The Constitution Has Collapsed Utterly And Totally As Trump Drools Out Insane Nonsense And Uses The Military To Commit Murder

I GENERALLY AVOID listening to the sound of Donald Trump's voice so I hadn't heard till just now his senile diatribe about President Biden,  claiming he'd claimed to be a pilot and a truck driver in front of an audience of service members who must have been stunned to hear the guy designated to be their commander sounding loonier than Captain Queeg raving about pilfered strawberries and, unlike that fictional character, just having his mind shut down mid-sentence.

And it's not as if Trump hasn't been doing this for the past nine months or even the years before,  you have to consider that at least several thousand of the more than thirty-thousand documented lies told back when the Washington Post was still something like a journalistic outfit had to have been similarly drug induced or dementia induced expressions of something that Trump may have had something like a fleeting notion were true.

Trump is exactly what, no doubt, the framers and founders must have felt themselves to have narrowly escaped,  being governed by a clearly insane George III.   Though by the time of the American Revolution he is still considered to have been largely in his right mind.   Trump has never had much of an attachment to reality or history or reason or even the own commonly experienced reality that he might make some twisted reference to BUT HE'S CLEARLY A RAVING, DROOLING, LYING AND DANGEROUS LUNATIC NOW AND NOT ONLY IS NOTHING BEING DONE TO REMOVE HIM,  HIS MOST DANGEROUS ROYAL IMPULSES ARE BEING ENABLED BY THE COURTS, BY THE REPUBLICAN-FASCIST CONGRESS, BY THE MEDIA AND BY THE LEADING (THAT IS WELL-FINANCED) INSTITUTIONS IN THE COUNTRY.  

This is way past what Britain has had so recently with Boris Johnson this is us being ruled by a mad king made more like the situation in Britain under the House of Hanover than the American Federalists  could imagine happening under their Constitution.  

The U.S. Constitution,  our presidential system, our "free press" our legal system has failed catastrophically and there is no sign that things won't get far worse.   Even if Trump is removed by natural death the failure has happened and the impunity the Roberts Court gave our mad king will be used more skillfully by Vance and his owner Thiel.   And that's before whoever the Courts and the tatters of our ratfucked election system puts in after him. 

The Federalist Attempt To Do What The Republican-fascists Are Doing To Permanently Possess The Government Today

I DON'T NECESSARILY AGREE WITH EVERYTHING that Tad Stoermer says in every video he issues but  his understanding of American history as "resistance history" is enormously valuable.  Instead of the typical "which side of the aristocrats are you on" view of history, he says to introduce this topic, "Yes, both groups are bastard covered bastards with bastard filling.   I get it. But we don't et to study just the history of People we like."  The sides in this case are the Federalists,  John Adams,  Alexander Hamilton, etc.  who tried to freeze out others from ever governing, on one side, and the Democratic-Republicans,  Jefferson, Madison, etc. on the other side (the so-called Jeffersonian revolution of 1800).   Ultimately the side I'm on are the People of that period who were left out of both the Federalist fascists and the Jefferson-Madison side,  those held in slavery,  those without property,  Women, other minority groups who were living under subjugation under the Constitution, even with that alleged Bill of Rights which, it should never be forgotten, even Madison wasn't all that hot on.*   Even as I admit that the Jeffersonian revolution made some progress for dispossessed white men, it was entirely short of what needed to happen to the original Constitution that the goddamned "originalists" want to bring us back to.   I'm no more happy with us going back to 1801 than I am going back to 1789.  I'm not happy to go back to any minute in American history, not even the day before the last presidential election.  All that gets you is going back to where things went wrong with the conditions that produced that wrong. 

The only legitimate history of the United States to be proud of in any way was the resistance to that Federalist establishment's Constitution as it was written then and as the aristocrats and thugs and the Supreme Court (to risk tautology) and the struggle for equality and, so democracy, most of all by those suffering under that subjugation and secondly to those more affluent, formally educated and almost uniformly religious enfranchised white men whose conscience was stronger than their sense of entitlement and greed.   If you want to call that "resistance history" I'd suggest that it's only really valuable to instruct us in those instances when it was successful.  BUT NEVER FORGETTING THAT THE SUPREME COURT, THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA, ENTERTAINMENT INCLUDED, WAS ALWAYS READY TO TRY TO TURN BACK THAT HARD-WON PROGRESS.   If you want a recent example,  it occurs to me that you could look at Susan Faludi's book from the 1990s,  Backlash:  The undeclared War Against american Women,  something which the Dobbs decision is a product of. 

But here's the video:

His reading of the 

* Paul Finkleman's essay James Madison And The Bill of Rights: A Reluctant Paternity is one of the best things I've ever seen on the topic.   Though I would note this reference to it from an article earlier this year by John B. Vile

 Madison pivoted in favor of Bill of Rights

The chapters by Paul Finkelman and Howard Schweber deal most closely with the First Amendment. Describing Madison as the “Stepfather” of the Bill of Rights, Finkelman notes that Madison was both a “reluctant and unenthusiastic,” albeit nonetheless effective, advocate for the Bill of Rights. He primarily viewed it as a relatively harmless way of avoiding a second constitutional convention that might undo the work of the first. It is commonly believed that Madison may have changed his mind about the value of the bill of rights as a result of his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, who strong favored such guarantees. Finkelman demonstrates that Madison had pivoted in favor of this bill even before he had received Jefferson’s letters.

Finkelman does not, however, note that, speaking before Congress on June 8, 1789, Madison argued that if individual rights were incorporated into the Constitution, “independent tribunals of justice will consider themselves in a peculiar manner the guardians of those rights” and “will be an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive.” This is very close to the argument that Jefferson presented to him in a letter of March 15, 1789, where Jefferson lauded “the legal check” that a bill of rights would put “into the hands of the judiciary.”

Anyone who knows the history of the "Bill of Rights" in the hands of the Supreme Court without having their blood run cold can't realize how wrong those luminaries were.  That's especially true of the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, but also courts going back sixy-one years distorting the First Amendment to do exactly the opposite of what Madison and Jefferson expected would be the results of putting such matters into the hands of the courts,  that that would guarantee a the protection of rights and the prevention of such usurpations of power as they faced in the run up to the election of 1800.  For anyone unfamilar with me on that topic,  I hold the Warren Court's absurd expansions of the meaning of "speech" in many of its most celebrated rulings to have opened the door that the Republican-fascists forced us into so as to do after 1976 what Adams and Hamilton tried to do, this time through "free speech" as distorted by the courts,  starting with Buckley v Valeo.  

I Have Confirmed

 that my relative who died of an easily treated infection didn't have insurance because he couldn't afford it even under the ACA in his state in which the Republicans had blocked Medicaid expansion in any real way.    He was murdered by the Republicans.  Especially John Roberts and the other Republican-fascists on the Court as well as in the state legislature in his state. 

---------

I am asked, in a related question, if I've read John Fugelsang's book,  Separation of Church and Hate.  No, I haven't.  I've listened to Fugelsang and agree with much of what he is saying though I was disappointed that, like virtually everyone, he seems to misunderstand the long argument against sanctimony and arrogance that most people think is a definitive condemnation of same-sex sex in Romans when, if you read over the artificial chapter break which Paul didn't put there, he used that in a list of things that he presumed his audience found disgusting or distasteful BEFORE HE POINTED OUT THAT THEY AS WELL AS HE DID THINGS THAT WERE AS WRONG AS HE ASSUMED THOSE OTHER THINGS WERE.    Instead of focusing on the entire list of things Paul lists, AFTER HE MENTIONS SAME SEX SEX.  I would point out that instead of falling for that,  if he kept on and pointed out the list,  it sounds like the list of things held to be virtuous by Republican-fascists,  Hollywood fascist-chic, bro-kulcha, and eutrophic level American capitalism.   Oh, and what the free press was given as a "right to lie, slander, vilify and etc. by current First Amendment dogma.   Here's his set up in "Chapter 1, which shows what they ignore to concentrate on exclusively on what he says about sex. 

 24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen.

26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. 29 They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them.  RSV

Anyone reading the list that render those who do them deserving of death without thinking of Donald Trump is someone who knows nothing about Trump.   But not only Trump.   The MAGAs, when they're confronted with the actual Gospel sometimes realize they hate Jesus who isn't their dispensationalist, fundamentalist action figure with blond hair and blue eyes.  

In a related and excellent video released yesterday by Hysteria,  there is this investigation of the central figure in the history of the current "Christian" hate,  Jerry Falwell. 

You will note that they announce they're going to do his sonny boy, too.   I just hope that somewhere,   Jerry's looking up from hell to see he's being roasted by feminists here, too.   He makes the rich man of the parable seem like Dorothy Day or Mother Teresa,  who he probably figured was going to hell for being a papist.  At least before she became useful or at least not touchable.   I recall some of his fellow TV hallelujah peddlers say she was in hell.  

The Woman Who Predicted Tech Fascism — Paulina Borsook Was Right

THIS STRIKES ME as one of the most important channels I hadn't heard about and Paulina Borsook impresses me as someone I should have known about before today.    I intend to read her book as soon as I can get hold of it. 

RMJ Has Done Me The Honor

of expanding on something I posted.   It's probably better to read it than much of what I said below.  He does philosophy a lot better than I do.   You lose a lot of reading time having to practice your scales and other exercises.  I doubt most music majors could really count as intellectuals considering how much time playing an instrument takes.  Though that did a lot for my typing.  

I'm looking forward to Advent.  

Almost Everyone Needs An Editor

if they want to produce a really well written book.   Harper Lee worked on To Kill a Mockingbird with Tay Hohoff, her editor, for more than two years to polish what apparently was a quite rough stone into the jewel that that book was.   When its precursor,  Go Set A Watchman was published with Lee's permission but without much of her participation,  a lot of people noted that it would have been a far better novel if it had undergone the same kind of editing process. 

I've been trying to do some translation work on a book by an author I have the highest respect for and am finding that this particular book - not one of his most well known but one which I think is uniquely valuable - could have used some rigorous editing, as well.   I've realized that my virtually clause by clause notes which I've taken on it broke down many of his extremely long complex sentences into separate sentences and have wondered if translating my notes might not be both easier for me to do and to publish online -  I'm sure it would violate America's absurd copyright laws but I might do it anonymously in several places so someone might profit from it.   The author will be long dead by the time I get around to doing that so I don't feel any moral compunctions against doing it.  I don't much give a damn about the American copyright laws as they've been expanded to absurd lengths to maximize profits well past the death of the original author or their children's lives.  

As I've said to you guys before - this is an answer to yet another trolling about the quality of my writing - if you notice a marked rise in the quality of the writing here,  such things as the words that unintentionally get deleted in my revisions remaining where they were,  you'll know I've hit the numbers and can hire someone to edit me.   Till then you get it quick and dirty, just like I write it. 

Republicans Are Bringing Healthcare For The Working Class Back To The 19th Century In Practice Though Hardly In Cost

A MEMBER OF MY FAMILY,  close but not immediate, has died, uninsured, of a matter that could have been likely cured by a dose of antibiotics.   He deferred treatment for the simple reason that he couldn't afford to go to the doctor another time this year.  He was middle aged with two children and others who are devastated by his death.  He had hidden his condition from everyone as he tried to treat it himself, he didn't want to burden his family with even that significant but relatively modest cost.   

I used to babysit him when he was a child.  He was an ornery little kid but adulthood improved him enormously.   He was a good father and son to his parents and brother to his siblings.    

His sudden death has affected me deeply but I can see that there is someone to blame for it,  it's the goddamned Republicans who, first in the Roberts Court weakened the Affordable Care Act through his declaration that the Medicaid expansion requirement on the states was unconstitutional.  The Republican ruled state he lived in didn't do much of anything in that direction.  His inability to pay was a direct consequence of that decision by John Roberts who has to bear responsibility for such deaths that his choice caused.    Though the original weakening of the Act, itself, so that Barack Obama could try to, unsuccessfully coax Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to vote for it so he could declare it was "bipartisan" and Rahm Emanuel's deal with big Pharma to keep their profits up played a role, too.  If he had lived in Canada,  cost would have been no issue at all.   

I remember when the debate over the ACA was going on,  a Canadian commented that the original Canadian healthcare law was only a few pages long whereas,  catering to private insurance and hospital corporations in the typical American way  the ACA was close to a thousand pages long.   Our Constitutional system, especially as distorted by the Supreme Court in things like its "corporate person-hood" bullshit gets us killed at an earlier age,  sometimes of horrific, agonizing conditions that are routinely cured in other countries.   There is a reason that in healthcare,  the rich get top level care,  most of us get something closer to what the poor can get in developing countries.   Lots of us get to die prematurely.   

And the Republican's most recent destruction of it haven't kicked in yet.  

Hate Mail

OH, THIS ONE IS EASY.  

The exact quote in its fuller context is from Marilynne Robinson's review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, alas behind a paywall at Harpers but I had quoted from it long ago so here it is:

Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil “in the name of. . . an insane and unscientific eugenics theory.” But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it.

I can add that since then Richard Dawkins made a number of statements that brought him from being one of the grooviest new atheists during the new atheism fad of the 00's who a number of the women of more questionable taste in guys on some of the lefty blog comment threads drooled over to having the cooties.   One of those was a defense of men who randomly hit on women who don't welcome it, and doubting that a little pedophile abuse by public school masters of the little boys they had sit on their laps did them any harm.   Another was bemoaning that Hitler had made eugenics taboo for a short while.   He was still doing a two-step on the issue as late as five years ago.

Richard Dawkins

@RichardDawkins

It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.

2:26 AM · Feb 16, 2020

For a start I'd say the success in producing biologically superior cows, horses, pigs, dogs and roses  by selective breeding by humans is extremely ambiguous, conflating human determined ECONOMIC UTILITY with biological superiority.   If that were true you'd expect that when a strain of such are free to breed freely as feral animals, they'd keep the same type that the original organisms had but that is rarely the case after several generations.     It would seem that what human beings define as biological superiority,  nature begs to differ on.   

It also assumes that human beings are capable of determining which humans possess desirable traits and which should be prevented from leaving offspring.   To which I would give any number of examples of such selectively bred lines of humans in royal and other aristocratic lineages from the time of the interbreeding Pharaohs of Egypt to the Hapsburg lines of royalty, to he Windsors to such lineages as the Bush family which gave us George W. Bush and his sibs.  And against that I would post every estimable person who came from parents and grandparents who scientists explicitly said were degenerate from the time of Charles Darwin,  Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel down to today.   I've noted before that when the Nobel laureate William Bradford Shockley was promoting his racist eugenics and his loony idea of setting up a Nobel Laureate stud farm  the geneticist Richard Lewontin,  noting the average age of those who Shockley proposed breed a generation of super geniuses guaranteed that their sperm would have an elevated number of likely dysgenic mutated genes in it and so risked producing children with birth defects.   Something that the physics genius didn't seem to have considered.   I don't know how well documented Julian Huxley's adventures in sperm donation at an advanced age have been but the rumors have been around for a long time. 

I think that far from ignoring ideology,  Dawkins was promoting his ideology, his especially dodgy one of Darwinian fundamentalism, what his entire professional career, including his two-faced promotion of eugenics while pretending to oppose it, has been based in.   Eugenics was invented and became wildly successful WITHIN SCIENCE on the inspiration of the theory of natural selection.   We have the best evidence of that, the attribution of eugenics by its inventors,  Galton, Haeckel, Schallemyer, etc to their reading of On the Origin of Species.   Natural selection is not supported in the rigorous application of scientific method which, by the way,  can't be done to support the theory of natural selection because no experiment or observation has, so far, observed a new species arising through natural selection, natural selection, itself, being unmeasurable and invisible and not discernible in nature through the time it takes for a new species to arise.   The entire history of human science, of human culture is a day compared to the ages those processes took. 

Science As Permission To Do Evil

I HADN'T BEEN reading or paying that much attention to the interviews with Virginia Roberts Giuffre's ghost-writer Amy Wallace until I happened to hear some of the interview she did with Katie Couric.*  Among the horrific recounting of what Epstein and Ghizz Maxwell did to her and the other girls they trafficked this passage jumped out at me.

But because of his bizarre pseudo-scientific justifications for his behavior that he could explain, you know, he had to have sex three times a day, it was a biological necessity. And he was, he validated the reasons that he had sex with young girls that as as long as they had started menstruating, they were capable of having a baby, so they were a woman even if they were 12 years old. He had all these bizarre sort of justifications . . . 

So I listened to the full interview when I got back to my computer. 

I would agree that the theories referred to are pseudo-science except for three facts about what science is.  The idealistic definition of science as what can withstand the rigors of testing by scientific methods of careful observation, reporting measuring, analysis, peer-review and replication of either an experiment or observation,  that's not what science really is,   What science is in the real world is what gets accepted to be called science by those in the profession, in the publishing in recognized journal deputed to be scientific journals, those who pass it in peer review (an uneven if not extremely dodgy thing in itself) and gets the approval of science departments in industry, universities, colleges, etc.   In the case of the kind of junk science that Jeffrey Epstein clearly relied on to approve of his sexual degeneracy, sadism, rape and abuse of young girls - though perhaps not his taking advantage of it in his trafficking, no doubt, blackmailing and courting power through peddling or giving his blackmail on the rich, probably largely white, straight and powerful to governments and, I'll bet you anything billionaires and their financial interests.   He was just using "science" exploiting the "natural" inclinations of the straight male gender as science led him to believe was "natural" and so, OK.

So, 

1. Scientific method is not what science is in the real world because

2. Science at any given time is whatever those in the scientific establishment call "science" and 

3. A lot of that is based entirely on what universities, colleges, the publishing industry and "journalism" allows them to get away with calling "science."   

Based on that,  I think it's inaccurate to call those self-serving declarations of science that Epstein felt entitled to practice as "pseudo-science."   I agree with what Marilynne Robinson said,  if religion is answerable for bad religion then science has to be answerable for bad science - especially as so much of it exists quite contentedly within what is called science.  

There was nothing in that list from Amy Wallace that I didn't hear university faculty,  peer-reviewed, published scientists, whether biologists or those in the pseudo-social sciences say in some fashion.  Presenting what they said as falling within the expansively enfolding blanket of what science is at any given time.   I remember lots of stuff like that being said in the 1960s, 70s and 80s and have read it going back and onward from there.    Even after I very early concluded that psychology, sociology and anthropology** were pseudo-science in the later 1960s,  I paid attention to what the hucksters and snake-oil peddlers of those university and publishing ordained sciences said because their suckers were everywhere in the university and college credentialed influencers (we called them "journalists" back then, I was skeptical of that profession, as well, by then) and politicians and especially lawyers, judges and "justices" were suckers for it, especially when, just as with Epstein,  their bullshit science supported what they liked and wanted the law to mean.   

Amy Wallace talked about how even when the victims of Epstein and Maxwell went to the FBI the largely male, straight, white, affluent cops ignored what they were told.   Maybe that's because such science had seeped into the professional and institutional culture of policing too deeply for them to take such crimes seriously.   Maybe as, I have little doubt Epstein would claim, that his victims had participated in what they were doing on the basis of scientifically identified predilections on their parts - that is if anyone had ever bothered to grill the bastard on what he was doing.   I recall that kind of talk as a way to dismiss the idea that women or girls can be raped.  I remember hearing that from college credentialed males who had certainly taken the soc-sci requisites (they've got to keep their faculty doing something so they have to force students to take those bullshit courses).   I've heard of from lefty bloggers especially in the form of arguing for the reduction of the age of consent which would have, by the way, made much of the rape of Epstein and Maxwell the responsibility o the young girls they raped.  

We've paid an enormous price for the choice in the late 19th century of universities, their faculties and others in the academic racket allowing psych, soc, anthropology and,  God help us, even econ into the category of science.   I have no doubt that Epstein and Maxwell would have been as prone to rape and abuse and traffic young girls without the blessings of science but, even as they financed science, scientists, and such cultural entities as the "Scienceblogs" they used science to justify it to themselves, the naive girls they preyed on and, no doubt, others as having that blessing.  

* I'm impressed with how many who made a lot of money in the TV "news" business are doing better work on their own online.  

** I don't know how they're getting on in the profession, but I do know there are some in anthropology who started admitting what they do in no way fulfills the requirements of scientific method, though I think they're probably a small minority of those in the profession.   I strongly doubt that honest admission is going to survive because there's such a vested interest in keeping up that pretense.  

Post Script:  Re-reading this you may think that my indictment of the social sciences in permission of men to rape children is inaccurate.   A figure I've mentioned any number of times, one of the main academic figures in and supporters of Paidka, a sort of journal of those who were trying to get governments to lower or abolish ages of consent, the better to enable such men was the American sexologist, Vern Bullough.  The Wikipedia page on him, no doubt written and maintained by those who want him to be remembered well, starts:

Vern Leroy Bullough (July 24, 1928 – June 21, 2006) was an American historian and sexologist.[1][2]

He was a distinguished professor emeritus at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, Faculty President at California State University, Northridge,[3] a past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, past Dean of natural and social sciences at the Buffalo State College in Buffalo, New York, one of the founders of the American Association for the History of Nursing, and a member of the editorial board of Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia.[4]

And he was hardly the only figure in the social science establishment involved with that effort.   I've never made a list of those I've read about who promote that kind of science while working as acknowledged scientists but it's wouldn't be a short one if I did. 

Finally An Important Lawyer Starts To Get It

THE HONORABLE ADAM SCHIFF has broken the dam and admitted that John Roberts and the fascist five are responsible for the Trump crime wave that is engulfing the country.  They are the ones who agreed with John Sauer that Trump could kill People and no one was going to hold him culpable for it,  he's killing lots of People now, especially innocent fishermen from Latin America,  openly soliciting and taking bribes and emoluments illegally, breaking law after law in the wake of Roberts' Dred Scott level corrupt decision in Trump v USA and, who knows, could lead to a civil war bloodier than the one his clear model in Chief "justices" Taney helped bring about.   They are certainly and actively and obviously trying to bring back Jim Crow to prevent Black People and others having either proportional representation or even an ability to cast a vote and lest anyone forget,  Roberts' party,  the one on whose behalf he and the fascist five have been rigging everything for has a not insignificant faction who talking up slavery these days.   Anyone who would put Roberts and all of the other five above reinstituting slavery as a reliable bet is probably someone who was betting they would side with the unanimous ruling of that three judge panel in the appeals court instead of Sauer that Trump didn't have immunity from prosecution for committing murder.   I am pretty sure Clarence Thomas would vote to legalize it and I'm sure Barrett would find most persuasive, to herself and her fellow liars, that it was entirely keeping with "originalism." 

But I'll give you Seantor Schiff who may get farther as this goes on.   I only wish other lawyers would admit that the Supreme Court at least has become the greatest danger to equality, democracy and even the republican species of government if not the actual enemy of it that Roberts and his fascist five are.  

Irish comedian relives ordeal after release from Israeli prison

 

Israel is an apartheid state and is imitating the Nazis like the South African apartheid state did.  Imagine what they are doing to Palestinians since they treated a European like this. 

I have a sudden impending death in my family so I might not get much written for a few days. 

This Video Just Posted Has Some Vitally Important Information About The Sleazy White Supremacist-Segregationist Origins Of The "Originalist" Ideology

 

In Part 2, The Court of History’s Sidney Blumenthal & Sean Wilentz are joined by acclaimed historian and journalist Jill Lepore to discuss her book We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. They explore the book’s argument that the U.S. Constitution—far from being a static artifact—is undergirded by a history of amendment, contestation, and possibility.

Note especially her making the point I have been making for years now that the Supreme Court has been the major force in destroying all of the hard won progress made against the anti-equality-anti-reform-anti-progress forces of white supremacy,  oligarchy and male supremacy.  The Supreme Court has been the foremost anti-democratic force in our history.   She mentions some of the same books I've relied on heavily.  

I'll Point It Out Again

DONALD TRUMP has the aesthetic sense of a 6-year-old girl who's watched way too many Disney Princess movies.    One who isn't that bright.

As I heard someone say, it looks like he's gone hog-wild on Temu.  

Getting rid of this king won't do it, you've got to get rid of the kingmakers, as well.

IT'S TOO BAD TRUMP TAKES UP ALL THE ATTENTION because after he's died and gone to the place the rich man went in the parable,  John Roberts and his five fellow fascists on the Supreme Court,  the fascists who comprise 100% of the Republican caucus in the House,  those who dominate the legislatures and governorships in most states will still be there.

I've been concentrating on the worst of those,  the Roberts majority on the Supreme Court because they are the ones who rewrote the Constitution to give Donald Trump, not  only impunity for the crimes he committed in the past,  but, unasked by those who brought the case,  made him or those like him in the future into actual kings who will enjoy the ability of absolute monarchs to break the law and do terrible things without any real restraint on them.   I imagine one of those liar-lawyers on the Supreme Court bench would say that it was up to the Congress to stop them KNOWING FULL WELL THAT THE IMPEACHMENT PROVISIONS OF THE CONSTITUTION ARE AMONG THOSE DUMBEST OF ALL DUMB IDEAS THAT THOSE AMATEUR STATE FRAMERS CAME UP WITH.   Impeachment, if it was ever going to work would have worked,  certainly when Trump fomented an actual insurrection against the Constitutional order of the United States only to have their fellow Republican-fascists in the Senate - don't forget, the ones that put all of them on the court - refused to convict him despite they, themselves having been witnesses to his crimes.  

My little story about "the Bob rule" is entirely apt for the occasion,  John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas,  Neal Gorsuch,   Brett Kavanaugh (never trust a rich Catholic boy named Brett) and Amy Coney Barrett fully intended to turn the worst president this country has had, the most undeniably criminal, the most crooked,  the most adulterous (yeah, I wish someone would bring a phony test case dealing with refusal to give services to a straight, white, rich adulterer,  let's see how those trad-caths on the court do the double-step when that part of Leviticus is cited) and monumentally stupid and vulgar man to have ever been president impunity for doing the most obviously criminal things in office AND WHEN HE WAS NOT IN OFFICE.  

I was not especially surprised to see Amy Coney Barrett being interviewed by one of her fellow trad-cath-fasc goons go all Sandra Day O'Connor when even Ross Douthat seemed a little nervous about what the Roberts Republcian-fascists on the Court have given to Trump.

In an interview released on Thursday, Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Comey Barrett had to be asked twice what the nation’s highest court would do if Donald Trump turned up his nose at an adverse ruling and refused to abide by it.

In a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, Barrett was first asked about the extent of the president’s power over the government that has been a central tenet of Trump’s second term as his inner circle has pushed the so-called “unitary executive theory" that slots him above the legislative and judicial branches of government.

According to Trump’s last appointee to the court, who replaced the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020, “It would imply strong presidential power over executive agencies. There has been a lot of debate and some new originalist scholarship debating right now whether indeed it has sound originalist credentials. But yes, it is one that has traditionally been associated with originalists.”

I'll point out again that the rather dim-witted Barrett takes refuge in the fraudulent idea that because she claims the mantle of "originalism" that that means the conclusions she pastes that label on means she isn't imposing her ideological preferences on the Constitution - ideologies are adopted OUT OF THEIR UTILITY FOR DOING EXACTLY THAT,  PROMOTING THEIR ADHERENT'S PREFERENCES.  That is true no matter what those preferences are, even those who might give some ideological school as their reason for preferring egalitarian democracy as well as those like her who favor pseudo-Christian, white-supremacist fascism of the kind she and her fellow five fascists working under Roberts do.    But these days it's only the fascists on the court who are doing that,  I have seen nothing in the three Democratic appointees on the Court which does the same thing.   As I said before,  I agree with Sheldon Whitehouse when he has expressed extreme skepticism of those who proclaim a "judicial philosophy" because of the cases I've known of,  whether it is the current wave of Republican-fascists proclaiming their "originalism" or "textualism" or whether it was Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. whose judicial philosophy was tied to his own ideology of scientism - a scientism which was already outmoded and naive at about the same time he got on the Court.   As I noted, in his case it led to one of the monuments in shameful Court decisions,  Buck v Bell, which I imagine would be decided right in line with the Republican-fascist ideological position that there is no right to privacy in the Constitution so it doesn't exist. 

She then noted that debate is currently being addressed “in some of the cases on the court’s docket now.”

Yeah, and every time one of those cases comes up it's a gamble whether anything like democracy will survive.   And it isn't only on the Supreme Court that we have to be nervous, now.    A panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has given Trump a green light to invade Portland, Oregon.   It's anyone's guess how a large bench of that Court will come down on the clearly illegal act by Trump - the original judge noted that the evidence the Trump goons presented doesn't support their case but that made no difference to the majority of the thugs who ruled that way the other day.   

This is the situation that Barrett and her fellow fascists on the Supreme Court have created out of their ideological position that the presidency is a "unitary executive."   

With that looming over the court as an avalanche of challenges to the current president are overwhelming federal courts, Douthat pointed out to the justice, “The Supreme Court does not command the power of the purse, doesn’t command the military, doesn’t have police powers. What it has, in a sense, is prestige, public support, a historic constitutional role.”

Adding, “... we’re in a moment — and we don’t have to make this specific to the Trump White House — when it’s very easy to imagine, from either the left or the right, some present or future president deciding to test the court, Andrew Jackson-style, saying: Interesting ruling, Justice Barrett. Good luck enforcing it,” he proposed, “How do you think about that potential challenge, as a member of the court?”

Admitting the NYT columnist was correct, Coney Barrett attempted, “Just as the court must take account of the consequences on the institutional dynamics, say, between a current president and a future president, the balance of power between the executive branch and the legislative branch, that of course, those same kinds of institutional concerns for the long run are ones that play a part in the court’s separation of powers decisions and always have, because they also are reflected in concerns of the constitutional structure.”

Unsatisfied with the lack of clarity in her answer, Douthat pressed, “OK, let me try that again: If a president defied the Supreme Court, what would you do?”

Coney Barrett then admitted that the court’s hands would largely be tied because there is a limited enforcement mechanism at its disposal.

“Well, as you say, the court lacks the power of the purse. We lack the power of the sword,” she conceded. “And so, we interpret the Constitution, we draw on precedents, we have these questions of structure, and we make the most with the tools that we have.”

Listen to the skank!  Burying the fact that it was she and her fellow fascists who have gotten us here,  first by enhancing the corruption of money in our politics and now with their overt pro-fascism rulings.  And hearing her, "we draw on precedents" as they have knocked down precedents going back to the post-war period POST CIVIL WAR.   And probably eariler.   I remember when the liar was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee that when asked which precedents she considered finally settled, she claimed that Brown was one and the Marbury power grab was another.   Other than those there is nothing that she and her fellow fascists wouldn't knock down to make Trump the kind of dictator that he has become -UNDER, NO, BY THEIR MAJORITY OPINION - and as I've said,  if they're willing to do that for Trump imagine what they'll do for Vance.

Those who come out for No Kings events should light a fire under the Courts,  the Supreme Court especially but also the lower courts, too, because every step we have made towards fascism has been given a green light by the Courts.  Every one of them.   Trump couldn't have run if the Supreme Court hadn't nullified the provisions in the 14th Amendment banning insurrectionists from holding federal offices.   

We need to do to the goddamned courts what Trump is doing to the East Wing of the Whitehouse.   I would actually zero out their budget except for their salaries - no clerks -  and remove them to the basement of the Capitol again.   If not some dump of a rented facility.  I'd turn that fascist marble palace* they reside in into a homeless shelter or low rent housing.   I'd also make them ride the circuit and abide by rigorous anti-corruption laws on pain of imprisonment with stiff sentences.   I think that one alone would empty out the Republican-fascists from the bench because we now know at least four of them are taking big bucks from those invested in Republican fascism.

Getting rid of this king won't do it,  you've got to get rid of the kingmakers,  as well.   The Supreme Court is the source of the corruption in our government through their line of rulings starting with Buckley v Valeo right down to what those thugs are cooking up right now.   They are the authors of American fascism, replacing the republic that Benjamin Franklin warned we'd only have as long as we can keep it.  Only it was the Ivy League Law School liar-lawyers who ditched it, not The People. 

* It's actually built with marble imported from Italy during Mussolini's reign.   How appropriate that is

Someone Who Trolls Me Threw Bari Weiss' Lesbianism At Me

as if that meant something.   I've known and have commented on many hypocritical quisling faggots from Joe McCarthy Roy Cohn to  Robert Bauman to the little liar from Louisiana,  Mike Johnson.   I've even commented on a couple of other hypocritical quisling Lesbians in the past.

So Kvetch n Fetchit doesn't surprise me at all.   I look forward to see her ride CBS News down to ground zero like Sim Pickins - that network has been shit for years and years now and if those who know better than I do am right, all of the so-called "news" divisions are in their death throes.   John Oliver's piece on her last week or so is a conclusive exposure of her total fraudulence and dishonesty.   She's an aging white billionaire's idea of an edgy contrarian,  she's my idea of an example that being a gay man or a Lesbian is entirely different from being an LGBTQ+ person.   I despise them as those ready to become Kapos if their political opportunism reaches its ultimate end. 

Biggest Small City Protest North of Boston

 I've ever seen.   Unfortunately no one around to make one of those guesstimates except the local cops and I don't trust them to tell the truth - too many Republicans on the force.   Though even they might have had enough of Republican-fascism. 

P.S. On Yesterday's Post

THERE IS A PARAGRAPH at the end of my footnote which I accidentally put in bold italics which I wrote but which some may have mistaken as part of the passage I borrowed from the excellent dictionary publishers.   I'm sorry if there was any confusion.  

The Reputation Of "Liberal" Supreme Court "Justices" Isn't What It Used To Be* - Hate Mail

 *AND IT NEVER WAS.  a repost because I've fought that battle to a decisive end once already and I'm backed up on work, now that I'm recovering from what ailed me.  

There has been a decided need for at least two different and never to be confused words for "liberal" because the dominant form of that in our de-Christianized American culture -  and there are none who have de-Christianized it more than those who proclaim their "Christianity" the loudest -  the worst aspects of the word have come to dominate over the best meaning of it.  It is that best meaning of the word that has earned it the enmity of those who disdain "liberals" and "liberalism" even as they champion everything that is worst in the use of the word,  what I call "libertarian liberalism" in which those with the most money and, so, the most power are allowed to do pretty much as they want to without much if any restraint of the law of the government - including corrupting the government with their money and so power which buys them influence and media the better to deceive the susceptible and gullible. *

In terms of the long history of putrid and corrupt Supreme Court "justicing" there is a perfect example of all the above in the figure of one of the most stupidly adopted of "liberal" heroes, the entirely illiberal Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.  So I'll repost what I said about him in 2013.   I used a slightly different font back then, I don't dare fiddle with it now because I'd have to spend a long time justifying the lines.  Sorry about that. 

 Wednesday, July 3, 2013

The Darwinist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. made what might be the most infamous declaration on eugenics made in the United States, it may be his most well known quote.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

The fuller reading of the paragraph, near the end of his decision in the Buck v Bell case, is even worse:

The attack is not upon the procedure, but upon the substantive law. It seems to be contended that in no circumstances could such an order be justified. It certainly is contended that the order cannot be justified upon the existing grounds. The judgment finds the facts that have been recited, and that Carrie Buck

"is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health, and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization,"

and thereupon makes the order. In view of the general declarations of the legislature and the specific findings of the Court, obviously we cannot say as matter of law that the grounds do not exist, and, if they exist, they justify the result. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

If I had the time, I'd go through Holmes' famous dissents in matters of prior restraint in printed matter, even, as in the Gitlow case, against the restraint of publishing incitements to violent insurrection and revolution, even as Holmes contemplated that sufficiently eloquent incitements might succeed in that incitement.  I see his approval of the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck was a "prior restraint" on her ability to have another child.  Leaving aside Stephen Jay Gould's essay on the case, in which he quite conclusively shows that neither Carrie Buck nor her daughter were, actually, of below normal intelligence,  Holmes clearly saw the danger of her having another child as being a greater danger to "the state" than a possibly successful insurrection overturning the government.   In the Gitlow case, when it was merely the mode of expression and its contents that were at stake, he said:

Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result. Eloquence may set fire to reason. But whatever may be thought of the redundant discourse before us it had no chance of starting a present conflagration. If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.

However, clearly, in Buck v Bell, Holmes considered that people, their right to have children, the right to the ownership of their own body, was less important compared to the right of words.  

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It would be possible to go through the decision and make point by point comparisons with what the great Holmes said and what such infamous figures as Galton, Haeckel, and their colleagues now considered less disreputable said and find who Holmes was very likely paraphrasing.  In fact, on the other end of the history of the first eugenics era, the defense of Nazi doctors at Nuremberg cited Holmes' decision as well as other American documents in their defense.  You have to wonder what that felt like for Francis Biddle, the chief judge at those trials, given that he had been Holmes' private secretary.   

His familiarity with Holmes gives Biddle's analysis of the effect that Holmes' thinking and reading a particular credibility that could stand alone as evidence of how he came to decide what he did.  In a series of lectures Biddle gave, which were published in 1960 he said.  

All society rested on the death of men or on the prevention of the lives of a good many. So that when the Chief Justice assigned him the task of writing an opinion upholding the constitutionality 

of a Virginia law for sterilizing imbeciles he felt that he was getting near the first principle of real reform— although of course he didn't mean that the surgeon's knife was the ultimate symbol. 

... He was amused at some of the rhetorical changes in his opinion suggested by his associates, and purposely used "short and rather brutal words for an antithesis," that made them mad. In most cases the difficulty was rather with the writing than with the thinking. To put the case well and from time to time to hint at a vista was the job. . . . 

The vista of which Biddle spoke was provided by Holmes' reading of Charles Darwin.  Biddle continued:

This approach is characteristic of Holmes, and constantly reflected in his opinions— to keep the law fluid and the doors of the mind open. For pedestrian lawyers it was often unsatisfactory— they wanted everything defined and settled and turned into everlasting precedents. 

Darwin's influence was strong on Holmes, and his theory of the survival of those who were fit to survive must have been constantly and passionately discussed in Dr. Holmes's house when 

Wendell was a growing lad and young man. On the Origin of Species had appeared when he was eighteen, and The Descent of Man in 1871, when he was thirty. Darwin led to Herbert Spencer, 

whom Holmes thought dull, with the ideals of a lower middle-class British Philistine, but who, with Darwin, he believed had done more than any other English writer to affect our whole way of thinking about the universe. All his life Holmes held to the survival of the strong, and did not disguise his view that the Sherman Act was a humbug, based on economic ignorance and incompetence, and that the Interstate Commerce Commission was not a fit body to be entrusted with rate making. However, as he said to Pollock, he was so skeptical about our knowledge of the goodness or badness of laws that he had no practical criticism except what the crowd wants. Personally he would bet that the crowd if it knew more wouldn't want what it does. 

Compared to the "right" of private businesses to do things that could have enormously effects, good or bad, on countless people, including deaths,  Holmes saw the danger of individual people asserted to be "imbeciles"  having a child as more deserving of the most extreme state intervention, even into their bodies with surgery, on the mere prediction that any child they had was of an increased potential to be intellectually or physically deficient.  

Yet Holmes is seen as some kind of great progressive force in the law, primarily, I'd guess, due to his free speech dissents and his usefulness to Franklin Roosevelt at the very end of his life.  There was the movie of the play "The Magnificent Yankee" which only adds weight to the case that historical fiction in the hands of the theater and Hollywood, is best considered to be fiction.  Liberals seem to be suckers for that kind of "history".

Since he lived until 1935, Holmes saw eugenics activity in the United States increase enormously after his decision, responsible for the forced and involuntary sterilization of scores of thousands of people.  He also lived to see the rise of fascists in Europe, the Nazis, he lived long enough and could have been quite aware of the Nazis eugenic laws, the first in Germany, in July of 1933, laws which were justified by the Nazis and their supporters by citing the eugenics laws in the United States, both at the beginning and, as mentioned before, after the fall of the Third Reich.  I don't know if he is recorded as ever having said anything about that,  other than his declaration that he felt he was getting at "the first principle of real reform" in his decision, I haven't yet found anything he said in its wake.  I would suspect there is something, I just haven't found it yet.

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David A. Hollinger, in an interesting essay, "The Tough-Minded Justice Holmes" gives more insight into what almost certainly influenced Holmes to write his most famous decision.  He notes the influence of Charles Darwin and his circle and how William James tried to broaden his friend, Holmes' views and lead him to be less unquestioningly accepting of them. 

This is not to claim that James developed his categories with Holmes in mind, but there is no doubt that this particular map of intellectual alternatives was suggested to James by a circle of mid-nineteenth-century British secular intellectuals with whom Holmes strongly identified himself and against whom Jame's own career as a philosopher was directed.  The members of this circle were often called “scientific naturalists” or, less helpfully, “positivists”;  they included Herbet Spencer, G. H. Lewes, T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, W.K. Clifford, Henry Buckle and – although his reticence in philosophical and religious matters made his position in this movement ambiguous – the great Charles Darwin Himself.  To James, these “knights of the razor,” as he called them sardonically, were anathema on account of their parochial misunderstanding of science and their extraordinary ability to intimidate people who would prefer to make a more generous view of religious experience and individual volition. While James mocked the pretensions of Popular Science Monthly – the major American medium for the dissemination of the views of this circle, Holmes so rejoiced in its influence that he sent a fan letter to its militant editor, E. L. Youmans.  Holmes celebrated the triumphs of this truly “scientific,” reality-facing, ostentatiously stoic cadre over the sentimentalism he associated with his own father.  While James thought his friend Holmes was making rather a spectacle of himself by representing his marks of toughness the scars worn by the sword-fighting duelists in German universities, Holmes seemed convinced that the battle against sentimentalism was never won. 

The idea that Holmes' "tough-mindedness", an attribute given him by James, could have been reacting to the "sentimentalism" of his father, the poet, is interesting.  It's almost tempting to see Holmes as an example of that turn from 19th century liberalism of the kind that produced the reform movements of abolition, women's rights, temperance, various reforms to protect workers and consumers, etc. into a more "scientific" liberalism that still distorts, denatures and defeats liberals today.  But I think the case is that such denatured liberalism was unable to make the distinction between a mythical, liberal Holmes and the reality of his products.  Is it his "free speech" language that deceives liberals?  Liberals go all soggy when someone says those words.  Free speech, with its potential to incite violent struggle can be seen as a useful motivator of natural selection as much as it is a vital component of liberal reform.  In the hands of the rich and powerful it has that effect, often to the detriment of genuine liberalism, as our freest press ever proves 24/7/365.  In the beginning of his essay, Hollinger points out:

.....that a major folk hero of the liberal intelligentsia is a man who has been plausibly described by Grant Gilmore as “savage, harsh, and cruel, a bitter and lifelong pessimist who saw in the course of human life nothing but a continuing struggle in which the rich and powerful impose their will on the poor and weak.  The two issues are largely distinct from one another, but they do connect through the utility of a “scientific” persona held for proponents of a genuinely secular, de-Christianized liberalism for the public culture of the United States. 

This is what I meant by the wrong turn that liberalism took as it attempted to become more "tough-minded", more "scientific", less "sentimental".  Such liberalism equates whatever is held to be science with hard reality and whatever can be associated with the "sentimental" as being an illusion, including religion, including vast stretches of morality which comprise the genuine substance of liberalism.  This is how it mistakes Holmes for a liberal when he was no such thing, it's how eugenics, the negation of everything that liberalism comprises, came to be associated with liberalism.  

Post Script:  I can't say it any better than the atheist and materialist and friend of Stephen Jay Gould,  Richard Lewontin, did in his Essay:  Billions and Billions of Demons

The struggle for possession of public consciousness between material and mystical explanations of the world is one aspect of the history of the confrontation between elite culture and popular culture. Without that history we cannot understand what was going on in the Little Rock Auditorium in 1964. The debate in Arkansas between a teacher from a Texas fundamentalist college and a Harvard astronomer and University of Chicago biologist was a stage play recapitulating the history of American rural populism. In the first decades of this century there was an immensely active populism among poor southwestern dirt farmers and miners.7 The most widely circulated American socialist journal of the time (The Appeal to Reason!) was published not in New York, but in Girard, Kansas, and in the presidential election of 1912 Eugene Debs got more votes in the poorest rural counties of Texas and Oklahoma than he did in the industrial wards of northern cities. Sentiment was extremely strong against the banks and corporations that held the mortgages and sweated the labor of the rural poor, who felt their lives to be in the power of a distant eastern elite. The only spheres of control that seemed to remain to them were family life, a fundamentalist religion, and local education. 

This sense of an embattled culture was carried from the southwest to California by the migrations of the Okies and Arkies dispossessed from their ruined farms in the 1930s. There was no serious public threat to their religious and family values until well after the Second World War. Evolution, for example, was not part of the regular biology curriculum when I was a student in 1946 in the New York City high schools, nor was it discussed in school textbooks. In consequence there was no organized creationist movement. Then, in the late 1950s, a national project was begun to bring school science curricula up to date. A group of biologists from elite universities together with science teachers from urban schools produced a new uniform set of biology textbooks, whose publication and dissemination were underwritten by the National Science Foundation. An extensive and successful public relations campaign was undertaken to have these books adopted, and suddenly Darwinian evolution was being taught to children everywhere. The elite culture was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children. 

Lewontin's is about the most realistic, most informed and most sophisticated analysis of the this struggle in the United States which I've read.

In a struggle that produces far more than its share of ironies, it is remarkable that as the fundamentalist anti-evolutionists who have made the best use of the history of American Eugenics, the eugenics history of Charles Darwin and his inner circle and the waves emanating from them as present day liberals are obsessively protecting the inspiration of eugenics, the lassie-faire capitalist, supporter of the 19th century British class system, anti-contraceptive, racist, flagrant bigot, etc. Charles Darwin on behalf of his science, which is long superseded by better explanations of the fact of evolution. 

How Darwinism became the great cause celebre of liberalism when it has nothing to do with a genuine liberal political agenda and, in the genuine history of Darwinism is antithetical to liberalism, is worth asking.  The separation of church and state is worth supporting but, frankly, if we've got to buy Darwinism to do it, it's not going to lead to liberalism.  I don't think liberalism has to make that deal.  At the very least it should face the real Charles Darwin and throw him off the sled.  Liberal struggle requires that. 

We borrowed liberal arts from French in the 14th century, and sometime after this liberal began to be used in conjunction with other words (such as education, profession, and pastime). When paired with these other words liberal was serving to indicate that the things described were fitting for a person of high social status. However, at the same time that the term liberal arts was beginning to make 14th century college-tuition-paying-parents a bit nervous about their children’s future job prospects, liberal was also being used as an adjective to indicate “generosity” and “bounteousness.” By the 15th century, people were using liberal to mean “bestowed in a generous and openhanded way,” as in “poured a liberal glass of wine.”

The word's meaning kept shifting. By the 18th century, people were using liberal to indicate that something was “not strict or rigorous.” The political antonyms of liberal and conservative began to take shape in the 19th century, as the British Whigs and Tories began to adopt these as titles for their respective parties.

Liberal is commonly used as a label for political parties in a number of other countries, although the positions these parties take do not always correspond to the sense of liberal that people in the United States commonly give it. In the US, the word has been associated with both the Republican and Democratic parties (now it is more commonly attached to the latter), although generally it has been in a descriptive, rather than a titular, sense.

The word has—for some people, at least—taken on some negative connotations when used in a political sense in the United States. It is still embraced with pride by others. We can see these associations with the word traced back to the early and mid-20th century in its combination with other words, such as pinko:

Thanks to The Dove, pinko-liberal journal of campus opinion at the University of Kansas, a small part of the world last week learned some inner workings of a Japanese college boy.

—Time: the Weekly Newsmagazine, 7 Jun., 1926

"To the well-to-do," writes Editor Oswald Garrison Villard of the pinko-liberal Nation, "contented and privileged, Older is an anathema.

—Time: the Weekly Newsmagazine, 9 Sept., 1929

Pinko liberals—the kind who have been so sympathetic with communistic ideals down through the years—will howl to high heaven.

—The Mason City Globe-Gazette (Mason City, IA), 12 Jun., 1940

The term limousine liberal, meaning "a wealthy political liberal," is older than many people realize; although the phrase was long believed to have originated in the 1960s, recent evidence shows that we have been sneering at “limousine liberals” almost as long as we have had limousines:

“Limousine liberals” is another phrase that has been attached to these comfortable nibblers at anarchy. But it seems to us too bourgeois. It may do as a subdivision of our higher priced Bolsheviki.

—New York Tribune, 5 May, 1919

Even with a highly polysemous word such as liberal we can usually figure out contextually which of its many possible senses is meant. However, when the word takes on multiple and closely-related meanings that are all related to politics, it can be rather difficult to tell one from another. These senses can be further muddied by the fact that we now have two distinct groups who each feel rather differently about some of the meanings of liberal.

One of these definitions we provide for liberal is “a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change”; it is up to you to choose whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. In other words, “We define, you decide.”

Of course, one of the ironies in this is that there couldn't be anything less "liberal" than the communists on the one hand and their American critics on the other.

We need a new designation for the best meaning of "liberal" that is derived from generosity to the least among us, the only "liberalism" that I care for because I've seen what the secular, scientistic kind of liberalism leads to.