Sick Day Repeat Night Radio Drama - Gordon Pengilly - Lucky Girl and The Rawhide Hour

Lucky Girl

 

The Rawhide Hour 

Gordon Pengilly is a too little known and produced playwright and sculptor from Canada.  I love his work.  I especially loved his  Seeing In The Dark originally written for radio which was once available online in the excellent production they did at the BBC.  If I ever find it again I'll post it again.  And his Mystery Project Series Bailey's Way (available in lots of places online).   Also loved those I've read and never heard, They Don't Call Them Farmers Anymore (originally a radio play), Flesh & Ghost and Metastasis, which I've only read, as well.   Maybe I should just say I've never not liked anything he wrote that I've heard or read.  I'd love to hear and see them, wish I'd get the opportunity.

How Wealth Inequality Spiraled Out of Control | Robert Reich

 

Direct link to the video

Still Kicking But Taking It In Stride

 'YEAH, got what's going round.  Not Covid but bad enough to not be getting on with.  Will write at length again soon, I hope.  Probably a few little things.  

For now, in light of what Bonhoeffer talked about how the obstinate denial of truth and moral responsibility can overcome human minds on a rational level by going lower, consider how a vague feeling of bigotry insinuated itself into a friend of Marion Pritchard when they went to see the Nazi antisemitic propaganda movie Der Ewig Jude shortly after it was made.

Marion Pritchard, then a graduate student in the Netherlands, recalled seeing the film: 

We went to see this movie and sat and made smart remarks all the way through and laughed at it because it was so outrageous. And yet when we came out of the movie, one of my Gentile friends said to me, “I wish I hadn’t seen it. I know that it was all ridiculous and propaganda, but for the first time in my life I have a sense of them and us—Jews and Gentiles. I’m going to do everything I can to help them, but I wish I didn’t have this feeling.” 

The fact is that mainstream English language, Hollywood movies have consistently had a huge amount or racist stereotyping in them and that the majority of the audience for that are not as sophisticated as these 1940's movie goers were. And consider, also, that Der Ewig Jude was not nearly as popular as the movie called the most antisemtic movie ever made,  Jud Süß, based on an early 19th century antisemitic novel, not a phony "documentary".   A death camp guard gave testimony that after seeing that movie they were more enthusiastic for their job of murdering Jews and brutalizing them before they killed them. In the American civil liberties industry line, the Swedish censor at the time was wrong to ban the movie from being shown in Sweden, which could have easily gone Nazi instead of being "neutral."  The effect of Birth of a Nation in the United States was certainly similar to the effect of that movie in that it revived the KKK, our indigenous analog to the Nazi and fascist movements of Europe.  

I don't think there is any right to do that which is superior to the rights of the intended victims of the propaganda to be protected from that known effect of theatrical, cinematic, TV and radio lies.  I think a lot of the backlash against the civil rights movement was aided, greatly by Hollywood and TV, lots of it stupidly counter-productive.   All In The Family did nothing at all to counter Nixonian Republicans, it encouraged the Archie Bunkers of real life.  

Hate Mail

NEVER!  I WILL NEVER TAKE BACK what I said.  The position of "free speech absolutism" the traditional ACLU position, the "civil liberties" industry would most honestly be expressed in the slogan, "Yeah, let's let it happen again,"  even as they strike a pose by piously and emptily saying "never again."

Our own history of our indigenous fascist tradition of white supremacy proves not only can it happen here, it has and is happening here and it's again getting worse largely through the "right to lie" and the predictable rise in lying, hate-talk media enabled through the ACLU and its ilk.   And this time, as the generation that fought against the Nazis is about all dead, with neo-Nazism in the mix. 

I get into a lot of online brawls that expose the thinking of a lot of these people, I've been engaged with some trad-Catholic fascist Latin mass fanatics and it quickly went to the antisemitic phase with them.  The same with secular Republican-fascists.   One of the reasons I get into brawls with these people is to get them to expose what they really think and intend.  It's not reassuring.

"Yeah, Again" is a more honest slogan for free speech absolutism, especially in its most effective aiding of indigenous American fascism, "free press" absolutism.   Since Skokie, it should be the slogan of the ACLU. 

"People died to defend the First Amendment. . . . "

My parents didn't fight the Nazis in WWII to make America safe for them to get a chance to repeat it here, nor the white supremacists to flourish as they now do under our regime of free speech, free press absolutism.  Anyone who would die for the "rights" of Nazis or the KKK or Stalinists or Maoists to get a chance to do it over again would die the most useless death in fighting against those things in the history of self-sacrifice.

Linked Index To The Commentary On Dietrich Bonhoeffer On The Extreme Danger Of Obstinate Denial Of The Truth, "Stupidity"

- "one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him"

- Beyond Nodding In Agreement With What Bonhoeffer Said About German Nazis, Long Ago and Far Away

-  "every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity"

- "the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity"

Rebecca Parris - When October Goes

 

Direct link

Rebecca Parris, voice

George Mesterhazy, piano

I was surprised Barry Manilow wrote the music, though I wasn't surprised to find out that Johnny Mercer wrote the words. 

Rebecca Parris wasn't as well known as she deserved to be.

P.S.

I've definitely got some health issue bubbling up.  I might miss tomorrow so I have posted the last part of my comments on Bonhoeffer on stupidity now.  

the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity

Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.
 

But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.

"To live the responsible life," the idea of being responsible, in today's secularized, entertainment addled America seems almost a quaint notion.  Everything around us is an inducement to not be responsible.  When I read that one of the first things I thought of was the principled, scrupulous refusal of that empty granite suit, Robert Mueller, to break protocol and speak voluntarily and fully to those who were investigating the total corruption of our elections by those backing and around Donald Trump, certainly a pose of living "the responsible life" but one based on professional and conventional expediency and, so, devoid of really acting responsibly.  He was joined in that by a host of other well-spoken of figures, many of them lawyers obligated to uphold secular, civil law and even those who had taken an oath to "protect and defend the Constitution."  Such is the secular notion of the responsible life. 

The heroic witness and action and martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer give him credibility today, even with many who would reject the central aspect of all of that and his motivation his religion, his Christianity.   I have seen bits and snips of this passage used by secularists which never really gets to the substance of what he was saying nor for the hope he held out for it.  Being a political blogger who agrees with him, I will begin with the end of the passage. 

But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance.

That is real reason to hope but not one that Americans should find reassurance and repose in.   The fact is that the American political context, as we have seen time and time again, the Constitutional system is set up to empower a minority over even the will of a large majority, such as on issues of gun control, environmental protection, the right of women to full ownership and control of their bodies, etc.  

The minority have consistently thwarted that will of the majority on the basis of appeals to a margin of those who can be duped and suckered and corrupted.  In the Governor's race in Virginia decided last night, it was shown how bald-faced lies in order to take advantage of vestigial racism in a large percentage of otherwise not stupid voters and, if not racism a ginned up sense of rightness or wrongness on issues they don't really know anything about "Critical Race Theory" can have that effect.  

On top of that there is the inherent anti-democratic structure and makeup of the Senate which was always set up so a minority of people centered in small population states could thwart the will and even the wisdom of even large majorities of The People as a whole.  It is far easier to win over small populations in artificially created populations, in states, so as to have that effect than to thwart the will of the electorate as a whole.  Add in such corruptions as the Senate filibuster and the court packing of the Republican-fascists in the past fifty years and that great hope can be definitively thwarted.  

We are not headed into a period in which the anti-democratic American "democracy" is being dictated to by a minority of bad will above the better will of the majority, we are directly in that now, especially with the capture of the Supreme Court and federal courts by Republican-fascists and the billionaires and millionaires who have paid for that court capture. 

The excuse originally given for the anti-democratic features of the Constitution, that it would prevent the majority from oppressing minorities was a lie from the start.  The reason for it was to protect the minority of those who kept an oppressed minority in slavery and their allies among the financier class who saddled poor whites and would soon reduce so many of them to wage slavery.  And now we see, over and over again, how it prevents the majority of The People of good will from making that good will, equality, economic justice, environmental protection the law of the land.   We have seen, from the inception of the country, how the Senate and, on a growing number of disastrous occasions, the Electoral College have thwarted the majority on behalf of those of bad will and selfish-self-interest.

I'm sorry to take away the consolation of that but the fact is the idolized American Constitution is set up to disempower the majority on behalf of a malignant, self-interested minority and whatever dupes they can gull to go along with what will be in the billionaires and millionaires interests and not those for The People as a whole.  Racism is the primary but far from only tool of deception and corruption that works for them over and over again. 

I have mentioned before how I went from someone who was entirely reluctant to discuss matters of religion in politics to becoming convinced that not only was that reticence unnecessary, it was one of the foremost reasons that the American left has been worse than a near total flop, it has been a left that has stupidly given up the ground to its opponents, turning in the very years that the sacrifice of the religious left, more than any others, got us the laws overturning American apartheid and started dismantling other forms of oppression and discrimination.  I read the same text from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to its end and I agree with what he said is the only hope, though not believing that that hope is only present in Christianity or Judaism or Islam but whenever people of good will accept the same teachings present in it that are the preconditions of the modern conception of democracy,  what is far more reliably contained in the economic and social justice, the personal obligations that are contained in the Hebrew word Mishpat, what Bonhoeffer was referring to in its most basic and, in an American context, potent form.  

I would caution one thing about that, as I recently pointed out the great Jewish theologian and scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel said that even the Torah was a human expression of inspired revelation and that it was a commentary, a midrash on the original content of that inspiration.  As such even that authoritative text of that inspiration is susceptible to human misunderstanding, distortion and misrepresentation.  I am no more a Torah "literalist" or "originalist" than I would be of the text of the Constitution and the idolized Bill of Rights.  I certainly don't think that the Holiness code for the priestly class should be held over us, today, not any more than the elaborate instructions for the outfitting of the priests and Temple, in all of its unreadable detail, should govern worship today. 

Anyone who tells you that their articulation of Scripture is not fallible is a liar and, as the "literalists," "originalists," laying down the meaning of the American Constitution, they are up to no good.   Those slogans sound right but they are an ad campaign for evil just as the "parental rights" spoken on TV by a Republican-fascist activist "mom" threw the election to the Republican-fascist in Virginia last night. 

The Scripture is not an iron bound code of civil law,  used as such it has the opposite of intended effects.  But, its basic substance which is shared by some other religions, ignored will produce the impotence of the American left in its periods of post Civil Rights Movement secularism.  There was never a good reason for that.   I say that as an LGBTQ man who fully understands the complexities and perils of saying what I just did.  None of this is easy but I agree with Bonhoeffer,  

The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.

every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER'S thoughts on the particular kind of stupidity he identified as one of the greatest dangers from where I left of yesterday:

And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. 

Just last week in talking in real life with someone about the terrible persistence of Trumpism and Republican-fascism, they reflexively brought up religion as one of the primary motivations of that, in the common way of college-credentialed, received ahistorical wisdom.   I pointed out that the majority of Americans don't go to church services or listen to them on TV, most Americans, even those who profess a religious belief do not do much in the way of practicing it and those who do might spend one or two hours at it once a week as opposed to how much media they consume.  Entertainment TV, mostly, "news" etc.   TV and other media, the social-disease spreading media, time-waste media, is what most American minds most of the time they aren't at work are focused on.  That is an enormous "upsurge of power in the public sphere"  starting with the advent of radio and the increased popularity of movies - the Nazis among others immediately understood that they could harness that "upsurge of power" and produced and mandated the use of cheap radios in Germany.   

When they invaded Poland, as a prelude to their planned genocide of the Polish People, they instituted a policy of degenerate and frivolous entertainment replacing anything informative and important for those they intended to kill.  Other gangster run regimes have done the same.  

The influence of heretical "white evangelical" "Christianity" and "traditional Catholicism" (neither of which have much use for the Gospel of Jesus)  is certainly not to be discounted among those in thrall to Republican-fascism, especially those of the self-discrediting Trump "Christians" but even there the primary venue of its consumption is probably the media, "Christian" broadcasters, EWTN and other Catholic identified hate media are real and a major force among a margin of people useful to American fascists.  The Catholic liturgy as a sort of spectacle conducted in an uncomprehended language, perhaps some following along with a libretto, features heavily in that part of it.*

When Christianity is intent on fulfilling The Law and the Gospel, as in the Civil Rights Movement against American apartheid that brought the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts, other laws being destroyed by America's indigenous fascism which runs the Republican Party now, it shows that religion can have a powerful effect but that effect can be destroyed by the power of the media which has been the foremost vehicle of the resurgence and backlash of white supremacy, starting almost as soon as those laws started to take effect. 

If you wonder why I spend so much time pointing this out it is because the "freedom of the press" read as a "right" to lie is a major opportunity for those who are lying us into fascism using the methods and tools practiced, honed, and perfected by that most purposefully deceptive of all media forms, advertising. 

Continuing on with the observation that every strong upsurge in power in the public sphere brings along with it an upsurge in that kind of obstinate refusal to accept the truth (stupidity),

It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

You may recognize the passage I took out of this to start with here because it contains a spot-on, quite full description of the Republican-fascist anti-vaxx-anti-mask Covid 19 denier, only one species of the denial of reality that was ginned up to be a campaign strategy of Donald Trump, a slew of Republican-fascist governors, Congressmen and women, Senators, etc. 

And those very people duped by that campaign as seen all day every day on FOX, spread by the kind of EWTN members of the Catholic Conference of Bishops, by "Darwinian economists" and those who promoted the Darwinist concept of "herd immunity" were the ones who have paid the highest price in deaths, catestrophic hospitalizations, infecting loved ones, and the lingering effects of "long Covid."   Yet they in their numbers are still in denial, even some of those who almost died, who lost loved ones who died on the mountain of Republican-fascist Covid denialism.   I will return to the point that, as the advertising industry, its related field of audience grabbing TV and movie production succeed by appealing to our worst habits and inclinations, they get people below the level of information to stoke their greed and envy, their pleasure seeking, immediate gratification, their fear of the other, their hatred and their rejection of responsibility.   The extent to which the religious imagery of the devil is a personification of our worst inclinations, Bonhoeffer was absolutely correct to attribute it to the diabolical, that which is opposed absolutely to morality and the author of morality, God.  

The secular answer to that in "more education" is certainly bound to be impotent as, in fact, it has been.  Many of the worst promoters of this evil have had full college educations, some of them in highly challenging fields, the law, medicine, etc.  It plays on the weaknesses of the secular world view that would be disinclined to bring up that what this is, at its foundation, is a problem of the rejection of moral responsibility.   The common received reluctance, even queasiness at bringing up anything that so directly impinges on a serious and responsible issue of religion in the modern, secular age is a tool that these gangsters have but one they might not yet fully realize is there for their use.  If any of the MSNBC TV liberal ghetto started addressing this in the terms that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. did they would probably find their contracts cancelled as they bled viewership.  The great force behind the success in getting the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts passed, the People of the Black Churches, other religious groups and figures who joined in that massive struggle were taken away as religion became uncool and an object of mockery among, mostly, white secular liberals - though others wanting to mix with them certainly went along with it.   At the same time the corporate media defined Christianity as first biblical fundamentalism and, more recently "evangelical Christianity" restricting that term to only those who were or were the close allies of white biblical fundamentalism and reactionary traditional Catholicism.  Thus further stigmatizing the thing that has been one of the most effective forces against the kind of stupidity and the power in the public sphere that uses such people. 

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

The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.

It strikes me that this could describe what became of popular entertainment starting in the 1970s, the nostalgia for the most meat-headed memory of the 1950s, the rise in Monty Pythonesque racial caricature, morally nihilistic comedy that was more mean boy and gal derision than funny.   That led directly to the "anti-political correctness" or, more honestly racist, sexist "comedy" of the likes of Andrew Dice Clay - though that had already been pioneered by the never was funny "comedy" of Lenny Bruce.  But I'd have to think that out more.  Perhaps what he describes is the use of something like the intellect completely lacking in anything to enjoin it to responsibility.  Freedom from religion.  

* The degeneracy of much 19th century Catholic liturgical music, especially in Italy, with Latin texts that an overwhelming majority of the audience didn't understand cannot be emphasized enough.  The reaction against that in the late 19th and early 20th century is not understandable unless you look at what it was reacting against.  I think, oddly enough, the process of reforming the Catholic liturgy that resulted in the abandonment of Latin for the vernacular languages may have gotten its first change in that direction by, among others, the arch conservative, anti-modernist Pius X.   I was rather shocked to find out that, before I was born, the somewhat less but still very conservative Pius XII started it by having the Scripture readings done to the congregation in the vernacular  as the priest whispered the same texts in Latin.  Something which I never noticed being done, it was done so subtly, from before the change to the vernacular.  Now, alas, I don't have anyone left to ask about the period from before that change was made what they recall.

 

What's The Favorite White Whine Of Secular Liberals?

WHEN I DEDICATED MY LIFE TO THOUGHT CRIME it was because I figured with all of the intelligent people looking for the answers in all of the acceptable places not finding them, maybe the answers lay outside of the allowed mode of expression.  

Considering what I wrote this morning about the ACLU, secular liberals agreeing with the Republican-fascists that white supremacy and Nazism lay within the POVs permitted not only a permission to be expressed by, also, the tender, caring regard of such pseudo-liberals as supported free speech absolutism, I'd try the idea that we should learn from the hardest lessons of history and admit there are a range of ideologies, of ideas that have proven themselves to be oppressive, deadly, genocidal and that those ideologies are not only not worthy of free expression but that they will, eventually, destroy egalitarian democracy and the free expression and freedom and lives of many innocent people.   Whose rights and lives are under the active non-protection of such groups as the ACLU whose potency to get them killed is far greater than to protect them from those the ACLU go to court on behalf of.  

If I say "never again" I mean it.  And part of that is to support the suppression of the lies and false witness that comprise the speech of the white supremacists, the neo-Nazis.    Their advocacy of destroying the real, life saving rights of those they target mark them as those who have forfeited their right to say it.

If it is perilous to suppress such speech the perils of allowing it, known through their not only past but current success are manifest in reality as known primarily to those they target, are even more fully known.   Though the white, affluent, comfortable and untargeted can pretend that shouldn't count.   If the largely white, affluent, untrageted lawyers and judges and "justices" cannot make the necessary distinctions between the truth and lies or, rather pretend not to be able to - they regularly discern the truth of far more ambiguous financial interests on a daily basis without feigning inability, even when they are totally ignorant of the mathematics or science necessary to do so - then we need lawyers and judges and "justices" who are both educated enough to make such distinctions and who are pledged to doing that honestly and to replace the current man-made structure of the legal establishment with another man-made one which is made for that task.  

There is that naughty enough to be as thrillingly transgressive as saying Nazis, America's indigenous fascists, the white supremacists, etc.  should get another chance ever again?

Beyond Nodding In Agreement With What Bonhoeffer Said About German Nazis, Long Ago and Far Away

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous

Reading the passage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's letter which certainly should be considered these days, after thinking along with so many others that he could be talking about the rise of neo-fascism in the United States and elsewhere,  the phrase "invincible ignorance" came to me though what Bonhoeffer is describing is different from the classical Catholic definition of ignorance of the truth of Christianity.  That ignorance was only invincible (in the Catholic articulation of the idea) so long as the person remained ignorant of ideas they could learn.  Once hearing it, they pass into those considered "vincably ignorant."  Looking it up I found that there is something closer to what Bonhoeffer discussed that was probably unfortunately formulated as a "logical fallacy of invincible ignorance" about sixty years ago.  Given here:

invincible ignorance -- the fallacy of insisting on the legitimacy of one's position in the face of contradictory facts. Statements like "I really don't care what the experts say; no one is going to convince me that I'm wrong"; "nothing you say is going to change my mind"; "yeah, okay, whatever!" are examples of this fallacy. 

The use of the word "stupidity" for that is probably unfortunate because in his letter Bonhoeffer has the insight to remove what he's talking about from a mere lack of intelligence, the favorite framing of "the problem" among the college-credentialed, made so obvious in how many of those involved with the neo-fascist movement being highly credentialed and craftier than many of their opponents. 

If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.

Perhaps less in his time but certainly in ours an individual's "society" is liable to be less through face to face communication or interaction and is likely through some form of electronic media, either the mental disease spreading "social media" or through the passive consumption of mass media, both entertainment and "news".  A large number of people have commented on how their parents or uncles and aunts or grandparents were nice, normal, level-headed people until they started watching FOX or EWTN or some other form of right-wing propaganda on TV, which uses every tool of deception sharpened by the advertising industry.  Or listening to hate-talk radio.  It is an established fact that the movies have a huge impact on its viewers, something already known when Birth of a Nation was made, the man who reignited what might be the foremost terrorist group in the United States, the KKK gleefully announced his intention to use the showing of the movie for that purpose, he used it and it worked in exactly the way he intended it to.  Earlier than that William Randolph Hurst deliberately fomented the Spanish American War using his newspaper empire  So with that extension of the word "sociological" I would entirely agree with what he is said.  

This effect is certainly not unknown though American liberals have been gulled by the advocates of free speech absolutism to pretend it doesn't exist.  Especially on behalf of the porn industry and the "rights" of Nazis and the KKK to get all the chances they will ever need to make it work, after they've learned from past failures, that they have a "right" to lie themselves into power eternally.   I would like to know how many people who parrot the morally responsible phrase of "never again" in light of the past success of the Nazis and the millions murdered in the process have, at the same time advocated the making the conditions of their future success in doing it again a "First Amendment right."   It seems to me you can't pose as an advocate of "never again" when, in the next breath, you say, well, maybe again.  Nor can you pick and choose the genocides you will say that about as you enable those with other lists of who to oppress and destroy to have their next bite of the apple.  That is exactly what the civil liberties ideology and industry has done in the 20th and 21st centuries, refusing to learn even the hardest lessons of recent history, the passing direct witness to the crimes of the Nazis and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot, etc. and ignoring the continual and living witness that is given witness by Black Lives Matter and a myriad of other groups attacked by the neo-fascist, neo-Nazi media that is both highly financed and empowered by the civil liberties industry and that ideology that has been embedded into the law.   

The refusal to see the result of that is the invincible ignorance of the kind that that "logical fallacy" encodes.  A logical fallacy of the libertarian liberal, often on behalf of those who transgress morality and promote harm to people for profit, the porn industry, the liquor industry, the peddlers of addictive prescription drugs, the tobacco industry, all of which have had the support of such groups as the ACLU to use the media to advertise their wares and the damage that comes from them.  

It isn't any accident at all that this kind of "stupidity" this kind of "invincible ignorance" uses direct appeals to our worst weaknesses, pleasure, laziness, a choice to not think of the consequences for people other than ourselves and those we care about.  "Yeah, ok, whatever."  I wonder how often that promotion of inconsideration has been repeated in TV shows or movies.   It's only one of a hundred product placements for willful stupidity in pop culture that more people watch than who watch FOX or other ersatz "news" shows.

All of that is directly related to and linked into the promoters of exactly the dangerous, deadly kind of "stupidity" that Dietrich Bonhoeffer identified in his fight against Nazism, and here it's considered a sacrosanct act of civic, 18th century "enlightenment" virtue.  

The links between American neo-fascism, edging into neo-Nazism and what secular liberals support are as obvious as the links between American neo-fascism and 1930s style German Nazism.   American liberals who have aided and supported the creation of the conditions in which American's indigenous fascists have gotten more than a mere next bite at the apple will piously nod in approval of the idea of Dietrich Bonhoeffer bravely, courageously setting himself against German Nazism, they will smugly nod at his identification of the problem as "stupidity" while ignoring that they and their casual ideology are exactly the same thing he was talking about.  They will ignore that as they will the previous examples of what their "civil libertarian" regime has gotten  us, or, until recently, for People of Color, for Women (especially those without money) for other targets of hate-media-hate-talk-hate-press.  

And a lot of those people are not only getting paid to advocate for them getting that next bite, some of them are sitting on the bench in black robes with lifetime appointments.  Lots of them are sitting in comfortable chairs of learning and advocating the "liberal" side in the media.  Lots of them get to make movies, too. 

Update:  Far from that being a "logical fallacy" what it is is a complete refusal to engage in logical thought which begins with the acceptance of truths which are obvious or well established.  There is no getting around that and the fact that without the moral decision to acknowledge the truth, any pose of logicality will only delude the willfully deluded even farther.  I suspect that John Eastman's infamous legal memo laying out how to make a coup American style flows from his willful choice to buy into lies.  He's not alone in that, it's regularly done by lawyers, judges and "justices," who often do it by willfully disclaiming the evil results of what they do.  If I had the chops to do it, I might try to figure out how the act of instrumental reasoning figures into it and how in the end all of it depends on what they want the end of their decisions to be.

Monday Night Standards - Dusty Springfield and Mel Torme duet with "Can't We Be Friends?" and "Let's Get Away From It All

 

 Direct link

Too short.  I have always had a lot of respect for Dusty Springfield's singing and Mel Torme was one of my favorite jazz singers, I only wish she'd done more in that field because she could have been great at it. 

Here's Mel Torme showing off brilliantly.

Fascinating Rhythm 

 Direct link

one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him - Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Stupidity 1

I HAVE NOT been following the Governors race in Virginia but from what I read this morning, the Republican-fascist could win because of the Republican-fascist-Murdoch media lies whipped up around a misrepresentation of "Critical Race Theory" getting suburban voters in a swivet over something that isn't happening and never was.  Of course, it being Republicans-fascists, the Murdoch media, white-voters, the underlying theme of that is lies fashioned, honed and told to take advantage of implied mild to flagrant racism among white people, among the foremost tools of America's indigenous fascists from the start, greed and envy being to other such tools.

The thing is that the issue of lies being enabled under the vague language of the First Amendment has very real, very dangerous and very harmful effects, effects big enough to negate the promise of freedom for Black People, in slavery,  in the post-Reconstruction period, the lie of "separate-but-equal" that led to post-slavery American apartheid segregation and,  now, the brief period of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights correction to that being overturned by Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court - placed there by presidents and Senators lied into office, the very same phenomenon that is said to be leading to the loss of a sizable lead for the Democrat to a Republican-fascist who is riding that lie to power. 

This issue is the central issue on which America's far from complete "experiment" with democratic self-government is kept from even progress toward that completion.  It is responsible for virtually all of the major evil done by the American government put in place by the votes of American People.  The corruption of The People today through mass media lies is the major tool to prevent progress by our indigenous fascists, originating in the slave-owning class, the financiers who worked hand in glove with them - and when not owning legally defined slaves used the forgotten wage slaves in, at times, in as brutal a manner.   The mass media, entertainment as well as "news" has been one of their major dispensers of lies, racism, envy and greed.  

We will have to change the words of the First Amendment to make the distinction between the real right to tell the truth and the stupidly created and false "right" to lie with impunity or American democracy will die and it's on its sick bed if not death bed right now.   

Something will also have to be done about the Second Amendment being used by the Rehnquist and Roberts courts to put modern mass killing machines in the hands of our indigenous fascists, the racists, the neo-Nazis, the Klansmen,  and those who, perhaps not fascists at heart but who can be duped into joining them by the lies told by the mass media permitted by "The First Amendment."   They have explicitly and knowingly armed the already deranged who have been shooting up schools, offices, outdoor audiences, churches, synagogues, etc. without the Courts or the Republican-controlled legislatures and executives doing a single thing to stop it.  The same people who wrote the idolized First Amendement wrote that one, the language of which is getting us killed in enormous numbers right now.  And the fascists are now openly threatening to use their arsenal to take power when the voters don't give it to them.

One of the things I have realized in the past four years, in the danger felt from the Trump regime was that a lot of White People got a little bit of a taste of the experience of Black People and other People of Color.  Or that white men got a bit of a taste of what it might be like to be a Woman, though lots of white women don't seem to understand the threat of violence standing over them, they've gotten so used to it.   White people are too much like that legendary frog in a pot being heated up in that regard, the frog thing is rather stupid thought experiment - the frog would get out or die after it stopped being used to the warming - any white voter who isn't a fascist but who would vote for a Republican-fascist on the basis of being scared by FOX on false witness over "critical race theory" is far more likely to vote us into death, lulled by the lying media that has lied us out of the high point of equality already. 

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It seems a lot of people are turning to what  Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the danger of stupidity.  I don't have the book with the translation of his letter that is being quoted but I have found a source of the text online which I think I'll go over this week.  It looks to me that it has a lot to consider, most of which is directly applicable to what's going on in the United States and many other Western countries as we lose even that level of democracy we once had.  The role of Rupert Murdoch's media empire in the United States, Britain and elsewhere among the English Speaking People in both making us stupid in the way that Bonhoeffer warned about and in morally corrupting us is among the most important dangers we face right now. 

Here is a passage I think is directly relevant to what I've said so I'll go over it first, here:

The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. 

That is exactly what the mass media does, a single source of lies  that can be broadcast to millions during the same hour, repeated, either verbally or, on a network, over and over again, which is the FOX 24-7 method of inserting lies about real terms they can, by repeated lies turn around into maliciously useful slogans such as "critical race theory" into the minds and irrational, uninformed fears of, if not a majority, enough voters to put fascists in office.  The next sentences seem prophetic of exactly our situation, today. 

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

The revelations of how Facebook designed its algorithms to feed stuff to those susceptible to taking it in is not that surprising, it has been the method of propaganda from well before computers were a reality.  It has been the science of lying so as to persuade and gull from the start.  It's not much different from the fable of the serpent lying Eve and Adam into eating the fruit, a reality that certainly predates the composition of Genesis.  Yet our founding document, our First Amendment in the so-called "Bill of Rights" neglects to make that distinction and it has certainly cost us, starting with the lies of racism and sexism and economic inequality.   And a lie being a lie, it doesn't have to conform to reality the way that the truth does, it doesn't have to cohere with anything, it can take advantage of us at our least realistic, our least coherent to get its effect.  Bonhoeffer's description of its character, its workings and its effects as he was waiting to be killed by the Nazis is a masterpiece of thought.  It's a shame that the deeper meaning of it is lost to the sloganistic effect of the First Amendment as it was badly written and as it has become something that is placed beyond criticism and so beyond repair. 

I, of course, believe that the reason it was so negligently written was because it would favor the liars who wanted to maintain and increase slavery, to lie to keep us in inequality and to prevent The People knowing the truth and, so, turning the United States into an economically egalitarian and just democracy in which the slave-owners and the rich would not be able to lord it over everyone else and to cheat and steal other peoples labor and the rights to the fruit of their labor.  I don't think Madison and the rest of them were unaware of what they were doing. I think those slave owners were cunning as the snake and we are all gulled and enslaved and killed by it, still.

 

Roger Sessions: Symphony No.3

 

Direct link to the video 

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra 

Igor Buketoff, director 

I almost forgot to post this symphony in the series.  Sorry for the lateness. 

let all corners of the earth be glad, knowing an end to gloom and darkness

Easter Proclamation

WITH FAILING eyesight of age and the financial inability to buy all of the recent books I'd like to read, I read a lot of free books on my computer from sources such as Archive.org and Project Gutenberg and much of the freely available, public domain publishing of primary documentary evidence, documents, letters, papers, etc. that I can get to without paying.  And being on computer, I can use dark screen mode and blow the letters up enough so I can read them.  I have come to love that.  No mildew from old paper to set my allergies off, too.

There, that's enough of that.

One of the books I'm in the process of reading is Universalism The Prevailing Doctrine of the Christian Church: During Its First Five Hundred Years by J. W. Hanson, a Universalist preacher and theologian of the 19th century.   I wish I had the time to fact check his assertions, though those that I'm somewhat familiar with he seems to be reliable.  

One of the most striking things about his account of earliest Christianity, before it became the state religion of the late Roman Empire and began to amass worldly power and wealth, he says it was a remarkably cheerful religion as opposed to the gloomy, fate-ridden, hopeless Roman and Greek pagan religions and other religions in the area.  I think he is a bit hard on Judaism and the Pharisees as well, as can be expected from a quasi-Protestant of the era, the Catholic Church in that regard, though the section of the book I'm interested in, before the Church came under the influence of the Roman imperial system, long, long before the split between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Churches, he points out that there is virtually no mention of eternal damnation, satanic influences, souls being sent to eternal hell fire and all of the rest of the phantasmagoria, house of horrors stuff that has been such a huge blight on Western Christianity and, with the corruption in the post-enlightenment pseudo-history of the romantic and post-romantic periods, continues in Hollywood style today.  

He remarks that in contrast to the gloomy, despairing, fatalistic Roman and Greek memorial texts, the readable messages in the Christian catacombs are full of hopeful expectation for the souls of the dead, that they have gone to be with God, with Christ and the martyrs and other saints in heaven.  A far cry from that putridly attractive 13th century chant heard in many a lurid movie and late 19th century program music , Dies Irae.  

He notes that until the Bible was translated into Latin, especially by Jerome, the original text in Greek didn't depict hell as eternal damnation of those who were forever cut off from God but as a period of purification during which souls not already sufficiently good would be coaxed into correction - though I'm sure my characterization of what he said is not how he'd put it.  He points out the difference between different words for an after death period of suffering or an eternal one, I'm not a Greek scholar nor a Hebrew one so I'm reliant on those who are.  I know that at least some other Greek scholars, then and now, make a similar point, David Bentley Hart being one of the most known modern Greek scholars who has written on it, too. 

I look at the long and gloomy period of  post-Constantine classical and medieval Western Christianity in which the sparks of light sometimes seem to be swamped in a sea of pathological dwelling on the dark, starting with Augustine's last work, and wonder if that isn't bound to come with an adoption of an all too worldly kingdom of the kind that Jesus emphatically said his kingdom was not.  Hanson also discusses the excuse for people who knew the Scriptures keeping the common lot in ignorance of the idea of universal salvation because they worried the plebs couldn't be trusted to mind themselves and toe the line if they weren't worried about eternal damnation.   The extent to which that and other sins feeding the other deadly sins, envy, covetousness, sexual neurosis and slander are tools of the rich and powerful to use against The People is pretty hard to deny, even today.  

I pointed out that Hanson is hard on the Catholics but he's pretty hard on a lot of Protestants too, he attributes to them more of that kind of depravity than even the late medieval Catholic Church taught.  Calvin is, of course, the one people blame the most and, fairly, he did seem to love the idea of a God evil enough to create people, even innocent babies, who God intended for eternal damnation, a God who is so evil it's no wonder so many who were brought up in that belief chose to stop believing in any God at all.  Even the bleakest Catholic idea on that holds that every soul has the possibility of salvation and that none of us can know if any one person is or (as some more charitable Catholics have asked, if even one person is) eternally damned.  

I would like to follow up on a lot of the things he says, for example, pointing to the non-Biblical but widespread idea that after he died on the cross Jesus descended into hell to preach to the souls there as evidence it was widely believed in the early Church that souls in hell were not there forever but only until they chose to be reunited to God.  I can believe in a God that punishes us for the evil we do in life after we die since so many get away with it in this life but even for the worst of us, the idea that such evil of limited duration would justify eternal and extreme torment is excessive.  It is certainly not understandable that God who is said to be all good and merciful and just could choose such a thing.  Those claims, made in human terms to human understanding have to stand in our comprehension for them to have any meaning at all.  I prefer the Jewish conception of God as being all good and holy to Calvin's God, or Augustine's who seems to me to describe the most evil creature ever conceived by human beings.   I don't believe in that God because we are told to forgive those who wrong us, the implication in the Lord's prayer being that our being forgiven is related to, God's forgiveness of us, divine forgiveness not necessarily contingent on it.  I relate it to the repeated exhortation to the Children of Israel in the commandments to practice charity, generosity and justice that they should remember they were slaves, strangers in Egypt.  And God freed them from that Earthly suffering after a period, notwithstanding their still being fallible people.  If we're supposed to remember that, maybe God remembers the obligation of the Creator to those who are created.   I couldn't love a person who begot children only to torture them for even a miserable lifetime,  I think to think God would do worse than what an evil person would do is blasphemous.  

So, today, Halloween, as you see the products of Jerome and Augustine not knowing their Greek well enough to set up Western culture for all of that gloom and darkness, ask yourself why those who reject the Gospel on that basis are so attracted to it and why those who claim to accept it seem to be, as well.   Easter is coming but All Saints Day is tomorrow.  All Souls Day after that.  Originally, as I understand it, the 1st was to commemorate children who had died and gone to heave, the 2nd, the adults.  But I haven't fact checked that, yet. 

 

Update:  You forget that I believe in eternal life.  God might create Poeple who suffer for a time in this world for eventual happiness whereas a parent who has children for the purpose of torturing them unto death doesn't have that power to bring them to eventual happiness.  I certainly don't understand why suffering exists but, then, neither do atheists.  I don't see any advantage of choosing to believe that all of that suffering is meaningless in the end, it's not as if atheists with power over other people are notably kinder than religious people are, especially those who accept the Jewish conception of God, Christians, Muslims, other monotheists who conceive of God in similar terms.  

I certainly don't believe that the line of belief that Christianity is a part of is exclusive.  We know of other Abrahamic monotheists, the Samaritans being the most well known through the Scriptures, the reported non-Jewish Abrahamic religionists described in the Islamic texts - though I don't know much about that.  I certainly think the conception of God in the American traditional religions shares in that as some of the other African and Asian traditions do.  The Hebrew Bible, after all, presents God as making covenants with other People, even enemies of the Children of Israel, two of the major figures of virtue in the Jewish Scriptures are Job and Ruth, neither of whom are Children of Israel, Jonah is sent by God to the enemy of Israel to preach so as to save the inhabitants of the enemy city of Nineveh.  When I say I'm a universalist, I really mean it.