Saturday, October 28, 2023

Errata

I NOTICED that I'd inverted the first two names of Michael Sean Winters in what I posted yesterday when I re-read it at home last night, but I don't have internet at home, anymore.   I'd tell my old acquaintance Sean Michaels it was his fault but he's long gone.   I should start calling him Michael Winters when I write about him.  

Other flaws in my writing are generally incomplete edits to change sentence structure, others because spell-check doesn't have much of a vocabulary.  

Other than that I am shameless about my writing, I don't even feel ashamed of being shameless about it.

Friday, October 27, 2023

My More Measured Response - It's Long

I HAVE SAID in the past that I like Michael Sean Winters and respect his thinking so I wanted to take some time to respond to his October 27th article.  I don't have time to go through every part of it so I'll go to what I think is the heart of his argument which he starts by saying:

At Politico Magazine, Evan Mandery penned an interesting profile of Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The organization is devoted to the promotion of civil libertarianism. Catholics cannot embrace libertarianism of any kind but we can, perhaps, extend good wishes to the civil libertarians in this moment of time.

Of course many will be surprised to find out that according to Catholic doctrine libertarianism is problematic, to say the least.  My objection to it is not at all based on Catholic doctrine but is due to my conviction that equality is an absolute requirement, a just and legitimate foundation of any legitimate government.  I think in practical terms equality is an nonnegotiable foundation of any legitimate government.  Equality under the law, equality under rules and practices, equality for the absolutes of material and spiritual right to live a decent, safe, secure life.  Libertarianism puts any number of "liberties" over that and has no problem with the use of liberties allowed to crush PEOPLE, their rights, their lives, putting those liberties over any morality that supports equality, democracy and a decent normal life for those either targeted by libertarians or those who benefit from their ideology, primarily those who are privileged, the wealthy, the white, the male, the straight, the glib and telegenic.  

I HAD BETTER SPECIFY THAT THAT EQUALITY IS  EQUALITY FOR PEOPLE, NOT FOR ABSTRACTIONS, NOT FOR IDEAS, NOT FOR WORDS.  I will never entertain the idea that rights, including a right to equality inheres to anything but natural living beings.   People are natural beings to whom rights can inhere, abstractions, ideas and words are not natural beings. It is quite possible to discern that those to not only be inferior to other ideas, while many ideas are good, many are innocuous and many absolutely true, others can be everything from suspected of to being known to be to be absolutely known to be dangerous to the rights of People and animals and other living beings.  Those ideas can often be suppressed with not only no danger but with the results that dangers are prevented.  No one in the world would have been harmed if Trumps lunatic advocacy of using horse wormer  to treat Covid-19 had been absolutely suppressed.  Many may have lived if that had happened, no one would have died because it was.

He continues:

The question remains: Are Lukianoff's principles right? The answer remains "no" and the reasons are in the profile. Civil libertarianism is a good thing, until it becomes an ideology, an absolute. In Lukianoff's hands, it fits the definition of heresy attributed to Lord Acton: a truth run amok.

How is it good? Free speech is a necessary lifeblood of democracy.


I can think of any number of "lifebloods" of democracy that come before this inspecific, abstracted even disembodied notion of "free speech."  One of those is certainly relevant to the claim, the freedom to tell the truth, which is the actual lifeblood of democracy.  There is a right to tell the truth, which is a good, there is no right to lie, lies being everything from innocuously wrong to fatally wrong and perhaps most often told for creating harm.  I can also note that many things like eating, drinking, breathing, shelter, safety, are more necessary to democracy than any word or idea.  Yet none of those are guaranteed by "civil liberties" or the United States Constitution, for that matter.

Without the truth being the crucial aspect of "free speech" free speech becomes the opposite of a lifeblood of democracy, it becomes a sure and fatal poison to democracy.  That is true of the only form of democracy with complete legitimacy, egalitarian democracy.  The vote of those who have been successfully lied to is certainly not any kind of a guarantee to that, those who voted for Trump, those who voted in dictators and despots who have then ended any elections and immediately abridged the rights of those who oppose them, most of all the right of anyone to tell truths that they want to suppress.  Those who toe the party line of the worst dictators are entirely free to speak or write or publish that, true or false makes no difference.  Such are the uses of "free speech" when the libertarian definition of that bears its full crop of fruit.  

I do thank Michael Sean Winters for so tidily putting it, though, "Civil libertarianism is a good thing, until it becomes an ideology, an absolute,"  which is a useful point of departure.  More useful than anything I've ever heard from any "civil libertarian."  

I have yet to read or hear libertarianism which is not an ideology, an absolute, including civil libertarianism.  The "civil liberties" industry, the ACLU, various free lance "civil liberties" lawyers - such as Ephraim London who,  pro-bono,  went after Mary McCarthy when she told the inconvenient truth about that icon of civil libertarian "free speech" Lillian Hellman, that she was a flagrant liar and fabulist.   That London's client spent decades idolizing Stalin and the Soviet Union as they not only abolished truth telling and even quite innocuous speech and artistic expression but murdered countless truth tellers and writers and artists doesn't seem to have much bothered the civil liberties lawyer.  Considering that and the fact she was filthy rich, unlike McCarthy, you'd have thought he'd have charged her. That is typical of "civil liberties" lawyers, as I've recently pointed out.  They seldom if ever intend to be the ones who pay the cost of their clients privilege to target other People.  They are generally like the named men in Winter's articles,  affluent, straight, white men who have white collar professions, mostly the product of elite educations supported by others fitting those descriptions and whatever dupes - such as me, who stupidly and dutifully sent my annual donation to the ACLU once was - who fall for their PR.

I have come to truly despise those who make "civil liberties" their professional identity as either a lawyer or a member of the scribbling class or media babbeler.  I have never looked far into the actual life or professional activities and associations of one which doesn't mark them as an accomplished hypocrite.  Almost always members of the privileged class who are seldom going to be targeted for destruction by their clients or those on whose behalf they write amicus briefs.

I'll list those in the article:

Evan Mandery- Harvard College, Law School
Greg Lukianoff - American University, Stanford Law Scholl
Jonathan Haidt - Pennsylvania University, Yale
Nicholas Christakis - Pennsylvania University, Harvard, Harvard Medical
Ron DeSantis - Yale, Harvard Law
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr - Harvard University 

Certainly I'm not the only one noticing a pattern, here.  The one out, according to Winters would be DeSantis, only I'd note that his policy as governor and would be president oddly ends up somewhere not that far from where the reality of what the "civil liberties" industry gets us, in the end.  If lies and false witness, the promotion of racism and bigotry were not allowed to flourish on the airwaves, on the cabloids, on hate-talk radio and the internet, Ron DeSantis would probably have a legal career such as the on Alina Habba did before Trump hired her.   It is certainly the same as that which so many in the "civil liberties" industry represent in court, as I mentioned the ACLU proudly announcing their amicus brief in favor of Trump practicing witness intimidation, intimidation of prosecutors and trial judges.   The Nazis, the white supremacists, etc.  Who are politically ascendant in no small part to their "free press" advocacy.

Anyone who calls themselves a liberal should think fondly on the memory of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.. who did so much to shape our understanding of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech.

I've gone into detail at how bizarre it is for any traditional American style liberal to hold Holmes jr. in that regard because he was a bitter, cynical opponent of much of what liberalism must champion for it to be liberalism.  He believed in survival of the fittest and it showed in his work, like his father before him he .  He was a convinced Darwinist, what most polite college credentialed People would call a "social-Darwinist" though, unlike them, Holmes had read Darwin and his followers and knew that "social Darwinism" is, in fact, identical to the ideological scientific theory of natural selection.  He was bitterly cynical about democracy and only late in his life modified his thinking in reaction to the Great Depression and the rise of European fascism and Nazism.  Unfortunately it came after he wrote the decision legalizing forced eugenics sterilization which he privately expressed deepest satisfaction in having done. And he never really much did atone for that.  I'll point out, again, that the Nazis, among others, were deeply impressed with and influenced by the eugenics that Holmes decision legalized in the United States.  

Since it figures so much in the article and the whiny advocacy of "civil liberties" by these guys, I think the reason that college campuses have become the locus of so much reaction against professor or student expressions of racism, bigotry, sexism, etc. is that those who go there often worked very hard to get there, those who are not affluent, straight, white men often having to work far harder than those who are.  They pay or borrow a lot of money to go there to get an education or, actually, the credentials that colleges and universities hold a monopoly on giving them, often their best hopes for something like a leg up, only knowing that those with privilege already have more than two legs up.*  

Landing at a college or university with all of that being the case, they then find themselves and those like them and those who they know they're in the same boat with being targeted in ways that make their lives on campus and during their college years far harder, their living conditions sometimes more frightening or upsetting than what they knew before.  The university or college they are paying and going into debt for not helping them is certainly more than just a "civil liberties" thing.  It is a danger to their future.  I wonder if they had more legal and political clout, you can read that "money," if they could not get what happened to them there made into a breach of contract.  Maybe they could find a lawyer who would take the case, though they'd certainly find the elite "civil liberties" lawyers filing a brief as to why they should be coerced into dropping out of college.   Untold martyrs to "civil liberties."  Unlike the lawyers and scribblers who support that result, in the end.

I think what these white men and their allies have a beef with is that Black People, other People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+ People are in the hallowed halls of the conferring of credentials with all the rights and privileges those afford being offered to them and the experience of those People, their lives lead to them knowing that the old slogans of libertarian ideology, the truncated language of "civil liberties" the facile interpretation of "free speech" aren't sufficient in the fight for equality and real democracy.  I hear some of them and I distinctly sense that what they don't like is that those people are going to the same places they went.  

The experience of the Trump era in which so many so often bemoaned the basis of Trumpian fascism, lies, the devaluation of the truth, the attack on the concept of truth, itself, forces the question of why, since we all know lies are such a danger to democracy, why lies are allowed to flourish under the slogans "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press".  That's hardly news, the role of lies in the rise of dictators throughout history has long been noted.  I doubt anyone could ever find the first expression of the experienced and noted danger of lies in world literature.  It is certainly there in the Torah, it is expressed in Scriptures and other writings from around the world from the earliest times.  

You have to be as pretend stupid as a civil liberties lawyer or a judge or "justice" to pretend to not know that lies are dangerous, in no small way dangerous to People and to equality and, yes, to democracy.**

That was hardly a novel concept to those who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, yet they stupidly neglected to make that clear in what they wrote and what got adopted.  Of course, since most of them were slave holders they can hardly have been suspected of much minding if false witness was spread about those they never intended to allow free-speech or free-press or any of the other things they wrote into the Constitution.  They certainly didn't intend the slaves to have "the right to bear arms."  They certainly didn't allow them any of the other civil liberties they wrote into the Bill of Rights.  That's a truth you'll get told to shut up if you say it.  

We have reached the end of that, it's clear the fascists among us, the white supremacists, the billionaire and millionaire weaponizers of "civil liberties" and the judges and "justices" who have no liking for equal or democracy - the attacks on Voting rights and Bush v Gore prove they are a majority on the Renquist and Roberts Courts - this can't go on in such lofty, Ivy-League law school inspecificity.  

We will either drastically change the current notions of "civil liberities," "free-speech" "free press" or we will lose them.  At the very least the frequently heard "civil liberties" lawyer slogan that someone "has a right to lie" has to be definitively suppressed.

Winters completed the thought left off above with this statement.

Keeping government out of the regulation of ideas is as essential to the functioning of a democracy as counting the ballots fairly.

Which is nonsense because while a fair vote count is always an essential act in a democracy there are numerous ideas that could be absolutely suppressed or abolished with absolutely no harm to the functioning of a democracy, anti-democratic ideas, for a start.  

The idea that the promotion of Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism, fascism, the indigenous American form of that white supremacy are not, actually, a danger to democracy instead of essential to it is sheer lunacy.  Winters gets close to that with this observation:

One of the deeper problems with the civil libertarianism Lukianoff promotes is its abstractness. It may be well suited to producing resilient young people, capable of arguing in ways that develop their ideas. But how do the moral claims of the common good manifest themselves in all this? For example, most liberals applauded the ACLU when it defended the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois. But what if they wanted to march in Stuttgart, Germany? Does the state there have the right to restrict speech given the uniquely horrific history of antisemitism in that country? .

Well, Native Americans, Black People, Women, LGBTQ+ People here have been murdered and oppressed, enslaved, etc. here.  Women are murdered every day because they are Women, Trans Women of Color have one of the highest murder rates in the United States.  Black People and Native Americans are murdered on account of their race, often with complete impunity, in our past, AND TODAY.  White supremacists, Neo-Nazis, the incumbent Speaker of the House make no secret of their intentions to continue and relive worse times for all of use, my fellow LGBTQ+ People and our fellow People in all of those other targeted groups that the "civil libertarians" want to always wear a target so their clients can always have a chance to do it again.  It is the open intention of the Republican-fascist party and a reality in many of the states in the country right now.   I have absolutely no intention of targeting the lives of them in the same way that they have every intention of targeting me.  Certainly my advocacy for equality of People, though not necessarily their words and ideas, is different from someone who wants to kill me.  If civil libertarians can't tell the difference they're too stupid take seriously on any of this.

None of this is a surprise to those who have been successfully targeted by one or more of those, the history of Black People in the United States is untellable without noting their lives living under white supremacy, the same for Native Americans.  As we have found in the long backlash against the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, etc. that form of fascism, targeting those without white skin is not in some past but is a reality today.  That People of Color on campus might see things differently from those white guys named in Winter's article is hardly to be wondered at, they know a reality that white people might know abstractly though it's clear that the "civil libertarians" don't really mind it, THAT THEY HAVE MORE CARE FOR THE "RIGHTS" OF WORDS THAN PEOPLE IS WHAT WOULD BE EXPECTED FROM THOSE SO PRIVILEGED.

The question such bleating civil libertarians always as is "But who is to decide?" the answer to that is certainly not those who benefit from the inequality of privilege, "civil liberties" has come to be a guarantee of every step forward being followed by some Supreme Court or lower court sending those targeted by such "speech" back to where they started from, if not somewhere worse.  Like the Taney Court in Dred Scott, like Joseph Story in Prigg v Pennsylvania, the tender regards for "rights" of those with privilege generally comes with a devastating loss of rights of the most basic kind.  The answer to that is we have to make those decisions and choices because to not make them is to allow the worst the liberty to make the worst happen, which is what they want to do.  

*  I hate to break it to anyone but getting a degree from even an elite university is not a sign of being educated, if you want an education that's a life-long job and, sorry, it's up to you to get it for yourself.  Given the vile characters that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc. are turning out and into our media and government, I've developed a very strong skepticism for those who have a degree from those preservers and bestowers of privilege, a law degree from their law schools more so than a BA or BS from their undergraduate sides.   "Civil liberties" lawyers from them as much or even more so as much as those who tried to overturn the 2020 election for Trump.  The stink from them should never get off of those institutions.  They should be leveled by taxing their obscene endowments, the money collected given to educational institutions and scholarship programs that lift those targeted by the product of the elite diploma mills.

** In the first version of this, before I cooled down a bit, I noted that Judge Judy is more honest about knowing bullshit for bullshit than any "civil liberties" lawyer or so many judges and many "justices" are.   Their professional poise of stupidly not seeing plain truth and even fact is disgusting.  I have an absolute conviction that stuff started as a way for them letting off those they wanted to let off, the privileged, the rich, those they knew or were related to.  From there that practice was made precedent and it is ubiquitous in the fact that the law is often not only an ass, it is an asshole.

Schools Still Shut And Locked Down Here, Just Smell The Civil Liberty!

I WAS GOING to answer the "civil liberties" bullshit I got but right now I'm too angry to.  Here's something one of the networks posted about the mass murderer in my state:

The suspect appears to have "interacted with conspiratorial content" online, information provided to law enforcement shows. Topics he engaged with included but were not limited to: concerns about a financial crisis/stock market, LGBTQ+ issues, gun rights and commentary about Democratic public officials, including President Joe Biden.

It took that as much as it did the guns, neither of which is going to be addressed thanks to, you know, "civil liberties." 

The civil liberties industry hacks can all fuck off as they preen in their safe, white-collar milieu.  From The ACLU to those who start other schemes to get money from suckers and those who idiotically believe them to be a force for good.   Even someone who knows that they're morally indefensible, in a very real sense. 

I'll probably be writing a response to the piece at the last link but I'm too angry right now.

 

the evidence shows what it shows and is neither ambiguous nor is it going to go away

NOTE:  I got yet another in the endless challenge over what I recently pointed out about Darwin's direct connection to eugenics and the eugenics of Nazism.  As I mentioned it wasn't me who was first to make that connection, it was a series of Darwinists starting with the inventor of eugenics, his cousin Francis Galton,  citing Darwin's glowing approval of Galton's first works in eugenics.  The link is to one of the first things I ever did here, an answer to a challenge to prove that eugenics was inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.   That evidence, given both from Galton's explicit statement that On the Origin of Species was his inspiration to invent eugenics has to stand as absolute proof.  That he quoted Darwin's enthusiastic endorsement of his earliest eugenics publications and Darwin cited it as reliable science, himself, makes anyone denying that link a liar at worst, too ignorant to be spouting the common received lies exonerating Darwin, not really any better than a liar.  Many such liars have flourished in academia and the popular understanding of science since the end of WWII.

The evidence tying natural selection to Nazi eugenics and their genocides only begins with the German scientist Ernst Haeckel whose proto-Nazi (I endorse Stephen J. Gould's statement of that word) race theories explicitly developed out of the same theory Galton used to invent eugenics, natural selection.   Darwin's glowing citation and praise of their work in supporting his theory of natural selection, the very early eugenic articles and book of Galton and Haeckel's proto-Nazi speculations in The History of Creation including his endorsement of murder in Darwin's second major work on natural selection, The Descent of Man has been there for anyone wanting to deny those links right in that book and in many of the rest of the literature from Darwin and his most intimate inner circle.

As you can see from the links, I've proved that connection beyond any rational doubt.  I can hardly be said to have been the first to make those links, Charles Darwin did that all by himself.

 As I pointed out recently a later figure of unimpeachable  authority to do the same, repeatedly, over decades was Charles Darwin's son Leonard Darwin, only one of the, I believe, four eugenicist Darwin sons, I'm not sure how many of his daughters or grandchildren or other Darwin's did, though I know his grandson Charles Galton Darwin was still doing it after WWII and in the period when eugenics went underground.  

I will point out that there is no one in the post WWII period who had or has the credibility of those figures I cited and quoted in the links above, including Leonard Darwin, including Charles Darwin, himself to tie him with eugenics and there is no one who can refute what the Nazis said, themselves and the Nazis of today.   I'd give more links but you can look for The Daily Stormer and William Luther Pierce in my archives.  I do warn you to make sure your anti-virus filters are at full power before you go doing the kind of research I did back when I researched that.   What you see there will disgust you unless you are morally depraved.   I've written scores of posts on these subjects and I never did so without citing primary documentation except when dealing with Wilhelm Schallmeyer because his German was so difficult to read.  

But I'm not going to go over what I've already done again so I'm going to do something I haven't done in years, repost an answer I gave those questions in 2015:

Answer To A Challenge

I could go on and on, answering the non-evidenced and ignorant retorts, refusing to look at the evidence and documentation that ties Darwin's natural selection to eugenics in both English speaking countries and Germany and the ties of the active eugenics programs of the United States directly to the Nazi eugenic-mass murders, every single time I have looked into this the number of direct, primary documents in my notes grows larger.  Virtually every scientific eugenicist I've ever read directly ties their eugenics to their reading of The Origin of Species and, even more so, The Descent of Man.  I would, of course, include the proto-Nazi Ernst Haeckel* to that list, the man named by Darwin and his closest associates such as Thomas Huxley and his son Francis Darwin as the foremost champion of Charles Darwin's work in Germany or, in fact, on the continent of Europe.

But this isn't about what the evidence shows and what it shows is neither ambiguous nor is it going to go away.  Eventually it is going to have to be faced by those who deny it now.   That is the thing about primary evidence, in the words of the principles, it doesn't go away, it can't be overcome except through lying and the lies are always vulnerable to people reading that primary documentation.

This article by the expert on these issues, Edwin Black, makes an irrefutable case that the Nazis learned a lot of what they did from Americans, including such ideas as murdering "undesirables" in gas chambers,

Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population." Point No. 8 was euthanasia.

The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a "lethal chamber" or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, "Applied Eugenics," which argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated." "Applied Eugenics" also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."

Applied Eugenics was unambiguous as to where the idea of eugenics came from,

The science of eugenics is the natural result of the spread and acceptance of organic evolution, following the publication of Darwin's work on The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in 1859. It took a generation for his ideas to win the day; but then they revolutionized the intellectual life of the civilized world. Man came to realize that the course of nature is regular; that the observed sequences of events can be described in formulas which are called natural laws; he learned that he could achieve great results in plant and animal breeding by working in harmony with these laws. Then the question logically arose, "Is not man himself subject to these same laws?[Pg 148] Can he not use his knowledge of them to improve his own species, as he has been more or less consciously improving the plants and animals that were of most value to him, for many centuries?"

The evolutionist* answered both these questions affirmatively. However great may be the superiority of his mind, man is first of all an animal, subject to the natural laws that govern other animals. He can learn to comply with these laws; he can, therefore, take an active share in furthering the process of evolution toward a higher life.

... It is really on Darwin's work that the modern science of eugenics is based, and it owes its beginning to Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton.

Or that the mechanism of selection was, in fact, death.

The lethal factor is the one which Darwin himself most emphasized. Obviously a race will be steadily improved, if the worst stock in it is cut off before it has a chance to reproduce, and if the best stock survives to perpetuate its kind. "This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called natural selection, or the survival of the fittest," Darwin wrote; and he went on to show that the principal checks on increase were overcrowding, the difficulty of obtaining food, destruction by enemies, and the lethal effects of climate. These causes may be conveniently divided as in the above diagram, into sustentative and non-sustentative. The sustentative factor has acquired particular prominence in the human species, since Malthus wrote his essay on population—that essay which both Darwin and Wallace confess was the starting point of their discovery of natural selection.


Paul Popenoe:  Applied Eugenics

So, there, the link from Darwin to the proposal to improve the human species through mass gassing of those considered undesirable, all in the person of Paul Popenoe, one of the foremost and respected of the American eugenicists, who, by the way, was quoted by Baur, Lenz and Fischer in the book Hitler was reading while he was spewing Mein Kampf.   The Americans (not to mention British eugenicists) were openly talking about the possible benefits of Darwinian murder of undesirables in gas chambers more than two decades before the Germans built the first of those.  The first of which, by the way, was not used to murder Jews, Roma, Pols and others on the basis of ethnicity but it was at Hadamar Hospital, constructed to murder people who were disabled, many of them Germans, the transports to it were on special buses, not trains, but the victims were just as murdered before their bodies were cremated at the crematorium constructed as part of that mass murder program.  It was certainly a small scale model of what the Nazis would later construct, in which they gassed and burned millions of Jews, Poles, Roma, members of religious minorities, political opponents, etc.

As I said, every time I look at the words of eugenicists, whenever they talk about what inspired their eugenic thinking, they inevitably mention the writings of Charles Darwin.   Another originator of an idea the Nazis made their own mentioned by Black in the article was the eminent American scientist David Starr Jordan.

Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.

In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.

And Jordan, as well, was explicit about the role that Charles Darwin played in all of his thinking as a biologist.

The law of descent, with change through “natural selection,” brings into organic connection a host of facts hitherto isolated.  Each one considered by itself would be without meaning or explanation.  The essential argument in favor of Darwinism is that it brings all biological facts into unison from whatever field of investigation these facts may be derived.  However much evolutionists have at times seemed to drift away from Darwin's conclusions, it is always the most accurate research and the sanest thought which comes nearest the opinions set forth in the Origin of Species.  The body of facts has grown enormously year by year, but the conclusions we must accept are substantially those laid down by Darwin himself.

David Starr Jordan:  Footnotes to Evolution

There is no possibility in mistaking the source of Jordan's inspiration whenever he talked as a biologist and a eugenicist.

Considering all of this pre-Nazi eugenics by founding presidents of universities like Jordan, whose work informed the millionaires and great philanthropic institutions who were up to their necks in promoting eugenics in pre-Nazi Germany and who funded the very institutions which provided the scientific justifications and methods to the Nazis, even employing the pioneer in using people in death camps for medical experiments and scientific research,  Eugen Fischer, reminds me of another quote, one from the survivor of the death camps and the Nazi mass murders,  Viktor Frankl

If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him.  When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.

I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz.  The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment – or as the Nazi liked to say, of “Blood and Soil.”  I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.  


Viktor E. Frankl:  The Doctor and the Soul

Which, in turn, reminds me of that foremost of all Darwinists in Germany up to the very year the Nazi party formed, 1919,  Ernst Haeckel

By the Theory of Descent we are for the first time enabled to conceive of the unity of nature in such a manner that a mechanico-causal explanation of even the most intricate organic phenomena, for example, the origin and structure of the organs of sense, is no more difficult (in a general way) than is the mechanical explanation of any physical process; as, for example, earthquakes, the courses of the wind, or the currents of the ocean. We thus arrive at the extremely important conviction that all natural bodies which are known to us are equally animated, that the distinction which has been made between animate and inanimate bodies does not exist. When a stone is thrown into the air, and falls to earth according to definite laws, or when in a solution of salt a crystal is formed, the phenomenon is neither more nor less a mechanical manifestation of life than the growth and flowering of plants, than the propagation of animals or the activity of their senses, than the perception or the formation of thought in man. This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature constitutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin.

Ernst Haeckel:  Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte  vol. 1 (translated by Ray Lankster)


*  [Haeckel's] evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a “just” state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others; the irrational mysticism that had always stood in strange communion with his grave words about objective science—all contributed to the rise of Nazism,

Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny


Thursday, October 26, 2023

 OF COURSE, THE NEWS in my state is the mass shootings in Lewiston, the closing of schools, government facilities, lock downs, etc.  The suspected killer is a weapons instructor with the Army,  one who was sent to a mental unit for a couple of weeks last summer and, apparently released.  Such is the state of mutual protection and domestic tranquility under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, etc. Such is the reliability of psychology, psychiatry and the mental health industry. 

Of course I could go on with what's wrong but almost anyone reading this knows exactly what's wrong and they know that the courts, the goddamned Supreme Court, the Congress, state legislators and governors are not going to fix it, out system is corrupt and corrupted and we live under the gun industry, their actual enforcers, the NRA, things like the Sportsmen's Alliance of Maine (I've called them Sons of SAM for a long time) and various other venues of preventing gun deaths in this benighted country.  

I haven't looked to see what Susan Collins has said, no doubt something like "hope and prayers,"   It's clear after decades of such prayers that God doesn't listen to Republican prayers.  I'll give it to you in the ol' KJV because the gun nuts worship that thing without ever reading it.

From Proverbs:  The Lord is far from the wicked: but he heareth the prayer of the righteous.

or John 9:31, Now we know that God heareth not sinners: but if any man be a worshipper of God, and doeth his will, him he heareth.

Clearly all those Republican-fascist hopes and prayers are, at this point, symptomatic of the state of their foul souls.  

I haven't dared look to see the names of those shot and killed, I know people who live in that area.  

I don't have anything else to say right now except that all of the above can go to hell.   Oh, and the ACLU has declared that Judges trying to keep Trump from inciting violence and intimidation and jury tampering is unconstitutional.   I've been telling you the ACLU is a fascist tool for quite a while now, how much evidence does it take?


Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Eat Dessert First

THE POST I DID the other day challenging the ideological "scientist"  Robert Sapolsky and the LA Times to come up with a materialist-scientistic exposition that ended up supporting equality, democracy or something like human rights?   Apparently I'm not the only one who noticed it's a bit problematic for those and other such experienced, and therefor knowable entities in human life, society and governments. 

I generally listen to Keith Olbermann's podcast on Youtube every chance I can get, downloading things to listen to later.  I used to save it for the last thing I'd listen to  but have been listening to it first.   Even when I don't see eye to eye with him - I'm not a Thurber fan - I enjoy his take on things and the news and think he's actually a pretty good journalistic writer.   He's actually the only person in the world I will listen to sports stories from.

Anyway, he apparently had some trouble with this Sapolsky because he made him one of two recipents as second worst person in the world today.

Those were serious questions.  I think that any such "science" that makes any such democracy obliterating claims should be challenged to answer those very real questions about such enormously important things that their claimed science puts at risk.   I will remind you of something I don't think can be repeated enough.  All Marxist dictatorships claim that the basis of their regimes is scientific,  based in the materialism of Marx which is really no different from the materialism that is the basic ideology of such ideological scientists.  And other of the most criminal anti-democratic regimes have claimed the same basis for their genocidal depravity.   The Nazis certainly did really believe what Rudolph Hess said, "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology."  As I recall Hitler loved to wax on about what was currently the popular understanding of science in his Table Talks,  sounding not that much less stupid than much of what you can hear mainstream biologists saying for a popular audience today.   And I'll also remind you that the most prominent of recent Nazis in America, William Luther Pierce, a credentialed, professional scientist before he went full-time Nazi theorist and propagandist said the same thing in a more up-to-date version.   His true believers are among the most serious terrorists and mass murderers around right now.  If 9-11 hadn't happened one of them, Timothy McVeigh would hold the record for most Americans murdered in a single incident of neo-Nazi terrorism.  He used to peddle Pierce's books which included how-to instructions on inciting genocidal violence.

What these people claim is really dangerous and that really does need to be addressed if egalitarian democracy is to survive anywhere in the future.   And the media that promotes it are as guilty of that undermining as the "scientists" themselves are.

I'd Really Rather Be Reading Denise Levertov - On Her Hundredth Birthday

A COUPLE OF WEEKS ago I was house sitting for a relative, taking care of her pets and plants.  Looking for something to read there was the Library of America volume of poetry and prose writing of Robert Frost.  I haven't read any of Frost's writing for decades, never having liked him or his work much. I'd never read any of his prose.  I was especially interested in the several plays in the book, finding out why I'd never heard of them before.  Modern verse drama is a species of writing I've never found especially good poetry or, especially, drama.  From Christopher Fry to Archibald MacLeish it's bad drama, probably least bad as read and not produced, and forced poesy.  Frost's aren't any better that I can see.

Frost is one of those writers who is known for a superficial reading of some of his most atypical work, the frequently anthologized poems, those which used to be and might still be found in jr. high or high school textbooks,  are nothing like most of it which is characterized by bitterness, a stingy and uncharitable view of people and reality.  He is primarily dispeptic not homey and folky as so many people think.   I remember once being fond of or, rather, amused by the obscure poem, The Witch of Coos and read it to some kids on Halloween once.  There are a few lines in his long poem New Hampshire that capture what's wrong with the only state that mine happens to share a border with.  He uses a "Massacusetts poet's" jab at him in that short list of what's wrong with New Hampshire.  I don't know who she was but I agreed with her when I read that probably about a half a century ago.   I don't know how topical that still is but yet another Sununu is their present governor.  Which is an indication that for a lot of them nothing much has changed and they didn't learn a thing from the first one who sold them the nuke which they've been paying for ever since.  

After a while I thought, I'd rather be reading Denise Levertov,  unfortunately there was none of her writing available that night.  I first became aware of her due to our shared opposition to the war in Vietnam and found out she was one of those lesser promoted poets whose work will probably outlive some of those who were wider known, though probably not as often anthologized. 

Later, looking online to find something of hers to read that I hadn't read I found out that today is the hundredth anniversary of her birth.   This is a recent article about her focusing on her late in life conversion to Christianity and then Catholicism.  I haven't really done enough research or recent reading of her to go into much detail.   I'm hoping to at least correct the second of those.   

Here she is a short time before her death reading six of her poems. 




Monday, October 23, 2023

I Challenge Sapolsky, The LA Times To Come Up With A Materialist-Causationist Defense of Equality, Democracy And The Reality of Personal Rights

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.

Anticipating Whining About My Dissing The Constitution

SEEING A YOUTUBE just now on how Trump could not only be elected president but "serve from prison" if he is convicted of what should be considered treason and insurrection makes me wonder how being convicted of a felony cannot be held to be a disqualification for president when having been convicted, served a full term in prison and released can be a disqualification to vote for or against him as a convicted felon.

I'm sure the "founders" never thought the country and society of the United States would not become so degenerate as to ever have that be a conceivable possibility but the fact that they didn't put those things in the list of disqualifications is among our more dangerous and pressing oversights to correct.  NOT that I think you could get such an amendment through the amendment process, so outdated and impractical as that has become.

But A New Creation, The Complex Meaning Of Freedom - A long and unrefined post

Note the footnote about our "new creation" and how it wasn't, really created new.

I HAVE DECIDED
to continue on with the disrupted series I'd planned on Luke Timothy Johnson's lecture on the Christian conception of freedom.  

You might remember in the first two postings, LTJ discussed Paul's use of common identity markers of female-male, slave-free, Jew-gentile, relativizing them in the lives of those who lived under those markers.  LTJ pointed out  how identity markers of ethnicity, gender and class were both used and subverted by Paul, demoting those to secondary or lower status, pointing out that in Christ those didn't matter to the converted.  

Twice, also, Paul uses the identity marker of ethnicity to make the same point.  In 1st Corinthians 7:19, he states flatly, circumcision is nothing, lack of circumcision is nothing, what counts is keeping the Commandments of God.

Similarly in Galatians 6:15, he declares, quote, "Neither circumcision or lack of circumcision, but a new creation."  

To appreciate just how radical such statements are we can remember that a pious Jewish scholar would include among his morning prayers, quote,"I thank you God that I am a man and not a woman, a Jew and not a gentile, a free man and not a slave."


Note that in Christ differences in gender, status and ethnicity do not disappear but they are made relative by a new and higher form of unity.  Indeed, for Paul such identity markers can serve not to divide humans but to demonstrate how unity in Christ is not a uniformity but a unity in diversity.  And such diverse unity is the ideal in the new creation.

I will break in here to say this reminds me of Abraham Joshua Heschel's conclusion that God favors religious pluralism, something I'm sure Paul would have rejected but something which I think is probably true even as I say that in the broader society no religion that doesn't allow freedom to everyone, including in terms of religious thinking, needs to be treated on an equal basis to that religion that does recognize that freedom.*

It's clear from Paul's discussion of spiritual gifts within the one body of Christ.  It is the gift of the spirit that empowers diverse roles and functions within the community and Paul makes clear that the point of persons being diversely gifted is the enrichment of the common life of the community.  The gifts are to be used to build up the community rather than the self.  As he says in Ephesians 4:12, The Spirit bestows gifts, quote, "to equip the saints for the work of service to build up the Body of Christ."

Just as for Paul cultural practices concerning diet are not of fundamental importance they are what philosophers called "adiraphia" [spelling?] things that don't matter so are these more obvious identity markers.  Paul tells the faithful in Rome who would make judgements on the food habits of other Christians, quote, "The Kingdom of God is not eating and drinking but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit."  And he tells the Corinthians, "Food does not establish us with God, we are not less if we do not eat and we are no greater if we do eat."  Thus, although Paul claims the right to be able to eat meat offered to idols, if his behavior becomes a stumbling block to a brother or sister he declares, quote, "I will never eat flesh again in order that I not offend my brother or sister."  I'll return to this passage later.  But for Paul what really counts are not societal placements or societal customs but moral dispositions and actions.  Paul goes on to employ all three identity markers of antiquity in his long discussion of marriage.

I have come to think that Paul's extreme change from a zealous Jewish persecutor of the followers of Jesus to being among the most active converter to the Jesus movement as described in his letters and in Acts and the source of much of the most profound intellectual foundation of Christianity was due to a profoundly powerful near death experience when he was stricken on the road to Damascus and encountered the Risen Jesus.  That's something that is reported in careful collections of Peoples' accounts of their own reported near death experiences, now,.  They often report experiences that differ in their details that they come away from convinced that things that were central to their own identities, as central as the most basic cultural practices of devout Judaism, seemed to them to be beside the point or even of no importance at all.  AND THOSE EXPERIENCES HAVE THE POWER TO TRANSFORM THEIR LIVES RADICALLY.   I think that is central in coming to a coherent understanding of Paul in the context of our only source material about him and his theological writing in the New Testament.  

Of course academics writing in the post-"enlightenment" period couldn't base an acceptable academic paper or lecture on seriously discussing that possibility, at least that I've ever come across, so if my conjecture is right it would not become widely accepted in academia or in more popular culture.  In academia even considering the Risen Jesus as possibly real would make much if not virtually all of it dismissive.  Which, considering some of the "historical Jesus" production is pretty outlandish and unsupportable on the available evidence, is tellingly remarkable.  But if I'm right that that's what Paul's experience was then I don't think you're able to come up with a coherent understanding of Paul, his ideas and what they really mean.  Without that assumption I doubt you can come to anything like a close understanding of him or his writing or, as Luke Timothy Johnson seems to understand it, the writings of his close circle.*  

In terms of Paul's uneasiness with new practices that would upset the ambient cultural contexts in which he and his followers and those who could be influenced by him were living out their lives, things that would upset believers in their faith in what he understands to be the meaning of Jesus and his teachings or cause them problems that would damage or destroy the communities of believers, I think you have to read him with a complete understanding. His letters were always written with those purposes.  You have to follow the long arcs of arguments he makes especially noticing where his warnings against feelings and expressions of self-righteousness in opposing the ideas and even practices of those who don't see eye-to-eye. What are sometimes taken as his pithy statements are merely parts of those arguments. I think his mistake in expecting an imminent world-wide coming of the overt Kingdom of God, a return of Jesus, plays a big part in his advice to retain many of the customs, habits, practices of the world while being transformed by the experience of conversion to belief and, so, changing the way in which those practices are performed.  His advice to a slave holder to stop treating his slave as a slave would, effectively, end slavery.  

His advice to those who those who found the sexual practices of unbelievers abhorrent not to ignore their own questionable practices is more subtle and more difficult to discern in his argument.  If there's one thing I've found out, there is no topic quite like sex about which to make a reasoned point with and being entirely misunderstood.  Christianity has been distracted by Paul's use of sex in arguments in a major way for close to two thousand years.  

We know from his own writing that far from restricting Women to a diminished role in the ministry of Christianity that has been taken as a rigid gender identity marker, he, himself, recommended Women as leaders of Churches, his fellow missionaries and messengers.  It's notable that in the centuries after Paul his own writing was used to leave Women to a lesser role, denying them of authority or independence from oppressive male authority and it still is.  Though a deeper, closer, broader focus on his writings, noticing things that you will entirely miss if you take a "proof texting" strategy of finding what you want to find instead of what he actually said, you will find he frequently meant the opposite.  One of the things which I hold is that you cannot understand Paul or any part of the New Testament without subjecting what was said to the test of measuring it against the Commandments of Jesus, to do to others what you would have them do to you as you are, with the diverse identities that you have, that don't hurt them or degrade them or seduce them into destructive acts or a context in which they will suffer violence, displacement or destitution.  I haven't read any comparison of the knowable cultural differences that Paul may have taken into account when he wrote on such things to different communities, it would be good to know if he tailored his words to take things like that into account.

I think it should always be considered that one thing Paul would have been deeply and importantly aware of would be that the fledgling churches and new Christians he wrote his letters to would always be in danger of destruction THROUGH EXACTLY THE KIND OF THING HE DID TO FOLLOWERS OF JESUS BEFORE HIS CONVERSION.  They'd have been in mortal danger from those who were like him before his conversion and probably even more at risk from the ambient, ubiquitous pagan cultures in which those new Churches and individual believers lived.   He'd certainly have been concerned for their physical well-being and their own missionary efforts to be carried out safely and effectively while  not being drawn away from the practices that were central to their identities as followers of Jesus.  

I think there is no greater example of that risk today than the "christian nationalists" especially those who live in places where Republican-fascism, white supremacy is common and in control of things.  That's why easily most of the "Christianity" that is spouted on the floor of Congress, in most statehouses, out of the most overt public shouting out of "Christianity" is done by people whose actions and statements are thoroughly Mammonist and entirely out of keeping with the words of Jesus and the un-proof-texted-entirety of Paul and the rest of the New Testament.  

I think Paul might have had an inkling of such minds and lives, though coming well before Christianity became a mere identity marker based on a corrupt cultural milieu, I doubt even he could have foreseen how bad it could get.   He certainly had the warning of Hebrew Scripture in which the early and frequent falling away from the vision of Moses, the heart of The Law constitutes the large majority of the texts within it.  The difficulty in keeping the Law seems to have been one of the major obsessions with those who wrote scripture and an often unstated knowledge that to not keep to the heart of The Law was to abandon what created The Children of Israel as an identifiable People.  It was certainly the understanding of the Prophetic literature out of which Jesus taught.  It would have certainly been something that Jews living in diaspora communities would have constantly been aware of, something that is common to those who live as a minority among large populations sometimes at odds with what identified them as belonging to their own identity group.  I think Paul's conservatism in regard to social convention and custom has to be read in light of that reality.  He would have constantly been trying to discern what such Christians would need to do to live among sometimes dangerous "others" while not letting that extinguish what was central to the teachings of Jesus.   Walter Brueggemann and Terry Eagleton have both commented on how extremely impractical and radically different the teachings of Jesus were, how profound a change from the ambient culture of then, now and any time between them those would have made someone who tried to follow them faithfully.  Even those trying to live within the narrow margins of Paul's "conservative" orthodox behavior were at risk of being persecuted and destroyed.   The current "christian nationalism" set in Republican-fascist Mammonism is a reenactment in which they are so "christian" that they have totally abandoned The Gospel and the rest of the New Testament for some lesser comic book version of it.  You can be certain that one of the things they would abolish was Christianity which actually tried to follow the teachings of Jesus and who wanted American law and policy to do so as well.  The history of Christianity is full of the vigorous and murderous suppression of efforts to do so, even within churches, the Catholic Church was certainly guilty of that in the past, the last two papacies practiced that as well, the "traditional Catholic" billionaire AstroTurf effort against Pope Francis is just such an effort.

I will also point out that that is what I have come to believe is the basis for the hostility to the Jewish People from Greek antiquity, through the middle ages till today, that the still radical egalitarianism of The Law was already unwelcome by those who wanted to live lives of self-centered selfishness even before something that was radically more so in the teachings of Jesus.  It was certainly what made Nazism and before then the newly conventionalized antisemitism of a Wilhelm Marr target Judaism.  What, ironically in the context of subsequent history, made Marr and the central faction of Nazism, oppose Christianity.  What led Marr to condemn Christianity as the "New Judaism" that he considered to be the vehicle by which "Judaism" "infects" traditional German culture which was romantically considered a warrior ruled golden age but which, like all warrior rule would have been more a gang dominated horror.  No doubt being heavily influenced by Nietzsche in that.  Nietzsche was an insane (perhaps syphilitic) but brilliant and educated man, Marr and the Nazis were more vulgar and Trumpian in their depravity.*  Of course, being a brilliant promoter of such stuff is no less dangerous than being a vulgarian bigot is.  The Ivy Leaguers of modern American Republican-fascism, those already indicted and those who have yet to be, prove that.  It should never be forgotten that Nazism had its scientific, university educated wing just as the Prussian military establishment did, the kind who would explain Nazism as "applied biology."  The history of elite American antisemitism and racism, within elite institutions needs more focus because I think that has always had a far stronger effect in law and policy than has ever been admitted.  

The young LGBTQ+ writer and thinker Matthew Vines is, I'd guess,  half my age or less but he has come to some of the same conclusions I did much later in life.  Central to any coherent understanding of Scripture is the advice of Jesus to judge teachings and ideas by the results that come of them.  "By their fruits you will know them," something which I started out this year by saying was a crucial saying in my judgement of things.   Matthew Vines started out as an evangelical and, no doubt, was far more of a reader of Scripture than I spent most of my life being even as we share the same experience of being gay men in different settings, him growing up in Kansas, me in New England decades earlier.  He grew up in a world in which LGBTQ+ rights were a far more developed and widely spread context.  When I was his age "gay liberation" was hampered by the idiocy of mid-20th century play-lefty bullshit.  While there is still plenty of that around, there seems to me to be more real-life informed thinking as well.  Even in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he says his profound experience of admitting to himself that he was gay*** happened, would hardly have been as overtly and casually accepting of being LGBTQ+ when I was his age.  An enormous difference in a cultural setting in a relatively short time in any one location can come about very rapidly in terms of even one human life.  When you throw in the differences in even a small distance in location, the differences can be quite profound.  I would bet that you wouldn't have to travel very far outside of the neighborhood of Harvard in Cambridge Massachusetts or some areas of New York City or San Francisco, even neighborhoods within the city limits to find profound differences right now.  The differences in how you can openly live your lives even if you appear to blend in with the ambient appearances, people who don't stand out as different can be decisive in how safe or comfortable you can live your life.  Certainly there is nothing in Jesus that is consistent with using violence or intimidation to enforce conformity, though that has been done in the name of Jesus from pretty early in the movement of is followers, especially when some of them started getting worldly power for themselves.

*  Luke Timothy Johnson has said that he holds a far wider range of the letters traditionally attributed to Paul to be more a product of Paul's inner circle.  He has used the model of speech writers for the Presidents, in which things like the State of the Union message is a product of a number of other hands but that the president delivers them as "his" State of the Union message.  He thinks that accounts for some of the ambiguously attributed denials of his authorship that are so current in contemporary scholarship.  

David Bentley Hart has said in the "Scientific Postscript" p. 469-470, of his translation of the New Testament that in him translating the Greek texts into modern English, he has become convinced that two of those letters widely held to be spurious, Ephesians and Colossians were not so legitimately denied to be "authentic" Pauline texts.  He notes that in especially Colossians the denial of Pauline attribution was due to the Protestant denial that "works" were redemptive as compared to "faith."  He makes a good case that that is an example of late Classical distortion through, who else,  but Augustine was enormously magnified by Luther and the other early Protestants when a reading of the original Greek of the Scriptures doesn't support that.  "Paul was not a Lutheran or Calvinist or even an Augustinian.  And, so, when Paul of the authentic letters is freed from the Paul of theological myth, it turns out that Colossians not only says nothing different on these matters at all, but does not even sound any distinctly different intonations."  

It was in dealing with an entirely different question of provenance of texts that led me into being quite skeptical of the alleged science of textual analysis that is practiced nowadays and, especially, the cutting of corners in making alleged scientific claims on the basis of a small body of examples from which to make such proclamations in academic publications.  DBH does note that the author of Ephesians seems to not share Paul's belief that the return of Christ was imminent, though it's quite possible for the same author to change their mind about even things so central to their belief.  I've certainly changed some of my ideas in the seventeen years I've been writing stuff and posting it online, often in light of new information about old things and watching how some of my previous beliefs have born fruit since 2006.   I originally intended never to bring up religion in trying to find out how the American left had gone so seriously off as to be permanently disempowered by its own refusal to change its ideas.  See where looking hard at things brought me in those years.  

** I also hold that there was a crucial difference in "antisemtisms," certainly there is one in regard to those who held Jewish identity was a biological matter as the Nazis did.  The Jewish Catholic Archbishop of Paris, Jean Lustiger, attributed the origin of antismeitism to Voltaire (with some real and legitimate justification), though the idea was also true of anti-conversos elites in 16th century Spain - especially those bishops and others who resented the rise to power of those of Jewish heritage within the Catholic hierarchy.  I think in the most legitimate use of the term "antisemitism" it is in its worst phase a phenomenon of modernism.  I think something like a claim of depravity as a biological attribute also was present in what became influential with his popularization, especially in Germany, in Tacitus.  But I think the central catastrophe of that in the 20th century Shoah was, on the other hand, far more a direct result of the adoption of natural selection within science and, so, secular culture.  I doubt that Voltaire, Tacitus or, especially, a fringe group of Spanish bishops who never gained much traction or influence in the wider Catholic hierarchy could have had such power, even combined as those never were.   That is the crucial aspect of the murders of six million Jews during the Nazi period, which has never been addressed or even much admitted though the overt part that played in the Holocaust, is as plain as can be in the primary documentation left by those who committed those murders.  I don't think the current denial of it having happened is at all unrelated to that denial of reality.   I don't think natural selection can ever be made a safe ideology and its retention in science and human culture is a guarantee of that history repeating itself as long as such an idea is mixed with human notions of biological identity, themselves deeply counterfactual in any but the most tangential matters, is retained and influential in actions.   Paul, the self-identified Jew as a Christian certainly saw Christianity as surpassing such notions, though he would also know that even conversion to Christianity would not guarantee that such evil assignment and use of identity markers was no guarantee against them or evil perpetrated through them.  I think that's part of what was missed by the misuse of Paul.  Paul might note identity markers or even that some of them had some kind of basis but he certainly held that those were no excuse for committing evil.  Not in thought, certainly not in deed.  He never advocated violence and oppression of even those he held were engaged in immorality.  Jesus certainly didn't.  He even advised against resisting evil, which, of course, you have to be a saint to do, especially when it's evil done to those you love.  The Republican-fascists are no more followers of Jesus than those who colluded with the Nazis were.

NOTE:  I wrote this more than two weeks ago and am just posting it today after recovering it.  Even I am surprised how long it got as I worked on it.  In the meantime someone who read some of the posts I did on Darwinism has whined and complained about my many posts laying out how Nazism and the Shoah were a product of the belief in natural selection, mixed with German romantic (post-Christian, "enlightenment") notions of linguistics and nationality.  I should organize and edit those many posts because they lay out the evidence pretty extensively, though hardly exhaustively.  Among the key findings proving that link were the statements of Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin's son and last-surviving child who, in April, 1939 months before the start of WWII and the direct implementation of Nazi genocides credited his father's invention of natural selection as being the foundation of German eugenics and even at that late date, after Kristallnacht, after two decades of Nazis targeting Jews, Slavs and others for suppression, oppression and elimination, credited the Nazis as changing German law and policy for what he termed was the better.  

As I pointed out many years ago, in 1939, with a quite ample demonstration of just what Nazi eugenics was and where it intended to go, Leonard Darwin, perhaps the last person alive who could have made such an attribution from such intimate knowledge of Charles Darwin tied his father and his science to Nazi "racial hygene" (eugenics) which was overtly eliminative well before then.  That wasn't an outlandish idea, Darwin's claim to fame, natural selection,  was universally acknowledged to be the entire reason that eugenics, including German eugenics existed.  I have yet to find a single authoritative or less-than-authoritative voice from before WWII who denied that.  Certainly no one with the status and credibility of Leonard Darwin did.  No one in the post-war period had the credibility and authority for separating Darwinism from Nazism which Leonard Darwin had in connecting them so late in time.  He'd been doing so in terms of English language eugenics for decades in the most explicit terms and he was among those who encouraged the development AND IMPLEMENTATION of eugenics in Germany.  No one at the time he did that who could be held to have had his level of authority to do so to contradict him.  I have yet to find anyone who did, either.  No one else had known Charles Darwin as intimately as he had, if they had tried to contradict him he would not only have his own authority to make that link, he would have the writings of German scientists and social thinkers and a line of English language scientists extending back to the publication of On The Origin of species which he could have cited, as well.  HE COULD HAVE CITED WHAT HIS FATHER WROTE IN THE DESCENT OF MAN, DOING THAT.  I have given only some of those on this blog, including such major figures in English language science as Karl Pearson, Francis Galton, Charles Davenport, and many figures considered minor now but who were prominent and often among the most eminent scientists of their time.  Even the American biologist and a complete Darwinist, Vernon Kellogg to his horror found that pre-Nazi German military officers regarded their role in World War I in overtly Darwinist terms.  Many of them likely those who joined and formed the Nazi party.  I never thought that would become a major focus of this when I started doing it but, especially after finding out about the existence of "Darwinian economics" which, among other things, encouraged a higher death count during the Covid-pandemic, I think it's inescapable because it is both the intellectual and sub-intellectual foundation of current day eugenics which dare not speak its name.  And it's just as overtly homicidal as it was starting with Thomas Huxley in 1865 gleefully anticipating the genocide of American Black People after emancipation due to what he believed would be the loss of an economic incentive with the ending of slavery for the "superior" white people to keep them alive.  He did that well before Nazism focused natural selection on a different list of those to kill.   I wonder if Huxley ever commented on the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow era American apartheid and de facto slavery.  But I don't have the time or resources to look to see if he left a record of that.  

*** I have said before that I don't recall a time when I didn't realize I had a physical attraction to adult males, though never when I was even a young adult, those of my own age.  I remember when I realized that attraction was a sexual attraction in my early adolesence but it was always there.  I don't remember ever feeling ashamed of it, though I never remember a time when I didn't realize it was among those of my feelings that it would be dangerous to express in the context of where I lived.  Today that last thing is among the things that have changed, somewhat.  My LGBTQ+ nieces and nephews don't have those issues but the ambient culture has given them other dangers to face, the encouragement of promiscuity probably among the most dangerous of those.  Sexual freedom doesn't change biological fact, promiscuity is inherently dangerous and, therefore, morally perilous.   Though my understanding of those moral perils are resonant with what Paul said, I have come to believe, as L.T. Johnson has said, the traditional often officially theological understanding of that as "Christian morality" is less than securely Pauline and, in light of our own experiences of the consequences of actions far from morally secure.  
 

  Seeing the clearly unequal, unjust and extremely dangerous liberties that even judges who have put Trump under restrictions for his dangerous speech mete out - as someone said, no obscure Black Person who has faced a court and acted even once like Trump does every day has ever escaped immediate imprisonment, even before trial - I think the deeply imbedded inequalities that are embedded into judicial practices need to be studied, listed and campaigned against.  I think some of that comes from the structure of the legal profession in which the "best" lawyers are those who serve those with enormous wealth, hired to find ways for the rich and merely affluent to get a million and one privileges for them, everything from the most petty of considerations up to and including getting lots of people killed without those doing them paying any price.  That is something that is as deeply embedded into the culture of lawyering, from there into the judging profession and, especially, the racket that being a "justice" so often is.  That is deeply embedded into the rules and practices of courts and Supreme Courts, embedded into laws written by and passed by those who even if not completely enculturated lawyers are familiar with the rackets and schemes of the law.

That Attorney General Merrick Garland has proven to everyone what an impotent coward "the law" is in the face of Donald Trump and the Republican-fascist attempts to overturn the landslide election in one of the most decisive votes the United States has ever taken doesn't surprise me now.  In my reading about the history of the Supreme Court and how corrupt that most august American institution has always been, with few periods of ethical behavior, approximately two short but often most unwise ones, I've come to think that those inbred corruptions - under our system having no possibility of correction by The People's vote - are some of the biggest obstacles for and dangers to egalitarian democracy.  In the disgusting tale of Joseph Story, originally called "an abolitionist justice" issuing what was rightly considered the most outrageously pro-slavery decision in Prigg v Pennsylvania, even rightly seen as a proto-Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court based on his smug and self-satisfied scholarship of the long history of property rights under English common law, I came to my first real appreciation of how deeply entrenched that kind of casual, accepted, moral atrocity is in that secular, hierarchical priesthood that the Supreme Court is.  And from them on down to the lowest courts.  I understand he also extended the practice of higher courts reducing awards in lawsuits, such as protects many an outrageous properited maimer and killer today.  

Why the United States should ever have thought it was required to take on the entire apparatus of the injustice of English law when it produced and in turned was produced by the very thing the "founders" had broken away from. the British monarchy,  is probably due to the large number of well trained, aristocratic, rich lawyers among them.  They certainly knew how such ancient legal lore had served their own financial interest, the interest of their families and friends - just as "justice" Coney-Barrett and the others can be counted on to rule in a way that serves her own families' wealth, today.  The "founders" also would have found an entirely new legal system founded on the propositions contained in the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, equality and with the endowment of rights by God rather inconvenient in that they'd have to junk so much of what they'd been taught and learned to become lawyers.  It would certainly have thrown up in the air much of what "settled law" already protected the wealth of the wealthy and given the plebs some notion that they had rights that would be very costly to the wealthy who the "founders" were.  Perhaps now that the Roberts Court, their lying under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee has shown what a lie "settled law" is, it is high time to unsettle much of that "settled law."  Of course, first on my list to unsettle is exactly the one that Coney-Barrett testified was never to change, Marbury v Madison.  As I've pointed out, if they can overturn the supreme authority, from which all of the government, including the Supreme Court derives its legitimacy, The People's Vote, then overturning them is a little thing in comparison.  

That the American Constitution and the legal aparatus that grew up under it is so cumbersome and incapable of protecting even the formal, far from real democracy that we've got now is proof that it has to be drastically changed or we are doomed to a future of autocracy, the kind of autocracy that Native Americans, Black People, Women, LGBTQ+ People, generally Poor People have lived under under the U.S. Constitution and "the rule of law" such inequality and non-democracy this court is, once again, reviving as the Court did in the wake of the Civil War Amendments.   Sometimes the praise for "the rule of law" "Equal Justice Under Law" (ha) needs to be looked at for the kinds of results it gets, WHO PAYS FOR IT AND WHO BENEFITS FROM IT AT THE COST OF THOSE WITHOUT WEALTH to measure those against the pretenses of those pious fictions.  Anyone who thinks, after the Supreme Court, Jeb Bush Florida, John Ellis-Fox Lies putsch of 2000, the Electoral College imposition of Trump in 2016 and his attempted putsch of 2020 - we now know getting the Supreme Court involved was intrinsic to the insurrectionists planning and there is no intelligent bet as to how they'd have ruled - anyone who thinks we are safe under "the law" as it is in reality is delusional.  Though I suspect saying that on MSNBC will result in it being the last time you are asked to come on - it would probably never get you onto NPR or in the NYT.  I doubt even the "radical lawyers" of podcasts and Youtube channels would be entirely uncomfortable with such ideas being discussed.  If the law were made truly egalitarian and democratic, they'd have to do a hell of a lot of reading and learning new legal lore.  It would render a huge amount of "Constitutional Scholarship" moot.