An Answer To A Complaint That I Said The Struggle For Civil Rights Has Lost Everything Through An IllConsidered Compact With Modernism

FIFTY YEARS after the resurgence of feminism in the 1960s and 70s, I think it's telling that the predominant prescribed role of women in literature, in movies, on TV, online, in popular culture and not in a little of the garbage that is considered science is as sex objects.   The decay of second-wave feminism in the face of the porn-industry financed "sex positive feminist" accommodation of the use of women as sex objects is typical of 20th and 21st century secular modernism.  

When an ideological framing insists that people are merely rather complex physical objects of no transcendent character that surpasses the banality of material causation, there isn't anything else for them to be.  That is an issue that dominant straight, white, affluent people, especially males can comfortably ignore but it is something that anyone who is not of the dominant and comfortable class constantly has to deal with.  If they get suckered out of a belief in their own AND OTHER PEOPLES' transcendent character, not of their value but of their rightful dignity and self-determination, their right to be treated with respect and dignity and decency by the predominant culture and its media, there's no one who's going to help them.

All subjugated people have to get past scientistic, atheistic, materialistic modernism or they will never get out of where it has gotten us this far into the catastrophic experiment with it that began in the early 20th century.  

One of the major defects in our thinking is the inability of English speakers to distinguish between linguistically similar terms that are entirely different in their motives and endpoints.  "Civil liberties" of the kind that enables the Republican-fascism and corporate oligarchic reversion to old lines of racism, sexism, etc. have nothing to do with the civil rights agitation, the progress of which is dying in the total-war that the civil liberties industry and the Supreme Court under Roberts Republican-fascist domination are waging against it.  

The ACLU is one of the primary engines that gave that war some of its most dangerous and potent fuel in words that are on the mouths of neo-facists and neo-Nazis and Republican-fasicsts today.  They were champions of the modernism that led us to where we are now.   Our side should have been a lot more careful about making common cause with the materialists because they have cost us everything.

McCoy Tyner Quartet - Moment's Notice

 

Direct link to video  

McCoy Tyner - piano
Bobby Hutcherson - vibes
Charnett Moffett - bass
Eric Harland - drums

Coda

SOREN KIERKEGAARD famously said: 

If someone lives in the midst of Christianity and enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol - where, then, is there more truth?  The one prays in truth to God although he is worshiping an idol the other prays in untruth to the true God and therefore in truth worshiping an idol.

The answer God gave Moses when he asked what he was to tell the People, the Children of Israel which god sent him to liberate them, that he was to tell them that "I Am" sent him, that God was I Am might be the most satisfactory and accurate identification of "the true idea of God" that there could be.  The Hebrew tradition, when you think about it deeply and without denominational glasses never fails to impress.

It is certainly related to the commandment against the making of graven images of God, even the pious abbreviation of the Hebrew name of God going to far in that direction for safety.

No matter what we do as soon as we settle on a human conception of God we are failing in the way Kierkegaard warned about.  

That's as much of an answer as I can give to your objection to that point.  Living in a largely media mythical evangelical "Christian" mono-culture America or a Roman Catholic one wouldn't do much to give us a God susceptible to academic methods, scientific ones are, by plan and design, incapable of dealing with God. 

The "Christian" America was only as Christian as it put the economic justice and social justice teachings of Jesus into practice and some of the greatest proponents of that have been non-Christians, Jews, Native Americans, Muslims, etc.  Christianity as an appendage of secular republicanism and secular democracy is more likely to miss that.  You get entirely closer in the doing of it than in the talking about it or proclaiming about it or believing about it.  I don't agree with the "faith alone" stuff, I agree with the Epistle of James on that.  As I said, Jesus said his Kingdom was not of this world, it's only present in so far as God's will is done and it's not going to be one by anyone but us creatures.   Anything else isn't something we have a say in.

Jimmie Noone's Apex Club Orchestra - Four Or Five Times 1928

Direct link to video 

Jimmie Noone,clarinet.
Joe Poston,alto sax.
Earl Hines,piano.
Buddy Scot,banjo.
Johnny Wells,drums.

It's nice to be reminded what a good piano player Earl Hines was.   He was the only person from this era of jazz I got to hear in person,  when he was very old. 

I've always loved Jimmie Noone's playing and his singing.  Some people in so-called "jazz criticism" slammed his playing but he was admired by Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and Maurice Ravel and he played with people like Earl Hines so who cares what John Hammond and his ilk said?   Criticism is artistic vampirism.

Noon Whine

I'LL WARN YOU, that adult-ed writing course I took last year is being offered again.  I've signed up for it.  Only if he assigns that stupid football story this time mine's going to be about how sports builds bad character.  

I got into a brawl over why anyone would figure Hulk Hogan or anyone who comes out of that industry would expect him to be anything other than a big-mouthed, ignorant, superstitious, neo-fascist ass because sports builds that far more often than not.  If he assigned a golfing story it would probably be even worse, from what I've read golfers are even worse than soap-opera wrestlers.  

Update:  I should have finished the thought, hearing recordings of the deranged musings of Herschel Walker, it's sad what football does to the brains of its players.  It reminds me of Paul Robeson's son being convinced that his father's dementia was caused by a government conspiracy against a man who, by then, had long ceased to be of any political effect in the United States when his college football playing was a far more likely reason for it.  The adulation of football doesn't only cause cognitive decline in the players but in everyone who focuses on it with a cheesy soft-focus lens and sentimental amber light.

Krysten Sinema Is A Champion Of Segregation And White Supremacy With A "D" After Her Name

I HADN'T SEEN the video of white-supremacist Krysten Sinema as she lied her friggin' head off in her anti-voting-rights speech last night so I didn't know that the allegedly former-Green, widely touted to be if not an atheist then a "non-theist" win for the anti-religion side Senator was wearing what looked to me not only like a cross on a chain around her neck but maybe even a crucifix?   I've gone looking for a closer view of her and couldn't see it.  Does this mean that as the lying, hypocritical, groovy-gal, thumbs-down on the worker-is-worthy-of-his-wage Senator has got religion as part of her ever changing, ever shifting shifty and always calculated identity?  Or is it just part of her current theatrical costuming?   She certainly hasn't shown any indication that she's gained a devotion to the teachings of Jesus so, as it generally is when someone shows they're wearing a cross like that, it's for show.

My conclusion at having watched her is that she is and always has been an amoral, self-seeking grifter who is far more interested in meeting with millionaires and billionaires to get money for her campaign fund, and, by the crooked laws of the land, herself than she is in anything she has purported to stand for.  The truth as can be heard in her 2010 season act of opposing the filibuster and contrasting that to that disgusting, dishonest speech of yesterday in which she claimed to have not been that person is the piece of crap stands for nothing except her own attention-getting gain. 

Arizona Democrats got duped by a con-artist, especially those on the left who probably thought it was groovy to have an ex-Green, pseudo-lefty, atheist as their Senator.  There are other con-artists in that vile body but she has got to take the cake among those sitting with a "D" after their names now.  

I called her speech an anti-voting rights speech and her a white-supremacist because she joins the long list of segregationist, white supremacists of the past who thwarted every civil-rights bill that was ever brought up in the past.  The results of what someone does is what they really mean, not the lying words that they say as a fig leaf covering their shame.  Only I doubt the racist piece of shit is capable of shame.

Never Trust A Green Or A Former Green They Are Republican Assets

I WILL ASSERT that there is almost certainly a financial payoff to Krysten Sinema that explains her perfidy.   What she proves is that Democrats actually do not have control of the Senate.  She's hoping to benefit from sinking democracy and from her actions it's just about certain she's planning to profit financially from it. 

She and Manchin are beneath contempt.

McCoy Tyner and the Latin Allstars Bossa Blue

 

Direct link to video  

    McCoy Tyner - piano
    Gary Bartz - saxophones
    Claudio Roditi - trumpet, flugelhorn
    Steve Turre - trombone
    Dave Valentin - flute
    Avery Sharpe - bass
    Ignacio Berroa - drums
    Johnny Almendra - timbales
    Giovanni Hidalgo - congas & percussion

Religion's Reduction Redux, Redux

THROUGH THE ESTIMABLE columnist Michael Sean Winters, I found out about a recently published book that asks if the West is reverting to paganism in the supposed death of Christianity.   The linked-to NYT article says, with me breaking in for comments: 

Many Americans have a sense that their country is less religious than it used to be. But is it really? The interplay among institutions, behaviors and beliefs is notoriously hard to chart. Even if we could determine that religious sentiment was in flux, it would be hard to say whether we were talking about this year’s fad or this century’s trend.

"Many Americans" mistake appearances for the real thing, the margarine of  "religion" of "Christianity" for the real thing.  Journalism and the scribbling professions encourage that substitution.  "Death of Christianity" is the bread and butter of many a person in the scribbling and academic rackets.

I remember my intense skepticism when, in the late 1970s the fad for people declaring themselves to be "reborn" was presented by the media as being a huge resurgence of "Christianity" in the United States.  Having grown up a Catholic and, at that time, a self-declared agnostic, not as a Christian, I'd say that such stuff is constantly in flux and as is the nature of things in flux, making a definitive statement about it is a. unlikely to be accurate and b. unlikely to even describe the state of affairs that will last, indeed, it's probably already unlike what it was when you made what you think was an observation of it.  I doubt that anyone who even sincerely was and remained an honest Christian during this entire time has not had their beliefs in anything but a state of fluctuation for the entire time.  To describe the ideas, the beliefs, the life experience that informs them in any fixed way is to distort or falsify the ongoing nature of all of those.   That is an error of thought that precedes all of those problems with scientific modernism I have been so critical of here.

Or perhaps we are dealing with an even deeper process. That is the argument of a much-discussed book published in Paris this fall. In it, the French political theorist Chantal Delsol contends that we are living through the end of Christian civilization — a civilization that began (roughly) with the Roman rout of pagan holdouts in the late fourth century and ended (roughly) with Pope John XXIII’s embrace of religious pluralism and the West’s legalization of abortion.

From what we can know of that enormous period of time I'd like to know exactly what stretch of it does anyone believe the nominally Christian West was actually governed by the teachings of Jesus?  The entire period of monarchies which claimed to be led by "Most Christian Princes" were better characterized by a continuation of the culture and practices and legal systems of the preceding pre-Christian epoch than anything based in turning the other cheek,  selling all you had and giving the money to those who wouldn't repay it, to the least among us, or any of the other commandments articulated by Jesus.  

I will be the first to note that there was much actual improvement when the Gospels, the Epistles, the Law and the Prophets entered into the imaginations and beliefs of at least some of the baptized pagans which Soren Kierkegaard suspected most nominal Christians are.  Christianity even has had some, limited and various but consequential influence on laws and legal systems in the alleged Christian period of Europe and the Americas.  But that has certainly not anywhere swamped either the traditional remains of paganism or other counter-forces that have arisen since then, the "enlightenment" slammed here foremost among those.  

The past isn't what it used to be and it never was, my skepticism about figuring out the cultural identity of the fleeting present is as true about any generalization made about the past, especially a period of one and a half thousand years. 

There's a reason that the problem with Christianity is its absence, not its practice.

The book is called “La Fin de la Chrétienté,” which might be translated as “The End of the Christian World.” Ms. Delsol is quite clear that what is ending is not the Christian faith, with its rites and dogmas, but only Christian culture — the way Christian societies are governed and the art, philosophy and lore that have arisen under Christianity’s influence. 

To mistake the trappings and decorations for feeding the poor, clothing the naked, treating the ill, visiting the prisoner, etc. is to ignore the substance for the appearance. 

That is still quite a lot. In the West, Christian society is the source of our cultural norms and moral proscriptions, not to mention the territory of our present-day culture wars, with their strident arguments over pronouns and statues and gay bridegrooms and pedophile priests.

For the most part, Ms. Delsol rues what is being lost as Christian civilization ends. Yet her arguments, though they are strong and pointed, are almost secondary to the tone of the book, which is a model for polite engagement with hotly contested subjects. A beneficiary of the trends she deplores — say, an atheist, a feminist, a transgender person, a Muslim immigrant — will likely recognize the world she describes as the world he lives in.

The Gospel of Jesus would be far, far more in line with treating all of those so named with the decency which has only recently started, in fits and starts and entirely imperfectly in the post-WWII period.   I have said that much as I deplore the origins of the Anglican tradition with Henry VIII, the Tudors, the Stuarts, etc. in the later 20th century to today it has been more Christian, in much of it, than it ever has been.  It is certainly far more Christian today than it was in the 18th and most of the 19th century when it was, almost thoroughly an appendage of industrial age British capitalist feudalism.  Like the equally pagan periods of the Papacy, the hierarchy and so most of the Roman Catholic Church, during its long and ambiguously moral history, it contained people who took the Gospel of Jesus seriously.  The same is true for most of the Christian denominations that writers and scribblers and social-scientists love to characterize in a way that crushes a view of their diversity.   

To take only two of those categories, there are vigorous and living and important Christian feminist and LGBTQ people who are some of the most important thinkers AND MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL DOERS* attempting to live their lives according to the teachings of Jesus and who evangelize to convert others to their most Christian and most "non-evangelical" points of view and points of departure. I think some of the most vigorous signs of the living vitality of Christianity are found in Christian feminism, in what is so often called Queer theology.  There is a lot of that which I think is wrong, some of the most paid attention to is the kind of religious attention getting that I found distasteful in the writing of the late Bishop John Spong.   But that's going to be true of any period of any of this.  

No one should ever go far into reading, thinking or writing about Christianity more certain of themselves and proud of themselves than they first went into it.  Anyone who doesn't come out of it questioning themselves, their expectations and conclusions - temporary as those are bound to be - hasn't really been doing it the right way.  The same is true to a lesser degree in history or other huge, person surpassing subjects. 

I think anyone who chooses to attempt to make a study of or a general statement about any of this should start with the knowledge that they are biting off more than anyone can chew. 

I'm not worried about the future of Christianity.  I believe it was the late Shaker Sister Mildred Barker who, when asked if she was worried about the likely extinction of the Shaker religion said she wasn't because it was the work of God and that that would continue.  She wasn't stupid, she knew that hers would almost certainly be the penultimate period of the United Society of Shakers at Sabbathday Lake, the last active Shaker community.  Last I looked they were down to their last three members.  Christianity didn't end with the extinction of the Ebionites or other early sects of it or the original Jerusalem Church that Paul talked about.  I think that Christianity, the belief in the Gospel of Jesus, the teachings of his followers, those who take it seriously and live their lives that way to the imperfect best of their abilities will not end.   

The extent to which doing unto others as we would have them do unto us, to loving God according to the Jewish creed and our neighbor as ourselves (the only creed Jesus is ever quoted as requiring) is expressed in the watered-down general culture is the extent to which decency, equality and democracy are possible.  Democracy, in the modern egalitarian understanding of it, is not a gift from the pagan Greeks, it is a modern development of an understanding of the Law of Moses and the Gospel of Jesus.  It is an imperfect human attempt to approximate something less dangerous than monarchy or other forms of gangster-oligarchy and to make something in the imperfect human terms that is closer to the entirely not-of-this-world Kingdom that Jesus announced as a possibility, perhaps one that is inevitable as creation continues.   It's that which I am in deepest fear for under the neo-pagan-"enlightenment" negation of everything Jesus taught.  Especially that which is called "Christian." 

* This article which was posted as I was writing this is exactly relevant to that point and to the anti-Christianity of much of hierarchical "Christianity" including Catholicism.  I think for Christianity to flourish in the churches, where it so often doesn't, much of "Christianity" will have to leave it.  Much of official, hierarchical, empowered "Christianity" left the church or never entered it to start with. 

Jesus said those who do the will of God are his brothers and sisters, etc.  Not those who uphold dogma, doctrine and man-made laws and regulations.  Churches have mostly been about those other things. 

On The Compliant That I Posted That Jimmie Noone Record Instead Of Posing And Posturing Over Ronnie Spector Passing Over

WHAT AM I SUPPOSED to do about a 78-year-old pop singer dying?   Open a vein? Tear my hair out and theatrically pose about the terrible injustice of a woman who lived a long and full life dying of cancer, not something at all uncommon among people in our age cohort?  

What did you do to prevent it?  If she hadn't fled that homicidal a-hole you hold up as a hero, she'd have died a lot younger. 

You don't see me posing and posturing over Jimmie Noone dying when he was 48, do you? 

The Price We Pay For Upholding Ideological Conformity Under That Framing I Talked About Yesterday Can Be Our LIves

I CONDUCTED AN UNSCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT last night.  I was in a small group of completely vaccinated, boosted distanced people, at my insistence distanced farther than the CDC ever recommended, and I decided to voice some of my skepticism about the wisdom of focusing biological education on the topic of evolution and it quickly developed in several interesting ways, including those who seemed to be panicked over my apostasy on that quickly bringing up the behavioral alleged sciences.  

I asked them what practical use anything they believed they knew about evolution has been in their lives or professional careers - one of them is a working though not usually teaching biologist -  and if they wouldn't rather, especially in this pandemic, preferred it if the People they encounter had a more accurate and realistic view of public health, immunology, virology and how to avoid catching and spreading the disease.  

The discussion that followed showed how anxious these college-credentialed people were with the idea that a perhaps interesting but otherwise practically useless topic in biology was of lesser importance to the list of practical biological issues of daily life, like how to avoid and deal with illness, the entirely related issue of sexual responsibility and the practical morality of not hurting anyone, giving them an STD, doing physical damage, THE UNWANTED PREGNANCIES THAT I KNOW SOME OF THEM HAVE HAD TO DEAL WITH, EITHER DIRECTLY OR THROUGH THEIR CHILDREN, etc.   None of which is helped by spending much time in the one high school biology class and/or the Intro class that they might take if they go to college on what is essentially a topic of only ideological value, such value as such junk generally is.  Less than an hour, five times a week, if that, approximately 185 days of their lives are probably as much time as most people spend on the topic of biology - what they would have needed to have even a basic, accurate view of viruses, the diseases they cause, how those develop, how to avoid them, etc. is a life and death matter.  

Is it any wonder that so many of the American People were such suckers for the shit they got sold online and over the cabloid venue of FOX?    Even the elderly now, among the most vulnerable of those who got suckered,  mostly took a biology or other science class in school where they could have been sucker-proofed to a larger extent, but, no, that didn't happen.

The panic that they felt was entirely related to the enormous weight that the mostly ideologically emphasis that the topic of evolution has in intellectual and class coercion and conformity to the common received block-thought and the unusual idea that someone like me might challenge its all-consuming importance. 

Other than the professional biologist, I may have known as much as any others in the group on the topic, having read so much of it in my own ideological war against eugenics and scientific racism and it became obvious how deeply it has been embedded in the thought of the college-credentialed - the biologist admitted he'd never read either On the Origin of Species or The Descent of Man, no one else in the group had, either.  Though one of them had read the Voyage of the Beagle.   Of course I had to diss Darwin and Huxley (they didn't know the names of Haeckel or any of the others) which really shocked some of them.  None of them had read Huxley either but they remembered him as the costume drama cum BBC-PBS presentation of the topic.  I wish there had been time for me to go into the lies about the Huxley-Wilberforce encounter but there wasn't.   I think the BBC and PBS have been largely responsible for the ideological propagandistic indoctrination on this topic among the TV watching credentialed public, and they sold us all a bunch of badly documented bull shit along the way.   Even a practical and accurate in-school education would have had to counter that concerted campaign that inflated the importance of this largely unimportant topic.

If I had another 20 years to devote to it I'd track down some of the other idols of the culture of the college credentialed.  I've noticed there are loads of things about which people of that credentialing and of even the more modest class of them are not only expected to hold with but are required to believe and uphold if they are to retain their respectability.    Respectability isn't something that I much care about anymore, it costs too much and once you see through it you lose your desire to have it. 

Jimmie Noone - You Rascal you

 

Direct link to video  

Felt like hearing some Jimmie Noone and his Apex Orchestra and his Albert system clarinet.  

Late Resolution: Last Hate Mail? Let's See If I Can Hold Out In The Future

WE IMPOSE STRUCTURES ON TIME, time doesn't seem to notice.  That structure we put on the past is what we think of as history.   That doesn't mean the structure is real but it does comprise what we story-telling animals can consider an understanding of it.  Though there isn't any real reason to think some of that isn't spot on, too.  Only time doesn't care.

I think it's extremely helpful to consider that the 20th century till today was the culmination of the test of time for modernism, whether the modernism that started with the Baconian-Descratian scientific revolution and its impact on world culture starting in Europe in the 17th century, the 18th century with one of the greatest achievements in the history of science or, indeed, in human culture, the Newtonian revolution of physics and cosmology.  And the subsequent and, I think entirely unfortunate, attempt to extend that far past its knowably valid realm into the general culture well outside of the process of Baconian observation, measurement and rigorous analysis.*  The so-called "enlightenment."  

The American "Founders" and many of the criticisms I've made of their Constitution and other writings are directly attributable to that cultural milieu.   The extent to which the "enlightenment" led to such milestones of actual progress such as the destruction of some, not all ghettos under the military despotism and bloodshed of the same Napoleon who John Adams credited in that quote I went over yesterday, that's a validly positive development from it.  But the concomitant violence and destruction and despotism that accompanied it is as real an evil as the ghetto was.  I think that a military dictator who crowned himself Emperor, widely considered a major milestone of "enlightenment" is worth considering as a warning of what was to come, one which is still not taken as such.

 The 19th century with its major figures in valid science and the ossification of the "enlightenment" into the ideological programs I've slammed, endlessly here, scientism, materialism, atheism, anti-religious secularism, Darwinism and the amorality that Nietzsche very insightfully and very accurately deduced from them and then developed with depraved abandonment.  

Those developed in the late 19th and early 20th century into what is more popularly understood to be "modernism" in philosophy, especially in literature, in the visual and solid arts, not as validly in most music**, though there are some generally lesser aspects of music that were self-consciously "modernistic."  And in what are considered sciences starting in the same period which I have also slammed endlessly here, sociology, psychology, anthropology (though there have been movements in anthropology to be more honest about the dubious scientific nature of what they do in that one) economics, etc. which, as I went through earlier here, jettisoned the use of Baconian methods, something that Darwinism had done before that and gotten away with. 

In politics and morality and real life modernism was given a test of time, especially in the 20th century until today and the results have been a disaster.  The environmental catastrophe that has come is directly attributable to the thing that Bacon hoped for in his science, the imperialistic domination of all of nature, turning it to human material advantage and profit without regard for anything like the sacred.  It is one of the reasons that I cannot believe, on reading much of him the past several years, that he, despite his intellectual and scholarly brilliance and experience, wrote the "Shakespeare" plays.  

The link between self-conscious modernism, especially literary modernism, scientific modernism, intellectual and philosophical modernism and all of the most horrific of the regimes which regarded what they do as  based in science, Communism, fascism, Nazism and the non-regime program of much of anarchism - never forget that the phony saint of anarchism Emma Goldman was a devotee of Nietzsche with all his moral depravity, violence and love of elitist inequality - is enough for me to have rejected modernism altogether.  Not in the stupid manner of longing for some lost past, which is not only a stupidly romantic and dishonest way to structure understanding of the past BUT AN ABSOLUTE IMPOSSIBILITY  but to get beyond modernism, including the malignant parts of the inheritance from Bacon and Descarte and a whole host of those who came with it.   Science, for better or worse, and there is much of both in it, we are not going to abandon.

We can't go back in time, we should not delude ourselves we can nor should we want to.  Time goes in one direction, the universe goes on as creation continues, we are to go into the future, our imaginations about that may make plans, we cannot know even as much about that as we do the past

One thing that I think is a reliable conclusion about that,  we have to try to do better or we will get worse.  Wallowing in the things that haven't worked are reliably suspected of producing the problem of the past, they are rightly believed to produce the same in the future and it is the highest immorality to retain them.

Doing to others as we would have them to do to us, treating the least among us as we would treat God, forgiving the wrongs done to us as we would have the wrongs we do forgiven, trying to act as People of good will while being fully aware that there are people of bad will that we have an obligation to thwart in their desires work.  Darwinism gave us eugenics, scientific racism, World War One, the mass murders of the Nazis and many other depravities.  Scientism, atheism and materialism have done nothing but made people arrogant and conceited and, in so far as science is involved, more efficient and effective in doing evil. 

And I don't care who says saying that gives me a case of the cooties.  Grow the fuck up and face history.

* In fairness, Bacon and Descartes were the originators of those far too ambitious extensions, Bacon put the ambitions for his science in terms taken from English imperialism,  his achievements in creating science are entirely admirable, his goals for it in life have been a disaster.  The same can be said of Descartes's to some extent.  His treatment of animals on the basis of his ideological conclusions has to mask a sadistic callous love of inflicting pain which even someone of his ideology would have been able to restrain themselves from if it were not a product of his malignant desire.  I could make a long list from Hobbes to the big names in "public intellectualism" today to go with it. 

**  In music the attachment to fascism largely came from the retrospective hankering after and attempt to regain the past in neo-classicism of such composers as Stravinsky who in 1930 declared his admiration for Mussolini and disdainfully rejected democracy,  I've never liked his neo-classical period with a very few exceptions though I have to admit since I read what he said then has soured me of all of it.  As a composer I would take off my hat to him but I can't stand it anymore.  There are things more important than music, literature, art and being attuned to the zeitgeist.   Hell with the zeitgeist, it's dead as soon as it develops.

Update:  I should add, in so far as music is concerned, the "folk music" revival was another thing which had its bad side.   The early, nationalistic-romantic view of folk lore and folk music isn't that far removed from some of the things which developed into various national fascisms and Nazism (doing a lot of original language reading of the literature of Nazism has done more to put me off of "volkisher" talk than even the singer-songwriter "folk musicians" of my youth did).  Though it also is as true that a truly universalist collector and researcher into folklore such as Bela Bartok was, was the opposite of that malignant trend. 

Update 2:  I could have mentioned the music of the Soviet and other Communist establishments, excepting that of Cuba, which have been characterized by retrogressive bathos and self-conscious populism.  There's a reason that even the neo-classicism of fine composers such as Prokofiev and, though I really don't care for his music, Shostakovitch, got them in trouble with Stalin and the mostly forgettable Soviet music establishment, their condemnations including terms and names describing some of the greatest music being composed and played at the time.  

Even When Law May Not Have Been An Ass As Written, Asses As Judges Will Make It So

I TAKE NO COMFORT from the obvious fact that the law is an ass in Australia as it is in the United States, if as much of an ass as the Republican-fascist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, we'll see.   A selfish, conceited, ignorant Serbian tennis star was allowed to break the public safety regulations by an ass of a judge named Anthony Kelley whose knowledge of mathematics and science is something I'd very much like to know.  From the NYT.

Novak Djokovic, the Serbian tennis star, moved one step closer to competing for his record 21st Grand Slam title after an Australian judge ordered his release from immigration detention on Monday, the latest turn in a five-day saga over his refusal to be vaccinated for Covid-19.

The judge, Anthony Kelly, found that Djokovic had been treated unfairly after his arrival at a Melbourne airport for the Australian Open, where he had been cleared to play with a vaccination exemption. After detaining Djokovic, the border authorities promised to let him speak with tournament organizers and his lawyers early Thursday morning, only to cancel his visa before he was given a chance.

Restoring the visa does not, however, guarantee that Djokovic will be able to vie for his 10th Open title when the tournament begins next Monday. In court, the government’s lawyers warned that the immigration minister could still cancel his visa, which would lead to an automatic three-year ban on his entering the country.

What's fair about letting someone who could make himself safe for admission into the country by getting vaccinated because he, through his selfishness, conceit and ignorance, chooses not to, putting who knows how many other people at potential risk.

What is clear from the actions of too many judges in the English speaking Peoples is that too many of those hired to administer the law are dangerously ignorant of the risks and consequences of a dangerously contagious infectious disease and, this far into this pandemic, it's clear that just as some members of the U. S. Supreme Court have openly said that their legal training and judicial habits are a sufficient replacement for knowledge,  their arrogant ignorance makes the law the engine of danger to all of us.   They have absolutely no business making court-bench law on matters they clearly don't understand or take seriously.

Making it impossible for elected officials who have to face the public and, so, the consequences for their decisions and actions in office to do that on the basis of some judge's sense of "fairness" to a pampered elite entity such as this man who is a rich celebrity on the basis of playing a fucking game is not something compatible with public safety.   It's clear that too many judges and "justices" have contempt for public safety but not for the whims and preferences of those who want to endanger the public.   "Liberty," "freedom" turned from real entities that entail responsibility into libertarian idols being used to do that.

I think judges and "justices" in more than just the United States need to be taken down a few pegs and made a little more humble.  Humility through imposing responsibility for their decisions and actions might help a lot, just kow-towing to them when they do what this ass of an Aussie judge and what I have every reason to believe the malicious members of the U. S. Supreme Court will soon do.   I don't favor an elected judiciary, the voters hiring them, the vileness of the Supreme Court in a place like Wisconsin or Michigan proves that's no answer.  But maybe the voting public should have the ability to directly fire them, since the impeachment process is so broken under Republican-fascist fascism.   Having them serve for life, imagined to shield them from the temptations of using their office for gain in their often sleazy profession, has not worked.  The U. S. Supreme Court is probably the most open to corruption of any court in the United States through the power of lifetime appointment and their self-given powers of dictatorial fiat.  I don't know enough about the Australian system to know if it's true there but I think a lot of the arrogance of a lot of lower level judges might be restrained if we could make the Supreme Court and its members follow some kind of real ethics code instead of what's there now.

McCoy Tyner - La Habana Sol

Direct link to video
 

McCoy Tyner, piano

Aaron Scott, drums 

Avery Sharpe, bass

Really cold night here, needed to hear this.  Rest in Peace McCoy Tyner 

The Tireless Tiresome Meter Maid of Orthography Is On The Case

 OH I think it was OK for someone running the fever I've been today.  Maybe I'll correct it.   Maybe I'll leave it like it is.  Gherry is the name of someone I used to e-mail with.  

Democracy Is Problematic When It Is Not An Expression Of Virtue - Even Disagreeing With Adams He Is Right That Democracy Is No Guarantee Of Virtuous Government

ONE OF THE TEXTS about computer programming I once attempted to understand said that every computer program, even simple ones, had defects in them that would either fail to be noticed or understood by even the best programmers, that bugs were inevitable.  That was something that always struck me as an insight into the contingency of every human endeavor, that everything that human beings make is bound to have unforseen problems to it that no one should ever pretend are not there.  Fixing those as soon as they become apparent is the best way to deal with them, pretending they are not there and requiring fixing is bound to eventually lead to a crash.

Our Constitutional republic is a real-life example of that, the Constitution is the program that has not been patched as needed - indeed the major ones from the 1960s have been removed we are headed for a crash of disastrous dimensions.

As ususal, RMJ has a more than just thought provoking post up that presents John Adams' conclusions about the inbuilt perils of democracies and that what virtues democracy may have, those are also prone to the madness of mob rule.

I beseech you, sir, to recollect the time when my three volumes of Defense were written and printed, in 1786, 1787, and 1788. The history of the universe had not then furnished me with a document I have since seen—an Alphabetical Dictionary of the Names and Qualities of Persons, “Mangled and Bleeding Victims of Democratic Rage and Popular Fury” in France During the Despotism of Democracy in That Country, which Napoleon ought to be immortalized for calling “ideology.” This work is in two printed volumes, in octavo, as large as Johnson’s Dictionary, and is in the library of our late virtuous and excellent vice president Elbridge Gerry, where I hope it will be preserved with anxious care. An edition of it ought to be printed in America; otherwise it will be forever supressed. France will never dare to look at it. The democrats themselves could not bear the sight of it; they prohibited it and suppressed it as far as they could. It contains an immense number of as great and good men as France every produced. We curse the Inquisition and the Jesuits, and yet the Inquisition and the Jesuits are restored. We curse religiously the memory of Mary for burning good men in Smithfield, when if England had then been democratical, she would have burned many more, and we murder many more by the guillotine in the latter years of the eighteenth century. We curse Guy Fawkes for thinking of blowing up Westminster Hall; yet Ross blows up the Capitol, the palace, and the library at Washington, and would have done it with the same sangfroid had Congress and the president’s family been within the walls. O! my soul! I am weary of these dismal contemplations! When will mankind listen to reason, to nature, or to revelation?

I thought about it a little last night.

I'd argue that calling the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror "democratical" when what it was was a government by various and competing mobs of educated aristocrats of a theoretical bent who had control of an army who, like the Republican-fascists here and now, are harnessing the fury of an effective and enraged margin of the underclass.  It is impossible to know how representative of the People of France any of it was, as the various civil wars in various regions of France, such as the War in the Vendée, it's doubtful that the central government and its factions had the support of a majority of The People.  Nothing like a modern conception of egalitarian democracy existed in France during the revolution anymore than it did in Russia during its civil war after the Revolution.  

I will point out in passing that calling the American Revolution and, in fact, the adoption of the Constitution a "democratic" act is unwarranted because it is doubtful that a majority of subjects at the time of the Revolution or citizens at the time of the adoption of the Constitution would have given it their just consent.  Indeed, they couldn't have because the largest majority of citizens were prevented by law from having any vote on that.  We, by habit and custom, skip over that defect in the program of our Constitutional government but it is and has been there from the start and its consequences are something we live with as a very real, very dangerous reality.  Yet talking about it is strictly forbidden, "liberty" the apple of the eyes of every officially deputed every right thinking person today, does not extend to that.

I would also argue with Adams about the reign of the, admittedly, bloody, Catholic Queen Mary and his comparison of her exaggerated bloodiness to an alternative history of a "democratical" England as compared to the very real blood soaked reign of her father  before her or her sister, Elizabeth's, after her.  To compare her reign to an imagined "democratical" alternative is not necessary when the actual history provided any number of non-democratic reigns of terror such as Henry VIII's was right there for him to have known of.  Though Protestant polemics of the kind that furnished the imaginations of someone like even John Adams blinded him to that.  I do think that anti-Catholic prejudice did influence his thinking throughout.

For example, I could quibble with his other examples such as "the Inquisition and Jesuits" - actually, in the case of the Jesuits and examples such as the "Jesuit Reductions" in Paraguay which, for their human-guaranteed defects were models of enlightenment given the alternatives managed by secular rulers and superior to anything done by any English speaking secular or Protestant rulers, with the exception of the Quakers in North America.   I would love to know if there are reliable figures that would really show what I've read, that you were far more likely to get out of the Inquisition alive and with your limbs intact than you were from the 18th century English legal system which hanged huge numbers of poor people for petty theft or the law as administered under the administrations Adams was a member of and those of his colleagues which he supported.  You were certainly more likely to get out of it alive than you were an accusation made under the modern, 20th-21st century "scientific" anti-democratic regimes or, indeed, the anti-clerical French Revolutionary system.

All that said, I think John Adams warning in this is, actually something that anyone who favors democracy as the best to be hoped for alternative to every other form of government should take extremely seriously.  

Democracy is a human endeavor, even the most carefully made government of, by and for The People, an era of equality and good will will have its defects, some which are extremely dangerous, especially as those develop under human administration and governance AND AS THEY BUILD UP ACCRETIONS OF LEGAL RULINGS AND HABITS IN TIME.   I am skeptical about Adam's assertion that democracy is short lived, what he would have based that on when he said it in 1814 is of little to no relevance for the modern conception and practice of democracy.  

As I heard a Black commentator (in the fog of illness I really don't remember who it was) say last week, the United States was certainly nothing like an egalitarian democracy before the adoption of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 - I would doubt that once the Roberts Court dismantled it, there is no honest case that we have remained one.   That the Roberts Court used the United States Constitution to ratfuck egalitarian democracy is certainly relevant to anything like an objective appraisal of the situation and how it fits in with Adams' criticism of democracy.

The extent to which, by 18th century standards, the disastrous French Revolution was "democratical" it provided a valid warning of the dangers of government based on the choice of a majority of those permitted to have a vote.  That may have provided someone like Adams a conscience saving excuse as to the anti-democratic features of his Constitution but it doesn't work the way he wanted to use it now.

I think, in the case of the United States under the written Constitution AND HOW THE PRESENT REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS ARE WORKING IT,  it's especially worth considering that he lauded Elbridge Gerry whose actual MO in politics and government was known at the time to be pretty sleazy.  As I once noted, Charles Beard said:

 Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts, participated extensively in the debates of the Convention, but his general view of government was doubtless stated in his speech on May 31, when he expressed himself as not liking the election of members of the lower house by popular vote. He said on this point : "The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots. In Massts. it has been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute. One principal evil arises from the want of due provision for those employed in the administration of Governnt. It would seem to be a maxim of democracy to starve the public servants. He mentioned the popular clamour in Massts. for the. reduction of salaries and the attack made on that of the Govr. though secured by the spirit of the Constitution itself. He had, he said, been too republican heretofore: he was still, however, republican, but had been taught by experience the danger of the devilling spirit.” 

I said at that time: 

It should be noted that elsewhere in the book Beard goes into Gerry's care in making sure the new Constitution and the system it set up was in accord with his massive land speculations in the West, turning public lands into his lands for his own profit.

He is the one who put the "gerry" in the "gerrymander" when he drew up the Massachusetts senatorial maps to rig things to his liking.  Adams, being from the same state must have known more about that more than we do now,  when he wrote what is quoted here.  I would love to know if there is any letter or other document that shows that Gherry's election rigging was related to his reading of the book Adams puts in his hands but, alas, which I can't find on Archive.org. *

The problem with democracy under a fixed, written Constitution as hard to amend as ours has become due to the number of small-population states with reactionary and regional interest is that there are anti-democratic corruptions embedded in the Constitution Adams had a hand in creating.  The evils that, perhaps, he may have accepted or even thought were acceptable due to his distrust of The People in democracy immediately were taken up by his valued colleagues to inflict other evils that were in their own interest.  The evils of the later French Revolution may have not been prevented if the intellectuals and other power-seekers who grabbed control of the central government and army had been actual democrats, actually valuing equality, liberty and fraternity (which their every actions proved they had no intentions of putting into practice) and the mobs that they harnessed may have done as much or more damage than they did.   

The problem of democracy in the United States isn't a matter of wisdom, it's a matter of a lack of devotion to the unselfish principles of equality, morality and universal good-will, tempered by the practical necessity that where those are lacking the law must impose that as a legal requirement on those who are resistant to them, the extent to which that is possible for the maintenance of egalitarian democracy, decency, domestic tranquility and the common good.  

In the attractive but hypocritical and problematic French revolutionary slogan, equality and fraternity are incompatible with absolute liberty.  Liberty that destroys equality and devotion to practicing fairness and decency (doing to others what they would have done unto them) has to be restrained.  Freedom is dependent on the common good, probably more than it is unrestrained personal preference.  America is saturated with the Hollywood-TV-internet cult of absolute personal liberty at the expense of the common good.  Every person, especially every proud-boy a king, to riff of of a would-be American populist dictator of 90 years ago.

* I wish I had the time to compare Adams' criticism of the suppression of that book he said was in Gherry's library to what his friends like Thomas Jefferson said about David Hume's History of England. 

 . 

About Those "Mild Cases"

THE NEWS COVERAGE of the break-through cases of Covid-19 tend to down-play how awful it still is.  My experience and that of the several people I've talked to who have had those "mild cases" is that it's no joy ride.  It's nothing anyone should down-play or figure is worth taking a chance of getting that they don't need to take. 

I'm exhausted from the coughing and congestion and still nervous about the possibility I passed it on to someone else. 

Two Shorts

THE SENTENCE before the one you object to explains why I said what you objected to.

Any  so-called sciences that relies on human reports of their internal experience are a direct means of introducing every evil Bacon sought to exclude with his methods.  Those that rely on third-party observations of behavior are probably even worse. 

If a person's reporting of their internal mental and sensory experience, their thoughts, their opinions is of unverifiable reliability, a third-party observer is in an even worse position to report on what they, as well, can't see.  They can't know the internal motivations of people doing even the same acts.  In the case of animals who can't articulate their own experience those problems multiply, they don't diminish. 

Any random person on the street who denies that people can be mistaken about their own experience or misrepresent it to other people is either unusually unaware of what life is like, including, probably, their own thinking, or they are lying.  But psychologists, sociologists, etc. have created professions in which that is done all the time as a standard professional practice which adds motives of financial interest and professional prestige on top of those. 

I'm not denying that there may be clinical psychologists who actually have helped some people they see professionally, but I doubt that's got much to do with the alleged science they allegedly base their practice in.  I strongly suspect that there are barbers, hairdressers and fingernail fiddlers who have been as effective in talk therapy and advice giving.  If someone offered me a choice between talking to a shrink and getting a professional massage, I'd take the massage, it might at least be good for relieving some aches and pains.  Cheaper, too.

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

I'd have really liked to comment on the Supreme Court theater of the absurd in regard to their hearing on vaccine mandates. If it shows one thing it is that when you mix the arrogance of office of which there is no more quintessential an example than the Republican-fascist majority on this court, with total ignorance of mathematics and science, you get what Alito, Gorsuch and Barrett said in that goon show. 

It is a clear and present danger that the Supreme Court, with 6-3 majority of unelected hacks chosen for their ideological and financial degeneracy - and  Breyer is with them at times, too - with the mathematical incompetence that Alito demonstrates has no business handing down a legal opinion that could get many people killed out of their disgusting ignorance.

If the court isn't expanded with the explicit reason of swamping these thugs in black robes AND TO ADD MATHEMATICAL AND SCIENTIFIC COMPETENCE TO THAT IGNORANT COURT the more legitimate branches, LEGITIMATE DUE TO THEIR BEING ELECTED AND SUBJECT TO DISMISSAL BY THE PEOPLE,  should refuse to allow them to keep the self-created power of overturning duly adopted federal laws.  

The danger of an out of control congress and executive making bad laws, even bad Constitutional amendments is far less than the dangers of what the Supreme Court has become, an unelected body that can set up a government by fiat and destroy government of, by and for, The People and thwart the general welfare and safety of the country.   

The Supreme Court and many federal courts in the hands of Republican-fascism have to be prevented from doing what they were selected to do, destroy equality, democracy and government of The People. 

Back, Sort Of

BACK sort of.  

I definitely can't taste things as well right now though I am assured that's probably temporary.   Kind of wish it would take my taste for salt away, I could probably do with less sodium in my diet.  

I thank God, immunological science, the Biden administration,  The administration of Governor Mills here in Maine, the York County Emergency Management Agency, the local fire and rescue crew, etc. that I got immunized and boosted because it's only due to that that my allergy racked self didn't end up dead from it.  

Anyone who thinks that they're safe without full vaccination, masking, distancing and constant vigilance is living in a fool's world.   Especially distancing from unmasked and so rationally presumed unvaccinated and dangerously selfish and irresponsible people of ill-will.  Republican-fascists and libertarians.  

I am 100% in favor of stigmatizing the selfish and irresponsible people of ill-will and making it socially abhorrent to be that way.  I am also 100% in favor of the forceful suppression of the social disease of media that encourages that kind of thing.