THAT TRUMP JUDGE Aileen Cannon is on the bench today proves the point but if she's still there a year or more after her conduct on the bench proves the inadequacy of the means of removing crooked judges from the Federal bench.
Considering the serious national security issues involved, anyone who thinks this isn't dangerous is deluding themselves.
- Everyone Should Be Encouraged To Write The Truth - Hate Mail
FIRST, I AM NOT "A WRITER" but I am a writer in that I write things and am a shameless enough writer that I publicly post my writing. Early in my experience of online commenting I got past the mind forged manacles that keep too many people from writing their thoughts and making them public, standard spelling, and other arbitrary rules that serve the purpose of snobbery more than they do anything else. Let me break it to you, no one needs your permission to write or post it.
In the recent online course in writing I took, twice, the teacher who has published professionally said "anyone who writes is a writer," and since he is the only expert I've paid for evaluation and he's the expert, I'll go with his rule. I think anyone who can manage to write something, read it themselves and make it clearer and better is performing the act of writing. They are as much a writer as someone who is talking is a speaker, maybe somewhat more so.
And I think everyone should be encouraged to do that throughout their lives whether with the thought of making it public, sending it to one person or keeping it as their own record of their thinking, so as to find out what's right and what's wrong with their thinking. Written language is far, far too good a tool for that to allow the snobs, the poseurs, the pros and other jerks to deprive we, the great unpaid, from having it as our birthright in language communities which have a written form. I wish all language groups had writing and hope those without it gain it for themselves and their posterity. If they do I would advise them to start out from the start making it informal and egalitarian without the ridiculous structure of rules and formalism and screwy archaeology of spelling that standard English currently has because that serves no one but the elites who want to keep it as their sole possession, the better to silence the rest of us. Only some of us are shameless enough to refuse to go along with that the rest of our lives. I am so shameless and shameless enough to be unashamed of that.
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As luck would have it, your objection to me writing this stuff and posting it online is relevant to my semi-public study of The Book of Jeremiah, or can be made an example of what is warned of in Walter Brueggemann's extraordinarily helpful lecture on Jeremiah and our own power elite and its service industry in educational snobbery.
From Slow Wisdom As A Sub-Version of Reality, with my inserted comments.
The God who presides over the historical process in poetic imagination connects and enacts what we would analyze differently. The outcome of such an odd reasoning is that internal anti-neighborliness yields external risk and danger.
It was very late in Jerusalem according to prophetic anticipation and if one were such a poet, if one were Jeremiah, what would one say about poetry about greedy exploitation and after poetry of external threat dispatched by holy resolve? Well, this is what the poet Jeremiah says in the midst of that lateness. "Do not let the wise" - here's our theme - "boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth."
I will start by noting that throughout his writing on the Prophets of the Jewish Scriptures, Walter Brueggemann notes two things about them, that the Prophets were poets and that they were "unauthorized," meaning they had no approving credentials that made everyone figure they were allowed to do what they did. "Authorized" writers, in my experience of reading poetry and prose, often means someone whose credentials hold up their reputation only so long as they're alive or promoted enough to support the assignment of reading them and their inclusion in anthologies but whose readership immediately plummets when they drop off the twig. Obviously the uncredentialed, unauthorized (interesting word to use in the context of this post about "un-authors") prophetic poets poetry didn't suffer in the test of time due to the disapproval of the critics. And they were really tough critics who tried to kill Jeremiah several times. I will forego making a list of just those over-praised, generally elite-university credentialed poets who were the toast of the town while they were alive but whose writing is pretty much a dead-letter now. Some of that failure was incredibly rapid. Clearly the business of approving writing isn't much more accurate in assessing durability or quality than the least durable of the so-called social sciences.
The poet focuses upon the great triad of control and pride, the three facets of having one's way in the world, might, wisdom and wealth.
Might here means military force, the capacity to control markets and natural resources. Wealth means the capacity to manage capital and impose requirements and restraints and leverage on all of the others so that the whole of the global economy is ordered to flow toward us.
But, then, wisdom. We had not expected wisdom to come along with might and wealth. Especially because our theme is wisdom and the work of the university is wisdom. Who can speak negatively of wisdom when we remember our great intellectual inheritance from the Greeks? But, of course, when wisdom is situated amid might and wealth something happens to wisdom.
"Something happens to wisdom," could be the title of this piece because "wisdom" in this case, approved writing, in that context is divorced from truth and morality. That is exactly what requires subversive writing that is unapproved, unauthorized, etc. to challenge it. Authorized, approved, standardized writing and thinking is impotent to challenge deeply enough the authorizing, approving, standard-setting establishment that co-opts those who seek that kind of approval, seldom without some level of payment.
I think the failed secular "lefts" of the United States and the rest of the West, that failure going on well into its second century of failure, fails in no small part because its figures are not really uninvested in the system of thought that the corrupt ruling class has mastered and uses to flourish. Most of that left is university authorized, approved, etc. and their "radicalism" is no more radical than what will still get them a job. It is not shocking to me that the leaders of the vilely counter-productive, affluent-class, ego maniacal, self-indulgent Weather Underground, those who didn't get themselves blown up or jail sentences and some of those who did, went on to teach at universities, their "radicalism" producing nothing, whatsoever, their credentialing and payment being standard for their economic-social milieu.
I am shameless enough to point out that my unapproved, unauthorized critique of the Bill of Rights - especially as interpreted by Supreme Courts from the secular-liberal Warren Court to the fascists under Rehnquist and Roberts - something which the secular left championed as a means of freely publishing their impotent propaganda, is far more anti-establishment than anything on the topic which Noam Chomsky or I. F. Stone or the entire civil-liberties industry have come up with. And the use of their conception of the First Amendment has served Republican-fascism far better than it has that secular liberalism which is just a milder form of top-down gangsterism. There is a reason that neo-Nazis, fascists, America's indigenous form of fascists, white supremacists (the writers of the Bill of Rights were, by and large if not entirely white supremacists) are the biggest fattest "free speech" spouting group around today, because a liberty to lie with impunity is what has gotten the United States where it is today even as protections for real, substantial rights is crumbling under that regime of thought. The secular left, those who champion "first amendment absolutism" from the alleged left, are too invested to even ask themselves how their promised regime of liberties has devolved from the height of the Civil Rights Act, The Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, etc. so fast into where we are now under the regime of "rights" they championed.
In terms of "speech," of publishing, I doubt there is any more radical a stance than to note that while there is a right to tell the truth, there is no such thing as a right to lie, whether the lie is knowing or the lie is lied through ignorance.** The difference in effect is intimately related to the moral categories the two things, the truth and lies, belong to.
There is a responsibility to try hard to discern the truth and it is wrong to lie are things that the plain language of "the First Amendment" entirely discounts. That omission is a serious deficiency in it. There can be no right to do what is wrong, the entire concept of "rights" so badly used in the framing of the Constitution* is based on that distinction. Our Constitution, especially the Bill of "Rights," ignores that aspect of rights. "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free," is an entirely sounder basis for any constitutional provision concerning the right to publish than the 18th century "enlightenment" notion that the truth will naturally win out in a contest with lies, especially distributed as published lies. If there's one thing that Scripture was never a sucker for, it was the notion that such things happened automatically for the best. It is ironic, considering the 20th century pop-Voltairian disdain for panglossian thinking, that it is the basis for so much of "enlightenment" gullibility and that the subsequent two-centuries and more of counter-evidence have not made a dent in that stupidity. From the second half of the 20th century till today, I'd say we are stupider about that than they were in the first century and a half of life under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
I will leave the next part of Brueggemann's speech as an example of what happens when official lie and the media lies and, now, the social-diseased social-media lies with the impunity that the Supreme Court has granted liars. . .
And, of course, that is what has happened among us. We have understood with Bacon that knowledge is power and we have transposed wisdom into knowledge that could control, that strange interplay between wisdom and knowledge has brought us the gift of the great scientific revolution in Bacon's time. And in its wake the great technological advances that have moved toward control that is never disinterested. And before we knew it Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas have entitled a book "The Wise Men," a study of six of the titanic figures who have managed U. S. foreign policy with Niebuhrian realism and have produced the abiding superpower, ample wisdom, ample might ample wealth in order to be the chosen race in the modern world.
But it has also led us to the sad picture of Lyndon Johnson in his last days concerning Vietnam with his head in his hands completely exasperated with ineffective power. It has led to the verdict of the brothers Bundy, McGeorge and William, architects of that war who wrote at the end of their book, "We were good but we were not as good as we thought we were." It has led to the departure of the wise men from the White House after conferring with the president about Vietnam and without a clue of what to do next.
It has led to the oil spills and to the Japanese nuclear crisis and to the widespread suspicion that our technology has outrun our capacity to think clearly. And it has left us with deep anxiety that seeks scapegoats along with the zeal to dispose of the others if necessary by violence.
. . . Only to note that today, after Nixon, Reagan, two Bushes and Trump, all with the freest of free presses in our history, we could look back on the days of LBJ as a less bad, less dishonest time.
* The fact that the framers of the Constitution didn't abolish chattel slavery in it while spouting "rights" proves that their use of the concept was blatantly dishonest and obviously wrong. Their many anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic insertions as well. The more I read about the framing and the push to adopt the Constitution the origins of our problems through that document become more obvious. "Hamilton" style, authorized, approved civics class style pieties about that are bullshit that we will have to abandon if egalitarian democracy is ever to be established and not the devolution into American apartheid we are seeing "free press" and all.
** The game that pretends we cannot call Trump a liar based on the impossibility of "proving" whether or not he or his ilk knew they were lying as they lied proves the stupidity of that modern civil-libertarian conception of "free speech-press." I wouldn't trust most judges and fewer "justices" to be honest about what they say, pretending there is a practical means of discerning when a lie can be called a lie under that rule just shows how absurd the whole thing rapidly becomes. Though, really, I think that pretense is more a creation of the credentialed journalism racket than the law courts. If I don't tend to trust "justices" I really don't trust "journalists" who often seem to be hired for their ability to lie persuasively and pretend shamelessly.
Note: You may also want to listen to Hannah Arendt on "Lying in Politics" from 1972.
What the Brian Tyler Cohen Said:
Since he doesn't go there, I will say that Sinema is as blatantly mercenary and money grubbing as Trump is, I think both of them worship the same god, Mammon. The same god as the nihilist, lunatic, fascist Gaetz Greene, Boebert wingnut do. And the skank with the "D" after her name is doing it for exactly the same reason. I don't trust materialists, either the intellectual kind nor the vulgar variety because, in the end, they are all the same. I don't trust anyone who had any association with the Green Party, they are Republican assets and they always will turn out to be that.
ONE OF THE THINGS that I've been using as an aid in reading the entirely topical Book of Jeremiah more deeply is the set of four lectures Walter Brueggemann gave over the course of a month at an Episcopal Church in Cincinnati, Into and Out of the Abyss. This comment touches on a seemingly unrelated piece of hate mail I got on another site over the dispute over free will, so I'll take it up as an example of the opportunity you get for usefully thinking about and changing behavior in the Jewish tradition and how the materialist-atheist-scientistic tradition, with supreme irony, considering the motivation behind the human invention of scientific method to enhance the effectiveness of human agency, leaves so many of its most dedicated ideologues claiming that we are mindless robots whose actions carry no consequential meaning or import, that we just do what we are programmed to do by our molecules, the complicated ones we pick out of our DNA and call "genes," which, as genetics becomes more aware of the enormous complexity of those molecules and the very ambiguous nature of those "genes" which we specify, abstracted out of those enormously long and complex molecules and their frequent impossibility to read and accurately specify as to their results.
I will also point out that I have identified "DNA" as being one of the unadmitted material gods of materialist-atheist-scientism so I think the comparison with the God of Abraham, Issac and Jesus is quite apt. As is so often true, this is my transcription from the posted video so any problems with it should be attributed to me.
- Q. Could you comment a little bit more about something you talked about earlier, about God changing God's mind? Especially in response to how the People requested (?) God to change God's mind. Would you comment more on that?
- Well, what that teaches is that we have impact on our futures, what we decide matters. God in the Old Testament never subscribed to the idea that God is immutable, unchanging and all that, so God is a character in the transaction and how we act causes God to position God's-self differently. That's how they imagined God. And so, if this is the Lord of the Covenant, this God is going to give blessings to People who obey Torah and not for those who don't. You know, that's the reasoning.
If you look in Jeremiah 18, I mentioned this I think another time, but there's a very clear case of it. Verse 18:7 "I will pluck up and tear down and destroy, but if that nation turns from its evil I will change my mind." But then, negatively, I will plant and build but if they do evil, then I will change my mind. So this is a God who is engaged in the Covenental conflicts. And, you know, in some ways that's kind of how we conduct some of our most important relationships. And so on.
Want to come back on that?
- I think what I [honestly meant] it scares me that my actions could change God's actions.
- Yeah, but you see the alternative to that is to say "My actions are irrelevant." It doesn't matter what I do, what the hell. So this tradition takes human conduct very seriously.
Over here what you tend to get is the promise that there is nothing you can do that will make me stop loving you. So they are in tension. And I think it's very useful for us to reflect on which one of these practices we were nurtured as Children on. It's amazing how many People who grew up in ferocious homes, for whom the Good News of Marcus Borg and so on is very welcomed. I think Marcus Borg grew up in such a home. And so on, and so on. So we're all living out our nurture and the way we got situated before we knew we were getting situated. So, I think this stuff rings true. It is an endless interpretive negotiation about that.
I will point out that Brueggemann does what I have never heard an ideologue of materialist-atheist-scientism do, admit that the focus of his thinking is a product of human imagination and, so, is subject to all of the conditions and vicissitudes, including being wrong, that our imagination of things outside of us, and all that is unseen within us, is exactly that, our trying to cope with our experience. Of course science is no less a product of the same human imagination subjected to a different set of filters in order to gain a possible enhancement of accuracy on the basis of a collective narrowing of focus and testing the rather pedestrian results about what it has narrowly focused on.
I have, since well before the internet was invented, rejected the pseudo-science that pretends to do what works on molecules and atoms quite well and with increasing difficulty subatomic particles, and with such things as planetary and stellar movement, about other aspects of human reality which cannot be subjected to that kind of filtering and the other genuine aspects of scientific method. What you can say with great confidence about some, especially non-organic, simple molecules and atoms and, to an extent, subatomic particles, you cannot now and I doubt ever will on things of anything from a relatively small to an enormously vast order of complexity and those things which it is impossible to actually observe. The mitigation of human imagination possible when scientific method is applied honestly and modestly becomes as open to ideological and self-interested pollution when you pretend to do science about things like human behavior, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, etc. as the disputes between Jeremiah and Hananiah when it was the experience of the People of Judea at the end of the monarchy and the period of exile.
One of the worst things about our current political peril are the huge numbers of Americans who are unengaged, uninterested, unwilling to learn and discern reality as opposed to being entertained by the unreality of movies, TV, games and the various species of social mental disease distributed by the internet. I think that one of the most dangerous aspects of that is the nihilistic belief that what we think and do is of no import, something which the social sciences have certainly stressed since the 1970s when Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology gained ideological dominance within those sciences which pretend to do science about their subject matter. Since then those have dominated in all of the college programs I'm aware of and through those media babblers and scribblers brought up on that nurturing, has filtered down, often unrealized, in their babblage and scribblage.
I think the nihilism of the post-WWII period even before that was a direct result of the rejection of the Jewish religious tradition, of consequential and real morality, both among gentiles and People who identify as culturally Jewish but who reject the religion. Secularists, in short. As Brueggemann points out, there is Biblical precedence for that, to some extent, in the false prophets who may have been held in favor by the political-Temple establishment and it is certainly one of the temptations of those whose lives are in despair as they, far more understandably than those reared in affluence, give up on the idea that what they think and do matters. Not a little of that giving up on the part of the underclass cultivated by those who make money off of them in the college-credentialed media, especially in entertainment media. He points out that that temptation is not unknown to those who engage in religion talk and alleged practice. I am never left unimpressed with the internal critique that much of religion practices but is rarely practiced to the same extent in much of science and hardly ever in secular ideology. In the case of those like Brueggemann, even noting the part that their academic training plays in the temptation to do evil or to quietly accept it as a fee of going along to get along.
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I have consciously decided to read translations, all claimed to be made from the "original" Hebrew, from decidedly different theological-ideological traditions to see what I notice of the different interpretations and am finding the Easy To Read Version, I believe made under the right-wing Church of Christ to, none the less carry almost the same information as the Catholic liberation theology inspired Christian Community Bible (with very interesting commentary). I chose the Easy to Read version because I am very sympathetic to its stated goal to give those who are not proficient readers the chance to engage with Scripture, it having been started as an attempt to give a written text to deaf users of American Sign Language who often find it difficult to read an English text. I don't know the extent to which that original attempt worked as intended, I'd tend to think an edition in ASL would be the way to go with that, of course, it would have to be published as a video, ASL being so tied with physical gesture that is printed with difficulty. I think in some ways it might be an edition more in keeping with what must have been, for most people, an orally transmitted text.
Having started with the Easy To Read text, finding its use of anachronistic pronouns and verb forms annoying, I started using the famous Good News version, which I suspect unskilled readers would find far easier, though they don't distinguish between the verse from the prose in the layout of the text in the online. Considering how much stress especially Bruggemann puts on the "original" poetry of Jeremiah and the later commentary that has been inserted in the book as we have it, I'd prefer them to distinguish that in the layout of what seems to me to be a very readable text. I'm also including one of the Revised Standard texts with another commentary, one that minimizes the use of linguistic anachronisms. I don't have any trouble with the anachronisms, having been brought up on the antiquated English translations of the Vulgate, which brings another whole bunch of issues.
The fights and brawling over most of the modern translations are generally much ado about little in most cases. I have found even the King James translations, there being a number of those, are useful but none of them are as useful on their own as reading several at a time, though it certainly goes a lot slower when you read the same chapter three or more times. I have found having help from commentaries, a number of them, to also be indefensible. Especially when they don't necessarily agree or come with the same agendas.
IT SHOULD STRIKE anyone who has observed the Republican-fascists since the 1990s as oddly hypocritical that they should be trying to revive the 1940s through 50s red-scare accusations that there are Marxists everywhere. It was their guy, Donald Trump who conducted a public homo-erotic wooing of the most extreme Communist regime still standing in the Kim dynasty's North Korea and was an obvious and obsequious asset of the KGB gangster running Russia and its virtually occupied nations, Putin. I still smirk when I remember it was the Archive not finding the mosh-note from Kim to Trump that clued them in on his thuggish theft of public documents. If there is one thing that we should have learned since Nixon and Kissinger opened up relations with still Communist controlled China it is that Republicans are all in on doing business with "Marxists" when it's those kinds of Marxists who rule as dictator-gangsters in other countries. I fully expect that we will find out that he sold them important and dangerous secrets he stole before the end of the Trump disaster is written. As someone pointed out, when the Rosenbergs did it, they got the death penalty.
But there is a different understanding of "Marxism" which Republican-fascists most certainly don't ever intend to do business with because it is focused on the welfare of the underclass and the least among us.
This passage from a 2003 paper by the American Baptist liberation theologian Jorge Pixley has an interesting take on this different kind of "Marxism." I'll preface this by noting, yet again, that Karl Marx, himself, disclaimed membership in the club of Marxists so it is a word that can have various and antithetical meanings.
But perhaps a word on Christian marxism (his use of the lower case for "marxism) is in order. The official Marxism promoted by the Communist parties of Latin America has no intellectual importance. It followed a party line dictated from Moscow, Stalin's view of the necessary five stages of historical development. These parties were not revolutionary, with the one exception of the Salvadoran Communist party that gained its credibility when it led the peasant uprising in 1932 where the leaders, including Farbundo Marti, were murdered. It is estimated that there were 30,000 killed by the army, 30,000 machete-baring peasants killed by the machine guns of the army. The Communists were among them. The likely candidate of the FMLN in the next election is Jorge Shafik Handal of the Communist Party, showing the confidence in which the other parties in this alliance hold the communists. This is most unusual in Latin America.
The Christian reading of Marx's writings is based on Marx's critique of economics, politics and culture depends on a reading of their social effects. In other words, there is a bourgeois economics, an economics at the service of the capitalist class. But there can be and must be a revolutionary economics placed at the service of the proletarian class. The same critique was applied or suggested by Marx in relation to law, literature, and philosophy. All of these critiques, but especially the economic one to which he devoted most of his life, are indispensable today for those who believe in the need for a different society. Marx himself did not apply the same logic to his critique of religion, which seemed to him irredeemably bourgeois. This we take to be a failure on his part, a failure, a costly failure. What is more consistent with Marxist thought, though Marx himself did not develop it, is the sort of critique which the prophets and Jesus applied to religion. The Lord of Israel that Solomon used to get forced labor for building his temple is a false god as the tenth century prophet Ahijah believed. The early Christians were denounced as atheists, and they were atheists in the sense that they did not bow down to the civic Gods of the Roman empire. This is the Marxism which we liberation philosophers and theologians believe in.
So, according to Jorge Pixley, it is a Marxism which includes what Marx definitively rejected. "Marxism" is that divorced from Karl Marx that you can do that. I would point out that what he defines as Marxist is certainly present, in a number of ways, in the Jewish Prophetic literature. Marilynne Robinson has quoted a large number of the commandments of Moses and, with good reason, points out that if followed they would produce conditions that leave what she understands as liberation theology behind in terms of its tender regard and treatment of the underclass, working poor as well as destitute. Certainly both the Law of Moses and the Gospel treat the debtor class with far more justice than secular republican government does. It was the debtor class who the framers of the American Constitution so often disparaged in stating their intentions by drafting the Constitution, who they openly intended to harm (again, read Charles Beard, he documents it) and the hard pressed who tended to be in debt were among the foremost opponents of the adoption of the Constitution in the months it was being put forward for adoption.
Being someone who has the deepest respect for many of the varied liberation theologies around today, I think its biggest problem is that in those who have a deep and impressive history with academic philosophy and theology (the paper is called Creativity and Struggle: Process Philosophy and Liberation Theology) is that the ideas threaten to become more important than actual life does. It is disheartening to see the extent to which academic writing about what should be a vital and real force to deliver justice seems to be devolving into academic abstraction and, inevitably, impotence. Academic process and procedures seems to me to inevitably tame the prophetic pursuit for justice and render it everything from misguided to totally counterproductive. I would note that unlike the Stalinist Communist Parties of most of Latin America and most of those Communists in the United States, liberation theology has always had its primary stake in the actual welfare of the least among us. That is one of the greatest differences between secular "Marxists" and Christians who believe in the Gospel, The Law and the Prophets who also make some use of Marx's critique. A lot of other allegedly religious philosophers and theologians, you certainly couldn't honestly say that about, they have no time for the least among us.
I think it would be more politically savvy to leave behind the talk of "Marxism" as well as that second most abused word in political-economic babble and scribbleage, "socialism." Both words and the various political ideologies that used them have distorted the terms out of any practical usefulness, they are as discredited and that abuse of both have earned the words many negative connotations. The idiot Republican-fascists flinging them around today only know those connotations and, removed from any denotative meaning, they can mean whatever they want them to. For anything positive, the words are now useless. I think their continued use is counter-productive even in liberation theology, among the most positive uses of them I'm familiar with.
Certainly the Republican and now Republican-fascist alliance with Marxists, Communists, and Stalinists like Putin who practice Stalin's kind of Marxism more profitably by not using the scary words for it, foregoing pretenses of "socialism" as the inherent gangsterism his politics shares with all anti-egalitarian-democratic regimes do, should show that the Republican-fascists, more than even the Democratic Socialist handful among elected Democrats, are all-in with "Marxism" when they can make money and gain power and advantage through it. American capitalists sold us out to the Chinese Communists who use their own population as slave labor. If Republican-fascists do manage to gain permanent power, I can foresee them opening up trade with North Korea as Putin has, I've read that Putin's Russian mafia using North Korean slave labor are some of the Kim gang's most lucrative sources of capital. Trump would certainly do whatever Putin told him to, if he had won the last election and didn't face a Democratically controlled Congress, he'd probably have done that by now. And the Republican-fascists at all levels would go along with it, just as they did Nixon's sucking up to the "Marxists" of China, all they had to do was give up pretenses of "socialism" which is one of the first things most Communist regimes have done, Lenin and Trotsky did it almost immediately as they suppressed all workers organizing to pursue their own good.
