WATCHING PAUL GOSAR

in the sham Biden impeachment smearings leads me to ask if he isn't an example of dementia caused by mercury poisoning, a result of a dentist who refused to follow safety procedures in their practice.   That's actually more charitable than my original observation that he looks exactly like Bruno Ganz acting the final days of Hitler's drug and likely syphilis induced decay.

John Harbison - San Antonio

 

Katherine Weintraub, Saxophone
Eunmi Ko, Piano

San Antonio, Sonata for alto saxophone and piano

I. The traveler has a free afternoon in San Antonio. It is August, 105 degrees. Expecting to start with the cool promenade along the river, he is instead lured by a sound. He follows it up a long stairway and finds himself in a little fiesta: a hot square, many people, no shade, a few people dancing to a fast beat, the band playing and singing in Spanish.

II. The first dancers finish, exhausted. Then, as if on cue, the whole crowd gets into a line of people of all ages, nine to ninety. They all know the steps, which change with the phrases.

III. The music changes again becoming slower. The people continue on in couples. No one seems to feel the heat and the band hardly stops. Everyone, the traveler included, sinks into it. Towards the end, a young girl asks the traveler to dance. He declines.

But a year later, when the tourist puts down the memory of the sounds, something about a saxophone, and a few rhythms in his distorted memory, he accepts.

—John Harbison

Yes, We Must Burn Sade And Snuff Porn And, Especially, Lies - Hate Mail

And you can throw the ACLU on to that pyre, too.

THERE IS SOMETHING OBVIOUSLY wrong with a conception of "freedom" which can contain the concept that some should be free to keep others in slavery and to commit genocide.  Yet that conception of freedom is exactly what the fabled founders of the United States Constitution not only held with but rigidly fixed into the Constitution which we still live under.  The slavery part of that is indisputable, nor is the genocide part of it, both which were not only the actual history but the official as well as somewhat unofficial policy of the United States.  Overt chattel slavery was still a part of it until just after the Civil War and genocide even after that is charcteristic of America under the Bill of Rights.  The Supreme Court, repeatedly, over that period, not only retained the slavery embedded into the Constitution, it intensified and, in the Dred Scott decision (which the Court has never overturned) it made it the supreme law of the land, making every state a de facto slave state.   That wasn't entirely or even effectively expunged from the foundational law of the United States.  The Courts and many states continued de facto slavery in the Jim Crow period until the 1960s.  What wasn't done by law and court ruling was done through white supremacist terrorism and violence enforced discrimination.  As I mentioned yesterday there were many slavery promoting and protecting features of the Constitution which were not, in fact, abolished in the vitally important amendments drafted in the wake of the Civil War.  Such things as mentioned yesterday.  And those Civil War Amendments have been twisted and distorted by the corrupt Supreme Court through thier usurped, extra-Constitutional powers to, by a simple majority of fewer than ten "justices" nullify laws duly adopted by the representatives of The People and the president  and to lie about the obvious meaning of the Constitution when it suits them.  The Supreme Court, not voted into office by the voters, the most remote part of the government from The People, stupidly given tenure for life by laws that should have been changed centuries ago, is, in fact, the most corrupt part of the government.  Until the Congress and President nullify the extra-Constitutional powers that the "justices" have granted themselves and placed the "justices" under an effective code of ethical conduct - for the first time in that Court's existence - it will be the dead hand of the slave power, white supremacy and oligarchy exerting itself as it did in the post Civil War period and, in the Rehnquist and courts, now, in their nullification of just the latest attempts to shake off the power of white supremacy, copying the late 19th century, Jim Crow Courts.  We are at high risk from our indigenous form of fascism, under which Black People and other People of Color and, yes, WOMEN have lived for most of the period in which the slave owners and financiers have had their Constitution in effect.  Not to mention workers in general.

But the misconception of "freedom" that I'm talking about above is older and more fundamentally depraved than the U.S. Constitution.   

To put it plainly, there is something obviously wrong with a conception of freedom that permits People to do what's wrong.*  I mentioned the Supreme Court ruling that said that the suppression of the trade in snuff porn was a terrible violation of that most idolized section of the Constitution, the idolized First Amendment.   That was a ruling joined in by every member on the court at that time except, oddly enough, one of the worst and most corrupt members of the court, Alito.  It was supported by the idolized Ruth Bader Ginsburg and all but one of the "original intent" "textualist" liars.   I'm always suspicious when they agree on something.   Now, I would bet you my last dollar that if we could revive the First Congress which drafted the First Amendment and every last member of every legislature that adopted the thing and asked them if contemporary snuff porn in which small animals are tortured and killed for the sexual pleasure of sadists and other degenerates was what they intended to protect, they would think you were insane to ask the question.  I think the American right went from their opposition to pornography to understanding the profit they got from allowing it in that the "freedom of speech" that line of civil libertarianism adopted by the Court was an opening for all kinds of peddling of lies profitable for the oligarchs and their fellow fascists.   On the other hand, I don't know if the legendary RGB had read the stupid and famous essay by Simone de Beauvoir, Must We Burn Sade, and if that figured into her vote on that issue of inverse morality, to allow snuff porn, to allow American sadists to have pay-per-view access to monkeys and other small animals being tortured to death for profit, but I wonder if it or its equivalent in literary essays did.  

I've written extensively about Sade and the assertion that his immoral and evil literature and the assertion that it comprises an act of libertarian virtue.  Of
Freedom, if you will.  A "freedom" which infamously includes the enslavement of Women and Children and men of the underclass so that libertines can practice their "liberties" upon them, their torture and rape and destruction, acts which the "enlightenment" conception of libertarian "freedom" valued so much that he was sprung from incarceration and put into the governing assembly during that other iconographic height of "enlightenment" "freedom," the reign of terror.  That the aristocratic de Sade  survived it while so many other aristocrats of his class - and myriads of common people - were tortured and viciously murdered in the name of "liberty, equality and fraternity" is certainly a sign of what such an "enlightened" conception of "freedom" leads to.   And if one thing's clear, it isn't equality that it leads to.  It's frequently not anything good.  As can be seen in the United States Supreme Court rulings which have made sadism into a "right" and the degenerate legal culture which has made that permission into some inverted conception of a virtue, Sade isn't in any danger of being burned today.  I mentioned the freedoms of presses and speech which gave rise to the commercial printing of and dissemination of penny postcard snuff porn of pictures of Black People lynched, of notices being posted that a lynching was going to happen at a specified time and date - something which no Supreme Court to my knowledge ever suppressed.  Not to mention the literature of white supremacy, the even more effective and corrupting cinematic promotion of white supremacy in its most violent manifestations at least since the time of Birth of a Nation which I've written about here before.  All of that was a promotion of violence and oppression of Black People, none of it was ever legally suppressed under the First Amendment or other laws upheld by the Supreme Court which I've been able to find.  It is what is allowed in under the gaping hole that that most lauded of all parts of the Constitution, that and the actual violence and oppression which inevitably comes with it.   To assert that we must allow that promotion is to assert that the next time those who want that have a right to do it under the First Amendment.   Forgive me if I suspect the "civil libertarians" of the legal profession and, um, "journalism" will be too busy worrying about some liberal, somewhere being mean to a Nazi to bother in fighting against it.  They are deadly parasites on the real left of equality and democracy.  

I can hear the scrupulous adherents to that libertarian conception of "liberty" now,  "But if we suppress lies, why, why,  we may be suppressed from telling the truth,"   or some such line as if the two things had to be considered as equivalent under the law.  That judges pretend that while they selectively make judgements on lies and truth (especially when the wealth of the wealthy needs to be protected) is one of the most amoral games of our legal system.

There is something not only wrong but brain-dead stupid with a conception of freedom that asserts to treat others as equals and well and to tell the truth and to live a normal, decent, not depraved life, "we must" permit others to treat others worse than shit.  Not only that but to allow them to to lie, to harm, to steal, to destroy.  Yet that is the very conception of freedom as is elevated by our depraved current Constitutional, legal, political and cultural presentations of it.  Not only is there no reason to conceive of the freedom to do what is good and right that way, it's clear, now, after that libertarian conception of freedom for some at the expense of others has been given a long test of time and political supremacy, it destroys the right to live decently.  Hearing a long time civil-rights lawyer I respect, a Woman of Color repeat the mantra of mendacity "there is a right to lie" made that reality click for me.  So deeply is that depraved conception of "freedom" embedded into all of those where it really does endanger us all.

I wonder if that Christianity was unfashionable among the 18th century "enlightened" founders of the United States that they clearly rejected the idea contained in Scripture that it's the truth that will set you free, otherwise they'd have written the First Amendment to distinguish between the truth and the lies that will enslave.   Perhaps they realized the truth that slavery was wrong would diminish their personal fortunes unacceptably.  

Again, there is something deeply wrong with the conception of freedom when it is divorced from the moral absolutes of equality and truth and the moral commandments to treat others as you would want to be treated.  To not harm or exploit or use or enslave other People and to treat other living beings with as much kindness as possible.  Such a misconception of freedom was certainly not what any of those who made the several attempts at a revolution in the late 18th century intended.  Certainly not the revolutionaries in France who immediately fell into murdering each other, as they were murdering so many others in their attempt to gain and consolidate their own power.  The modern secular-lefty adoration of the French Revolution and the similar and worse Russian and Chinese Revolutions leading to some of the most brutal dictatorships in human history are a continuation of the most extreme insanity in that regard.  It is part of the "Must We Must Not Burn Sade" pseudo-left.   

Monarchy, what the "enlightenment" revolutions were supposedly against, was an expression of freedom in a hierarchy of ever decreasing freedom from the monarch and the thugs who kept one in power, down to those who were enslaved ending in the destitute who weren't even kept as slaves who might, at least, be valued as property.  Modern dictatorship as Trump wants to install here is merely a less decorous form of that gangster governance.  And the "enlightenment" for all its claims, never delivered on that.  In part getting caught up in a conception of freedom divorced from egalitarian morality has played a big part in that.  I might agree that the American Revolution may be considered to be the best they did.

But the American Revolution, the elite part of it, the part which didn't do much fighting (largely done by the underclass, recently enslaved, indentured, propertyless) but which controlled politics and the judiciary and wrote the Constitution, clearly weren't far different in kind.  The embedding of slavery, of genocide and imperialism, into the Constitution,  the subjugation of Women, etc. in the Constitution and law, by them, proves that.  It's no great wonder that the January 6th insurrectionists used the flags and symbols of the American Revolution AS WELL AS THE SLAVE POWER CONFEDERACY in their attack on a Democratic Presidents election and installation.  Those symbols and that lore - the Black Revolutionary common soldiers being bleached out of the "history" they learned from TV and movies and novels and perhaps even "history books" - are useful to modern American fascism, the continuation of our long lasting and greatly empowered indigenous form of it, white supremacy because of the real nature of America's history.  

The real and only worthwhile story of American history is the long and continually thwarted struggle against the slave-power features of the American Constitution and the dead hand of inequality.  The latest lesson in that history is the actual nature of the supposed freedoms and liberties contained in the Bill of Rights as those really are in real life.  Rights for mass murderers and the criminally insane to obtain automatic military rifles with which they mow down young children and anyone else, rights for the promotion of that in the mass media and others in the pay of the corporations that make those military rifles and sell them to the mass murderers.  Rights for those who promote sadism and torture and murder to encourage those in the population who want to do that for profit.  Rights for those who want to violently attack and kill People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, etc.   Our history is the struggle against the Constitution and that libertarian distortion of freedom in all its form.   In the 21st century it is the struggle against the depraved conception of "freedom of the press" which permits lies to triumph over the truth, racism and sexism over equality, the "freedom" which created and installed Donald Trump in the presidency, the American judicial and legal and Constitutional system stupidly and impotently leaving it as an open question whether or not he can, not only do the damage he did before, but assume the insanely structured and empowered American presidency to destroy even the self-doomed liberal democracy that was wrested out of the original Constitution.  That something like that very likely would have quickly happened if Madison had not been forced to promise a Bill of Rights in the First Congress and if the improvised and dangerous one that was adopted was in place, far earlier is no excuse to ignore that Trumpism is a product of that very Bill of Rights as interpreted by 20th century courts in the age of mass media.  Hamilton certainly wanted that and he was far from the only one of the "founders" who wanted to thwart anything like egalitarian democracy.  

The "free speech" rulings of the Court, with the support of the ACLU and other "civil liberties" frauds are certainly a part of that, in that they have protected the big money corruption of our politics and the lies in the media on which the big money depends.   I think we must scrap the ACLU and its conception of "civil liberties" if we're going to have any chance of getting and keeping egalitarian democracy.  

We need to take a hard, critical look at all of this and much more if we're going to survive, not only as any kind of democracy but as a species.**  I think anything like egalitarian democracy requires that.   In thinking about this I thought of the often made atheist critique of Jesus that he didn't condemn slavery, which I would hold is not true.  You can't keep someone in slavery if you do to others what you would have done to you.  Jesus often spoke in parables, some of which are more confusing than others.  I think he told his listeners rather explicitly what he was doing in those which he compared the Kingdom of Heaven to the sewing of seeds and putting yeast in bread dough.  He was planting seeds and leavening dough with his elevation of the commandments of equality, the Golden Rule, his commands to love.  Those have certainly not yet taken though, perhaps, they are still embedded in the culture that was forming.  They had, in fact, been part of the Law of Moses, already.  They are certainly negated and destroyed by a conception of morality and rights divorced from equality and the practice of love, concepts that slave holders and genocidalists and sharp businessmen have no use for, especially on an equal basis.  

I don't remember, perhaps it was the moral brute Churchill,  who noted that Americans will always do the right thing but only when they have no other choice.  I think the conditions we live under right now leave us with no other choice, though getting past the mythical status of the Constitution and our legal and political traditions will have to be overcome just as the slave provisions in those had to be overcome to come to even the point of progress we are at now.  Slavery and lynch law endured with the insouciant acceptance of and tacit understanding of the majority of those with power for a long, long time.  The same powers which profited from those are trying to bring them back, the Republican-fascist party, the party of Trump and the backlash against the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, the other laws which were adopted in the 1960s and 70s and a few after, are still powerful and using the Constitution and the mythical conception of our history and traditions to reimpose them.  The Roberts Court, the Republican-fascists in Congress, the American mass media are all part of that.  I don't think the American left really needs to help them by holding that it would be a terrible affront to "ethics" to suppress snuff porn and S&M, B&D promotion and the promotion of racism and fascism.   That anyone could hold that Nazism or Stalinism should have another chance at power, that our indigenous form of that as embodied in the KKK should have a chance to redo it here AS A VALUE OF THE AMERICAN LEFT HAS NO CREDIBILITY, AT ALL..  

We certainly have to get past the ACLU conception of freedom, they're some of the worst enablers of America's indigenous form of fascism which has taken hold of the country, a large number of states, as the slave states were always under their control from the start.   We need to scrap them for a real civil liberties entity, not like that thing.  I don't trust them at all.  One which does not hold that the KKK and Nazis are to always have a chance to do it again as they preen in their First Amendmenty purity.   I've long thought of Alan Dershowitz as an advocate of torture who plays a civil libertarian on TV since about the turn of the century.  I wasn't at all surprised when he turned out as he has.  Now I understand that even better than I did twenty years ago.  Such a conception of freedom will always trend that way.

* Since I'm sure some will take advantage of the difficulty of scientifically or mathematically determining what is wrong, I'd base a political and legal definition of that on the basis of every person's right to bodily autonomy, the right to live in a viable environment and the moral obligation to treat others as they would want to be treated.  Taking into account that mental illness can twist those desires in a small number of People BUT that such Peoples' desires are not useful for making a rule of general governance instead of turning that insanity into a rule under which all are supposed to live, as the stupid "enlightenment" comes down to when that question is pressed.  That's why an educated idiot like de Beauvior could ask if we must burn de Sade instead of living under a regime of "freedom" in which his psychotic fantasies re held up as a beacon of liberty.  I will point out that she and her boy friend Sartre, were supporters of Maoism as Mao and his inner circle was competing with Hitler and Stalin for whose mountain of corpses would be highest.  Such was her erudition on the topic of "liberty" and "equality."   Don't get me started on Pollitt's nostaliga for the Maoist "Progressive Labor Party."  They are in every way the exact moral equivalent of the German American Bund and the French collaboration.  

** The "liberty" of the oil, coal and other extraction industries to peddle lies through American TV and radio about global warming should stand as the absolute proof that such a conception of "civil liberties" is prepared to get us all killed in the name of "liberty."   That is a more subtle lesson of experience than them turning America into a shooting gallery through the same promotion of lies in the mass media but it's more deadly in the end.  Civil libertarianism and Constitutionalism is a demand that we don't even learn from even the hardest lessons of experience.

People Get The Vapors When You Make A Realistic Criticism of the Sacred Constitution - A Few Friggin' Obvious Defects In The United States Constitution

HOW ABOUT the constantly repeated statement that Trump could run for president while he's in prison after being convicted of felonies?   

How about the fact that the claims of his sleazy Saur lawyer to the appeals court that the president can commit the most serious felonies in office and unless convicted in that fictitious means of removing presidents, the never has happened and never will happen conviction by 2/3rds of the Senate, he can get away with it entirely?   The "impeachment power" of Congress is one of the worst jokes contained in it, it is a total fiction.   There is no actual means of removing the most depraved and criminal of presidents, we, in fact, live in an electoral monarchy. 

That either of those are glaring defects in any constitution and that those could even be argued as being Constitutional under the US Constitution, in any court shows just how deficient the document is.  Let me go on.

That the Electoral College is still in existence,  that the electoral vote of a state is based even partly on the anti-democratic number of Senators.*    I suspect that will never be abolished because of  the absurdly unrealistic means of amending the damned thing.   The near impossibility of doing that to get rid of some of its worst and most anti-democratic features certainly counts as another of its greatest defects. 

I'd like to go into a lot more, such as the slave-power implanted ban on the federal government taxing exports - something which has been an economic disadvantage which every American has had to pay for, from the beginning, which shows that the friggin' Constitution was, as Wendell Phillips called it, a pro-slavery compact.  Lincoln and the Civil War Amendments didn't get rid of some of the worst of those which the Republican-facists and white supremacists still use and which still puts money in their pockets.  

The pardon power, that anything like the fascistic "unitary executive" theory is not obviously unconstitutional.  Elite law school faculties are always trying to come up with that kind of anti-democatic, anti-egalitarian crap and the judges and "justices" as well.   That anyone could hold such a position while promoting fascism is certainly an indictment of the legal profession and judicial system under the Constitution.   You can be a fascist AND a Constitutional scholar in the United States, a real egalitarian democratic Constitution and legal system would never produce that result.

The Second Amendment is a mass murder permitting catastrophe, born in the desire to protect slave owners against those they kept in bondage.

And, since this has to be a short post, today,  don't get me started on the permission to lie in the mass media and for the media to sell the most evil and depraved crap (as FOX Lies, does)  in the First Amendment, and numerous other clear defects in it.**


* That's something that matters disproportionately when you consider the number of states with lowest number of electoral votes but whose combined numbers, both in the Senate and the Electoral College, makes their votes count many times more than those who vote in the largest states.

Anyone who has a 6th graders knowledge of American history knows that the white supremacists in the slave states and beyond made themselves even more politically powerful by denying the vote to Black People, under slavery and under the de facto continuation of it in Jim Crow, the Jim Crow that the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts are bringing back.  

Any honest electoral system would elect a president based on the national majority vote, getting rid of the corrupt electoral college.   Its congressional representation would, as well, be based on the potential size of the electorate in the state.  But, given the white supremacist use of voter suppression, in the past and, under the Roberts Court and its destruction of the Voting Rights Act, today,  both Congressional representation and any disgustingly retained Electoral College should be enumerated on the basis of the percentage of ELIGIBLE VOTERS AS DEFINED BY A NATIONAL STANDARD AND ON THE BASIS OF THE NATIONAL CENSUS which votes in any decade.  You'll have to incentivize the permission of voter participation, state by state, if you want to overcome the practices of America's indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy.  Imagine if Texas's or South Dakota's or Wisconsin's delegation to the Congress were dependent on allowing all People of Color to vote how that would change things and fuck the white supremacists shit.  They'd probably repeal the lifetime ban on voting by those convicted of crimes, one of the ways that they have used the injustice system to suppress minority votes.  

**  The definition of "free speech" that is capacious enough that it permits the production and dissemination of snuff porn with the Supreme Court's approval is certainly something that could have been better drafted by those amateurs in the Constitutional Convention and the First Congress.   It's legal for companies to pay people in Indonesia to torture monkeys to death while it's live streamed or on video for the depraved pleasure of American sadists.   It's legal for those videos you may have read about that showed up on Twitter after Elon opened it up to Nazis and fascists where kittens are killed in blenders to be shown.  And we haven't gotten to what is done to human beings under the First Amendment as stupidly written and as amended by Supreme Courts in the 20th century.   Of course, it was legal to do things like make picture postcards of Black People lynched and send them through the mail under it during the 19th and 20th centuries, so you see the hole in it is bigger than the biggest door in an aircraft hanger in the world.  In fact, they used their "free speech" to announce impending lynchings, even through the mail, to get a bigger crowd.  I don't recall reading of that ever being stopped by law. 

And the one that allows con men and hucksters and, yes, Neo-Nazis, to use the freedom of "religion" to operate freely is another.  That the thing doesn't explicitly ban anything promoting inequality and destructive of democracy is another of its most dangerous short-comings.   

I've asked every member of my family

who voted in the 1990s, all of whom voted for Bill Clinton if they would have any problem with him spending the rest of his life in jail IF he were guilty of having sex with minors in the continuing Jeffrey Epstein scandal and every one of us said we would have no problem with him going to prison for the rest of his life if he did.   I am certain that by a large majority Democrats would take that position.   Look at how they dumped Al Franken on the trumped up accusations made against him by a Republican operative.  

You can compare that to the reaction of Republican-fascists to the at least as probable if not far more probable possibility that Trump committed that crime and the excuses already being made for him by them.   

There is no Democratic equivalent to the Trump cult which rules Republican-fascist politics and politicians. 

Hate Mail - I Meant Every Word I Said About Pollitt's Ideological Position And A Lot More Words I Could Have Said

PERHAPS I SHOULD explain how I came to go from resolutely avoiding the topic of religion in my political blogging to coming to see it as, perhaps, the most important issue there is in understanding politics.

It was in the early months of my political blogging, when I had been invited to be the weekend blogger on a far more popular blog.   It was 2006 as the obnoxious, ballot box poison of the "new atheism" was everywhere on the online comment threads of us lefties.  I knew that it was ballot box poison so I posted a piece that said it was and that it was counter-productive and the religious left and the atheist left had to work in common.   My post was attacked and misrepresented by some of those who were riding the "new atheist" fad hard, it was, probably, the most attention that one of my posts had gotten at that time.  I pointed out the misrepresentations and asked, then demanded that they retract the lies they had told about it to uniform refusal.   Even by those who were representing themselves as "journalists." 

The theme I'd chosen for my blog was to investigate why the side which had many more of the facts on their side could so consistently, over the previous fifty or so years, fail politically in the United States and elsewhere.  I knew a few, though not most of the answers to that, the not infrequent snobbishness of so many of the college-credentialed lefty crowd being among the most friggin' obvious of those.  Their obsessions with stupid issues, some of them more in the area of lifestyle than of anything important, high among those.   Among the other things I'd already annoyed some on comment threads with was saying that while I didn't especially care for prayers in the public schools (though, I've come to understand, not for the reasons the ACLU opposed it) and totally unimportant things like the erection of manger scenes and crosses on public property as something worth costing the left among voters.  Disestablishment on such issues as prayer in schools or manger scence may be a mildly good thing in itself but it was hardly a life or death issue or likely to become one.  It was no hill worth enough for the left do die politically on.  So I was already pointed in the direction I've taken.  I hadn't noted that their presence before the Warren Court banned them had been a major contributing factor in preventing what is, in fact, the highest point of the American left, the period in 1964 and 1965 when the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid and a whole host of other legislation had been passed, things that did more for more People than the entire program of the secular left had managed to achieve in their entire existence.  

In the brawls I got in over such things I started to sense that the middle class and affluent college-credentialed lefties who had little to nothing to lose if Republicans won elections were quite willing to see all of the progress made die so their mere preferences could be asserted and, at times, win in courts from the leftover judges and "justices" who were willing to give them wins.  In the meantime, the perpetual American underclass, especially People of Color, didn't really count as much to them.  It was more a lifestyle and club membership than a matter of real importance to them.  

I was still naive enough to think such people were more reasonable than the, then, Bush II cultists.  But that naivety didn't last long.  I try not to hold on to illusions for any longer than there's evidence to support them.  I started looking more into the "new atheism" and quickly found out that it was hardly new, they were merely reiterating the tired, old, threadbare slogans and claims that the old atheists had always made.  I'd read much of that from the likes of, from the somewhat higher end, Voltaire, Bertrand Russell, down through the mid-brows such as Clarence Darrow and Mark Twain, to the decidedly low-brow crap such as made its way into articles in the lefty media and organized atheism.  

But I'd also read much of the religious left's literature, Dorothy Day, liberation theologians, . . . and, increasingly in those days, Protestant liberals and radicals.  And I have to say that in virtually every case, I had a lot more faith in their practicality and devotion to the basic program of the left than that of those whose primary devotion wasn't doing better for the least among us but to the promotion of atheism.   That is, I think, the real primary goal of the alleged atheist left, that and the promotion of their materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology.  Something which, as I investigated that, convinced me that it was not only ballot box poison but, in fact, is inevitably destructive of the very basis of any real left which has an aim of equality and democracy and the preservation of life and the biosphere on which we all depend.

Among the milestones at about the same time pushing my own liberation from the mindset of the conventional American secular, college-credentialed left was noticing, by chance, one of the barroom style atheists on the conventional lefty blog I frequented making the claim that "science" had debunked the idea of free will" and that there was no opposition to the idea.   I suddenly realized that believing that nonsense was fatal to any real left based on equality, on any idea of people being free to make a free and informed choice on who will hold political power and govern.  It was, in fact, something that would not bring egalitarian democracy but the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche realized was an inevitable result of his materialist-atheist-scientism.   That led me to read more of the thinking of such materialist-atheitst-true believes in scientism and, to a person, they were either entirely pudding headed on the matter of governance or they were devoted to some ideological position which was, in fact, opposed to egatltarian democracy, Marxism, of course, some non-Marxist though atheist articulations of what they called "socialism" but which inevitably looked more like state capitalism to me, or, perhaps stupidest of all anarchism.   I found that having access online to very large if not all inclusive samples of the old-line left going back for centuries was a real eye-opener to the actual thinking of such people mistaken as heroes of the contemporary secular left.  I've presented such thinking a lot on this blog and at the previous blogs I wrote on.  Darwin is certainly one, Voltaire,  Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, Emma Goldman, etc.  I also had much more access to the ability to fact check the historical and biographical claims that are and have long been current in the lore of materialist-atheist-scientism and very often found that, if anything, that lore is constructed of lies.  Lies which are never fact-checked by the journalists and other materialist-atheist-even scientistic scribblers who will rely on the secondary, tertiary claims and junk and even more remote from the actual primary documentation to repeat that common received lore.  Many of those I respected highly on the contemporary left did that, though there were some few who were far more scrupulous scholars and writers.  There are still a few of those I respect for their unusual honesty.  

One of the things I have become absolutely convinced of it is that the materialist-atheist-scientistic holding the People and other living beings are mere objects, of no more transcendent character than the kinds of objects physicists and chemists study,  is not and cannot be made consistent with egalitarian democracy and any such basis for any politics or legal system will, inevitably and eventually, result in everything from injustice to genocide, to the destruction of the biosphere and life on Earth.   No materialistic ideology is compatible with any left which has any right to the label.

-------

Why am I bringing that up now?   Because of a complaint about what I said in my critique of Katha Pollitt the other day on the matter of moral absolutes.

One of the arguments I early got into was on the whining in 2006 that opinion polls said that a majority of Americans said they would not vote for an atheist as president or, as I recall, for lower offices.   It figured in that first most controversial of my posts I mention above.  I pointed out that if that was something atheists didn't like the only People who could change that opinion among American People were atheists who could make themselves more appealing and trusted by voters.  I pointed out that the anti-religious snark which blanketed the lefty blogs and in magazine and other articles by atheists was that ballot-box poison which it was and if they wanted voters to vote for them, and this was news to them, THEY HAD TO BE LIKABLE.  No one is likely to vote for someone who they believe doesn't respect them or disrespect them.  THEY SEEMED TO BELIEVE THAT THEY HAD SOME KIND OF RIGHT TO HAVE THE VOTES OF PEOPLE THEY DERIDED AND MOCKED AND WHO THEY CLEARLY NOT ONLY DIDN'T RESPECT BUT DESPISED.

I asked how many of them would vote for a Southern Baptist or what the shorthand was already calling "evangelicals."  I don't recall any of them taking the point that that question made.  

As you no doubt will understand, these guys who figured they were the smartest people there were, were entirely clueless about how real People think and react to that kind of thing.  In the back and forth that came as a result from that post I realized that their ideology, apart from any issue they claimed to support, was inevitably worse than counter productive, it was self-destructive.

In further arguments along those lines, the claim that morality was nothing but a product of common consensus of a majority opinion of any society at any given time.  I asked how they could complain if a society came to a consensus or majority opinion that you shouldn't trust atheists with political power, then.   Or how anyone could hold that within a society in which Black chattel slavery or the subjugation of Women or the brutal inequality of LGBTetc. People was believed to be right doing those things was, in fact, wrong.

Of course I said that such a basis of morality or "ethics" could ever call any society in which a majority believed it was the right thing to do to kill all Jews, wrong if they did that.   I may have already pointed out that such a secular-legal position was taken by Senator Robert Taft in his opposition to the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis on the basis that what they had done in the Shoah was legal under the laws the Nazis had adopted and, therefore, the legal process against them was illegitimate.   A position so depraved that it took that Harvard trained lawyer, JFK, to identify Taft's moral depravity as "A Profile in Courage."  As I indicated above,  I'm not so warm on  Constitutional secularism and, especially, as that has developed in the lore and "ethics" of the American legal profession.  I'm impressed with how frequently a training in the secular law will make the most obviously morally depraved position acceptable as the "right" position and course of action, or inaction.   Especially at the Ivy-League level of respectability.  

The fact is Katha Pollitt AND VIRTUALLY EVERY OTHER MATERILAIST-ATHEIST-SECULAR lefty scribbler does what the great musician Eduard Stuerrmann called "Vienese double-counterpoint"* on "ethics" or what is really morality.  They hold all kinds of "ethical" positions that are impeached by their underlying materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology.   And their instance on their "secularist" (really M-A-S) ideology creates all kinds of intellectual problems but, in reality and far more importantly, undermines real morality.  I have come to see that as one of the most important reasons that the American left and so many other secular would-be lefts have failed so catastrophically.   I think it is one of the reasons that liberal democracy was doomed by coming out of that same ideological stream and why any liberalism that has a chance has to be based on the kind of moral absolutes that are found in Scripture.  I believe those can come from other traditions than the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, any religious holding that holds that People are equally endowed by their Creator with rights that are absolute an inalienable, and that there are absolute moral obligations of the right kind could provide a support for egalitarian democracy and real equal justice but the fact is, in the United States, other aspiring democracies, for the most part it is, as the atheist-materialist philosopher Jurgen Habermass DID ACTUALLY SAY, that has no other source or source of nourishment than than the Jewish "ethic" of justice or the Christian one of universal love.   Something which, when the Christian apologist John Lennox (unlike his critics, a fluent German speaker) quoted Habermass as saying, atheists online blatantly lied about what he said.  When I pointed that out, repeatedly and exhaustively using the exact words of Habermass in the original, they still claimed Lennox was lying.

I think the current failure of liberal democracies is a strong indication that the very bases on which those are founded, especially such things as the failure of the acknolegement that there is a right to tell the truth but no right to lie, a right to promote equality but no right to promote privilege and discrimation against groups, THE MEAT-HEADED IDEA THAT MEDIA COMPANIES OR CORPORATIONS HAVE A RIGHT TO LIE AND SPREAD HATE WHEN CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE AND HAVE NO RIGHTS, is fatal to them,  And I think those were all adopted out of that self-destorying scientistic ideology taken from the frequently dangerous exemption that science was given from the consideration of morality in the thinking of the 17th and 18th century "enlightenment."   I'm not sure that was ever a wise decision to make in the scientific pursuit of the knowledge of and manipulation of the physical universe, I KNOW IT IS A DISASTER WHEN IT IS APPLIED TO THE REAL LIFE POLITICAL AND LEGAL REALMS REGULATING THE BEHAVIOR OF PEOPLE.   I don't see that there is any difference between the death lists of the Nazis or those that current "ethicists" are always drawing up on the basis of the economic valuation of human beings.  I think you really have to be educated and acculturated into true depravity to do such things with the human population's experience of the scientific genocides of the 20th century.  And such a depravity is promoted and made mandatory by our secularized Constitution and legal rulings and legal lore and in the most insane, brain and soul-dead culture which is the norm in our journalism, academic writing and popular culture.  A lot of that is imprecise and inexact adoption of the original ideas but even watered down and alterered slightly, they have become quite poisionous to egalitarian democracy.  

I've come a long way since 2006.  A long way much farther to a real left to egalitarian democracy and the presevation and improvement of life.  I don't think I hold much of anything else strongly enough for it to be called an ideology.   As FDR said,  I'm a democrat and a Christian, nothing else.  I'm not stupid enough to think any of this is discernible with the methods of science, not as asserted by the ideology of those I'm criticizing.   I think rigorous and honest consideration of history is a superior method of finding out about that.  Their scientism certainly hasn't worked out as prediction after prediction fails in the test of time, which is what is supposed to be the source of the credibility of science.  The failure of the secular left is what got me going on this to start with.

*  As I recall, he mentioned someone who was a member of the Nazi party but who, nevertheless, asked someone for an introduction to Alban Berg because he wanted composition lessons with him.  

John Harbison - The Flight Into Egypt

 

Los Angeles Philharmonic, Andre Previn,  David Hoose, Cantata Singers and Ensemble, Sanford Sylvan,  Roberta Anderson

I can't find my copy of this recording so I can't be sure of who is performing here.  

The flight into Egypt,  Jesus and his parents as aliens,  if they'd fled to the United States or most other modern countries, they'd be illegal aliens.   God as an illegal alien is certainly something People today should be led to consider, one the king was after so he could kill him.   That's one of the things I most like about Christianity, one of the most believable things about its narratives, that God truly chose to become one of the lowest of the low.   I don't have any faith in princely or elite saviors.

It's a mistake to think stupidity is the main issue

 in the Trump cult because the main defect in them isn't intellectual, it's moral.   They are an expression of vulgar materialist immorality and amorality, which end up being the same thing.   Their inventiveness in coming up with excuses for Trump and his failure to deliver what he promised them - most of which they shouldn't have wanted if they were motivated by morality - proves that they have an intelligence detached from any sense that it's wrong to lie.  

It's one of the stupidest ideas that "if only they knew" they'd abandon the Trump cult.   It's not like they haven't seen the truth, it's that they have no sense of a moral obligation to reality or the truth.   And they're hardly alone in that.  

Hate Mail - Put Up Or Admit You Can't - This Is A Good Model For How The Trump Cult Operates

I HAVE BEEN issuing the challenge since about 2008 to anyone who wants to refute what I wrote from the words in the primary scientific record of Darwinism to demonstrate that Darwin rejected eugenics and didn't do what he did in his letter to Francis Galton praising his first book of eugenic theory,  Hereditary Genius, and the two articles which Galton, himself said were his first publications of eugenics.    That Darwin not only praised those to Galton and others privately BUT CITED THEM AND THE EVEN MORE EXTREME EUGENICS OF ERNST HAECKEL IN HIS SECOND MAJOR BOOK ON NATURAL SELECTION, THE DESCENT OF MAN.   That he supported his son George's article which may be the first time that anyone proposed a law instituting eugenics, the involuntary dissolution of a marriage if either partner was judged to be mentally ill, attacking those who pointed out what an outrageous intrusion of the legal system and government into the private choices of married couples that was.   Those are rather conclusive proof that Charles Darwin was not merely accepting of eugenics, he asserted it as a holding of science and of legal and social policy. 

No one has ever shown that the acknowledged inventor of eugenics,  Darwin's cousin and an eminent scientist in his own right, Francis Galton, who explicitly said the entire thing was based on Charles Darwin's articulation of natural selection in On the Origin of Species, ever renounced that claim before his death.   That claim is certainly not made in his authorized biography by his eminent student and figure in science, Karl Pearson, who asserted the basis of eugenics in natural selection, himself.  Even if Charles Darwin had rejected eugenics,  Galton proclaiming On The Origin of Species as the thing that inspired him to invent eugenics would absolutely settle that case.   

Without the theory of natural selection being claimed by Darwin, eugenics would likely never have been invented or put into practice in the Americas, in Europe, in Nazi Germany.  

As I pointed out yesterday,  Leonard Darwin, who certainly knew his father's thinking better than any post-WWII liar who distanced him from eugenics and who has absolutely more credibility to make that claim than anyone who never once laid eyes on the man or talked to him, or who knew him as intimately as a son knows his own father,  said his own eugenics activism was him carrying on his father's work, he said so over at least a period of three decades, as I documented from his own words.   He, as well, in 1939, five months before the Nazi government started WWII and, with that the active genocidal phase of their eugenics program,  credited On the Origin of Species as the spark for Wilhelm Schallmeyer, independently inventing German eugenics - though I'd say Ernst Haeckel and others had come to the same conclusions well before Schallmeyer did.   He explicitly endorsed Nazi eugenics, though it had not yet come to the logical conclusion of eugenics and natural selection, of actively killing people,  though such talk had been rampant in English language eugenics for about four to five decades.   

The talk of one ethnic group wiping out other ethnic groups on the basis of their respective economic value (though seldom admitted to be what was under discussion) on the basis of natural selection started almost immediately, as can be seen by Haeckel's publications and those of Darwin's protective "bull dog" Thomas Huxley who breezily announced the impending obliteration of American Black People in his infamous 1865 essay Emancipation: Black and White.  The scenario he gave of such a genocidal race war was entirely based in his own scientific racism and the theory of his master, natural selection.    Darwin, in The Descent of Man, repeatedly made assertions of the beneficial effects of murder, individual to genocidal, constantly presenting the deaths of those he deemed inferior as a means of the improvement of the (murdering) survivors.   

Given the availability and ubiquity of such claims AS SCIENCE in the primary record of Darwinism, of the theory of natural selection, it astounds me how long the scientific, academic, journalistic, etc. establishment got away with peddling the lie that Darwin and his theory of natural selection had nothing to do with eugenics.  It could only be done either through a. reading those scientific publications on which so much subsequent science is alleged to be based and lying to themselves and everyone else what they said or, b. pretending to have read them and merely repeating the tertiary or even more remote claims made about it, especially on the popular level of "the public understanding of science."   As I said, though always on the look out for that denial of a connection in the pre-WWII period, I never found anyone actually claiming that natural selection had nothing to do with eugenics - especially not as claimed by the eugenicists.   The closest thing I found to that was in such clearly embarrassed implications of Vernon Kellogg in his Headquarters Nights, that the German military officers he encountered, some of whom he had known from the time they were students together,  had an understanding of Darwin that was, in some unspecified way, illegitimate.   Kellogg, himself, had supported eugenics and was a through Darwinist and I'm certain he must have read The Descent of Man and probably the things Darwin endorsed as science in it, from such scientists as Galton and Haeckel which couldn't be more clear of the connection between exactly the ideas of the German officers Kellogg talked to.   

It was one of the unintended results of the more than fifteen years I've put into studying this issue that I was stunned by how easily that lie was inserted into the common received wisdom of the college-credentialed class in the post-WWII period and how resistant those who bought into that are to a presentation of the actual primary record contradicting that lie - in my experience among the most absolute proofs of any such thing as could be found.   The reliance on the very lies in the popular post-WWII presentation of it insisted on being more reliable than the very words of Darwin and those he presented as supporting scientists and the plain meaning of what they said.   I think if you want to see how the Trump cult thinks or, rather, doesn't think but lies on his behalf,  the conventional post-WWII line on Darwin and natural selection is a good model to consider.