I HAD TO TAKE CARE of my sister's young dog again, still a puppy in behavior, for the past two weeks. I love dogs but I've only this year come to realize how much work a young one is. I'm worn out. So worn out I missed the 20th anniversary of my posting blog posts - so you can see how casual I am about anniversaries. I'll have more to say in the future but for now I'll leave you with what I posted on that Saturday morning after hearing Scott Simon whining that some Democrat wasn't being a doormat for some Republican in violation of the Code of Liberal Ethics.
Saturday, May 13, 2006
To start with, there are two things about the Code of Liberal Ethics that bother me. One, that we are supposed to be entirely fair to everyone and especially in instances when that would put us at a disadvantage, will be dealt with later. The one I will deal with first is the assumption that liberals must get it right every time, not only right but correct. That liberals and leftists, such as myself, must be purer than pure or relegated to the tip, is something I'd better address right now in this first post.
I have no intention of getting it right every time. I begin with no expectation of getting it entirely right a plurality of the time. No guarantee of such is given or offered. I will not allow considerations of the possibility of failure from keeping me from action. On occasion I'll plow straight ahead if conditions seem to warrant it. I, friends, am the thoroughly bad sort and claim as mine, as the sacred possession of every liberal and leftist, the absolute right enjoyed by the rest of humanity to get it wrong. And not only this but I claim as the birthright of leftists to present our side of things to the advantage of our side. I have absolutely no intention to be fair to fascists either, but that's for another day and I hope that Nat Hentoff doesn't die before I get to it.
The Code of Liberal Ethics is a standard operating setting required in every organ of the media. It is applied without consideration, without thought, as a matter of habit. It is a solid state component of the minds of far too many liberals. It is a weapon used exclusively against liberals and leftists and is applied to no other segment of the political spectrum. Everyone, from mushy moderate to rabid fascist is allowed their failings and their biases. But not liberals. Certainly not leftists.
No more. Here, today, I issue our own manumission, my fellow leftists. We have shaken off the chains of perfection, we are free of the lash of faultlessness. We claim our right to consider our own opinions superior and worthy of dominance. Never again will we present the arguments of conservatives as if they merit equal treatment. We will scorn their folly and expose their lies and their entertaining hypocrisies without apology. We will get off our knees and kick every fascist where it counts. In all seriousness, our lives, the lives of our loved ones, the life of the biosphere absolutely depend on it. We must crush out of ourselves and our kind the remains of these mind forged manacles and wipe their residue from every voice and their assumed existence from every ban. Friends, we have nothing to fear. We are free.
Disclaimer: I make no pretense of being a journalist. At best, if someone wanted to insult me, they might claim me as a columnist, an unskilled occupation of which I do not claim to be a part. I would never want anyone to assume that I pretend to be a real journalist, a reporter.
One of the things I can say that looking over those early blog posts at my first blog, OLVLZL (which was a series of letters that came up on a random character generator, having no meaning) is that I've gone from the secular left to a far, far more radical left in the process of trying to figure out where the American left went so wrong from its high point in the mid-1960s when it had some actual political power.
A left that witnessed the secular left not only getting stuck in the myriads of stupidity that wasted the opportunities and possibilities it once had but actively pissed away chance after chance on self-destructive pursuits based on the whims of the generally affluent, generally college-credentialed, libertarian left instead of making EQUALITY real, economic, legal and political EQUALITY the cornerstone of leftist politics.
As I looked at one after another of the shibboleths of mid-20th century lefties, testing them and challenging them, seeing which ones stood up and which ones fell away, it was as shocking to me as it was to many of those who read what I had found how many of the very central ones were not only invalid or wrong but which were absolutely destructive of equality and, so, any valid democracy. That led me to understand that liberal democracy, itself, was founded on inequality or, at best, what leads to indifference of the privileged and empowered to equality, and that it could not be any more of a legitimate government than the apartheid democracy that America was founded to be or the various anti-egalitarian "democracies" that stood in for the real thing around the world. When people decry the retreat of democracy here and around the world, it is that anti-egalitarian, pseudo-civil libertarian, elite-favoring "democracy" that is sinking as the lawyers, judges and "justice" here and elsewhere find ways to use it to empower propagandists and the billionaires and millionaires who the majority of those lawyers and judges and "justices" serve.
Of course there have been several major areas in which I've attacked those shibboleths of mid-20th century lefties, the ones found to be based on and continuing within lies, Darwinism and its inevitability of generating eugenics, free speech absolutism (the major tool that the Republican-fascists have used to lie us into fascism), the cult of the Constitution and the putrid, lying founders fetish, materialist-atheist-scientism, and a host of minor ones, many of those related to that default source of edgycation, the media and pop culture, and many of the would-be heroes of such in my generation and those immediately before and since.
I don't think the minor ones were really less important to attack because Americans are far, far, far more influenced by entertainment than they are by reality or truth or facts. The very "press" which has been distorted by Supreme Court idiots starting with the Warren years to mean mass media, has been the central player in destroying America's too-brief experiment with equality under the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and a few other laws in that area, and leading us to the total decadence we experience now. Two of the major figures of that, Reagan and Trump were products of entertainment media, its potential to cause harm, up to and including the deaths of hundreds of thousands and millions should never be underestimated because Madison and the other slave-holders and crooked fat-heads in the First Congress worded the First Amendment so vaguely and incompletely so as to create that most dangerous of all legal fictions, a "right to lie."
My renewal of belief in God and the Gospel of Jesus turned out to be the thing that led me forward. That is something I certainly could not have predicted when this started in 2006. I will say that it was in confronting the determined ballot-box poisoning of the then faddish new atheism, fact checking them, pointing out their idiotic idea that they could win electoral power by insulting the large majority of voters, looking at their allegedly scientific claims supporting their ideology that very early on led me to realize that materialism, atheism, scientism, was worse than harmful to egalitarian democracy, it was deadly to it. If there had been no "new atheism" fad in reaction to 9-11, I expect I'd have gotten there eventually, maybe by the end of my life. It was reacting to them that got me here and beyond much faster. Even before I started posting pieces on blogs, while I was still commenting I'd started using the arguments I got into to test my ideas, to see what those who wanted to refute them could mount in refutation of them. I seem to recall that when I said that the esteemed early blogger and commentator, "Phila" said he did that as well. I have found that it was a real motivation to looking up primary documentation - secondary sources can be everything from valuable to being total liars and idiots - to see if I could support my contentions and to avoid making claims I couldn't support with legitimate information. If I'd had access to word processing, other clerical utilities and the internet I'd have had a far more extensive education. Though I don't think that would have happened without the brawling. I still enjoy some of that, though I wish I had better opponents. Those two old blog brawls I linked to the other day still shock me in how bad you can be at that and still have a professorship at one of our major universities. The decadence of English language universities and colleges and journals has been one of the major shocks of the experience of roughly the last twenty-eight years of me actively being online. I think that's all an aspect of the decadence of America's so-called democracy and materialist-atheist-materialism. You wanna go outside about that?
