Stupid Mail

HEY I'M LARGELY OFFLINE these days, editing is going to be iffy at best.  Checking of details even more so.

The profoundly stupid Simps thinks I attacked Margaret Atwood for writing her "Gilead" books when I said they were worth reading, she can write.  What they are not worth doing is mistaking for being more than fiction or a roadmap to the dangers we really are facing.   I read it more than thirty years ago, that I forgot the title doesn't bother me much, especially as brought up by someone who never read anything MA wrote in his life. 

I think Cat's Eye is a far more interesting book, one that is far harder to read, more challenging.

What I did criticize about Margaret Atwood is her belief that liberal democracy is going to save us from the very results that have come with liberal as opposed to egalitarian democracy.   Stupy didn't argue with anything I said about that because he didn't understand it.

That said, I think cousin Mary's review from 1986 linked to the other day was even more apt today as it was then.  Atwood's horror tale is a series of fictitious stereotypes from pop-history that tells us nothing about the past and little about the present and she gets the real source of such stuff in real Women's lives right now, as I listed in my second post.   

I like Margaret Atwood and I like some of what she wrote but the first of the two books the one that gets all the attention - the one I've read - is just a scary story.  That's why it's popular, it's also popular because she goes after a weak force that it's not dangerous at all to attack, she doesn't attack the real source of subjugation and enslavement and deadly oppression of women, right now.   If she really wanted to look at the real thing, she could have written one about those entrapped in the porn industry and prostitution.  That one wouldn't get made into a TV show because the media she is a part of is collusive in one which is inseparable from the other.

Hate Mail - Without Equality Liberty Really Is Slavery But Ignorance Is Never Strength

Fiction Is Fiction

CONSIDER WHAT MAKES Margaret Atwood's Handmaiden's Tale so horrific, the subjugation of women by male authority - with the collusion of other women -  their loss of personal and even bodily autonomy through terrorism, the enforcement of the will of others through violence by those enforcing that will on them. Being turned into birth machines, modern-day concubines - though whenever sex is involved, in reality, that will be the primary motivation for such a scenario no matter what the pretense.  And never forget that violence is an intrinsic part of any subjugation and any terror, without violence and the threat of pain, murder or death no subjugation would ever succeed.

The imaginary scenario of Margaret Atwood may be apt for some particularly horrific socio-religious contexts right now, "honor" murders in Iran, intimately related to child marriage as mentioned, were reported on by the BBC again the other day.  Though there are scholars of Islam and Islamic cultures who will point out that those murders are a violation of their conception of Islam and are a product of secular culture.  Though obviously there are others who disagree, some who claim expertise and are held to be experts.  I don't know, I'm neither such a scholar of nor am I sufficiently informed as to whether or not that is the case.  Since many Muslims don't do such things, I don't think it's inevitably a feature of Islam.  

It is indisputable that it is a terror crime of long standing in countries in which Women are regularly murdered by boy-friends, husbands, fathers, brothers, other family members and it doesn't seem that the civil or religious authorities are really doing much to stop it there.  There are certainly murders of Women on similar excuses in entirely non-Islamic contexts, I suspect if Islam suddenly disappeared from those countries, the murders would continue as they probably happened before Islam arose.

They are certainly documented in many polytheistic and pagan contexts.  The murders of unwanted wives, daughters-in-law, etc. is a feature of, for example, some Hindu cultures, perhaps more accurately, they occur within a nominally Hindu milieu.  

Horrific sexual subjugation of Women certainly happens in a totally atheist context.  It seems to me that the training of teenage girls to be concubines for the North Korean military-fascist elite is a close day equivalent to the fantasies of Margaret Atwood in reality.  The rape-murder of Women by some of the elites in Stalin's Soviet Union is certainly not attributable to religion.  I wouldn't be shocked to find that is common in the anti-religious regimes throughout history.  About the only one I know of in which that might not be as true was the short-lived Paris Commume where prostitution was abolished for a short time.  When you don't believe there are moral absolutes you tend to do what you want to, especially if you have power.  All of the agnostic and atheist contented cattle on every college faculty who are too contented to do much more than fool around with their students and colleagues won't convince me that isn't true among anyone with the energy to pursue real power.

But the Handmaiden's Tale isn't set in those Islamic majority countries where such murders and such terror exists, it happens in what is certainly English speaking North America in "Christian" milieu where such "honor" killings are far rarer in an Islamic context as well as being rare in a "Christian" context.  Though there are an enormous number of murders of Women outside of any religious context in every day life, right now, as there has been all along, including during the period that Atwood may have considered the high-point (so far) of "liberal democracy."  As I've mentioned before, when I researched the issue of Women who were murdered because of their gender, the figure then was an average of four a day in the United States which, if you consider what is being described is different from lynching only in the word used, is horrific.

I'm going to repeat that.  Under secular American secularized culture, government and law, there are Women murdered, often brutally, every day, right now, Women live restricted lives because of that and if they transgress the limits of safety, the general attitude is that they are "asking for" what happens to them. And even as they are terrorized by it, they are encouraged to dangerously make themselves vulnerable to those consequences.  I have gotten some flack recently for pointing out that as that happens, Women are encouraged and enticed by the popular culture into making themselves more vulnerable through the use of alcohol, encouraged to become participants in their own victimization. Certainly that's a part of such a "Handmaiden" scenario - without alcohol as date rape drug - as it would really be.  But this isn't directly about that.

The greatest irony of Margaret Atwood's championing of "liberal democracy" is that I would suppose for many that would include the pornogrification of culture, both pop kulcha and elite kulcha.  The pornogrification of culture is one of the things which liberal democracy of the 18th century kind, today, frequently pats itself on the back for.  And that goes back to the time when the Marquis de Sade became one of the members of the Revolutionary Government in post Revolutionary France.  The "liberty" to produce his glorification of the sexual violence practiced by the strong against the weak, an act of male "fraternity" which belies the "equality" that such 18th century conceptions of liberalism always do contradict - It should be remembered that France didn't extend the vote to Women until after it was liberated in WWII NOT THAT ENGLISH SPEAKING NATIONS HAVE MUCH TO CROW ABOUT EITHER. I have long wished I could find the exact source of the quote from a Black Union soldier who noted that he was not in the war to preserve the Constitution because he and his People had been held in slavery by it for its entire history.  Women should be as skeptical of it or any such constitution or document which does not assert their actual equality as the United States Constitution does not and which Women are about to be reminded of, powerfully.  American "liberal democracy" has never really been about equality of Women or People of Color or those with less, it has been about the liberty of those with more, especially straight, white men of affluence to lord it over the rest, with a diminishing number of such privileges allowed to white males of decreasing affluence, set up so that those beneath them are the ones who get blamed and feared when they fear losing their measure of privileges.  

"Liberal democracy," with which subjugation and oppression, legal and merely by long custom and neglect is entirely compatible is, certainly, compatible with the level of violence and even threat of death - if death by neglect and refusal to aid.  The level of violence that those forms of subjugation and oppression require to stand is obviously compatible with liberal democracy.

Equality, real equality in life, in physical, material security and well being, held under a moral law of justice that includes those and which generates the thought habits of really believing that is how it should be AND HOW WE SHOULD ACT.  Without that equality "liberty" will always be a game of the ability to amass wealth and privilege to those with a leg up, exactly what has happened under "liberal democracy" in the United States and elsewhere.  It was always set up to be that from the beginning.

It was less verbally explicit in the American forms of that, the enslavement and concurrent rape of Black Women (certainly children and, at times men), something certainly practiced by that great hero of 18th century liberal democracy, Thomas Jefferson and almost as certainly by other heroes of American liberal democracy.  Certainly it was a liberty taken by others with the "founders" knowledge and, in no case I know of, their open disapproval.  It is clear that even John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were passive acceptors of it in their support for the Constitution.  I have not studied any legal proscription of it and since I've come across no mention of that, I'm betting it was never made illegal.   That kind of rape, especially in the context of chattel slavery is a specialized form of violence within the general violence of legal or non-legal slavery.  

It was certainly not infrequently visited on poor Women, working Women not held in formal, legal slavery, even today.   I remember one of my mother's friends, during the Clarence Thomas hearings when Anita Hill revealed his history of sexual abuse of her that it was common all during her working life as a nurse and back then, she said, if you wanted to keep working, "you just took it."  My mother's friend considered Anita Hill a heroine for being one of the few who risked their careers to reveal that about a powerful man with the kind of patronage Thomas had and has.  There is nothing he did that wasn't an intrinsic part of "liberal democracy" and that is provable by the history of life under it and the reaction of many a champion of such "liberty" to Women's rights as those were asserted.  Consider the backlash to Me-too. The whining about the loss of "liberty."  The far from totally successful campaign to make workplace sexual harassment and abuse illegal is far less of a success even as such commercial and show biz kulcha encouragement of men and boys to engage in it has flourished under the "liberal democratic" regime of free-speech-press.  I wrote about one such liberty-practicing multi-millionaire sexual abuse tycoon here the other day.

Most ironic to me are those champions of such "liberal democracy" who are big fans of Atwood's Handmaiden franchise is that I'll bet most of them are big fans of the sex industry, prostitution, pay-per-view prostitution which, in reality, may well be the closest thing we have to an actual Atwood scenario in North America and Europe and other places where porn is produced, today.  The images sold to men, their messages strengthened, enhanced and encouraged by sexual arousal, are so common, the use and enslavement and actual violent abuse of women are so common that they are easily acceptable even by those who will watch the make believe actors or read the fiction of Handmaiden and, since those are so bizarrely strange, will get worked up over the make believe future of it as the reality of it easily found in even the most innocuous computer searches, much of it the sadistic abuse of women held in slavery or taken advantage of through addiction or economic desperation is seen as a positive thing, an expression of "liberty" of "The First Amendment" working the way it should because, heaven forbid that Congress should outlaw such stuff as the sexual degradation of Women, or gay men, such stuff is rampant in gay porn.  

I would include that such prohibitions of involving children as might, at least for now, withstand a Supreme Court Challenge are certainly violated flagrantly online where the "models" or "actors" are most certainly not 18 or older in many cases.  And, since the damage of those includes the encouragement of men and boys to practice that, the simulation of it which may be technically not child porn, has the same effect on its consumers as the real thing.  The abuse, use, enslavement, destruction you see on a screen or a page is probably the tip of an iceberg of practice in those who are encouraged to do what they see.

The scary dream of such "theocracy" as imagined by Atwood is certainly something that should be prevented though I think its promotion is more of a scare-tale like the old Brit anti-Catholic hate lit, it has more in common with Chick Publications than would be comfortable to consider.  But there is not nothing to it if kept tied to reality.  I think, given the role that organized religion had in the impending nationalization of Women's bodies by the Supreme Court, that that is an entirely legitimate aspect to be addressed in fighting against it.  But that also ignores that there is certainly more organized religion that supports Women's right to their own bodily integrity and ownership and that any religious influence in that direction is no less religion trying to influence things. I'm sure those whose motive is to despise religion would complain that that is also a danger of "theocracy".  Given that many, probably most American Catholics disagree with the bishops, Cardinals and Popes on making abortion illegal,* given that many Catholics ignore the teachings of the Church on matters related to sex and in other ways, the dangers of "theocracy" are way overblown, generally.  Though in some states where even more rigidly enforced hierarchies of some other religions, Mormonism, perhaps the Southern Baptists, there is something to worry about. The present day Supreme Court is creating a Jane Crow system in which many states will turn Women back to the worst of the bad old days just as they are making it states to reinstall legal discrimination against Black and other People of Color.  But the real enslavement of Women in the United States and other Western countries, today, is far more likely to find its most extreme forms in those bastions of "liberal democracy" such as described above.  

But for women without means, women addicted, women entrapped, worse is real right now and in many of the most progressive states in the country.  Women are held in bondage as extreme as merely imagined by Atwood and her colleagues in some make-belief future wherever prostitution and the production of porn are engaged in.

The irony of this is that the Supreme Court under John Roberts, as under Rehnquist, under Berger and under Warren, etc. are and were bastions of "liberal democracy," to one extent or another.  Once the Warren Court started demolishing the old-fashioned restrictions on the explicit sex-show-biz industry and the fascists on the Court realized the boon to them and the billionaires they work for that freeing the media to lie with impunity under "The First Amendment" was, they were all-in on it, that trade-off worked far, far better for them and the billionaires than it did Women, than it did the working class, than the wage-slaves or, certainly, the Women and others held in bondage by the sex industry, chewed up and spat out by it.  The biggest fattest champions of "liberal democracy" are libertarian men, many are Atwood's colleagues in the show-biz and scribbling and publishing rackets, many, perhaps most of whom are quite comfortable with the most degrading and diminishing of Women and whoever else they want to use in the ways dreamed of by de Sade. In fact, as I've pointed out before, as mis-identified a feminist as Simone de Beauvoir championed Sade in exactly "liberal democratic" terms.  

I have come to have an enormous skepticism for any supposed champion of liberation who is a devotee to that 18th century conception of "liberty" unattached to a higher moral purpose.  Liberty to do what, responsibility for the results never seems to be a real consideration in even the cleverest of them.   

I have repeatedly encouraged those on the left to give up their romantic fantasies about the 18th century and its rhetoric about "liberty" about other such clap trap because the real history of those who spouted that stuff shows why it has produced such terrible results.  That is certainly not because I favor any return to what preceded that, we have to reject any try to return or maintain any past because that is a dead hand holding us back from getting past ALL OF THAT and on with making a decent, sustainable future.  It's not that there is nothing in the past that is worth considering, not every idea held or expressed by those in the past is bad and much of it can be learned from, even a lot of the bad stuff can be learned from as a caution.  But not if the real results of those things in our history and today are not faced and we admit that those are a real result of trying to put those into practice.  If we maintain those romantic unrealistic, we will repeat the same evils that resulted before.  It is the stupidest thing in American culture today, the idea that because some long-dead 18th century enslavers and crooks, genocidalists and racists said something, we have to live by that forever no matter what results have already come from them, no matter how many of even the hardest lessons experience has given us.  

I would encourage Atwood to junk the 18th century and move on, her nightmares coming true is a product of the "liberal democracy" the "free speech absolutism" that I suspect she believes in with all of her heart.  Women get lied into voting against their own and most intimately and importantly held rights by the lies of the mass media, they get suckered into it by freely told lies in their private lives.  So do men.  They get lied out of holding themselves as fully and rightfully free and entitled to dignity and a decent life by those who are permitted to tell those lies under liberal democracy and the culture that it has produced, here in North America, right now.  You don't have to worry about some imaginary reproduction of some historically disconnected fictitious Hollywood idea of Puritan New England, some Brit hate-lit horror show of Medieval Catholic Europe or even the importation of today's worst realities for Women under Islamic governments.  Lots of women got there with all of the "liberty" that modern Courts have given us, show-biz and publishing are in it as thick as thieves.  

One of the most discouraging things that has happened in my life is being witness to the success with which the backlash against second-wave feminism has made things worse than they were in the early 1970s.  Things I hoped would die with my generation are reproduced in ever worse forms among young people, young women accepting things being done to them by males that normalize what would have been seen as extreme fifty years ago.  The internet, its libertine libertarianism has made things so much worse.  And it's getting worse as time goes on with all of the liberty of speech and publication in the world. All of the "First Amendment" blather become reality.

One of the ironies in Atwood's championing of "liberal democracy" is that her own words hold up one of the greatest dangers under it, especially under the current understandings of "free speech-press".   I found the quote while looking up reviews of Handmaiden's Tale from Women at the time it was published, finding the really deep review of Mary McCarthy which is posted with a shorter commentary by Caryn James,  who quotes the author saying,  ''Anyone who wants power will try to manipulate you by appealing to your desires and fears, and sometimes your best instincts. Women have to be a little cautious about that kind of appeal to them. What are we being asked to give up?'' 

Certainly that is a perfect description of how the pornographers, the promoters of prostitution, the entire ad industry and much of popular entertainment have enslaved Women, starting when they were girls.  They got talked out of equality in an entirely commercial-secular context, most of them never having much ever really taking religion seriously.

* You can be against abortion as a moral consideration and still be opposed to it being made illegal.  Making abortion illegal won't do much to stop abortions, it only makes abortions unregulated, dangerous and deadly, victimizing women who exercise ownership of their own bodies and providing opportunities for some of the scummiest of prosecutors, judges, politicians and others as well as the organized criminals who profit from anything that is subject to prohibitions.  The only thing keeping abortion as a safe alternative is the government regulation of it.  If it were not legal and regulated, legal or illegal, it would be as dangerous as a completely deregulated food industry.   Something which is, as well, entirely compatible with "liberal democracy" we know that because a lot of "classical liberals" champions of "liberal democracy" would like us to have one. 

The greatest prevention of abortion is the free availability of effective contraception and the education and encouragement of its use from an early age.  The U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops and other alleged religious entities to the Republican-fascists who will use it for political purposes who oppose the widespread use of contraception are the greatest promoters of abortion we have.  I would bet that the bishops opposition to the free use of contraception has been responsible for an enormous percentage of abortions, in reality.  Now they want to make those abortions which will continue to happen illegal and unsafe.  I don't think the fact that they are (supposedly) chaste, all unmarried men is unrelated to their total removal from the reality of what their positions produce.  They're so like judges and "justices" in that who can imagine the good they can do to their own class but who regularly disregard the realities of others.  That's not a defect restricted by gender, there are many Women placed on the bench who are fully in on the corrupt racket.  And never forget Clarence Thomas.

Raise A Whine To Harvard - And Three Cheers For The Self-Taught

ONE OF THE THINGS that I've read recently that made me think was the fact that biblical scholars today have access to more background information in their subject than any previous scholars in that field.  Which is kind of remarkable to think about, though it won't, in itself, guarantee the best or most important or useful scholarship. I would add as a caveat that today's scholars are probably as apt to be ideologically driven as they ever were and an attachment to ideology, when it comes to the pretense of doing pure research, is almost a certain guarantee of a diminution of quality and will, at times, hinder even a rational pursuit of truth.

This is a response to a whine that I dissed dear old Harvard, again, something which is always bound to raise a whine.  To which I say what I said the other day, by their fruits you will know them and those of Harvard would generally be such a mix of superb and rotten that the whole of it would probably be sent to the dumpster at most mid-quality green grocers.  It is a training brothel for the intellectual whores of oligarchy, especially its professional schools.  But, really, they're more like the sleaziest pimps in the world.  With some exceptions, it's product started out self-seeking and low on moral courage and its training is heavily geared to increasing the first and obliterating the second in those who might start with, respectively,  less and more of them.  If those who are better than that want to complain, why should they whine at me when it's Harvard that turns out AND SO OFTEN HIRES what is discrediting to it.  And with such world-class arrogance and presumption in the mix!

It is remarkable to think that even at most of the mid-level or even lower state universities and many colleges, the resources to gain a superb education are in place in many subjects, especially those not requiring generally unavailable lab equipment or other such stuff.  University libraries today have far more access to texts and other research materials, images, images of originals (where that's important) than any previous generation of students at even what were, then, more honesty considered the greatest universities - those were largely defined by their possession of such materials as are even found in great abundance online, especially if you have an institutional access to JSTOR or other such entities (I faked mine until it got caught).  Online resources should be a great equalizer of such things.

The actual advantage to students of what faculties the universities and colleges have, the supposed greatness of the personalities of repute they hire is certainly a secondary thing.  A diligent and sufficiently intelligent student will be able to go a long way even on their own with the resources they have available.  I think in a lot of cases one of the things that keeps them from doing that, other than the nervous sense that they need to be guided on the real, right, reputable pathways, is the silly idea that they need someone's permission to undertake a study, that any which is unguided by a, likely, ideologically contained and motivated member of a faculty with their own professional reputation in their enclave to protect, will go off track.  What keeps anyone on a real track is their own sense of integrity in searching for the truth and their moral obligation to letting the truth be their guide.  In many, maybe most contemporary formal situations, it is what is professionally most advantageous and most likely to keep one reputable within the established order which does that. Guidance by a university faculty member has its own perils, you're as likely to get one who will be in it for themselves as for you and your pursuit of the truth.

I am convinced that the most original and best scholars are generally autodidacts, in the end.  They may have had some really good and inspired teachers but those same good and inspired teachers have produced more work-a-day hacks and scoundrels than they have great original thinkers.  In many fields* basing yourself in a formal university or college milieu is probably more harmful than it is helpful to doing good and original work. I know a lot of the stuff I was taught, formally, was stuff I had to get over and get past to make any kind of progress towards something like the truth.  There's no guarantee that you won't face a stiff backlash, even on the most mundane of easily supported contradiction of the "common received wisdom" about fairly unimportant topics.  In fact, I will promise you that the more evidenced your contradiction of the "CRW" the more perplexed and outraged the reaction among the college-credentialed will be.  

When I first pointed out that Galileo's famous complaint to Kepler about the refusal of his enemies to even look into his telescope wasn't him whining about the Cardinals and the Pope but the university scientists of his day, giving dates that proved the bit of tripe being asserted was chronologically impossible - AND THAT BOTH GALILEO AND KEPLER WERE RELIGIOUS BELIEVERS, THEMSELVES.  You wouldn't believe the anger over such an overturning of the show biz (Brecht, among others) and cultivated propagators of the "common received wisdom" got from these self-declared members of the "reality community" those whose professional pretense was that they would boldly go wherever the facts led.  

That's one of the things I've found a college grad really has to fight hard to get past, I had to get past worrying about the reaction of my peers and (they certainly think so) betters, it's not easy.  I can only imagine how much harder it is if you've invested so much of your money, your time, your desire getting the prestige and position that having an animal skin from Harvard or its like would make that. 

 Thank God I went to an unpretentious land-grant university where no one especially cared about me getting those glittering prizes.  It's probably what gave me the freedom to break away.

* Today's post was almost another about the University of Toronto "emeritus" Prof of Psych and online huckster millionaire fraud Jordan Peterson who I've been seeing more about again.  That universities even have departments of Psychology is overwhelming evidence that they are purveyors of fraud and superstition, even into the most modern of modern periods.  Any field that could have someone like Peterson as a reputable member has something deeply wrong with it.  

But Harvard has had an impressive roster of actual war criminals as faculty and "fellows" there was even a blog that started listing some of them, though, any such site that doesn't start with Henry Kissinger is certainly incomplete (they give the Annie Hall quote to that effect).  The Kennedy School is an especially sordid cesspool for bringing the worst to Harvard, whether criminals from government or the media or the law, though Harvard Law can give them a run for the title of sleaziest school at dear old Harvard.  If Harvard groupies and grad want to complain about someone pointing out what a sleazy joint it is, the first place for them to lodge their complaints is Harvard which is such a sleazy joint by its own choice.  You can generally count on anything being considered "the best and brightest" to be a sordid cesspool because that's the way of the world-class and highly reputed of the world. 

Liberty Is Not Enough - Liberal Democracy Got Us Here, Egalitarian Democracy Has A Chance Of Getting Us Out Of It

I DO NOT HAVE A TV and am largely off-line these days so did not hear the interview Joe Scarborough did with the Canadian novelist and essayist Margaret Atwood, unfortunately most known for her "Gilead" an American theocratic dystopian fantasy which, being a scary story, is far more popular than the "Gilead" novels of her fellow (and I say far superior) essayist and novelist, Marilynne Robinson.    Both are worth reading but the latter far more so.  Atwood has written far better stuff than "Handmaidens Tale" I wish people would read some of her other things, though most of those who know anything about it probably, in the modern way, watched the show and never knew about the books. 

I really liked what she said about the experience of those of us old enough to remember epidemics before vaccines were developed in such abundance, I'm always in favor of facing the good old days were pretty bad. 

I agree with much that Atwood says but her championing of "liberal democracy" is something I can't agree with because it is what got us where we are, now.  What I understand as "liberal democracy" is essentially the laissez-faire libertarian conception of "rights" and "liberties" which does not begin with any higher moral purpose than "freedom" in which laws that are made apply to the billionaire and the destitute and that's the "level playing field" that we are to live in as if the billionaires and the media and the publishing industry that a Margaret Atwood is a part of will allow anything except what benefits them at the cost of others to result. 

The destruction of truth, which Atwood bemoans and hopes is receding is a product of such "liberties" such "freedom."   

She poses the question as to what the alternative to "liberal democracy" is, the one I propose is, as readers of these posts knows, egalitarian democracy.   Part of that may make the Atwoods of the world uneasy because part of that is facing the truth that government must be involved in the pursuit of moral goals or it founders in the cesspools of amorality which the billionaires, the Trumps, the Bushes, the Susan Collins, etc. flourish in.

Government either has a moral purpose higher than the ones 18th century philosophy - almost entirely a product of the upper class - would have favored or it devolves into gangsterism and oligarchy.  America's worst aspects are a product of such unequally held "liberty" such as allows the rich to corrupt everything.   The pursuit and achievement of the common good, of the COMMON WEALTH, of individuals having equal access to having a good life, a peaceful life for themselves, their families, their communities is certainly among the most important things that results from knowing the truth and the truth making us free.   Any government, any theory of government which stops short of those goals, of the moral imperative to achieve those and merely rests on the "liberty" the "freedom" of individuals to do whatever they want to, no matter who else it afflicts is too little and will, eventually get to where the United States has been and may be soon again.

  LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE

Forget The Words, The Laws, The Pious Civic Fictions - By Their Fruit You Really Know Them And Those Are Rotted

SECULAR LIBERALISM has failed the test of time when it had one of the greatest of opportunities ever given to it by religious liberals of the Civil Rights Movement led by the likes of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr.  They, himself, his colleagues and followers, through their sacrifice, their blood, their lives, they got the passage of the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act.  And they, directly or indirectly, in that spirit and by their example got other legislation passed.  They inspired the later movements for real rights such as the LGBTQ rights movement and the Women's Rights Movement.  The enormous opportunity for liberalism in the United States gained during Lyndon Johnson's time in office was not only squandered by the secularists, it was undermined by their deeper ideological commitments and real self-interests.  If there is one thing you should be suspicious of, it is upper-class, elite reformers, especially when their "liberalism" is a product of secularist, ideological, often 18th or 19th century European romance and not a belief that we are supernaturally required to do unto others what we would have them do unto us.  And that there will be terrible consequences when we don't.  We are suffering just such consequences, I'm convinced of that.

That enormous effort started to founder and go off track and sputter and die as secularists, college and university instead of Church based, pushed their way to the forefront, something that had been done before.  As the overtly religious motivation of the movements for equality were pushed aside, as the theories of secularism, materialism, scientism, anti-religious civil liberties legalism divorced from morality, etc. took over, things stopped, then they went into reverse.  The assinine romance of Marxism, almost certainly never a majority of the "new left," either gulled a large number of otherwise secular lefties or were loud enough to provide the enemies of equality and real democracy a weapon to attack the real left.  That is a factor but it is more complex than a simple statement of it can clarify.  Johnson getting gulled by the Ivy Leaguers, the Bundys, the McNamaras etc. into expanding America's involvement in the war in Vietnam had some role in that as it got sympathy for communism that it didn't deserve.*  The tragedy of Karl Marx is that his greatest achievement as a critic of capitalism was destroyed by his prescribing communism as the next step in his imaginary force replacing God, the dialectic.  Like I said, its complex but there was never any real need for traditional American liberals to get gulled, once again, by the "Marxists" a bunch who, no one should ever forget, Marx, himself, disassociated himself from.

More than fifty years after that, no one has any excuse for maintaining the rote pities for that bunch, Marxism has been given the test of time, it ends as it begins, in violent gangsterism, from Russia to China, to Nicaragua, God help the poor of any country which falls into the hands of those gangsters.  I would maintain that the least bad of those was Cuba, though I would never choose to live there just as the most devoted Stalinists and Maoists of the United States, somehow, managed to never leave the country they despised so much for their "workers paradises," excepting a few handfuls of those of marginal grips on reality.

 Jimmy Carter was the last Democrat before Joe Biden to really believe in the effective left of the Civil Rights Movement, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were fully in with the secular left which turned out to really not be any left at all and for whatever positive things they may purportedly have valued, what they pursued was a corporatist agenda that was, at its bottom not ever going to really challenge inequality. Bill Clinton's betrayal of the poor in the "reform" of welfare and Obama's elitist liberalishness that never exceded the bounds of what you could expect from a president of the Harvard Law Review (one who got election by working with conservatives to shaft anything closer to real liberalism) should be considered the death of the delusion that anything but a real, sincere religious left who live with integrity according to their profession of belief,  will ever really even make the effort to struggle against the evils of privilege and inequality and the tool of the oligarchs, such as racism, regional and class resentments and hatred, sexism and paranoia among those who fear the least among us will obtain their petty privileges allowed them by the elites.

That's my history of the past sixty-five years of the United States in short. And I could write a much longer one extending much farther back because the failure of secular liberalism and, even more so, the secular, anti-religious left is the longest running currently in production serial in the history of the United States.  The extent to which it is a foreign import, it has its counterpart in the British Left and in other places, though never minimize the ability of Americans to make their own mistakes of that kind.  

There is no past we can return to, we not only must we will inevitably move on to the future, whatever form of decency and morality and egalitarian democracy we have cannot be found in any past of our history.  There are no good old days, there are no romantic programs, tactics or theories of the past that we can cling to and expect those will produce results that are different from those they already have produced.  The corruption of the Republican-fascists and Roberts-Alito Court (a tautology if there ever was one) is founded in such romantic lies about the past, including those embedded in the cult of the Constitution and the fetish of the "Founders."  Those have been what they were designed to be, a boon for the oligarchs, the racists, the stealers of wealth produced by others of, by and for the rich.  

American traditional liberals based on egalitarianism and the common good was founded on the core of the most radical egalitarian and leveling morality that has yet to be achieved, do to the least among you what you would do for God, love your neighbor as yourself, if you have, give, etc.  Compared to that every theory of governance modernism and its secularism has cooked up is garbage for the ash heap of history, they will have a small measure of success the extent to which they agree with religion on that. I think that's why Cuba was less bad than other experiments in Communism were, though it was plenty bad, too.

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It is a mistake to have members of Congress, the President, Supreme Court "justices" and others take an oath to protect and defend The Constitution.  The Constitution is a terrible document which was sired by slavers and brought to term by financiers. Though, since they were all wealthy, white males, no Women involved, that analogy to birth is inept.  No living American ever voted to accept it,  its adoption was never by a majority of The People even when it was being adopted. It was never the product of considered adoption or rejection by any majority of People living under it, not People of Color, not Women, no one who was not born in the 18th century.**   Only a very small minority of whom were allowed to vote on those who would approve it and even those elections were timed and made inconvenient so even a small percentage of even the propertied, white men of age participated in the process. Slavery and anti-democratic features were embedded in it at the start, maintained in it and have not in any way really been abandoned in it.  That was made far worse by the extra-Constitutional innovations of the Supreme Court in usurping the functions of both the legislative and executive departments of the government and the corruptly born and filled Senate which, since it was the anti-democratically chosen and constituted part of the government, was given the power to approve of the Supreme Court which has, throughout its history, proven itself to be a cesspool of corruption - the Roberts-Alito Court we have now is typical of it, the Warren Court was its sole outlier and they proved to not be exactly wise in their decisions, acculturated as they were in Constitutional lore and law, bound by that thinking.

Louis Boudin pointed out that under the Court's usurped powers that the Constitution means whatever the sitting Court says it means and the present day Court has certainly proved that to be the case.   

It is sheer idiocy for anyone to believe the Constitution means anything since they have definitely shown that what previous Courts have said it was was less solid than the ink those decisions were made in.  The foul thing is next to impossible to really and basically reform even when its present state is murderous in its effect, even when Supreme Courts make that reform vital to the survival of the People of the United States and of anything mimicking democracy.  It was it a contraption set up for the benefit of oligarchs and slavers and it has become, through most of our history, more that than anything else.  The short periods when something better in it is asserted, that has, in terms of the history of the country, eventually and effectively been crushed.  That was made obvious during the Jim Crow period, in the period after the great struggle for Civil Rights started to be turned back.  A terrible Civil War and its aftermath, the experience of the WWII generation, the Great Depression, that terrible war the enormous and far from finished Civil Rights struggle which produced the greatest reform in the history of the country has been turned back using the very mechanisms provided by the Constitution to thwart equality and, so, democracy.

They should be required to swear an oath to egalitarian democracy,to The People of the United States if to anything, not that absurd and abstract idol which is meaningless by its very terms as its own black-robed high-priesthood of thugs allowed UNDER IT to become.  It is ridiculous for anyone, especially those who have studied it and its history to play that kind of let's pretend about it anymore because it is the deadly enemy of the safety, the equality of and so the legitimate freedom of the American People.

If The People of the United States allows the Roberts Court to get away with what they are doing, it's all over and we will have earned the murderous tyranny they will bring us to - NO, AS THE DEAD IN UVALDE, SANDY HOOK, ETC. ETC. ETC. HAVE SHOWN WHICH WE ARE ALREADY LIVING UNDER!-  those who tolerate that and, especially, the secular liberals of the media who whose feet of clay washed away in 1968.  They will not save us.  We are coming to the time when only those who look to God for salvation should be considered the realists among us. And under the degradation that Christianity has come to under corporate religiousity, much of that is as bad as the secularism that underlies it.

* The one and only achievement of American communists is suckering liberals into feeling sorry for them, they are the biggest whiners and criers in the cultural history of the country.  Liberals, encouraged by Hollywood and Broadway (the real source of such education) were successfully gulled with the cheapest of drama into feeling sorry for people who were, in every way, the moral equivalent of America's domestic Nazis and Hitler admirers, those who lied that Mussolini made the trains run on time.  Stalinists, Maoists supported some of the champion mass murderers in human history, they deserve to be exposed as that and the fraudulent fictions shattered.   All of the Hollywood 10 were in that category either when they were prosecuted or in their past.

** Jefferson's fantasy that there should be a new one every 20 years was certainly not the road taken. I've become more interested in how the Founders who lived into the 1820s and 30s, as they saw the abysmal moral cesspool they had founded,  might have written or talked about that in their more candid moments.  I was surprised to find that unremarked on much, some of them seemed to think things were less than wonderful.  Madison seems to have become remarkably cynical in the few things I've read from him in the 1830s, and he was plenty more cynical from the start than the civic piety of my youth claimed him to be. So was Jefferson.  Not officially a founder but certainly a front row witness of it, John Quincy Adams certainly came to regard the Constitution with far less than piety.  The cult of the Constitution is for the majority of Americans what the cult of the poor, blacklisted commies is for the secular left, a dangerous lie. Only it's more dangerous because the commies never stood a chance of taking power in the United States.

I, by the way, no more believe any sitting member of this or any other Supreme Court really maintains the sham of piety in regard to the Constitution that their priestly duties requires them to pretend they do.  Not to mention the members of Congress or Trump, does anyone believe Gatez, Green, Boebert, etc. really meant it when they took that oath?  Especially the Republican-fascists  on the Court whose cynicism about it far exceeds even that of J. Q. Adams whose private declaration that it was a "menstruous rag" was a product of his moral outrage at what it produced in regard to the slave power.  Behind the Roberts Court majority is just more cynicism, including the gal from Notre Dame.  

I fully believe Adams expected his journal would be published, as he had so recently seen Madison's papers published, after he was safely dead and could not be made to suffer for his candid opinion.  I've got nothing to lose so I say it out loud.