Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Waterloo Station

 Waterloo Station

Two strangers look back on an incident that happened a couple of years ago, just before the world turned upside down. As they do so, they take stock of what's happened over the last two years.

Ray ..... Ralph Ineson
Christa. ..... Christine Bottomley

Written by Katie Hims
Directed by Mary Peate

Waterloo Station was named Best Radio Drama at the 2023 Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Awards. 

Considering that the well-manicured, lawyer mass killer RFK jr. may be put in charge of our health, I thought it might be good to remember what happened the last time Trump ruled here and Boris Johnson ruled in Britain.

The Anglican Priest and Theologian Naim Ateek Said It Perfectly Seven Years Ago - With An Update On Racist Stereotyping As Promoted By Opinion Polling

Allyson Kenny:  What do you say to people who believe that Palestinian Liberation Theology is antisemitic or is anti-Jew? Do you have an answer to that?

Naim Ateek: It is not. But people use it, use [the label] "antisemitism" as a weapon to silence that discussion.  So they come to me, but many people, especially in Canada and the United States. They don't want to be called antisemitic so it silences them.  And that's exactly the objective of being called antisemitic.  But don't give them that privilege. You know.  You need to take a stand and tell them you're not gonna silence me.  I know what's happening in Palestine, in Israel.  I know the oppression, I know the violence which is done and used by the Israeli army and the Israeli settlers and I'm not going to stop talking about it because it is wrong and it's a violation of international law.  So it is that kind of courage that we are asking people to show whenever somebody is trying to silence them. 

I'd recommend listening to the entire interview of someone who lived through the Nakbar in 1948 and who experienced Israeli apartheid from then on.  Especially at the end when he tells People to inform themselves of the reality of what is going on so they know the truth and don't argue out of ignorance.   Which is what is typical of Americans, which is what makes us so vulnerable to manipulation.   

I'm pretty well fed up with the Israel lobby  exercising such out-sized influence and effects on American politics and politicians.  It has been doing what Putin and Xi have been but over decades.   I'm even more fed up with the American media carrying water for the fascist majority in Israel as they did in the story of the Maccabi soccer hooligan riot in Amsterdam.   I like what the fans did in Paris, largely boycotting the match between the Israeli and French national teams (how sick is it that a country would have a sports team!)  and the violence that the Israeli team supporters seem to generate in so many places.  I heard one point out that when international football finally got forced into a ban on South Africa during the apartheid era there.   I think a ban on Israel, certainly now that they are overtly and clearly practicing genocide in Gaza is as called for. 

As for me shutting "the fuck up,"  No, what Naim Ateek said was true, it is immoral for me to stop talking about this, I stopped talking about it way too much, already.   I won't let the word that has been used into meaninglessness (which is extremely unfortunate because it used to identify a very real and dangerous ideology) is being used against me by an ignorant ass who knows nothing about any of it.  

Update:   Simps says:

 Those people whose anti-Semitism you're trying to justify voted for Trump, you simple shithead.

The first thing to notice is the classic lie that antizionism or even opposition to Israel's systematic genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank is antisemitism, the classic lie that is addressed by Naim Ateek above and thousands of antizionists who are Jews as well as Jews who may not be antizionist but who oppose the policies of the Likud-fascist coalition which has certainly not made Jewish Israelis safer.   That is exactly the lie which Rabbi Yakkov Shapiro and many others have pointed out.   I would really like to find out if someone has traced the origin and path of that lie which is told ubiquitiously in the modern day West, certainly in the United States, a lie pushed by the media even as they lie about current events related to this subject.  A lie that even someone I respected as much as I have Deborah Lipstadt has promoted along with the IHRA in their "official definition" of antismitism, something which I posted this week a member of the committee that came up with that dishonest definition said is being used in exactly the way that Naim Ateek noted it was used seven years ago. 

Simels, as always, and as is typical of those who hold with Israel right or wrong, comes up with nothing but that lie. 

You will know that I have repeatedly rejected the opinion polling based blanket characterization and, so, blame of groups for this issue or another one.    If there is something that is akin to all such stereotyping as antismitism is made of, it is exactly that practice.   I have not seen that Pew has done what it did in 2016, broken down a poll it conducted to come up with alleged figures showing percentages of those who voted for Hillary Clinton as opposed to Trump by religious affiliation, something which I used in my argument that those calling for "Dems" to break with "Christians" over that vote were stupid because even the several lowest percentages of voters who supported Hillary Clinton among the most conservative of denominations numbered many times more voters than those who identified as atheist-agnostics.  

The place I've read and heard most often cited was Dearborn Michigan with its very large Muslim population.   I looked for the FACTS, such as those are available to me and found unofficial results from the City of Dearborn where about 36%  of voters voted  for Kamala Harris and under 43% voted for Trump.  However, about 18% voted for the Putin-Republican-fascist asset Jill Stein.  Assuming most of those who wouldn't vote for Trump but would cast a protest vote on the basis of Israel's invasion of Gaza for the phony lefty Jill Stein,  it's another case in which it's more than just a little likely that the Green Party was acting, as Stein and her surrogates encouraged, to put Trump back in office.   I will note that of those who cast a straight party ballot in Dearborn  40.43 did so for Democrats, 41.89 did for Republicans and, again,  15.45 did for the spoiler Greens. 

Assuming almost all of the Green votes were protest votes against the Biden policy of support for the Israeli government, something I think is certainly a product of the decades long campaign to protect Israel by hurling the accusation of "antisemitism" at those who refuse to practice "Israel right or wrong" even as Israel assumed its identity as an apartheid and genocidal state, demanding American aid to do that, is what led to Muslims not supporting Kamala Harris.   

I have said one of the few points of hope in this past year of first the Hamas attack on Israelis and many non-Israelis who were murdered in the October 7th attack and the Likud-fascist coalition using it as an opportunity to depopulate, level and, I have no doubt, annex Northern Gaza if not the entire area, using its typical genocide tactics is that increasingly large numbers of People, including many American Jews are standing up against the genocide and annexation by the Israeli government, they are in increasing numbers rejecting the lie that their rejection of the genocide of the Palestinian People and the Lebensraum policy of the Israeli government and, especially the "settler" gangsters who are continuing the gangsterism of Irgun, the Stern gang and other gangsters from the early days of zionism and the Israeli government.   The present coalition is led by the overt ideological and political heirs of Jabotinsky and Stern and the others, though as I've read a lot more of the actual history of Israel under the Labor governments, it is not something unknown among them, either.   A lot of those who are speaking out are Jewish Israelis and Jews from America and elsewhere, especially among younger People.   That and the fact that the Jewish population in Israel is decreasing due to both low birth rates and Israelis choosing to leave Israel will, eventually, force drastic change in the situation.   As I've said many times before, I wouldn't mind having a lot more Jews living in the United States,  excluding those who have actual criminal pasts in committing and supporting and ordering genocide and apartheid.   We took in some of the worst of South African apartheid beneficiaries, including members of the Musk family.   I don't want any more criminals of any identity coming here, we have enough of our own indigenous, fascist criminals (white supremacists) and I don't want any more of them.  I wouldn't be surprised if something like that is the denouement of zionism.  It's not looking very hopeful for a two-state solution, which Israeli supremacists reject and I suspect will never try for until it's way, way too late for that.

Pete Buttigieg's Name For Joe Biden's Economic Accomplishments Is What It Must Be Called

THE BIG DEAL

I Really Wish You Would Stop Telling Me What He's Saying About Me At The BBB (That's baby blue blog)

YOU KNOW WHO seems to be trying to associate me with the scandal rocking the Anglican Church centering on what the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby seems to have known but did nothing to stop the long term sadistic sexual abuse of boys by the barrister John Smyth.  In other words, that Justin Welby did what the late criminal hell spawn Cardinal Bernard Law and a number of other male Catholic clergy and hierarchs did.   If you want to see what I've said about Bernard Law, his crimes and the way that John Paul II shielded him from consequences when he should have ordered him to stay in the United States and answer for his crimes,  you'll find I've written about that and I've never had anything good to say about Law and just about nothing good to say about JPII or, for that matter, his equally culpable side kick Benedict XVI back when he was Ratzinger.  I will note that he did try to do better when he was in charge, though he was a uniquely ineffective reformer even as he was an autocrat when it was a question of what really mattered to him, and it wasn't the welfare of his flock. 

I'm not answerable for what a conservative Anglican Archbishop did than I am what a Canadian-Brit barrister who was part of what I now read is a long-standing conservative, "muscular Christianity" outfit who sadistically abused boys.   How the fact that he was a right-wing barrister doesn't seem to have led to much soul-searching by those in the profession - what he was doing was illegal as well as immoral - a man who apparently brought a private prosecution against the gay press in Britain on behalf of Mary Whitehall.   I am entirely opposed to that kind of evangelical "christianity," which is a complete and total heresy as far as I'm concerned.  Jesus walked a lot and must have been in good health, as must have been those who walked with him but they didn't play rugby or football or even marbles.  I pretty much reject and dislike everything to do with "muscular Christianity."   It is capitalistic, nationalistic, brutal, competitive and anti-intellectual.   It is, decidedly, male supremacist and, as I said, a heresy against the Gospel, the Epistles, The Law and the Prophets.   And it is just so emetically upper-class Brit.  

If Christians who reject all of that, everything up to and including the rape of children, is responsible for what those who we have nothing to do with doing those things, then anyone who listens to rock and roll must share the guilt of the BBC serial child rapist who got away with it,  Jimmy Savile or anyone who has anything to do with the legal profession has to do with John Smyth or, in fact, the American lawyers who have done their best to keep rich serial rapists out of prison where they can do it again or, in fact, the free-speech-press types who have no problem with the reality that a lot of the First Amendment permitted porn is actually an encouragement of child rape, not to mention the obvious, a lot of it is actual filming and photographing of child rape.  Much of that is part of the mainstream of Hollywood movie making and TV shows in a watered down appeal to the sexualization of even very young children and those who can be presented as children on screen.   You can look back at the movie Pretty Baby which was soft-core child porn, though it was defended by the likes of Susan Sarandon, who was in it, and the bizarrely sainted Roger Ebert, it so obviously presents a 12-year-old girl as a sex object and it's certainly many straight men who watched it took it as that.  But it's art, don'tcha know.  Some times I think there's more than a little of Trump in all the free speechy guys.  And gals, too.

It is really, really telling that the standards of blanket culpability for this apply in one and only one area of life, religion, and that that blanket culpability is especially true for Christianity WHEN THAT STANDARD IS APPLIED IN NO OTHER PLACE, NOT EVEN FOR GROUPS WHO FACILITATE OR REFUSE TO STOP OR PUNISH THOSE WHO ENCOURAGE AND PROFIT FROM THE RAPE OF CHILDREN.  The difference is that anyone who believes in Christianity is supposed to accept that the rape of children or anyone is a serious sin whereas secular culture has little problem with it under "free speech-press."   The contemporary Christian theological criticism of rape extends to pointing out that it is sanctioned in both Genesis and Judges, where first daughters then daughters and the innocent concubine of a Levite are offered to a rape mob.   In history, the apparently ubiquitous prostitution of children and young women in pagan temples was not practiced by Jews or Christians and, in fact, it, as well as legal infanticide, were ended only when Christianity took hold in the Roman empire and elsewhere.  

I have no problem with a culpable Archbishop of Canterbury being forced out or held answerable for his sins of omission in covering up and not reporting a serial child rapist over decades.  Just as I thought and have repeatedly said Bernard Law should have been arrested and made answerable for his crimes in the United States.    I have no problem with any religious figure being fully held accountable by the law, a law which has yet to really punish the most pagan of American presidents for his sexual crimes who is, in fact, about to become our dictator thanks in no small part to the irresponsibility of American lawyers, judges and "justices."   

I think that the pornography that promotes child rape and, in fact, consists of the filming and photographing of child rape to be totally suppressed and those who are as guilty in that as Bernard Law or Justin Welby or John Smyth being imprisoned for the rest of their lives and sued into ruin by their victims.  I think it should be an iron rule that whenever any institution deals with children, especially young children, no adult should ever be alone with them without other adult supervision.  Men, especially, should never be trusted to be alone with children because it would seem that the minority among us who rape and abuse children routinely benefit from that kind of trust.  As this goes on there seem to be few instances where such isolated interaction between men and children happen routinely, where there aren't instances when such men as who rape don't do it and children are abused. 

That's the real question that never seems to be pushed, almost all of this is exactly that, men raping and, given the percentage of those actively involved with organized religion is a minority in Britain and, probably now, in the United States, religion certainly isn't the most common venue for such abuse to happen .   Why aren't all men held accountable, including those deputed to be men who tried to bring me into it? 

Why I Don't Belive Right-Wing Religion - Psalm 15

1  Who can live in your tent, Lord?
    Who can dwell on your holy mountain?
 

2  The person who
    lives free of blame,
    does what is right,
        and speaks the truth sincerely;
 

3  who does no damage with their talk,
    does no harm to a friend,
    doesn’t insult a neighbor;
 

4  someone who despises
        those who act wickedly,
        but who honors those
        who honor the Lord;
    someone who keeps their promise even when it hurts;
 

5 someone who doesn’t lend money with interest,
    who won’t accept a bribe against any innocent person.
Whoever does these things will never stumble.

Common English Bible 

Verse 5 pretty much rules out the large majority of white "christians" in the United States, certainly any who practice or are OK with lending out money with interest, the entire basis of capitalism and accepting bribes against innocent  People, the entire basis of right wing and a lot of other media, if you include taking a salary to do that as bribes, which I do.  The careers of all the TV and radio preachers consist of pretty much the opposite of all of it.  And the same is true of virtually all of the corporate media.  Especially if you consider the lines about telling the truth and doing no damage with their talk.  

If you believe that these ideas are at least inspired by God, the Creator of the universe and us or if you go so far as to take them as commandments, you have an absolute standard against which you can not only judge your own conduct but believe you will be held to, you have a durable moral obligation to try to act that way.   If you don't believe in God or don't accept this as true, you only have what you figure you can get away with, to your own profit if you can work it that way.   Secularism has a way of turning everyone into some degree of a conman, some with vestiges of an ever more vaguely recalled virtue, perhaps some with the notions of goodness that Paul said were given to everyone by our Creator.   I know during my long years of cowardly agnosticism I still had the memory of what I was brought up to know was right,  telling the truth, especially not lying about other People or important things, not causing harm with what I said.  But I also knew that those feelings weren't as strong.   Maybe it was lucky for me and People I could have cheated and hurt that I've also always had the feeling that even if someone else could get away with it,  I wouldn't be able to.   Perhaps that's Irish Catholic guilt kicking in,  something that doesn't seem to have ever kicked in with RFK jr. or so many others who were raised Catholic.  Kennedy men seem to have been largely immune to it.   As do Republicans and a majority of white men, as well. 

I could ask scoffers and skeptics, who would you rather have living around you, who would you rather deal with in life, someone who believes and tries to act the way this little, seldom mentioned Psalm advocates or someone who doesn't?   Even the worst of the Trumpers would rather live with People who acted like this but they might ask themselves if People who act like this would like to live near them.  That's where verse 4 comes into play. 

For those of us on the left,  there are plenty of lefties who aren't all that much different from those on the right,  the asshole mentioned above was considered quite the lefty in days past.  Most of the big time lefties you used to see on TV weren't that much different from him.   The number of lefties I've known of who turned on us and went Republican-fascist or libertarian or just sold out are very large and most of those I know of were atheists, agnostics or committed secularists in life and not merely as a necessity for the government.   For Pete's sake, Glenn Greenwald is still considered by a lot of idiots to have been of the left.   Which leads me to the goddamned Green Party peddled by so many an irreligious lefty magazine as recently as 2016.  

I don't really know of any sincere religious believers on the left who have that kind of record of rottenness, even those among Catholics who hold with the official teaching of the Catholic Church on that one issue.   And, from what I've seen in person and at a distance, those who really believe are far more to go the distance as those beliefs apply to politics, society and life.   Which, by the way, I've never known an informed right-winger to show much evidence of really believing in all of their lives.  Amy Coney Barrett, even with her adoption of two orphans from Haiti certainly doesn't live her professional life as if she really cared about orphaned Hatians or others.  And I don't know of any of the other right-wing Catholics who begin to demonstrate anything like that in their professional actions or their lives.  

Well, I could go on but I've heaped enough extension onto this little Psalm, already.  Though I think it can take it.

The Atheism Fad Of The OO's Is So Over

I take (possibly forlorn) hope in the fact that although Trump is a mendacious, malevolent, transparently evil man, and stupid with it, Musk is not.  He is highly intelligent and, diametrically opposed to Trump, he has the welfare of the world at heart.  

Richard Dawkins

Reading that at RMJ's I remembered that the philosopher and atheist Quentin Smith said that Dawkins had succeeded Stephen Hawking as having made the worst argument in the history of Western thought, the one he made against God in The God Delusion.  I'd say it was only one of a number of stupidest things that Dawkins has said, including his most famous invented scientific fact and pretty much his radical gene-centric view of natural selection but this one is stunningly stupid.  Even for Dawkins, it's stupid. 

Yet I would bet you if he hadn't given himself a case of the cooties with his creepy misogyny and things like his saying a little pedophile abuse such as those fabled Brit public school dons practiced in his youth wasn't any big deal, the atheists online would still consider him a gen'yus. 

The Dangerous Failures Of The Constitution

THE GAMING of the recess appointment provision of our dangerously out of date and inadequate 18th century Constitution by Trump proves how dangerous that document is in 2024.   That is only one of a list of extremely dangerous provisions in it, the absolute pardon power is another one that Trump has used to further his own criminality,  something which we knew had been done by George H. W. Bush with his pardons of his co-criminals and Gerald Ford did in one of the most dangerous pardons ever given, to the criminal president and model for all future criminal presidents,  George H. W. Bush and Donald Trump and I'd argue George W. Bush, as well.  

The fabled, idolized "framers" were sadly and dangerously wrong about a lot of things, among others was the absurdly difficult rules for fixing their mistakes and those things which they did which have been turned into deadly weapons against democracy and even our national security by lawyers and legal theorists.  That six of those lawyers bent on destroying democracy sit on the Supreme Court and have made Donald Trump a despot with full knowledge of what they were doing proves how dangerous and disordered the system they gave us is.   Central to that is that they gave us a presidential system, a system which, when copied by other countries, is associated with an enhanced possibility of that turning, quickly, into a dictatorial system.

I doubt that Merrick Garland is thinking what I am, that depending on the integrity of John Thune that is the only thing we have against our safety and the nominees of Wednesday, November 13, 2024, including a known Putin asset as National Security Director,  a drunken, drug using, child raping fascist as Attorney General, and a Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and who knows what others Trump will tap, that having John Thune as the last, best hope of America is entirely too little security for American democracy and even our very lives.  He's too busy making sure no one can say he acted politically and otherwise shining his tin halo as an institutionalist of integrity. 

Our Constitution and our law and, especially, allowing the Supreme Court to grab the powers it did in 1803 - without that extraConstitutional power grab ever being rejected - dangerous in ways we can't go on with.   Since our fabled, deified founders were so hepped on looking to the Roman Republic as a model for our country,  they should have really considered what Cicero said, Silent enim leges inter arma.  The law is silent in the midst of armed violence, is what he meant, not that the courts don't tell the military what to do during wartime.   I won't go into the very interesting history of the speech and the extreme violence and political corruption in the late Republic, a result of the very political system(s) that inspired the extremely rickety and often failing American system.  At least not at this time of the morning during another insomniac night, worrying for the distress of our country and the world.  I will point out that Cicero's defense of his friend against a charge of murder failed, due in no small part to political mob violence threatening him during the trial.   Mob violence of the kind which Trump and his thugs practice as politics and the goddamned lawyers and judges and "justices" being OK with that.   The ones with the real power under our corrupt system.  

This can't continue indefinitely, the whole system is already dangerous to us all.

Freedom Of The Press Should Be Replaced With Carefully Given Privileges GRANTED FOR ACTING RESPONSIBLY AND TRUTHFULLY

WITH THE NOMINEES of yesterday,  where are all of the journalists  and online talking heads who ceaselessly peddled the idea that President Biden was senile as they sane-washed Trump?   That's a serious question and the proposal in the title is a serious proposal. 

I think we're about to find out just how morally depraved and criminally irresponsible the lawyers at the DoJ are in failing to protect the national security of the United States and democracy.   

Joe Biden should order the immediate release of any and all of the intelligence that has ever been collected on Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard and the rest of the worst of Trump's picks for some of the most dangerously powerful and consequential jobs there are in government.   The to hell with the rules,  they don't apply anymore and the self-serving, ass-covering lawerly scruples of a Merrick Garland are a threat to our safety and decency.

Don't Fall For The Reassurances - They Didn't Come True Either During Trump I Or The Rescue Mission The Lawyers Were Supposed To Be On

CAN'T REMEMBER which DC insider type it was who was reassuring us that Susie Wiles would be the adult in the room for Trump II but his pick of Pete Hegseth, a 44 year old Fox snake oil salesman with absolutely no relevant experience to head the DoD, the largest department of government and the largest bureaucracy in the world should kill that bull shit.   It's like everyone telling us Jared and Vanky were going to be the adults in the room last time.   Susie Wiles is a Republican-fascist lady pimp.  There is no such a thing as a decent Republican in 2024, there wasn't in 2020, either. 

Looking him up, Hegseth is a Princeton-Harvard product, having gone to one of the bigger right-wing establishment oligarchs and their whores training ground outside of Harvard Law, the friggin' Kennedy School.   I have caught some of his FOX act, that no doubt is why Trump wants him to run the American military,  HE'S AS MUCH OF A CON ARTIST, CON MAN MADE FOR TV AS TRUMP IS. 

I have every confidence that this is a move that will please Trump, Xi and MBE who are all probably going to act fast to grab whatever they figure they can get as the American military is in the control of a babbling baby and a senile degenerate. 

America, this is what you bought from the media that sandbagged Joe Biden - the most outrageously successful American president since Johnson, back when Johnson had a Congress and Supreme Court pretty much in the control of Democrats and Joe Biden didn't have that.   You were conned out of good government for Trumpian grift, plunder and violent, repressive fascism with at least a recession if not a total collapse of the economy as well.  

An effective majority of Americans who voted for Trump or an even cheaper con-man, Jill Stein, OR THE ONES WHO HANDED VICTORY TO THE, NON-VOTERS are TV and movie and hate talk media trained suckers.   I heard the quaint notion floated of making civics classes in high school mandatory.  I can think of few things that would be less effective than that because hardly any of the "education" of Americans happens in school, IT HAPPENS IN THE MEDIA, ENTERTAINMENT MOSTLY BUT ALSO A TINY BIT IN THE "NEWS" DIVISION BECAUSE AMERICA IS POST-LITERATE.   I strongly doubt that democracy can stand in a media saturated, post-literate country because the media is a remarkably inefficient method of teaching People the truth or, more importantly morals.   It is far more efficient at replacing those with hucksterism and con jobs and easy to sell lies, all with a frisson of exciting fear and hate.  

It will be interesting to see the extent to which the supposed adults in government and the vestiges of that in the media are going to react to this.  My guess is they are as cowardly and supine as the lawyers and judges and "justices" will be to Trumpian fascism.   I can barely stand listening to the lawyers, especially the ones who reassured us that the courts would save us from Trump II.   Well, from the gutless and irresponsible Department of "Justice" to the Supreme Court that was a pig in a poke.  

If American democracy revives,  they're going to have to fix so much in the goddamned Constitution, as it was first written and as the Supreme Court has distorted it that I have a strong feeling that will never be done.   We'd have to disabuse a very large majority in the country that those are a reliable means of protecting and defending and promoting equal justice and democracy.   I heard Lawrence Tribe reassure us of the difficulties embedded into the Constitutional order that will make Trump and his Heritage Foundation fascists destroying democracy very hard.   Well, it was some of his students and colleagues who were all in on that effort so we'll see how reliable the best of Harvard Law is in producing one or the other.   

I don't think the intellectual elite has the vaguest notion of how bad this is going to be, but, then, they're probably pretty safe from the consequences in their hallowed halls and emeritus retirements. 

The Eyewitness Of The Soccer Riot Says Her Footage Was Lied About In The Media

 

“They told the opposite of what happened in that footage.”

Photographer Annet de Graaf captured the Israeli Maccabi soccer fan violence in Amsterdam. In her first interview with US media, she tells Mehdi that outlets like Sky News, the New York Times, BBC, and CNN misused her footage and twisted the narrative to frame the Maccabi fans as victims of antisemitic attacks and overlook the anti-Arab racism that fueled the clash.

I've looked up what has been said about Maccabis' supporters and it looks like this kind of racist hooliganism is typical of them. So, like I suspected, they weren't innocents being attacked on the basis of antisemitism.   You will note that Mehdi Hassan notes that there were antisemitic things shouted during the violence but, then, so were some pretty terrible things said by the Maccabi supporters about Palestinians who are being killed in the tens of thousands even as they were rioting in Amsterdam.   The insistence of the Israeli government that Israel represents all Jews around the world is certainly not irrelevant to the misconception that Jews are to blame when Israelis do things.   I think it's extremely dangerous for that false idea to be promoted by Israel's government and zionists in other countries.    As I've noted here, more than thirty years ago Jacobo Timerman noted that most of the major incidents of antisemitism around the world since the establishment of Israel have been focused on things the Israeli government has done, I think reading that was the beginning of the end of my naive veiw of Israel and zionism which I had just grown up assuming were virtuous, but that was back when the calm, well-spoken Abba Eban was the face  of Israel in the United States. 

Israel is just another country, it shouldn't get special treatment.   Israelis are just People whose soccer supporters, at least of this club, have a record of racism and obnoxious and violent behavior.  Like a number of Brit supporters and fans of American football.  They're not little angels and our media shouldn't be lying for them.   If I was in authority in a country which participates in international football, I'd be trying to ban them coming to the country along with all such clubs. 

Don't Get Me Wrong, I'm Not Upset About Trump Voters Finding Out After They F'd Around

 

 

I've heard about other Latino Trump voters expressing shock when they're told they're about to be deported.   If they get deported,  I'm OK with them getting what they voted for. 

If I were a Woman I'd be rethinking having sex with a man, especially Trumpers.   Women should realize they can't  depend on any man who voted for Trump.   I'd divorce anyone or cut off any family member or friend who voted for him in 2024,  that's the difference of joining the Nazi party in 1930 and joining it in 1939.  

I hope the consequences keep coming for them though I doubt they're going to learn anything from even the worst experience.   I'll save my sorrow and worry for innocent victims of Trumpian Republican-fascism.  

The wicked roam all over the place, while depravity is praised by human beings - Psalm 12

1 

Help, Lord, because the godly are all gone;
    the faithful have completely disappeared
    from the human race!
2
Everyone tells lies to everyone else;
    they talk with slick speech and divided hearts.
3
Let the Lord cut off all slick-talking lips
    and every tongue that brags and brags,
4
    that says, “We’re unbeatable with our tongues!
    Who could get the best of us with lips like ours?”

5
But the Lord says,
    “Because the poor are oppressed,
    because of the groans of the needy,
    I’m now standing up.
    I will provide the help they are gasping for.”
6
The Lord’s promises are pure,
    like silver that’s been refined in an oven,
    purified seven times over!

7
You, Lord, will keep us,
    protecting us from this generation forever.
8
The wicked roam all over the place,
    while depravity is praised by human beings.

Common English Bible

I don't think I have to point out the relevance to what is happening right now, not only here but around the world.   A cynic might wonder how long God's intervention is going to take,  I'd point out that that depends on whatever agencies God delivers those in.  In the case of human agency as would seem to be the one God chooses,  that depends on us.   Psalm 8 famously says:

You’ve let them rule over your handiwork,
    putting everything under their feet

That's not a controversial claim among atheists,  Marx is only one of the big thinkers of atheism to acknowledge that human agency is the dominant force, at least in the Earth's biosphere with the enhancement of that by the human innovations in technology and science.   I'd point out that the benefits of those as opposed to their evils are as dependent on human choices to be moral, immoral or amoral as the unspecified ground which the Psalmist sets the Psalm in.   The difference is that science and technology, by mutual human agreement, are exempted from that consideration.   Either a scientist or a technologist can work as a weaponeer, an Earth despoiling careerist, a theorist claiming that human inequality is "hard wired" and that those who are inferior can profitably be crushed and disposed of.  If you think that's not relevant to the discussion, you haven't kept up with the intersection between the neo-fascist, neo-Nazi adjacent tech bros.   All the reports and legends about the Nazis turning those they murdered into raw materials is openly advocated by some of them.

You may have noticed that the Psalm I posted yesterday and the one today correspond to the days' dates,  that's due to my reading plan of reading them, divided into two groups (don't know what I'll do when I come to the really long one, yet,  I might save it for later).  So on the first of the month I read Psalm 1 and Psalm 76, then 2 and 77 and kept going on in that order.   So I didn't have some clever idea of posting Psalms that so clearly match our present conditions, that was a consequence of the ordering in the published book.  

I have been using the Common English Bible because it is a pretty good attempt to make the meaning of the text clear,  striking a balance somewhat in that direction without abandoning good diction.   Maybe I should include the notes in the future.

When the very bottom of things falls out, what can a righteous person possibly accomplish? But . . . Psalm 11

Psalm 11

1 I have taken refuge in the Lord.
    So how can you say to me,
    “Flee to the hills like a bird
2
        because the wicked
        have already bent their bows;
        they’ve already strung their arrows;
        they are ready to secretly shoot
        those whose heart is right”?
3
When the very bottom of things falls out,
    what can a righteous person possibly accomplish?

4
But the Lord is in his holy temple.
    The Lord! His throne is in heaven.
His eyes see—
    his vision examines all of humanity.
5
The Lord examines
    both the righteous and the wicked;
    his very being hates anyone who loves violence.
6
God will rain fiery coals and sulfur on the wicked;
    their cups will be filled
    with nothing but a scorching hot wind
7
    because the Lord is righteous!
    He loves righteous deeds.
    Those whose heart is right will see God’s face.

I was listening yesterday to a young Democratic Congressman who said that Democrats had more support from men 85 and over than we had from "Gen Z" men and asked how is a party supposed to exist in the future under that situation.   It's a good question.  He or the person who was interviewing him mentioned a culture of gaming among such males being heavily influenced by the intersection of such an acculturation with podcasts congenial to it. 

I have enough young relatives who I know very well to be familiar with such a "gaming culture" and know that the content of most all of those games fosters a love of violence, certainly at least in those who are or become susceptible to that.  I remember having a discussion with one of my brothers that I didn't think it was a good idea for them to allow their kids to play such games, which we were then being told by soc-sci guys and gals was "teaching them valuable skills."  Soc-sci guys, at least the ones who get in the media a lot are corporate whores going for the easy sell.  

This Psalm asks the question I touched on the other day when I said I didn't know what to do about persuading those who have been acculturated out of the morality of the Gospel, of The Law, the Prophets and the Epistles.  I would note that is a quite different question than how it would be understood by many who are acculturated by the media campaign of presenting the TV preachers as the definition of "Christianity" noting that for a lot of them their reading of The Book of Revelation, mixed with their action movie presentation of it some of the more bloody and lurid passages from such books as Judges and the such turns religion centered on Jesus into something not that much different from what a mind formed by video games will produce.  

The answer would seem to be that such People will be instructed by the consequences of turning that into their social, economic and political choices and actions, and

their cups will be filled
    with nothing but a scorching hot wind.

I can't say that the message makes me in any way happy but I think it is probably more realistic than most of the retributive criticism of Kamala and the DNC and blanket blaming of Latino men or even white men.   Those young relatives of mine who were influenced by gaming voted for Kamala Harris, even one of my young relatives who had been gulled by libertarianism has learned the hard lessons of life and voted for Kamala Harris as they voted for Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton before them.   But clearly a lot of such People don't learn even from the hardest lessons of the last Trump regime and the incredible handling of the economy by Joe Biden who even Bernie Sanders in his criticism that Democrats had abandoned the working class admitted was the most worker supporting President in American history.   THOSE were the voters I said I had no idea of how to reach them because they don't seem to learn from experience and they seem utterly divorced from any real morality which even considers their close neighbors, never even thinking about the least among us except in action movie and video game terms.  

I suspect that a scorching hot wind will be the result, not as an active punishment by God but as a consequence of God's ordering of reality.  What secularism might stupidly imagine as a product of material causation acting on that level of reality.  I think the first part of the Psalm gives good advice, to take refuge in God.  The idea that we can flee to Canada or Ireland or some other country is a delusion.   As if Canada would be very happy to welcome in a lot of the folks who either voted for Trump or couldn't stop his comeback.   And other countries have their own problems, largely caused by corporations and corporate media.  

Read the Psalms,  I'm reading two a day and really stopping to think about what they say.  I'm reading through Jeremiah and will start at the beginning again when I finish it.  I'm reading through Luke right now, as a preparation for Advent.   That's going to inform my reading and thinking about what's going on right now as those consequences are coming.   It's a lot more reliable than the polls were,  if you can't trust them on the election, AGAIN, how can you rely on them to tell you how to fix things? 

What JFK Might Say

Elon Musk is a man who combines northern charm with southern efficiency.   

And get a load of his trucks.  You'd have to because they don't carry much of one.  Or for very far.   

I forget, are his rockets the ones shaped like a phallus?  More issues than the National Geographic. 

Found While Looking Up Citations Of Hate Mail

NO, DUNCAN,  it's not universal, you feel that way because you're an slacker narcissist.  Or maybe that should be narcissist slacker.   But, then, I think I have a real and durable moral obligation to act with urgency in the face of sin.

Update:  I really don't care what ahistorcial nonsense gets spouted there but the 26th Amendment hadn't even been put out for ratification in 1968.  That happened in 1971 so I think it might be an example of him having such a good memory that he remembered doing something he couldn't have done.  It's not the first time that's happened.   As for Duncan's later post, I'm not upset that he confirms my suspicion above.  

And that's called "antisemitism" - Hate Mail

THOUGH I HAVE little respect for him as a man and I disagree with him about much, I certainly agree with Thomas Jefferson that governments, states obtain their only legitimacy from receiving the just consent to be governed by those who are to be governed by it.  They can lose their legitimacy through the loss of that consent, which is why we must have elections and don't have kings and dictators in legitimate governance.   No matter what the corrupt Roberts Court and the corporate media is trying to impose one through Trumpian con jobs.

In a perfect world, that would be on the basis of consensus but that is not generally practical in even a small Quaker meeting and certainly not on the basis of a nation state of millions and hundreds of millions.   So the minimum measure of legitimacy in governance must be had through the majority choice governing such decisions BUT ONLY WITH A GUARANTEE OF EQUAL RIGHTS FOR MINORITIES.  

It is one of the greatest ironies of the American founding that the group of aristocrats who framed the Constitution were constantly, obsessively worried about the "tyranny of the majority" by which they certainly meant the empowered common People while they tyrannized over Black People held in slavery and workers and disenfranchised Women and slaves and even white males who were not property owners, the details of that left to the various states.  It is one of the ironies of the fabled Jacksonian democratic revolution of the early to mid-decades of the 19th century that with the gradual elimination of property requirements and then tax requirements on the enfranchisement of white males, a number of the states which had allowed Black Men to vote abridged that right - an early warning about just such liberal democracies in which an enfranchisement of a majority without guarantees of equality can lead to the apartheidization of a country.  

I would go so far as to say the hoarding of the vote to one class or a limited number of classes who are to be governed under such a rigged "democracy" delegitimatizes the alleged democracy and the actions of it and the very things voted for under such an apartheid regime.  I don't think much of anything the United States Government or most of the states have done throughout our history has any real "right" to the status of legitimacy due to the outrageous restrictions on Women, Black People, other People of Color and, in a number of the states, the restriction of the vote to Protestant males including the adoption of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or anything else, as good and wise as some of those, especially later, things were adopted as law.   I don't think the United States has or had any strong measure of legitimacy until the adoption and implementation of first Women's suffrage and then the Voting Rights Act  I hold the same is true for any country anywhere in the world.  If you are going to claim to believe in those two basic principles of legitimacy, just consent of those governed and the practical necessity of the majoritarian principle WITH THE PROTECTION OF THE RIGHTS OF MINORITIES, then there is no other logical means of determining the legitimacy of any government or its actions.

From that it is clear that the artificial entities that states are derive their legitimate existence, not on the basis of rights, which inhere only to naturally living beings, but, indeed from the permission they give to those very living beings to staff and structure and determine, directly or indirectly, the course of government that they agree to follow.  Instead of nation states having rights, they have no legitimacy without their existence being the product of the exercise of rights on the basis of equality.  There is no such a thing as the "right" of a nation to exist or to do anything anymore than there is such a thing as "corporate person hood" which was the invention of the non, even anti-democratic branch of the American government, the Surpreme Court exercising its illegitimate powers it granted itself under the Marbury v Madison decision and on the basis of longstanding habits to shamefully accept that.  The very same Court which has been dismantling the last achievement in forcing legitimacy on the United States and the states within it, the Voting Rights Act under the neo-segretationist Rehnquist and Roberts Courts.  John Roberts' name should be as infamous as Roger Taney's now, as he sits on that Court.  I have no great wonderment at his turning out to be such, a Republican who was in on the effort to ratfuck the 2000 election to put George W. Bush into the presidency even though he lost the election, a Virginia aristocrat who knows how to talk nice as he issues rulings that would have warmed the heart of the infamous segregationists and vote suppressors and, yes, Klansmen of seventy years ago.  

If you have taken my advice and listened to the erudite Rabbi Yakkov Shapiro you would know that the Israeli government claims to represent Jews world-wide, those who have never set foot in Israel, those who never intend to, those who reject such an assertion and those who oppose the existence of the Israeli government on that basis or others.  I had not been aware of just how outrageously dishonest that claim was until I heard the details of his arguments against that.  There are so many but I will give you a few.  

Israeli law and Supreme Court rulings reject the idea that Israel is fully the state, the country of all of its citizens but is the country of only the Jews who live there.  There are many ways in which Israeli laws, which may allow other citizens a vote - apparently so long as they can never become a majority of voters in the country - relegate others to second-class or lower status.  A more genteely expressed apartheid is still apartheid.  (See the Roberts Court for proof positive of that.) 

The basis of who is a Jew for purposes of such things as the "law of return" which allows any Jew to relocate to Israel and become a citizen, is on the theory that Jewishness is a nationality, also the basis that Israel represents and speaks for all Jews no matter where they live.  It's an odd kind of nationality though, because you can become Jewish through being converted by an Orthodox Rabbi, as Ivanka Trump has been, but not a Masorti or Reform Rabbi.  And you can retain your Jewish identity even if you reject the Jewish religion so long as you become an atheist but not if you become a Christian.  Even though Christians accept the Jewish Scriptures, follow a Jewish prophet (and more than a prophet), and accept the validity of the Jewish religion.  Until I heard Rabbi Shaprio, I had been unaware of the Court case that rejected the right of return to a Polish man who was Jewish, who converted to Christianity, who helped other Jews escape the Nazis at great risk to his own life and who, after the establishment of Israel wanted to move there, so I would guess he could have even been a zionist. 

If you listen to the three-way discussion among Rabbi Shapiro and two other Jewish anti-zionists posted above, you will hear discussion of the claim by the American historian Deborah Lipstadt that anti-zionism is anti-semitism and how, when asked, 'What about the Orthodox who are anti-zionist' her answer was the jury was out on that.  I would guess that means the self-empaneled jury that she was a member of who dictate such "official definitions."  I have had great respect for Lipstadt for her exposure of the crypto-Nazism of the fraudulent historian David Irving and for her part in his exposure and discrediting in the infamous libel case that Irving brought against her.  I have respect for a lot of her work and I spoke out against Republicans blocking her appointment by President Biden.  

But I have been very critical of the IHRA project of coming up with an official definition of "antisemitism" which, to a discrediting extent,  was a transparent attempt to define any criticism of Israel as antisemitism so as to shield Israel from even the most morally required criticism or condemnation or the cessation of military or financial aid to that government as it carried out criminal acts, even genocide.  That effort was and is a campaign of blackmail of gentiles AND JEWS  with the fear of being tarred with the accusation of antisemtism, which under our racist country is as or even more potent accusation than that of racism and far more potent than accusations of misogyny or hatred of LGBTQ+, etc.  It depends on those who hear the accusation never fact checking it to see if it is actually justifiable.  What else can someone saying that Orthodox Jews might be antisemetic boil down to?   It's an accusation that is frequently made against other religious and secular Jews who are critics of the Israeli government and the state of Israel.  Here's only one academic paper which points out even one of the People who was on that committee that came up with the definition has said that's how it's being used.

Many observers attribute such sleights of hand to pro-Israel advocates seeking to clamp down on people who criticise the conduct of the Israeli government (see for example: Winstanley 2020; Stern-Weiner and Maddison 2019; Stern-Weiner 2021b). One of the original drafters of the IHRA definition, Kenneth Stern, accused right-wing Jews of weaponising it. According to Stern’s testimony, these advocates have been enormously persistent in their quest to close down free speech on Israel in the USA: ‘The Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA) and other groups will hunt political speech with which they disagree and threaten to bring legal cases’ (Stern 2019). Further on in this article, we show in greater depth how the IHRA definition has been instrumentalised to shield the Israeli government from criticism as well as to falsely frame pro-Palestinian activists as antisemitic.

I am certain that there are many Israeli citizens, Jews, secular and religious, who are, by that definition, "antisemites."  Who the hell gave IHRA or Deborah Lipstadt the right to label them like that?   And if they don't,  I am not going to worry about any random liar who calls me one, though I know that even the college-credentialed seldom to never actually fact-check such accusations so casually made with such blatant dishonesty. 

I had known there were religious Jews who were opposed to the existence of the state of Israel because they believe that Jews are not to have a country until the Messiah comes and establishes morality and justice throughout the world.  I've known about them since I first read about the Satmar Rebbe (see Rabbi Shapiro's exposure of the fake "quote" attributed to him in support of equating antizionism with antisemitism.) I had not known how large the number of such religious Jews were nor how much they had opposed zionism before the establishment of Israel in 1948.  I had, of course, known of Jewish critics of Israel such as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finklestein, Jacobo Timerman, etc, who were regularly called "antisemites" as well as others who were certainly not antisemites.  

I had not known, until starting to look into Jewish anti-zionism, how zionism, from the start, included what would more legitimately be considered antisemitic hatred of the Jewish religion and what they claimed to be the character of Jews.  Rabbi Shaprio points out, with complete justification, that the language used by some of the most widely known and influential zionists sounds exactly like the worst of gentile antisemitism, the ideological idol of Benjamin Netanyahu, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, using exactly the same language that the Nazis and our contemporary fascists and neo-Nazis have used to describe Jews, saying that hating Jews was justified on the basis of that stereotype.  

All of this is little to completely unknown in the wider world, it is certainly not mentioned and it may actually be considered suppressed.  When is the last time you heard an erudite, anti-zionist Jew given any kind of hearing in the American media, never mind A FAIR HEARING. You won't hear someone like that, you will hear the crudest antisemites given full voice, you will hear those who lie about both history AND THE PRESENT in the American media, you'll hear Israeli propaganda, what most Americans believe they know about the situation, but you won't hear the most careful of citation and documentation, the clearest reason and the most just appeal to morality and fairness on the topic of Palestinians and Israel anywhere in the American media.  

I don't think that's because of the old antisemtic myth that "Jews control the media" I think it's because of the blackmail of not wanting to be accused of antisemitism as the label is so casually hurled at both Jews and gentiles.  And that is something that is cracking under both the genocidal and expansionist policies and practices of the Israeli government - which is indistinguishable from the Lebensraum policy of the Nazis, except it is pretended that isn't what has been happening all along.   I'm hardly the only person who has decided it is immoral to let the accusation silence me in the face of the Israeli genocide and Lebansraum in Gaza which it seems to be extending into Lebanon for which they demand America's full support, such support almost always having been gotten.* 

My last statement will get me labeled as an antisemite under that "official" definition of "antisemitism" even though it is the obvious truth of what the combination of the actions of the Israeli government and the fanatical "settlers" whose violence is seldom if ever even mentioned in the American media.

As for the soccer riot in Amsterdam, I have no idea who started it, I've read both those who claim it was Palestinians living in Amsterdam and the Israeli team's supporters.  I have no doubt that either side might have started it but I think it's undeniable on the basis of the posted videos of Israeli supporters ripping down Palestinian flags outside of Peoples' houses and harassing Palestinians with racist, genocidal taunts and chanting, that they were not innocent as doves.  If there are videos showing that the Palestinians were not as innocent of doves, give me links.  I have no doubt many on both sides were not.    I really have to wonder why authorities in Europe allow football matches that they know have a high potential to result in riots to be played in their countries, this is hardly the only such riot.  But, then, I don't get why Americans where the supporters riot if they win and riot if they lose, let that happen either.  

As for Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah, I don't have to like any of them.  I don't have to choose a side EXCEPT THE SIDE OF THOSE WHO ARE VICTIMS OF ALL THREE, PALESTINIAN, LEBANESE, ISRAELI, ETC.  That's who I choose, the least among any given population.   I sure as hell am under no obligation to cut Israel any more slack than I do the country I, and Rabbit Shapiro, am a citizen of.  As you can read all over my two decades of writing,  I have no problem with holding my own country to account,  I am and have never held with "America, right or wrong," and I entirely reject the blackmail that I am required to treat Israel in that way.   I believe that slogan was originated by or, at least, often said by one of the most putrid of American Cardinals, Francis Spelman.   I have no problem of holding the church I was born into and am still considered a member of as NOT above criticism, either.  

I am under no obligation to choose the side of either national group,  no artificial entity, which is what all nation states are, has a right to that and neither do those who would coerce me into declaring such a choice.   There are those who have a moral right to do that but it isn't any country, not my own nor any foreign country. 

I choose those who are under attack, held hostage, maimed and starved and murdered.  I don't make choices among People on the basis of race, religion, gender, gender preference THOUGH I HAVE NO PROBLEM MAKING CHOICES AMONG PEOPLE ON THE BASIS OF THEIR CHOSEN IDEOLOGIES AND ALLEGIANCES.  I am an antizionist, Rabbi Shaprio has converted me with his facts and his reasoning and his elucidation of morality.  Just as the Chief Rabbi of Dublin converted me to veganism a number of years back.  And that's called "antisemitism" under the "official definition" of it. 

* I doubt the opposition to President Biden's support for Israel during its Gaza genocide campaign and, I have no doubt, seizure of at least part of Gaza is what single-handedly gave Trump the election.  I think misogyny and racism are far stronger forces in the United States, but it was a contributing factor, certainly in Michigan.  Jews have been one of the strongest parts of the Democratic coalition and there are enough reflexive supporters of Israel, both Jewish and gentile, to make it impossible for Democrats to sanction Israel for even the most obvious of war crimes and crimes against humanity.   The espionage of Jonathan Pollard (who has told American Jews that they have an obligation to spy on America for Israel, something else I learned from Rabbi Shapiro) didn't cause much of a pause in the "Israel right or wrong" policy.  

That's not viable, anymore.  Too many Americans of all identities are fed up with it,  the world community is increasingly fed up with it.   America's protection of Israel even within the largely impotent United Nations is an abomination on par with dictatorships protecting other thug nations in the same way.  It's time to treat Israel by the same rules any other country is treated by. 

Three Perspectives on Anti-Zionism: Miko Peled, Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, and Professor Norton Mezvinsky

 

You could start with this three way conversation among three Jewish anti-zionists, it was one of the things that has really changed a lot of my ideas about the Israeli state.   Particularly note what Rabbi Shapiro lists about the clear, crude, antisemitism that was rampant among some of the major figures in Zionism.  I've never heard anything more antisemitic than some of the stuff that Jabotinsky said about Jews.  Jabotinsky is the grandfather of today's Likud party,  Netanyahu's father was one of Jabotinsky's associates, today's Israel is ruled by descendants of violent, antisemtic, pro-fascists.  You can read a hardly hostile account of that here.  

In this conversation, when they are introducing themselves and telling how they came to be anti-zionists who are certainly not antisemites, Miko Peled's description of the zionism he was brought up in had distinctly fascist tendencies is something I have an obligation to take seriously.