into his career as a "public intellectual."  It is about as remarkable in its originality as a card catalog is and about as significant and useful as the hagiographic high school civics of the 50s and early 60s, one which didn't mention the civil rights movement or the labor movement and considered such things as the abolition of slavery and women's' equality as battles won with the passage of laws and the 19th amendment.   

For establishment Republicans, for never-Trump conservatives, I will admit that it's rather remarkable for one of them to admit that the Constitution isn't self-acting, self-governing and entirely reliant in itself.   But considering the stunning obviousness of the point, it's not any kind of compliment to say that.  He goes on self-evidently in that way for a while, stating the obvious as if it's an original insight.

The same is true of the constitution of knowledge, which is not written down but is very similar to the U.S. Constitution. It’s a way of creating managed conflict about opinions, ideas, facts—forcing them into contention and making people persuade each other in order to make knowledge—and do that in a systematic, structured way. It’s a very, very similar kind of thing. To make it work, first, you need a lot of diversity, because we never see our own biases. We have to have people with different biases, however wrong-headed they might seem to me or to you. Then you need people who are committed to making knowledge by putting those into managed conflict and living with the outcome, even if it’s not always favorable and even if they think it’s wrong. So those are the values and structures you need, and they work fantastically well.

I claim that the constitution of knowledge is the greatest social technology ever invented by human kind. It’s transformed us as a species. It makes possible the global network of knowledge seekers and error checkers who put the COVID vaccine in my arm a couple months ago. It makes possible the organization of millions of expert minds in hundreds of countries, thousands of institutions who can pivot and decode a genome in two days. It’s astonishing. So the big-picture answer to your question is the constitution of knowledge and sticking with those values and defending those values and understanding them. 

It's a lot less astonishing if you consider that the sciences behind epidemiology, virology, immunology have been under constant, world-wide development and learning for a long while, now.  And that that effort was not without resistance from, mostly, conservative Republicans who attacked it and thwart it, today.  Not only Republicans here but Conservatives in Britain and elsewhere.  These conservatives don't seem to notice that it is their ideological side which has done that in many countries.  As an aside, considering what is said about gay issues later in the conversation, you might want to go back and look at the state of conservative governance during the previous health emergency of HIV-AIDS during the Reagan and Bush I administrations and the irresponsibility of Andrew Sullivan in that regard. 

Unfortunately, it worked so well for so long that we forgot it was there. We decided, Well, free speech is enough. You have free speech; you’ll have a marketplace of ideas; truth will emerge from that. That’s how the internet was supposed to work. No structure, just peer-to-peer conversations. Well, that’s a disaster. Madison knew that. So we need to recommit to these rules; we need to understand what they are; we need to defend them in an active way.

Here I think he reaches the apogee of his daring,  which is, again, rather stunning merely in its self-evidence.  Though he, again, uses it to blame the internet while totally ignoring the earlier venues of media which proved to be no less culpable in lying and deceiving and creating the myths and racist common received POV which Trump and his puppet master, Putin, merely exploited.  There was nothing they used which was not already long in place, the internet and the technology of targeted propaganda - something which, as I recently pointed out, Richard Vigurie was doing for Republicans with targeted mail before the internet became a force in society, culture and commerce.   The evidence of the use of such propaganda methods are as old as human literature and certainly far older than that.   The Mosaic prohibition on bearing false witness is a response to that. 

The next question and its answer is a mix of self-promotion, promotion of the kinds of  oligarchy financed "institutions" both of these clowns live on and in and more self-evident generality and non-specificity in what is to be done.  

Wehner: And what, specifically, can be done?

Rauch: In terms of responding to disinformation, this is the hardest part of my book to talk about because you want to be able to say, “Here are the three things you need to do and you solve it.” And it’s not like that. Major epistemic disruptions, like the development of the printing press or, in the 19th century, offset printing, require all-of-society responses, mostly nongovernmental but including many, many actors and institutions figuring out how to change the rules, revise the rules so that you can adapt to these new technologies and tactics.

So what are we talking about? Social media and digital media need systemic redesign. The press needs to get savvier about the use of disinformation and not fall for it hook, line, and sinker by repeating every conspiracy theory in order to debunk it. The public needs to be made aware of what’s going on; that’s why I wrote this book. A population that understands it’s being manipulated and understands the tactics can still be manipulated because they’re very powerful tactics, but we’ll have more resistance if they understand what’s going on.

Civic activism on matters like depolarization can make a difference. That’s where groups like Braver Angels come in. It turns out that when people actually know that the real level of disagreement is lower than they’ve been led to believe, that itself can reduce polarization. Direct civic action can help. Setting up watchdogs, monitors, and academic centers that understand this information, and penetrate the networks where the campaigns are hatched in order to disrupt them, alert social-media companies, intelligence agencies, and so on. I can go on in this vein, but you get the idea. We’ve got a long way to go, but all of those things are already starting to happen.

You can always tell that one of these guys has nothing to say when it comes to how to really address the problems, leaving things to the same set of designated "responsible people" who have gotten us here to start wit.   What it really comes down to is that they don't really want it to change.  "Nothing more can be done," is the inevitable stage that elite talk about such public problems.  It's the stage of elite public grief which doesn't even have the theoretical benefits of that less than helpful road map of how one is to cope.  Marilynne Robinson in her great analysis of elite British social thought in her book Mother  Country exactly describes what these two creatures of American foundations, institutions, "public intellectualism" are engaged in here in a sort of sub-committee of two.   It might help see that if you consider how Madison keeps being brought back into it.

British social thought can well be imagined as occurring this way.  It takes place in a country house built and furnished to accord with conventions polished by use, a house filled with guests, great and minor luminaries, ornaments of literature, the sciences, the church and of philosophy and politics.   Most of them, not coincidentally, are cousins at some remove.  They are charmed to find in one another just that streak of intuitive brilliance they had always admired in themselves and to be confirmed in their sense that they are true members of a group in which there are no impostors by a very great similarity of taste, of interest  of sympathy.  It is a leisurely visit, some centuries in length, and in due course everyone has confessed his weakness for Hesiod, and admired the garden, and regretted the weather.  The evenings would perhaps have begun to weigh, if someone had not suggested a game called Philanthropy.  The rules of the game are very simple.  One must justify things as they are by attacking things as they are.  It is a philosophic game, perfectly suited to showing off a fine wit.  It has even the thrill of risk, since it invites subversive ideas.  But the point is always, of course, to achieve a resolution that will bring the argument right back where it began.

Among the things that really need to be done, apart from things like licensing FOX and the other cable networks THE REAL POWER BEHIND TRUMPISM and re-instituting things like the Fairness Doctrine, public service requirements, ownership diversity YEAH, HOW ABOUT THAT, WHITE BOYS, OWNERSHIP DIVERSITY, is letting people like Al Gore and Hillary Clinton sue those in the media who carry lies about them into the flames of hell.  But you'll find those have gone out before the likes of these two consider anything that will really change things.

Whining That I'm Not Posting The Comments I Answer

YOU LEAVE A COMMENT in my moderation file, you slander me elsewhere,  I'll use what you give me on my terms, not on yours.

You Say "Enrice" He Said "Enrique - Let's Call Th Whole Thing Off

AS I HAVE WRITTEN about before, I'm not a huge fan of the standardized spelling of the English language which I think is more a blight than a virtue.   Like most English speakers, even those with college-credentials and even many of those who you can call "college-educated" without stretching truth, I am not a master of that standardized spelling, or, rather of the American standard spelling, which would, if observed totally, would render them a "bad speller" in places which practice the English or Canadian rules for the same.   

In researching this the last time my tireless little meter-maid of orthography got all schoolmarmish over my posts, I read some of Noah Webster's biography and writing on the topic and have to say that my view of him, which previously had been based on a 20th century bio for children I read in grade school, rose enormously.  Here's just one of my more recent pieces on the topic.  He would have been a far more radical reformer of spelling from the English system than the establishment of his time allowed him to be, democratizing the written language by getting rid of the "futile classicism" to a large extent and making the spelling far closer to phonetic spelling, even with the variations in pronunciation then current.

Democratizing and facilitating the written form of English is a vitally important thing if things are to get better.  I know that after I learned to use a word processor and started typing (which I can do a hell of a lot faster than I could write with a pen) and I started typing out a lot of the notes I would have taken by hand and my thinking, it helped me to clarify a lot of things that I didn't realize were muddled before.   That most English speaking people are inhibited from writing for any number of reasons - the other merely mechanical issue of  (un)standardized punctuation of English being another of those - is a real danger, not only to personal memory and understanding but, also, in unreviewed thinking.  I think one of the things that they could do to help that is to require students to type out something, anything important to them in school every day and to read it and edit it before some of them (chosen at random) had them read aloud to the class for criticism.  Just requiring them to write and think about what they wrote would have an enormous effect in clarifying thinking and expression.  If it would help, having them read it themselves might be good, though if someone has trouble doing that, they might need help on that count too. 

I don't think there is any substitute for writing and reading text, words on a screen or on a page in semi-permanent form, easily edited and reviewable.  I have come to deeply distrust extempore oral expression such as in presidential "debates" and interviews and question and answer sessions.  Not everyone is as honest or as brilliant as Jen Psaki who might be the bst I've ever seen in that format.  I'll bet she's a great writer, too. 

An oral culture such as ours has become - even texting, tweeting and online commenting is more that than writing - is bound to have that be a problem for it.  Memory failure, alone, is a guarantee if it's not written down and kept.   Accurate memory seems to count for little to us resulting in a tsunami of lies, which is a big part of our problem.  I'd illustrate with examples from my personal meter-maid of "correct writing" but I'm already spending more time with this than I'd intended to. 

Failing the ever failing effort to "reform" the spelling of English, I say let's go back to the pre-Dr. Johnson time of unstandardized spelling being the standard.  Many of the greatest works in the English language have that feature in the original manuscript AND IN THE ORIGINAL PRINT VERSIONS.   In fact a lot of the worst of "correct spelling" of English were atrocities introduced because a lot of the printers in England at the time printing was introduced were imported from the Low Countries where such combinations as "eight" and ight" etc. were introduced.  How stupid does an intellectual class have to be to allow such a thing to continue for so many centuries?   Noah Webster's original reforms should be adopted but without that, let the chaos begin!

------------------------

This time it's over my intentionally annoying said troll with an intentional "misspelling" because the idiot let me know that really set him off.  That one was intentional but another one came up unknowingly on my part when I copied what I have to believe was a Castilian writer writing it "Enrice Granados" using what I afterwards read was the way it was written where Granados lived in Barcelona while he used the more typically Spanish spelling "Enrique" which I have now changed that to.  It wasn't something Simps noticed but I do respect Granados enough to change it to his spelling.  Apparently people think it was something of a political thing as well, but that's their business, I'll concentrate on his music.   

Update:  Looking around, I saw some idiot writing for a well respected venue made light of one of the stories that claimed Amparo, Enrique Granados' wife was too fat to get into a life-boat, the implication that he should have just let her drown because, you know, she was fat.   Which I think is one of the kind of disgusting things that is casually said that shows how vile contemporary speech is.  The claims that Granados took the route home that ended up in getting them killed was due to him longing to be with his current mistress makes him risking and losing his life to save his wife, the mother of their six children all the more a testimony to his heroic death.   Clearly, he loved her in ways that entirely go over the heads of such scribbling class wits for whom things like looks matter more than love and devotion, bravery and courage, the willingness to sacrifice yourself to save others, which is why such superficial asses should never be considered seriously or hired to write things.   

If there's one thing I've learned from reading the reality behind some of our great wits, its remarkable how many of them were total scum and complete assholes.  Especially those who write as "critics" of the popular variety.

I Used To Call Think Tanks "Guess Pools"

IN AN INTERVIEW published on Atlantic Monthly the day before last,  Peter Wehner , "a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump,"  who I was unaware of before I read it starts nicely enough.

America is in the grips of an epistemic crisis—an assault on reality, a rising inability to distinguish fact from fiction, an effort to shut down free inquiry—that poses an existential threat to liberal democracy. Which is why Jonathan Rauch’s new book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, is so timely and so essential. It helps us understand this moment better than anything else I’ve read and offers insights into what can be done to strengthen what Rauch calls a “reality-based community.” Rauch’s “constitution of knowledge” is a structured system of institutions and rules that we depend on to settle disagreements and discover truth. As Rauch puts it, “Free speech is not enough; you have to get a lot of the settings right.”

To which I thought, isn't that pretty much what I've been telling people for the last 20 years and more?   Alas, the interview ended up being as much what it claims to have identified as the problem as anything else.  In fact, the problems with what both of them say are so extensive and so much an example of the kind of thing they're identifying as "the problem" that I wonder how what was once considered a major venue of intellectual activity could have not noticed that.  The problems start in paragraph 3, see how many false equivalents and outright lies told in the interest of getting everything your own way it contains and where those lies start in the both-siderism.

I called him recently to talk about his book, and about polarization, epistemic disruption, and the blast radius of Donald Trump, whom Rauch describes as “a genius-level propaganda operative.” The Republican Party has become “an institutionalized propaganda outlet,” he argues. But we also talk about the dangers of so-called “cancel culture” and the left’s “totalistic ideology,” what cognitive psychology can teach us about politics, the writers who have shaped his political sensibilities and philosophy, his pivotal role in the gay-rights debate and his concerns about where it’s heading, his thoughts on atheism and Christianity, and his aspirations as a writer and a public intellectual.

As if there is ANYTHING on the left, the real political left in American politics that begins to compare with the Republican-fascists, the billionaires who finance such projects as the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a right-wing project started by Ernest Warren Lefever who, I have absolutely no doubt would have been part of the Trump regime if he were in the prime he was in when Reagan nominated him to a position at the State Department and had his record as thickly involved with Latin American fascist regimes exposed, including the Argentinian fascist regime that murdered so many - one of its victims, the tortured Jacobo Timmerman opposed his nomination as well as two of Lefever's own brothers.  I don't think his "Ethics" and Policy Center has put that legacy behind it.  I am prepared to believe that if Trump had not been so bizarre and so extreme in his cartoonishness, they'd have had no problems with many if not most of the crimes against people he committed.   

But this is about the interview so I'll let you read and research the source of it.  As there are things I partly agree with and things I think are everything from partially false to totally false I will interject from time to time.

Peter Wehner: What’s different and more dangerous about American politics today than before, and why is this epistemic disruption so much worse now than ever before? Or is it worse now than ever before?

Jonathan Rauch: It probably tracks polarization, to which it’s closely related. And indications are that polarization is at its worst since approximately the time of the Civil War. That’s not a sentence anyone enjoys saying or thinking about. And I think the same is true of the epistemic crisis.

There was a big one in the 1850s. The South engaged in a campaign to create an alternative reality in which the North was the aggressor and it was coming down to destroy the South and its lifestyle. And that was very effective in ginning up war fever, which was the intention. I don’t think we’ve seen anything remotely like that since that time in terms of magnitude and danger. And the present crisis, of course, is of a very different nature.

So why now? It’s been building for a long time. Polarization per se is not new, but the more polarized a society gets, the easier it is to manipulate people by hating on the other side. Polarization opens the door for propaganda campaigns. And then propaganda exploits polarization, because it seeks to further divide the society. That’s what Putin was doing in 2016 when he used the Internet Research Agency to stimulate protests, even opposite protests across the street from each other. Divide the society. That in turn weakens your opponents; weakens the society; lays the groundwork for cultism, demagoguery, and so on. So first, polarization creates a substrate that’s favorable to propaganda.

The first thing that jumps out at me about that is this is obviously one white male of privilege talking to another white male of privilege so they can get through paragraphs like that without mentioning People Of Color, especially Black People and their treatment by White People as the background to all of American history.   It would seem that the central issue to all of that SLAVERY AND THE FACT THAT IT WAS THE ENTIRE BASIS OF THE WEALTH OF THE SOUTHERN ARISTOCRACY(said by some to, actually be the wealthiest class of people in the world, at the time, their billionaire class) AND A LARGE PART OF NORTHERN FINANCIAL ARISTOCRACY SUCH AS WHO WROTE THE CONSTITUTION FOR THEIR OWN SELF-INTEREST, granting a few piddling rights to propertied white men and a few left overs to others.  Doing so in such a way that the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision, more than a bit to do with the actual start of the Civil War, could claim that the Constitution excluded Black People from all of the rights of citizenship and many of the rights of non-citizen humans.  And the corruption baked into the Constitution allowed that abomination to stand as the law of the land until the Civil War amendments overturned it.  If those hadn't passed in the wake of the Civil War, I'm not prepared to say they would not still be the law of the land and that our politics would not have more closely resembled hose of apartheid South Africa which maintained such a system against a far larger percentage of Black People into recent history.  AND IN FACT OURS DID UNTIL THE VOTING RIGHTS AND CIVIL RIGHTS LAWS WERE PASSED.  That is all allowed under our Constitution AS IT REALLY IS AND WILL NOW BE AGAIN UNDER THE ROBERTS' RULINGS.   I don't recall the conservative think-tank, public intellectual class testifying against the nomination of Samuel Alito the author of the death warrant for the Voting Rights Act.   I do remember a memorable testimony by a Black Yale law school member against him as well as the establishment "liberals" Alito went to law school and worked with. including "liberal judges"  testifying that he'd be just swell on the court.

And what you can say about Black People and slavery you can say about Native Americans and genocide, the other great source of American wealth in our history.   To think those are not so much more than ghosts that haunt our governmental system, our laws, the tradition of that abomination, Supreme Court written law but are still vital forces in that is THE GREAT LIE of American culture and life.

The second one is technology. We had a major information revolution in the form of internet, digital media, social media. And those turned out to be designed much better for propaganda and disinformation and “canceling” than they were for truth. They did not evaluate truth in transmitting information. They simply evaluated addictiveness, which means they prioritized outrage and enticing the false conspiracy theories over truth. 

This pretends that all of this started with online media, online social media when the grounds laid for Trump are older than that.  The attack on the truth is as old as our national myths and they were accelerated with the arrival of the movies, radio, most of all television and the rise of the networks and, before that newspaper syndicates and media corporations.  William Randoph Hurst, of course, springs to mind as a print source the Rupert Murdoch of his time, credited with having the power to start a terrible war based on a lie told about a boat blowing up.   Donald Trump as a public figure first depended not on the internet but on NBC putting him on as a dictatorial CEO in what, tellingly in regard to peddling lies as "the truth" is called "reality television".   Before him Hollywood created Ronald Reagan, the real predecessor of Trumpism being Reaganism.  All of which had the skids greased for them by the Supreme Court allowing the mass media to lie with impunity and libertarians of the kind who opposed such measures as kept things from going completely to hell for a while, things like the Fairness Doctrine and public service requirements.   Things which, BY THE WAY, were not gotten rid of by "the left" but by the conservative Reagan administration.  I will grant that the Warren Court gave them the Sullivan Decision, which started in the permission of the media to lie about politicians with impunity, something they started doing immediately and put the previous standard of presidential criminality,  Richard Nixon in the White House in 1968.

And then a third thing that happened, and I argue it must not be underestimated, and that’s the arrival of Donald Trump and conservative media, which he co-opts and exploits.

Donald Trump is a genius-level propaganda operative. He had the audacity and skill to look at Russian-style disinformation and adapt it to American politics. He used all the power of his campaign, then his presidency, then his entire political party, plus conservative media, to push disinformation and conspiracy theories and trolling through every possible channel on a scale that was never dreamed of in America before. So this is the first time America has ever been exposed to Russian-style disinformation on a massive scale from a domestic actor. And when you take that, which is just an enormous change, and you add it to the technology and the polarization, you get what we’ve got

He certainly had lessons in how to do that from the NYC and other media which he played well before there was an internet,  especially the lightly to never really fact-checked features sections of newspapers and interview programs who knew they could turn to him for audience interesting outrageousness and bombast.   The style of media he practiced owed as much to the broadcast-cabloid form of the TV commercial, made to gull, persuade and cheat, something much closer in proximity to the idiot Trump whose mastery is more that of an idiot savant appealing to the others so propagandized, the natural audience for FOX - another omission from this very curious interview.  Considering the rise of Trump in terms of intellectualism is a lie because that's not what created him, though many such as float in the think tanks and their patrons used him once he was so created.

Wehner: Pluralism provides a context for how citizens can live together and even flourish amidst differences over priorities and values. So how does a nation like America cohere, when citizens are divided along the lines of truth and falsity, reality and unreality, and are living in different epistemic universes? How can a shared sense of reality be recovered?

Rauch: At the theoretical level, James Madison had the answer to that problem, and he had the answer both in politics and in the epistemic realm, the realm of knowledge. The answer is that when you’ve got a large, diverse society, you have to harness that diversity by putting people into managed conflict with each other so that they’re forced to come to some kind of understanding in order to get anything done and no one group can dominate in the long term.

The U.S. Constitution is basically a mechanism that forces compromise and disperses power in order to make that happen, and it forces people to follow rules. That’s the only way you can run a large society with a lot of political diversity. It requires that individuals and institutions commit themselves to those rules and those values. If they don’t commit themselves to those rules and values, no paper constitution will defend them.

This is NPR-PBS-Ken Burns DC think tank nonsense.  It is not the way the Constitution has worked, certainly not as James Madison intended, he was hardly a modern egalitarian democrat.  His alleged paternity of the Bill of Rights is, as the fine historian Paul Finkleman has noted, it was a "reluctant paternity" and the results have been the source of much of what has led to Trump.  The absurdity of the cultural deification of the "balance of powers" which have never been much balanced and with the Supreme Court assuming powers never granted to it in the Constitution to act as a super-veto over laws duly adopted by the Congress, even those signed into law by the Executive, have, throughout our history, exercised a pernicious and unbalanced role in preserving the interests of the oligarchs.  Not to mention such things as "corporate person-hood and the stream of innovations that are coming in under the Roberts Court as under Rehnquist when the court blatantly overturned an election, putting Bush II in power with the blessings of the "free press".   Madison and the other "founders" were primarily amateurs who were trying to set up a government without a governing monarch and their results are something that literally everything good in American history has had to struggle with or against.   That's a lie I swore I'd stop letting get by without challenging it well before Trump was raised up by entertainment TV as a force in American politics. 

I could go on and on with the problems of this interview which I see as mostly a lab test for what's wrong with the conventional line of "public intellectualism" (how anyone can use that term for themselves or others as in this interview without getting laughed in the face is, perhaps, another such lab test for just what's wrong with our intellectuals, these days).  I'd dearly love to go into the advocacy about a group I'd never heard of before "Braver Angels" and its origins and issues positions as what happens among those who live inside the daisy-chain of "public intellectualism" and the think tanks and billionaire-millionaire funded "institutes" and foundations such as appear in such magazines as The Atlantic.   But there are other piles of outrageous crap in this I want to address and I think this is as much as I can ask someone to digest in one post.   So I'll deal with more of the huge loads of crap that are contained in this effluent from these "public intellectuals" over the coming days.  It is amazing as a document of two-faced crap that comes out of the well-funded alleged intellectual establishment such as who gets in such magazines and who show up on PBS and NPR and other such venues.