AT ITS BEST THE UNITED STATES is an aspiring democracy that is highly endangered by fascism, oligarchy and billionaire gangster attacks, domestic and foreign.
The turn of the century after decades of backlash against the high points of egalitarian democracy c. 1964-5 was ushered in by a clearly corrupt Supreme Court ruling in which five Republican appointed "justices" handed the presidency to the son of an oligarchic Republican dynasty on the basis of a clearly badly run if not rigged election in Florida in which the brother of the "winner of the election" was governor and the ballots that threw the results into question were printed on the most questionable of bases. The embedded anti-democratic feature of the Electoral College had, once again, imposed a loser of an election as president. I won't go into the extremely dubious role that Dick Cheney played as virtual regent - he more or less chose himself to be Vice President and, with the collusion and aid of the "free press" they incompetently got us into what was, then, the greatest attack on the United States by a foreign power, the largely Saudi based and financed and supported terrorists of 9-11 and from that whipped up the ignorance and bigotry of the American People, using the "free press" to get us involved in one of the worst military quests to attack an entirely different foreign dictator involving us in not one but two of the worst wars we have ever been enmeshed in, the consequences of which have hardly played out to whatever even more bitter end those will, inevitably be. I have to wonder how much the enhanced power of Iran in the consequent debacle of the Bush-Cheney invasion of IRAQ led to and whatever role that may have played in the Hamas terrorism earlier in this month. Not that America's "free press" is ever going to go there.
Since the Bush v Gore putsch of 2000 we have had the Electoral College give us the loser of the 2016 election, another Republican, an overt Republican-fascist and the Republican-fascist attempt by Trump and Congressional Republicans to overturn the plain majority vote AND ELECTORAL COLLEGE ELECTION of Joe Biden in 2020.
And despite the obvious and overt treason against American democracy, against the will of the voters and in so many other felonies and crimes, Donald Trump is the clear choice of not only one of the two major parties in the United States, he is clearly the choice of a large part of our media as they have ceaselessly attacked the most effective democrat to have been president since Lyndon Johnson and far wiser and less corrupted than Johnson. A president who - USING THE STUPIDLY AND ARBITRARILY CHOSEN DATE FOR THE U. S. TO PULL OUT OF BUSH II'S WAR IN AFGHANISTAN, the longest war in U.S. history and among the most futile - got the United States out of an unwinnable war, one which would probably go on ad infinitum. Joe Biden is the best President we have had in my lifetime and perhaps in the history of the country, though the few who are in the running for that title are a matter of opinion.
Clearly, American aspirations to democracy are in deep trouble. It is under these ambient and dangerous conditions for democracy that the LA Times chooses to promote the democracy obliterating claims of a Stanford neuro-biologist which holds that there is no such a thing as free will.
I won't go at depth into why I believe that all such "neurobiology," "cognitive science" presented in such confident generality is not at all science but ideological promotion masquerading as science. I have not read his published science so I do not know what technology he bases his claims in. The last time I did that in depth it was when the pretty images of fMRI were attached to each and every such claim. In looking into that, ESPECIALLY IN CLAIMS DEBUNKING "FREE WILL" I was fascinated to find out that every single action in the making of fMRIs was based on a choice of what part of the potentially vast range of "data" was to be focused on and, indeed, to focus the mechanism on "collecting" and how that was then processed.
If "free will, free choice" is bogus and a product of material causation based in what chemicals and physical structures were present in the brains of the "neurobiolgists" et al who were "doing the science" then there is a vanishingly tiny chance that they were actually sampling and processing what was going to give them a picture of reality. My guess is that they knew the results that they either wanted or expected their professional colleagues would want or expect and they tailored their method to that end. I would like to know how they could possibly shield their methodology from such choices without that being a product of their free choice to go against whatever deterministic program their brains would have produced. Indeed, if such determinism is real, HOW COULD ANY SCIENCE OF ANY KIND BE SHIELDED AGAINST THE DETERMINISTIC ELEMENTS THAT WOULD INEVITABLY GOVERN THEIR CHOICES, GIVING ANYTHING LIKE AN "OBJECTIVE" VIEW OF NATURE.
But that's not what I'm choosing to ask here, it is to ask how anyone who claims to favor democracy, popular election of governments, majority rule, the rule of law, THE RIGHTS OF OFTEN BELEAGUERED MINORITIES, etc. can not see that such materialistic ideological science doesn't entirely sandbag the efforts to secure democracy, popular election of governments, majority rule WITH PROTECTION FOR OFTEN BELEAGUERED MINORITIES, etc. How could any journalists who, no doubt, are champions of freedom of speech, freedom to publish, etc. NOT REALIZE THAT IN PROMOTING THIS THEY ARE SUPPORTING AN IDEOLOGY THAT CUTS THE LEGS OUT FROM UNDER DEMOCRACY.
Perhaps they see what they choose to see?
I recently mentioned the question of the great American author Marilynne Robinson,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
What would a secular paraphrase of that sentence look like?
In what nonreligious terms is human equality self evident?
I think it's not only entirely in order but contemporaneously exigent to demand an answer from Robert Sapolsky AND THE LA TIMES to give us a materialist-casuationist (if you want, I'd say "atheist-materialist") exposition that ends up with democracy, self-government, PROTECTION OF MINORITIES, even something so basic to that as equality and the other things Marilynne Robinson included in her questions.
My contention is that materialism will always fail to come up with any intellectual basis for believing any or that even as they will inevitably attack and debunk any basis for believing that those are right, that their existence is real.
I would bet you anything if Sapolsky, the scribblers and editors and publishers of the LA Times had to live with a government which is a direct consequence of their attacks on the bases of egalitarian democracy or even such a democracy as we have had, they would be among the loudest of those whining about it. I would bet if Sapolsky found himself and his projects unfunded by the mindless choice of those with an ability to hand out money, he would whine and complain most stridently as the Republican-fascists do when it's their ox that gets gored as a result of the positions they promoted.
I thank RMJ for putting me on to this.
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