Saturday, May 7, 2022

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Zoë Comyns - Marconi & Me

 

Marconi & Me  

 

A podcast producer finds a set of code books. They are the Marconi International Code books. They contain 500 pages of 5-letter codes and their translations. The main character starts to read the codes obsessively and twist them into her own life story. In themselves the codes form extraordinarily poetic lists.The innovative drama charts a crumbling relationship from its origins, via a history of sound, telegraphy and communication, Marconi's telegraphic work in Ireland and a flight into family madness.

Written and narrated by Zoë Comyns.

Performed by Zoë Comyns and José Miguel Jiménez

Additional roles voiced by Nathalie Cazaux, Michael Comyns, Leo Oosterweghel,

Oliver Hochadel, Kerstin Aquaviva, Jesper Bergmann and Dora Vargha.

Extra recordings by Colette Kinsella

Sound Design by Brendan Rehill, Brendan Jenkinson, and Damian Chennells

Sound Supervision by Damian Chennells

Producer for RTÉ: Kevin Brew

Producer for New Normal Culture: Zoë Comyns

Series Producer, RTÉ Drama On One: Kevin Reynolds

The original text was published in the Australian journal The Lifted Brow under the title 'Owing to the Failure Of.’ An early version of the piece was performed at Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival and at Dublin Fringe Festival 2018, with direction by Caitriona McLaughlin

The beginning and some of the interludes in this remind me of the 1950s - far-out composer Kenneth Gaburo but it's a satisfying drama which much of his stuff wasn't, though some of it was musically interesting. 

Thursday, May 5, 2022

I Freely Renounce My "Right" To Lie And Promote Bigotry When The Cost Of That "Right" Is The Lives Of Others

THE SCRIBBLING PROFESSIONS, the media have always had an interest in being able to publish anything they wanted without any regard for its consequences, that is apart from those absolute bans on publication and "speech," which they maintain as absolutely as they do "free press", are in its members interest, such as people who can be accused of stealing their literary property and making a profit off of it.  The legal fictions absolutely banning the alleged stealing of valuable scribblage and that to which scholars and "scholars" object is a huge exception to "free speech" absolutism for which those who maintain that ideological stand have little problem standing for.

And the ersatz heroes and heroines of "free speech - free press" etc. and their lawyers have had very notably flexible standards, I have before noted that heroine of such bilge as Lillian Hellman who paid her famously "free speech" lawyer Ephraim London big bucks to swallow his previous claim to fame to sue Mary McCarthy when Mary McCarthy told the truth, that Lillian Hellman was a prodigious liar and falsifier who, it should be noted, infamously stole the heroism of a woman who actually was in the anti-Nazi resistance to make herself a heroine in one of her alleged memoirs, the story made into the allegedly based-on-life movie which, no doubt, much of its audience mistook for truth, "Julia".  

The hypocrisies of the writing profession and so-called journalism on the issues of speech are so many, going from the subtle to the blatant, that it has provided me with lots of material over the years.  The language used to describe speech that is malignant in its content and obvious goals, terms such as "objectionable speech," "speech you don't personally like," "offensive speech," when applied to the kind of thing that leads to people being attacked, oppressed and murdered is speech of monumentally cynically calculated dismissal by those who never expect such speech will impinge on the lives of themselves or those they allegedly care about.  

And lets clear that up right now.  No lawyer, no judge, no "justice" no scribbler or babbler who would knowingly put at risk those they allegedly care about in this way, any of them DO NOT REALLY CARE ABOUT THOSE THEY PUT AT RISK.  Not putting people at such risk, putting their physical safety and lives at risk over the ersatz value of protecting hate speech is an act or real caring.  That is as true for family members as it is unknown Women, Black People, People of Color, LGBTQ, etc. who you have no real affectionate or personal connection to.  I don't think the civil liberties lawyers really do care about those their work victimizes. I dare you to explain how facilitating their endangerment on behalf of those who hate them and can be whipped up by those words is an act of caring.*

When it is lawyers, judges and "justices" who dismiss the clearly intended and frequently delivered harms of such speech, who often approve of that harm - and here I would name a long list including those sitting on the bench right now, including names like Powell, and Rehnquist and Roberts, Alito, Thomas, etc. many of the big names in the affluent ranks of civil liberties lawyers, that cynical and calculated dismissal will lead the scribblers and media to either excuse or praise those cynical and often evil men and women.

In an article in the very self-interested New York Times last year there was hand-wringing over the fact that a lot of younger lawyers who work in or are associated with one of the most misrepresented of all allegedly virtuous groups mistaken as liberal, the ACLU, were questioning its devotion to free-speech absolutism in face of the rise of neo-Nazism and neo-facism among those who the old ACLU could be counted on to represent or support in court.  It mentioned the Virginia ACLU who facilitated the neo-Nazis in Charlottsville Va.

A tragedy also haunts the A.C.L.U.’s wrenching debates over free speech.

In August 2017, officials in Charlottesville, Va., rescinded a permit for far-right groups to rally downtown in support of a statue to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Officials instead relocated the demonstration to outside the city’s core.

The A.C.L.U. of Virginia argued that this violated the free speech rights of the far-right groups and won, preserving the right for the group to parade downtown. With too few police officers who reacted too passively, the demonstration turned ugly and violent; in addition to fistfights, the far right loosed anti-Semitic and racist chants and a right-wing demonstrator plowed his car into counterprotesters, killing a woman. Dozens were injured in the tumult.

Revulsion swelled within the A.C.L.U., and many assailed its executive director, Anthony Romero, and legal director, Mr. Cole, as privileged and clueless. The A.C.L.U. unfurled new guidelines that suggested lawyers should balance taking a free speech case representing right-wing groups whose “values are contrary to our values” against the potential such a case might give “offense to marginalized groups.”

A.C.L.U. leaders asserted that nothing substantive had changed. “We should recognize the cost to our allies but we are committed to represent those whose views we regard as repugnant,” Mr. Cole said in an interview with The New York Times.


Which, of course, is easy to say if YOU AND YOUR LOVED ONES are not under direct danger from the Nazis and fascists the ACLU represent as the major part of their fundraising schtick - a few of the higher salary levels at the ACLU are mentioned in the article.  

The blood of the victims of those the ACLU and the judge facilitated are rightly seen as being on their hands as much as those they enabled and, through that, encouraged.

Perhaps more should be considered as to just what it is that makes the speech facilitated by the ACLU and the judge is "repugnant".  

If hate speech were merely words of dislike or innocuous insult implied in the civil-liberties language, they would not achieve that level of objectionablity.  

Such speech isn't repugnant due to it offending the delicate sensibilities of the genteel and well heeled, IT IS REPUGANT BECAUSE IT GETS PEOPLE ATTACKED, MAIMED AND KILLED.  To maintain the line of not only the largely majority white affluent lawyer male and, in some cases, female civil liberties industry personnel, they cannot really believe themselves and their loved ones to be in any real danger from it.  I would go so far as to say that many of their minority members and allies who have a greater expectation of their loved ones or even themselves being the targets of hate speech must have become professionally acculturated to ignoring that risk out of professional advantage.

The twisted morality of such genteel-well-heeled professionals who will go home to their lives of protected affluence allows them to separate themselves from the consequences of what they champion AND THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT BOTH ADVOCATING HATE SPEECH ON THE PART OF LAWYERS AND ITS PERMISSION BY JUDGES AND "JUSTICES" ARE ACTS FACILITATING ITS RESULTS.

So is writing that kind of virtue-signaling liberalish, really libertarian, journalism or scribblage, babbling such babblage.  The blood of the victims of white-supremacists, fascists (in the American context that is a tautology) and Nazis is on those lawyers, those judges, those "justices" the virtuous journalists and scribblers AND THOSE WHO DONATE TO THAT FACILITATION OF THE RESULTS.   In the case of the New York Times, the defense of which is the substance of the comment this is an answer to, it has been right in the middle of this because, in pursuit of its profitable ability to print untruth in the Sullivan case, it got one of the stupidest and most dangerous decisions a sometimes  muddled court made in its favor.  It could have asked to print a harmless retraction and paid the court costs during the first hearing and the judge may well have let them off for pennies, instead, for the want of and cost of fact checking of a paid ad in that rag, the demons of lies was unleashed in the name of the First Amendment.   I have to wonder if hate speech had not the year before gotten a Supreme Court "justice" killed instead of a president if they would have felt so virtuous in handing down that decision by an all-white, affluent, lawyer staffed Court.

* The old ACLU style dodge "if they can suppress the speech of Nazis they can suppress the speech of anyone" is a symptom of how susceptible otherwise allegedly intelligent People are to slogans that that, itself accentuates the danger of such speech.  In the United States, in the golden age of "free speech-press" it is the benevolent and positive speech which has not flourished as hate-talk-jockery, hate talk TV, FOX, etc. have swamped the truth with hate talk and lies.  That theory is so disproved in real life that its maintenance is evidence for the study of popular delusions.

As a gay man who has several times experienced real violence due to my identity and a lifetime of threats, I'd rather sacrifice the privilege to lie and spout hate that the likes of the ACLU have protected -WHICH, IF I USED THEM, I WOULD KNOW I WAS DOING SOMETHING WRONG - in favor of the safety and security of other members of targeted minorities and Women.  You can take my "right" to lie and spread hate from me and I doubt I'd feel anything but an enhanced practice of using speech and writing responsibly and morally.

Wednesday, May 4, 2022

Still Faking A Swivet About The Leak Instead Of The Nationalization of Womens' Bodies

IF THE SUPREME COURT were up to all good, they never would have adopted the pose of judicial secrecy that is so much in the news now that, almost certainly a conservative, associated with the court has leaked a draft opinion, clearly coordinated with right-wing media, The Wall Street Journal and Senate Republican-fascists, leaked a draft opinion bound to be as bad in its effect as the Dred Scott decision, perhaps its nearest historical like. Nothing about the leak to POLITICO! has any benefit to liberals.

The Supreme Court should be required to conduct almost all of its business in public, little to nothing about almost all of its case load has anything like a national security character that requires that.  It is not like a grand-jury which is justifiably conducted under strict secrecy rules until its final decision is made.  It should certainly have more stringent reporting and anti-corruption measures enforced by law and removal - we've got to make a way to do that other than the myth of impeachment - if those are violated.  The Court is and has been for almost all of its history the most corrupt branch of government.

The publications and replication and associated scandals in scientific and so-called scientific research has had a small effect in forcing some measure of transparency in very recent years.  Something similar is clearly necessary in the Supreme Court BECAUSE ITS MEMBERS CANNOT BE TRUSTED TO POLICE THEMSELVES.  Clarence Thomas and his insurrectionist wife should be the last veil covering that raw and putrid power play that lies behind the pose of judicial decorum.

The Supreme Court should be stripped of its robes, its mystique and its legend because that is part and parcel of its evil doing.   It should be legally required to conduct all of its business in public and not behind any kind of a veil of secrecy.   Its legend is as phony as that of the ol' way-est and the Lost Cause and all of the other regional BS that are tools against the common good.

All Of The Poisons Embedded In The Constitution And Others Placed Their By Supreme Courts Are Reaching Fatal Level

Finally, it is the act itself that matters.  When instrumental reason is is the sole guide to action, the acts it justifies are robbed of their inherent meanings and thus exist in an ethical vacuum. Joseph Weisenbaum

THE EVILS EMBEDDED in the United States Constitution by founder-slavers and founder-financiers at its framing and adoption have never not been something that impinges on the life experience of those who those evils were intended to enslave and oppress, Black People and other People of Color and those whose subjugation was so routine at the time of its adoption that they didn't bother to encode them, Women.   LGBTQ People weren't even thought of, though certainly oppressed by law and custom.

Yesterday I posted about the most notable and scandalous lapses among Christians, "most Christian princes" etc. in ignoring and blatantly violating the teachings of Jesus while professing to believe that he was divine.  Something similar is typical of those who uphold the Constitutional order, especially those whose entire profession, under the obviously badly framed federal government, is allegedly dedicated to it.  Of course I'm talking about the Supreme Court and the judicial system and legal profession which is so largely determined by the Supreme Court.  If there is anything like royalty in the United States, it isn't the executive which embodies it, it is the Supreme Court as it has taken the dangerously vague and expansive powers granted to it by the written Constitution and as it has usurped powers to itself never put into it, by its say so and maintained because the other branches had no power to prune that parasitic growth back.  They could, of course, do that but Democrats, who have a misplaced respect for even that "law," won't do it and Republican-fascists would do it to regularize the kind of Republican-fascist criminality that was pioneered by the Nixon, Reagan and Bush I and II administrations and regime and which went whole hog in the Trump regime.*

Though I doubt he knows I or this platform exists, I felt confirmed in my view of the Constitution and the Supreme Court when I heard the truly honorable Congressman and Constitutional Scholar Jamie Raskin on Rachel Maddow's show characterize the Supreme Court and its sordid history, its role in American history as the foremost tool of wealth and oligarchy and the character of its members as social, economic and legal anti-democratic reactionaries.  

He even noted that that was its history despite the entirely atypical Warren Court.  Over the past several decades, when I pointed out that terrible truth about the Supreme Court. the secularly sainted Warren Court was the chicken-wire and terry-cloth surrogate mommy figure clung to by the college-credentialed liberals who were the audience for what I said.  The number of times I had to point out to them that Earl Warren and his associates were long gone and that even other such idols of the liberal American civic religion, such as Holmes were false demigods would number in the hundreds if not thousands.  

They especially didn't like it when I pointed out that if the Warren Court's civil-libertarian rulings were supposed to enhance equality and egalitarian democracy, subsequent American history proved they have had the opposite effect.  

The highest point of official, federally enacted egalitarian democracy in American history, the early years of the Johnson Administration, sank in their "freedom of the press" attacks on Democrats, Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon won the office he lost before those rulings were made freeing the press to lie with impunity.  The march to today's dangerous situation that risks actual fascism, embodied in Trump but also any time the Republican-fascists gain control of the elected branches - it now has the Court - began with the criminal, Nixon.  It has steadily gotten more dangerous since then.  The Warren Court gave them the key to that in a number of its allegedly liberal rulings.

The dangers of trying to reform the American government through a new Constitution which could beneficially look at the two hundred fifty years in which the novel attempt of the "founders" has repeatedly been proven to not only be inadequate for its intended purpose, and how to correct them but at times disastrously dangerous, are more than matched by the dangers of keeping it as it is.

It was designed to be a vehicle of slavery and subjugation (see first paragraph above) and all sorts of corruption and theft and graft and LIES have not only never been corrected, they have expanded and flourished UNDER THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER WITH "THE BILL OF RIGHTS" FOR TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES.  The one great alleged success in its reform took one of the most horrific Civil Wars in modern history.  That, in itself, even if it had worked to really correct it, proves that the Constitution and, especially, the government by judiciary under it, is not a success.   And de jure slavery was succeeded by American apartheid and de facto slavery even with the Civil War Amendments in place, the Supreme Court weaponized those at cross purpose to their adoption and the legislative record of that.

A presidential system is far more dangerous than a prime ministerial system in a republic, though as Boris Johnson's Britain proves, even a prime ministerial form under the reign of Murdocian style lying press,  is not as safe as it should be. Though a lot of that is because the British system has anti-democratic features embedded in it of unequal representation as much as the American one does.  

As Trump and other lesser criminal presidents have proven, the founders imaginary protection against even the most dictatorial of those who manage to get in under our corrupt system of electing a president (the stinking putrid Electoral College), impeachment, is a fairy tale which is not even used to remove corrupt Supreme Court members.  The two which the Democrats got against Trump hardly slowed him down as the Republican-fascist party, AND IT IS NOW UNDENIABLY A FASCIST PARTY, supported him and still, now, out of power and under inadequate investigation for the most serious of crimes, has him as the head of his party.  Of course the anti-democratically constituted Senate will always be the place where impeachment actions against even the most criminal and dangerous of Republican-fascist presidents and unethical Supreme Court Republican-fascist "justices" die.  

And if he does not become their nominee in 2024, some other Trumpian figure, the extremely stupid and morally degenerate governor of Florida, or any one of various others, can be counted on to continue much in the same way as Trump did.

This is the time when all of the evil embedded in the Constitution, weaponized by lawyers, scholars and scribblers in the hire of fascist billionaires FOREIGN AS WELL AS DOMESTIC, thanks to the Supreme Court and the idiots of the American Civil Liberties industry, have come up with the algorithms of instrumental reasoning which, to any supposed democratic American Republic are like prions in the brains of brain eaters.  That's what that "judicial philosophy" so discussed in the recent Supreme Court nomination hearings were. That is what was bound to happen in American government, under the written Constitution from the late 18th century under the operation of Supreme Courts and their sometimes-thing of precedent.  Such Constitutional scholars as Jamie Raskin will point out that no other country allows its Supreme Court to do what ours gave itself the power to do, that evil is one that cannot be blamed on the amateur status of the "founders" it was the creation of the Taney Court when it nullified the Missouri Compromise in the Dred Scott decision to try to cement legal slavery into American law forever and to extend it to the entire country.  

The Roberts Court - which is probably more the Alito Court, in fact - is about to do to Women what the Taney Court did to Black People.  And the same Court has already made some of the most blatant and effective attacks on democracy and the right of The People to vote in the history of the Country, it is hell bent on stripping many people, Black People, other People of Color, Women, LGBTQ, ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO ARE NOT RICH of their rights, theirs is more than the mirror image of the Warren Court because their program has the backing of the biggest money in our history and the most blatantly fascist party in our history.  The Republican-fascist Party is the wet dream of the KKK that marched in Washington a century ago, it is the disideratum of the framers of the Confederacy and unlike that time, those with the power and money backing to do it are not confined to a specific region of the country which a concentrated military effort can, at terrible cost, defeat.  

The Warren Court and its short-sighted to idiotic "free speech-press" rulings did, in fact, give the billionaires and multi-millionaire fascists their foremost tool, the ability to lie with impunity, and with the full support and promotion of the media.  Lies have always been a foundtaion of all evil, especially when that evil is a result of malignant governments and courts. If you can lie people into opposing their own interests as well as equality and justice, as a fascist oligarch, you've got it made and the Warren Court and the ACLU gave them that using the inadequate and sacrilized language of the First Amendment.  In an electoral government it is necessary to lie effectively to enough people to put the henchmen of the rich and oligarchic in power and under our appalling anti-democratic Constitution with the anti-democratic Senate and the repeatedly demonstrated evil of the Electoral College, you don't have to get nearly a majority of The People to be suckered.  

Maybe most of all we have to declare, finally, that the 18th century is over, the "enlightenment" was not enlightened, the "founders" were not geniuses or especially virtuous, some of them are were as vile as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and the rest of the billionaire hoarders of the common wealth.  The "genius" of the "founders" amateur status - uniformed by the two and a half centuries of information gathering and viewing their creation in action since then - is nothing we should tolerate anymore.  We will either get rid of the anti-democratic mechanisms in government they created for evil purposes and those which don't work the way they're supposed to and once and for all remove the self-created powers of government by judiciary which the Supreme Court has steadily used to make those and other evils worse AND DO IT IN THE CONSTITUTION or we are doomed.  The slave power and its modern translation into American apartheid has had two and a half centuries for its henchmen, the lawyers and scholars and media scribblers, to make what they do more effective.  We change that and once and for all remove those or we are doomed.
 

Tuesday, May 3, 2022

 LET ME GO ON RECORD as not giving the slightest frick about some clerk leaking the draft opinion, the stately cotillion that masks the raw power play of the judicial power and its anti-democratic, oligarchic corruption has been a protection for what has always been the most dangerous and most corrupt branch of the federal government.

Anyone who wrings their clean, manicured little hands over that is as much a part of the problem as Alito and Kavanaugh. 

Hate Mail - About "The Historical Jesus" And "Imaginary Friends"

ONE OF THE biggest follies and one of the greatest dishonesties of so-called enlightenment modernism is the denigration of the imagination, "that's only imaginary," "you're imagining that," "it's all in his, her, their,your imagination," is a general dismissal of whatever someone wants to dismiss.  The dismissed, alleged to be "merely imaginary" entity can be understood to be contrasted with whatever the dismisser asserts is a solid and solidly real entity which they hold in their own (no doubt believed to be) superior mind which isn't dependent on the merely imaginary.

That is such an obvious lie that to point out that it is a lie will shock the self-imagined rationalist but it wouldn't be a surprise to some of the greatest heroes of modern, "rationalist," college-credentialed, "reality based" people.  Einstein in his evaluation of his friend and colleague Eddington praised his work based on the fecundity of his imagination even as he criticized some of his conclusions on his alleged failure in critical thinking.  I assumed he meant in Eddington's late attempt to come up with a "Fundamental Theory" of physical science, something which Einstein, himself, failed to do in his late work and which I doubt anyone will ever achieve because I don't think our imaginations can comprehend enough of even the physical world to allow someone to achieve such a thing.  The much vaunted "theory of everything" that modern physicists and cosmologists, especially the atheist fundamentalists among those, is likely never to be more than the figment of some very specialized and cultivated imaginations with an unadmitted ideological goal which has nothing to do with physical science and everything to do with atheist-materialist fundamentalism.  

That's not to say that what's imagined can't be a mistakenly held belief or view of things, which may be entirely innocuous but which may, also, be extremely dangerous or evil.  Our imaginations are capacious enough for them to contain all of those things.  Imagination is no more good or bad than life is, even "real life."  Every weapon of mass or individual destruction wielded or threatened by a tyrant was the imagination of some scientist or other weaponeer harnessing their imagined view of material science.

History. dealing with a far, far broader range of realities than the physical sciences, is, generally, more honest about that, or at least it should be.  Any work of history, dealing with a far broader and far more difficult to encompass reality than particle physicists have as their professional concentration, is merely fragmentary.  There is no such thing as a comprehensive historical point of view, even those which encompass a very large body of evidence, documentary and physical, will be nothing like a comprehensive view of even any given day, never mind a year or decade or era. Despite the fact that before my involuntary recess I'd praised the ability of history to come up with some SOME facts of far more certain reliability and finality than even physics can in some cases, history as a study is never a completely comprehended view of its subject matter.  And all of it, even that which rigorously deals with documentation and physical evidence, is permeated with and resides in and depends on human imagination.  

There is no part of anything which we do which is not entirely dependent on the imagination of things and events, living organisms and human beings . . . Even our most basic sensory apprehension of our surroundings is dependent  on and founded in images and scenarios in our imaginations, even the tiniest part of the outside universe is not recreated in our minds, what we have in there is not what is really out there, though it might be a good and reliable model of it and, in many cases, an honest one.  Our imaginations might lead us to some success in navigating and living in the external universe but we are all as likely to imagine ourselves into trouble, for ourselves and other living beings, there are no People more apt to do that than those within the culture of modern "enlightenment" college-credentialed snobs, especially the affluent among them.

I re-read, yet again, The Real Jesus by Luke Timothy Johnson and was struck by both his deep appreciation for the benefits of historical method and the problems of it, especially the problems of academics who make assumptions about their historicism that are as careless as those of the most arrogant and clueless of physicist-cosmologists about the limits of their subject.  The beginning of the honest practice of any historical method is to admit that it is inherently problematic and what it produces is not going to be the reproduction of reality.  The best historian, the best biographer - when they have what can honestly be considered enough of the right kind of evidence to produce biography - does not reproduce an "historical" anyone.   And there is not that kind of evidence much before the modern era to produce that kind of biographic treatment.  Any claim that you can produce an, or, even more cluelessly, THE "historical Jesus," is a self-impeaching flight of dishonest imagination.

 I am very tempted to go over that entire chapter of the book that deals most directly with that because the bad habits of thought he discusses in it are ubiquitous and there is definite bleed over into the general culture.  He asks a very provocative question as to why "the Church" should consider the "historical Jesus" which is a product of the imaginations of some, very often quite ideologically motivated, academics more than the "Jesus of faith" which is who you find in the Scriptures.  

Why should a modernist, reductionist "Jesus" of what was, honestly, a rather dodgy academic publicity stunt of announced ideological motivation, be considered to be superior to the Jesus of the Gospels?  Johnson does something I've never really seen much as a self-criticism within that kind of effort, he pointedly criticizes the criteria used to come up with some of the most ubiquitous of claims of the historical-critical method such as those used to illegitimate some of the Pauline Letters, other Letters in the New Testament, the Book of Acts and which are used to slice, dice and trim the Gospels, canonical and apocryphal, into an ideologically acceptable form - which often renders them quite useless for any good purpose.  I will admit that I, very far from a rigorous New Testament scholar have just accepted that current most common view of it without questioning.  And I won't go into the non-scholarly side-show of those like the late John Spong except to point out that I never did take him seriously on such topics.  

I really have to wonder at the motivations of why they want us to imagine Jesus in the many, conflicting, incompatible ways they want him to be thought of when it's clear that such Jesuses don't really come out in a place much better than that of the fundamentalist-televangelists who they announced themselves in opposition to.

Even a quarter of a century ago, after about what I noticed as a quarter of a century effort by the American media of presenting right-wing ideological "christianity" as Christianity, Luke Timothy Johnson was able to ask why the churches closest to the John Spong, Karen King, John Dominic Crossan, etc. imagination of Jesus were ever fading as the fundamentalists were gaining.  I think it's because that kind of Jesus imagining effort comes out with a Jesus that doesn't work for what they claim they want him to do.  

The Jesus of the Gospels asks us to do some of the hardest things imaginable, to sell all we have and give the money to the poor, to give all of our money to those who won't pay us back (absolutely fatal to capitalism and the investment portfolios of Christians, right to left), to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, to be without a beam in our eye before we criticize a speck in someone else's, to be without sin before we cast the first stone (absolutely fatal to those who favor capital punishment), to do to others what we'd have them do to us (this risks me getting on football at allegedly Christian institutions of learning), etc.

If that Jesus, the Jesus that the conservative Churches, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Orthodox (risking getting into the Patriarch of Moscow), the Jesus of the Catholic medieval monarchs and the Protestant Most Christian Princes, the Jesus of the old mainline denominations back when they tried clergy for heresy, etc. was unsuccessful in leading those who professed that belief into actually doing what Jesus would have done - AND NONE OF US EVER HAS DONE THAT - then the diluted, diminished, pruned and rationalized Jesus of the historical-critical movement, the Jesus made acceptable to "enlightenment rationalism" and scientism and materialism is going to be ever less of a force for doing that in the general population.  If such a denatured Jesus might work among those for whom the cultural vestiges of the "real Jesus" of faith are mixed with a general culture of liberalish niceness, that's certainly something that diminishes over time.  I can't recall which comedian it was I recently heard pointing out that the professed morality among the mocking dismissers of Jesus were actually derived from the Gospel but that's certainly true.  I think it's as certainly true that within my lifetime the vestiges of that cultural heritage have been petering out like Nietzsche's imagination of the Shadow of the Buddha.  Look at the "Buddhists" among the libertarian amoralist cyber-tycoon class for a parallel to that.  And the ones that don't even make that much of an effort at putting up a false front over their Nietzchean march of acquisition and amoral decadence.  I'll bet they all pretty much bought into the new atheist fad of the '00s. Jeffrey Epstein and his pimpess were really big in that as they were in their other activities.

Monday, May 2, 2022

Announcing The Grand ReOpening - Sort of

THEY THOUGHT THEY FOUND SOMETHING, which meant more time out, but it wasn't there.   They think I'm going to live.  I was going to say "sorry" but that would be a lie.  Especially with the hate mail that got left here over the past two weeks. 

I'm working on something to post tomorrow or Wednesday.  I hope to get back to the daily schedule at that time.   I'm out of touch haven't read any news - wasn't online where I was.  I couldn't stand to have their TV on and American radio news mostly stinks.   I loathe NPR as much as I had come to loathe it.  

Though I listened to Toby Laboutillier's "Down Memory Lane" something I used to do weekly but haven't for a while.  He has a somewhat different format now and I made the mistake of leaving it on for the second hour when they start with the top hits for the week in 1962,  I had The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance going through my head for days.   The only person in that movie I had any respect for as an actor was the villain, Lee Marvin who I thought was one of the best Hollywood actors of that generation.  I hated both Jimmy and the Duke and not just because they were Republicans.   

One of my sisters loved them some Gene Pitney and so I got that song indelibly burned into my memory.  I hate that era of pop music even though I do think some of the song writing was better than what came later.  Pop culture is retrogressive, the idea that it's progressive is one of the biggest loads of B.S. there is.