Saturday, January 27, 2018
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Peter Whalley - The Missing Wife
A psychological thriller, set in the suburbs of Manchester. When Mark's wife goes missing he thinks she will return. Just why has Denise Telfer disappeared from her own house one summer's evening? Can she really have walked out on her married life, leaving Mark devastated and forlorn, or might there be some other, more sinister explanation?
Cast:
Mark: Alistair Gillbraith
Paul: David Schofield
Alison: Kathryn Hunt
Kate: Alison Dartin
The BBC has produced more post-TV era English language radio drama than just about any other source and they do a good job. I'm hesitant to lean as much on their past broadcasts as I have been recently, the problem is that so many of them are so good. And the guy who's posting these has pretty good taste.
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My posting radio dramas ever week began with me wondering why people who wanted to work in theater, playwrights, actors, directors, etc didn't do plays on their own, for the cast and their closest families or small audiences (you could always do what they do in music and pass-round a hat). When it's purely audio the possibilities are even greater, you can be a 72-year-old hamlet if no one sees you and you don't have to do the sword play or an 80-year-old Maggie the Cat. If I aspired to act or write, I'd form a two-hander theater company consisting of me and one other member (who could both play more than one role, it being audio). Who knows, maybe I have and I don't want to share the results, yet. Oh, the romance and mystery of audio theater.
Roger Helou Organetto Virtuoso
Back when I was in college, in the middle ages of speculative medieval music performance practice, being a piano major who had taken some lessons in organ, I'd considered taking up the playing of those tiny little organs you see in medieval pictures, the ones that look like a little pipe organ with 2' register pipes. The motive was, mostly, that I loved the music of Francesco Landini and the other Italian composers of the 14th century ( Jacopo da Bologna was also a great composer). Landini was famous for his playing of the instrument as well as for his numerous settings of vocal texts. There is a famous manuscript of keyboard settings of many of those composers who are depicted, the Squarcialupi Codex, maybe the most beautiful of the medieval music manuscripts, certainly one of the most valuable in musical terms. Here's Landini as pictured in it:
But the recordings and few live performances of people playing reconstructed organettos were pretty boring and uninspiring. Truth be told, everything about the actual performance of medieval music was pretty much speculative, everything from what the ideal vocal or instrumental tone was to what the improvisation we knew was a part of the actual practice. Then the goal was always "realizing the composer's intent" which isn't a bad goal when the composer has actually left hints of what that was, though apart from a few ambiguous or widely interpretable descriptions, such as those of Guillaume de Machaut, we didn't really have more than speculations and personal preferences to go on. We always talked as if that were one "thing" instead of the wide range that it certainly must have been at least as variable as modern musical practice. And that was a recipe for constant warfare among those who had come up with competing methods of reconstruction which went in and out of fashion unnoticed by the wider world. It wasn't exactly something I'd have enjoyed being thrown into, so I opted for concentrating on music by living or recently dead composers and, then, teaching.
Anyway, for the past few days I've been enjoying the organetto performances of one Roger Helou which I have to say, knowing musicians and how they will always be trying to use whatever sounds they can make with their instruments, I think must give us a better feeling of what it must have been like to hear Landini than the "informed" performance practice of fifty years ago. He certainly must have taken advantage of the variable pressure and articulations available through his manipulation of the bellows, instead of the uniformity that so many seemed to strive for in their "reconstructed" performances.
Francesco Landini - Fortuna Ria
Anonym: Lavandose Le Mane / Francesco Landini: Che cosa è questa amor
De Tout Flors (by Machaut, I believe)
Is it how the composers of these pieces would have performed it or enjoyed hearing it? I don't know, but given how people who, unlike any of us, heard it described the playing of medieval instrumental music, I'll bet this is closer than what people were doing fifty years ago.
The Failure To Acknowledge There Are Two "Freedoms" One Great The Other Disastrous Is Dangerous Eventually Fatal
I don't think we can safely talk about "freedom" without being more careful about what we mean. I think there is an inescapable distinction to be made between "freedom" as a libertarian conception, essentially anyone who can act like a self-centered, willful brat with impunity doing that and the kind of freedom which produces a moral, egalitarian democratic political system.
It's the Trumpian conception of freedom, liberty without reciprocal equality (when they inevitably don't want that) without any moral obligation to respect rights, or even rational responsibility that is dangerous. That is the "freedom" claimed by a large chunk of internet proponents of "freedom," for themselves, that is, until the same species of "freedom" exercised by someone else impinges on or harms them, then they can be most eloquent in their claims that they are a victim of an "unfairness" that they were quite willing to inflict on other people when they liked the results.
Then there is freedom as a responsible adult would consider as a realistic and reasonable goal, including moral obligations, a moral obligation to act in accord with egalitarian moral stands, in accord with the truth, within limits of harm to other people and animals and the biosphere.
Anyone who would die for the first kind of "freedom" is either not thinking very clearly or they've foolishly wasted their life, anyone who died for the second one is a saint.
I'm pretty sure that in today's degraded intellectual climate (the flower of " scientific-enlightenment rationality"don'tchano?) that it will be claimed that there is no scientific means of determining the necessary distinctions between those categories a means of making judgements in line with those two most obviously different conceptions of freedom. But if you want to do an experiment, try living with a bunch of jerks who act in accord with the Trumpian style of "freedom" or a bunch of people who act in mutual respect of moral obligations on an equal basis, the truth being better than lies and excuses to not be able to discern that, and the rest of what distinguishes the later, dare I say democratic conception of freedom and tell me which ones you prefer? I doubt even the superannuated brats who want the first for themselves would choose, voluntarily, to live with their own kind and I don't think that any lame-brained assertion of "fairness" should lead us to put with them either.
Politically, legally, the price of you being treated with respect will have to be treating other people with respect, which should always be part of the political covenant that is the basis of democracy. The best prospect of a government which we can all live with would have to make that kind of stipulation. There should be no room for lawyers and judges who claim that people have a right to lie, to be assholes to others , to be selfish assholes on any scale because to restrict their assholishness is some kind of violation of "freedom" or the Bill of Rights. They are, essentially, the council of gangsters and the gangster governance of oligarchy and fascism. There is no right to lie, there is no right to privilege, there is no right to make the lives of others intolerably miserable. It is the legacy of slaveholding that asserts that in our legal system. If the United States is to ever recover and secure egalitarian democracy, the rule of just law, etc. it will have to reject that definition of "freedom" and cleanse out legal culture of its vestiges.
It's the Trumpian conception of freedom, liberty without reciprocal equality (when they inevitably don't want that) without any moral obligation to respect rights, or even rational responsibility that is dangerous. That is the "freedom" claimed by a large chunk of internet proponents of "freedom," for themselves, that is, until the same species of "freedom" exercised by someone else impinges on or harms them, then they can be most eloquent in their claims that they are a victim of an "unfairness" that they were quite willing to inflict on other people when they liked the results.
Then there is freedom as a responsible adult would consider as a realistic and reasonable goal, including moral obligations, a moral obligation to act in accord with egalitarian moral stands, in accord with the truth, within limits of harm to other people and animals and the biosphere.
Anyone who would die for the first kind of "freedom" is either not thinking very clearly or they've foolishly wasted their life, anyone who died for the second one is a saint.
I'm pretty sure that in today's degraded intellectual climate (the flower of " scientific-enlightenment rationality"don'tchano?) that it will be claimed that there is no scientific means of determining the necessary distinctions between those categories a means of making judgements in line with those two most obviously different conceptions of freedom. But if you want to do an experiment, try living with a bunch of jerks who act in accord with the Trumpian style of "freedom" or a bunch of people who act in mutual respect of moral obligations on an equal basis, the truth being better than lies and excuses to not be able to discern that, and the rest of what distinguishes the later, dare I say democratic conception of freedom and tell me which ones you prefer? I doubt even the superannuated brats who want the first for themselves would choose, voluntarily, to live with their own kind and I don't think that any lame-brained assertion of "fairness" should lead us to put with them either.
Politically, legally, the price of you being treated with respect will have to be treating other people with respect, which should always be part of the political covenant that is the basis of democracy. The best prospect of a government which we can all live with would have to make that kind of stipulation. There should be no room for lawyers and judges who claim that people have a right to lie, to be assholes to others , to be selfish assholes on any scale because to restrict their assholishness is some kind of violation of "freedom" or the Bill of Rights. They are, essentially, the council of gangsters and the gangster governance of oligarchy and fascism. There is no right to lie, there is no right to privilege, there is no right to make the lives of others intolerably miserable. It is the legacy of slaveholding that asserts that in our legal system. If the United States is to ever recover and secure egalitarian democracy, the rule of just law, etc. it will have to reject that definition of "freedom" and cleanse out legal culture of its vestiges.
Friday, January 26, 2018
Oliver Nelson Septet - Stolen Moments
Freddie Hubbard (trumpet)
Eric Dolphy (alto sax, flute)
Oliver Nelson (tenor sax, arrange)
George Barrow (baritone saxophone)
Bill Evans (piano)
Paul Chambers (bass)
Roy Haynes (drums)
Yearnin'
Even The Genuinely Great Charles Pierce Won't Tell You How Bad It Is But I Will
As almost always, Charles Pierce tells the hard truth in the piece he posted yesterday about the origins of Trumpism in the Republican Party, he diagnoses it as a prion disease that entered the Republican brain when Ronald Reagan became president and his insanity - he fingers supply-side economic bull shit and "splinter protestantism" - became common received wisdom. After a list of the recent shocked! shocked! Republican staffer of such administrations and campaigns as preceded Trump who just can't believe how things have fallen so low after the glories of one Reagan and two Bushes (including Bush II, imposed by Supreme Court fiat and previous holder of the title of Worst President In Living Memory If Not In History*) not to mention the campaign of McCain-Palin, Pierce says:
But my most serious reservation is that the dynamic being engaged by these wandering spirits tends to make the inevitable an anomaly. The prion disease has been at work for decades and Trump is just one of its most egregious symptoms. Earlier ones include the strangulation of the nomination of Merrick Garland, the nomination of Sarah Palin, the disinformation regarding Iraq, the U.S. Attorney scandal, the Great Penis Hunt of 1998, TravelGate, FileGate, Whitewater, Iran-Contra, supply-side economics, and the ensemble encroaching on the institutions of government by organized plutocracy and organized theocracy. All of these things, large and small, led inexorably to the presidency* of someone like Donald Trump.
and pointing out why this can't be made to be a mere passing era, remembering the hundreds of thousands left dead in the wake of the now rehabilitated Bush II (Cheney) regime, the seeds of such forgetting appearing on cabloid shows such as that of Lawrence O'Donnell most nights:
That presidency*, believe it or not, one day will end, and, when it does, the country cannot be allowed to go back to the status quo ante. The damage done by this presidency* can’t be swept out of the national memory the way the damage done by the last Republican president has been. The Republican Party has to be purged of the prion disease, all of it. Because the prion disease has sickened the entire nation now. The progress of the disease is now so advanced that the Republican powers within the national legislature are unable to check the powers of a president* that a good portion of the country believes shouldn’t be within 200 miles of the White House, a form of ideological enfeeblement that may be the final stages of the disease. That there are people who were involved in the disease’s earlier stages who are unnerved now seems to me to be yet another manifestation of it. At least, with kuru, the cannibalism comes at the beginning.
All to which I say a very Catholic and Protestant and Jewish, and Islamic AMEN! even as I know it doesn't actually get to the real root of the disease which is embedded in the Constitution and the line of supposedly liberal First Amendment rulings that I doubt Charles Pierce is willing to seriously challenge, not to mention the ACLU and liberal members of past courts have brought and joined in. If you want to read something that demonstrates that, consider this passage from a self-congratulatory piece on the 40th anniversary of Buckley v. Valeo by Joel Gora, one of the ACLU lawyers most responsible for creating the conditions that Pierce decrys as inevitably producing Trump.
Some thought the restrictions on campaign giving and spending violated the very core of the First Amendment’s protections and undermined the essential role of free speech in safeguarding democracy. They organized a “strange bedfellows” coalition of liberal and conservative politicians and groups to challenge these new Draconian restrictions on political freedom in America. The group of plaintiffs included conservative Senator James L. Buckley, liberal anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy, the American Conservative Union, and the New York Civil Liberties Union. They claimed that, as outsiders and underdogs challenging the establishment and the status quo, they would not be able to get their messages out without being able to raise and spend a modest number of larger donations from friends and supporters. Their lead counsel was Ralph K. Winter, a Yale Law School professor, who would go on to a long and distinguished career as a United States Circuit Judge for the Second Circuit. Another key attorney for the challengers was John R. Bolton, who would later serve in top foreign policy positions and is now a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Yes, that John Bolton, mustache lunatic who was put first proposed to Trump as Sec. of State - Trump didn't like the retro mustache - Ralph K. Winter, one of Reagan's first appointments to the federal judiciary, Eugene McCarthy, who by that time had become a bitter Naderesque enemy of a Democratic Party which would, somehow not nominate him as president, and James L. Buckley, brother of the genteel fascist, William F. soon to be member of the Reagan administration and then, also, put into the federal judiciary by him. And you really could tell what the results would be from the company that Gora and the ACLU kept in that case.
And it's hardly the only time the icon of pseudo-liberalism has kept such company to such oligarchy advancing effect. In the same piece, Gora gives credit to his and that motley crew's victory in the putrid Buckley v. Valeo ruling for it leading to Citizen's United:
That principle would also be the basis for the Court’s more recent and highly controversial decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), holding that these First Amendment rights also allowed corporations, unions, and non-profit organizations to use their funds to communicate their views on government and the politicians who run it.
The principle being that money equals speech, and, by so doing so turns speech into a measurable commodity. Eleven years ago I put that in the form of an equation, mP=s in which m is "money," s is "speech" and P is the constant "Person" with a value of 1, though such a "person" is either one real, human citizen or one gigantic corporate entity. As should surprise no one, when the "P" has billions of dollars that "Person" either a billionaire or billionaires amassed in a boys club or the "Person" is a mega rich corporation, they will have billions of times the "speech" of people without that money. The results in our politics has not benefited We The mere People or the unions or the non-profit sector that Gora was using as a fig-leaf to cover up his shame at enabling oligarchy. If you doubt that's the case then let me ask you how's this going in the laboratory of real life.
Reagan was product of the country produced by the First Amendment rulings that the ACLU and lawyers like Joel Gora got from the least democratic of the branches of government, staffed by a largely Ivy League trained elite appointed for their service to the elite or, in the past, at least not generating waves that would have sunk their aspirations to the federal judiciary. The fact is that that goes back in the past right through the "corporate personhood" insertion and right back to the the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention that produced the potential for this to happen. Charles Pierce is absolutely right to suspect that the same country that went from Reagan to Trump will go right through Trump and on down into whatever degenerate demagogue the Republican primary voters will choose. Just as it went from Nixon - the first beneficiary of that road to oligarchy which began in 1964 with Sullivan v New York Times.
The Trump regime, if it were incompatible or inconsistent with or unacceptable under the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights would have been aborted weeks into it. That it hasn't and well may not be ended, even as blatant treason and high crimes, theft, looting, oppression, racism and insane depravity are its hallmarks is proof that the Constitution contains the seeds of Trumpian fascism and no real inhibitions that will be a reliable prevention of it.
* But who is now a Famous Artist, perhaps a little like what Adolf Hitler would have been if Adolf Hitler had led The Curious Life of Benjamin Button.
But my most serious reservation is that the dynamic being engaged by these wandering spirits tends to make the inevitable an anomaly. The prion disease has been at work for decades and Trump is just one of its most egregious symptoms. Earlier ones include the strangulation of the nomination of Merrick Garland, the nomination of Sarah Palin, the disinformation regarding Iraq, the U.S. Attorney scandal, the Great Penis Hunt of 1998, TravelGate, FileGate, Whitewater, Iran-Contra, supply-side economics, and the ensemble encroaching on the institutions of government by organized plutocracy and organized theocracy. All of these things, large and small, led inexorably to the presidency* of someone like Donald Trump.
and pointing out why this can't be made to be a mere passing era, remembering the hundreds of thousands left dead in the wake of the now rehabilitated Bush II (Cheney) regime, the seeds of such forgetting appearing on cabloid shows such as that of Lawrence O'Donnell most nights:
That presidency*, believe it or not, one day will end, and, when it does, the country cannot be allowed to go back to the status quo ante. The damage done by this presidency* can’t be swept out of the national memory the way the damage done by the last Republican president has been. The Republican Party has to be purged of the prion disease, all of it. Because the prion disease has sickened the entire nation now. The progress of the disease is now so advanced that the Republican powers within the national legislature are unable to check the powers of a president* that a good portion of the country believes shouldn’t be within 200 miles of the White House, a form of ideological enfeeblement that may be the final stages of the disease. That there are people who were involved in the disease’s earlier stages who are unnerved now seems to me to be yet another manifestation of it. At least, with kuru, the cannibalism comes at the beginning.
All to which I say a very Catholic and Protestant and Jewish, and Islamic AMEN! even as I know it doesn't actually get to the real root of the disease which is embedded in the Constitution and the line of supposedly liberal First Amendment rulings that I doubt Charles Pierce is willing to seriously challenge, not to mention the ACLU and liberal members of past courts have brought and joined in. If you want to read something that demonstrates that, consider this passage from a self-congratulatory piece on the 40th anniversary of Buckley v. Valeo by Joel Gora, one of the ACLU lawyers most responsible for creating the conditions that Pierce decrys as inevitably producing Trump.
Some thought the restrictions on campaign giving and spending violated the very core of the First Amendment’s protections and undermined the essential role of free speech in safeguarding democracy. They organized a “strange bedfellows” coalition of liberal and conservative politicians and groups to challenge these new Draconian restrictions on political freedom in America. The group of plaintiffs included conservative Senator James L. Buckley, liberal anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy, the American Conservative Union, and the New York Civil Liberties Union. They claimed that, as outsiders and underdogs challenging the establishment and the status quo, they would not be able to get their messages out without being able to raise and spend a modest number of larger donations from friends and supporters. Their lead counsel was Ralph K. Winter, a Yale Law School professor, who would go on to a long and distinguished career as a United States Circuit Judge for the Second Circuit. Another key attorney for the challengers was John R. Bolton, who would later serve in top foreign policy positions and is now a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Yes, that John Bolton, mustache lunatic who was put first proposed to Trump as Sec. of State - Trump didn't like the retro mustache - Ralph K. Winter, one of Reagan's first appointments to the federal judiciary, Eugene McCarthy, who by that time had become a bitter Naderesque enemy of a Democratic Party which would, somehow not nominate him as president, and James L. Buckley, brother of the genteel fascist, William F. soon to be member of the Reagan administration and then, also, put into the federal judiciary by him. And you really could tell what the results would be from the company that Gora and the ACLU kept in that case.
And it's hardly the only time the icon of pseudo-liberalism has kept such company to such oligarchy advancing effect. In the same piece, Gora gives credit to his and that motley crew's victory in the putrid Buckley v. Valeo ruling for it leading to Citizen's United:
That principle would also be the basis for the Court’s more recent and highly controversial decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), holding that these First Amendment rights also allowed corporations, unions, and non-profit organizations to use their funds to communicate their views on government and the politicians who run it.
The principle being that money equals speech, and, by so doing so turns speech into a measurable commodity. Eleven years ago I put that in the form of an equation, mP=s in which m is "money," s is "speech" and P is the constant "Person" with a value of 1, though such a "person" is either one real, human citizen or one gigantic corporate entity. As should surprise no one, when the "P" has billions of dollars that "Person" either a billionaire or billionaires amassed in a boys club or the "Person" is a mega rich corporation, they will have billions of times the "speech" of people without that money. The results in our politics has not benefited We The mere People or the unions or the non-profit sector that Gora was using as a fig-leaf to cover up his shame at enabling oligarchy. If you doubt that's the case then let me ask you how's this going in the laboratory of real life.
Reagan was product of the country produced by the First Amendment rulings that the ACLU and lawyers like Joel Gora got from the least democratic of the branches of government, staffed by a largely Ivy League trained elite appointed for their service to the elite or, in the past, at least not generating waves that would have sunk their aspirations to the federal judiciary. The fact is that that goes back in the past right through the "corporate personhood" insertion and right back to the the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention that produced the potential for this to happen. Charles Pierce is absolutely right to suspect that the same country that went from Reagan to Trump will go right through Trump and on down into whatever degenerate demagogue the Republican primary voters will choose. Just as it went from Nixon - the first beneficiary of that road to oligarchy which began in 1964 with Sullivan v New York Times.
The Trump regime, if it were incompatible or inconsistent with or unacceptable under the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights would have been aborted weeks into it. That it hasn't and well may not be ended, even as blatant treason and high crimes, theft, looting, oppression, racism and insane depravity are its hallmarks is proof that the Constitution contains the seeds of Trumpian fascism and no real inhibitions that will be a reliable prevention of it.
* But who is now a Famous Artist, perhaps a little like what Adolf Hitler would have been if Adolf Hitler had led The Curious Life of Benjamin Button.
There Is Nothing So Obviously Untrue Or Even Absurd As An Accusation Against Religion That Even Academics Need Fear Saying It
I'm sick as a frickin' dog. As the saying goes. I'm going to post a bit more of Marilynne Robinson's essay, The Fate of Ideas: Moses, and try to write something of my own later.
It's tempting to go over the several fairly recent books that she takes apart because they were well chosen to illustrate the typical, current mid-brow, would-be erudition on the topic. The first one is the ridiculous claims of Jack Miles in his "God: A Biography (1995), which is so much like what you'll typically read in online atheist garbage, but it's not the most serious of them. I'll take the two that I think are the most typical of would-be serious
Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (1997) is the work of Jas Assmann, a major German Egyptologist. It dusts off Freud's old theory that Mose was in fact Egyptian. Therefore Moses would have been influenced, Assmnn argues, by the monotheistic cult of Aton, which worshiped the solar disk. (More precisely, it seems the pharaoh worshiped Aton and everyone else worshiped the pharaoh.) Aton tended to go down at night, and there are lovely hymns of relief at his rising in the morning – facts which suggest that this was a lesser order of monotheism, and that Moses's achievement is undiminished. This is another example of the tendentious use of scholarship. Assmann argues that the monotheism of Akhenaton, the pharaoh who founded the cult, was intolerant and hated, and its effects lingered to infect the monotheism of Moses, which was therefore also profoundly intolerant and hated. Obviously there is nothing inevitable here.
Assmann's argument is the sort of razzle-dazzle that depends on coinages like “mnemohistory,” which is the exalted and useful discipline of intepreting history that collective memory has displaced and suppressed so thoroughly only the writer has an inkling even of the fact of suppression. In this cognitive implosion a fusion occurs between Moses and the Aton cultus which conventional history simply cannot achieve. Assmann is writing this book in response to Freud's abysmal question about the origins of anti-Semitism. “Strikingly enough, his [Freud's] question was not how the Gentiles, or the Christians or the Germans came to hate the Jews, but “how the Jew had become what he is and why he attracted this undying hatred.” He paraphrases Freud's answer thus: “Not the Jew but monotheism had attracted this undying hatred. by making Moses an Egyptian, [Freud] deemed himself able to shift the sources of negativity and intolerance out of Judaism and back to Egypt, and to show that the defining fundamentals of Jewish monotheism and mentality came from outside it.” So we are to concede, apparently, that these are “the defining fundamentals of Jewish monotheism and mentality.” Comment is unnecessary, though I will draw attention here to the notion of victimization I remarked on earlier. We Gentiles have the Torah to blame for our own worst moments, it would appear.
Like others of these writers, Assann argues that ancient polytheism was essentially tolerant, “cosmotheism,” and readily accepted other gods, translating them into the terms of the culture that received them. Granting that Melqart, a god of Carthage, did indeed lounge around in a lion skin looking just like Hercules, we have the fact that Rome loathed Carthage and was despised in turn and reduced that great city to bare earth. Athens and Sparta had just the same pantheon, and they fought to the death. And Rome conquered Greece, whose gods it had thoroughly Latinized. That is to say, whatever the merits of polytheism, at best it only obliged people to find other than religious grounds for hostility, which they were clearly very able to do. How the wars of the Hebrews against the Canaanites are more culpable than the wars of the Romans against the Etruscans I fail to see, or why anyone should imagine that these wars were less formative of European civilization than those distant, inconclusive wars among the Semites. Or, for that matter, why they do not prove that the character of the civilization was already formed when Rome set about the conquest of Italy. Miles attributes the structure of Western consciousness to monotheism on the grounds that “the Bible was the popular encyclopedia of the Middle Ages.” But in fact through most of the Common Era in Europe the Bible and especially the Old Testament, existed almost exclusively in Latin, a language incomprehensible to the great majority of people, who were in any case illiterate. So its influence is easily overstated. Yet ferocious intolerance has characterized most of Western history in the Common Era.
Polytheism is as fashionable now as it has been since fascism was in it prime. As a corollary to the current tendency to blame monotheism for intolerance and aggression and genocide, there is an assumption that polytheism must have been tolerant, pacific and humane. This notion is old, too. In The Natural History of Religion, Hume says, “by limiting the powers and functions of its deities, [idolatry] naturally admits the gods of other sects and nations to a share of divinity, and renders all the various deities, as well as rites, ceremonies, or traditions, compatible with each other . . . [By comparison] when one sole object of devotion is acknowledged, the worship of other deities is regarded as absurd and impious.”
It's tempting to go over the several fairly recent books that she takes apart because they were well chosen to illustrate the typical, current mid-brow, would-be erudition on the topic. The first one is the ridiculous claims of Jack Miles in his "God: A Biography (1995), which is so much like what you'll typically read in online atheist garbage, but it's not the most serious of them. I'll take the two that I think are the most typical of would-be serious
Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (1997) is the work of Jas Assmann, a major German Egyptologist. It dusts off Freud's old theory that Mose was in fact Egyptian. Therefore Moses would have been influenced, Assmnn argues, by the monotheistic cult of Aton, which worshiped the solar disk. (More precisely, it seems the pharaoh worshiped Aton and everyone else worshiped the pharaoh.) Aton tended to go down at night, and there are lovely hymns of relief at his rising in the morning – facts which suggest that this was a lesser order of monotheism, and that Moses's achievement is undiminished. This is another example of the tendentious use of scholarship. Assmann argues that the monotheism of Akhenaton, the pharaoh who founded the cult, was intolerant and hated, and its effects lingered to infect the monotheism of Moses, which was therefore also profoundly intolerant and hated. Obviously there is nothing inevitable here.
Assmann's argument is the sort of razzle-dazzle that depends on coinages like “mnemohistory,” which is the exalted and useful discipline of intepreting history that collective memory has displaced and suppressed so thoroughly only the writer has an inkling even of the fact of suppression. In this cognitive implosion a fusion occurs between Moses and the Aton cultus which conventional history simply cannot achieve. Assmann is writing this book in response to Freud's abysmal question about the origins of anti-Semitism. “Strikingly enough, his [Freud's] question was not how the Gentiles, or the Christians or the Germans came to hate the Jews, but “how the Jew had become what he is and why he attracted this undying hatred.” He paraphrases Freud's answer thus: “Not the Jew but monotheism had attracted this undying hatred. by making Moses an Egyptian, [Freud] deemed himself able to shift the sources of negativity and intolerance out of Judaism and back to Egypt, and to show that the defining fundamentals of Jewish monotheism and mentality came from outside it.” So we are to concede, apparently, that these are “the defining fundamentals of Jewish monotheism and mentality.” Comment is unnecessary, though I will draw attention here to the notion of victimization I remarked on earlier. We Gentiles have the Torah to blame for our own worst moments, it would appear.
Like others of these writers, Assann argues that ancient polytheism was essentially tolerant, “cosmotheism,” and readily accepted other gods, translating them into the terms of the culture that received them. Granting that Melqart, a god of Carthage, did indeed lounge around in a lion skin looking just like Hercules, we have the fact that Rome loathed Carthage and was despised in turn and reduced that great city to bare earth. Athens and Sparta had just the same pantheon, and they fought to the death. And Rome conquered Greece, whose gods it had thoroughly Latinized. That is to say, whatever the merits of polytheism, at best it only obliged people to find other than religious grounds for hostility, which they were clearly very able to do. How the wars of the Hebrews against the Canaanites are more culpable than the wars of the Romans against the Etruscans I fail to see, or why anyone should imagine that these wars were less formative of European civilization than those distant, inconclusive wars among the Semites. Or, for that matter, why they do not prove that the character of the civilization was already formed when Rome set about the conquest of Italy. Miles attributes the structure of Western consciousness to monotheism on the grounds that “the Bible was the popular encyclopedia of the Middle Ages.” But in fact through most of the Common Era in Europe the Bible and especially the Old Testament, existed almost exclusively in Latin, a language incomprehensible to the great majority of people, who were in any case illiterate. So its influence is easily overstated. Yet ferocious intolerance has characterized most of Western history in the Common Era.
Polytheism is as fashionable now as it has been since fascism was in it prime. As a corollary to the current tendency to blame monotheism for intolerance and aggression and genocide, there is an assumption that polytheism must have been tolerant, pacific and humane. This notion is old, too. In The Natural History of Religion, Hume says, “by limiting the powers and functions of its deities, [idolatry] naturally admits the gods of other sects and nations to a share of divinity, and renders all the various deities, as well as rites, ceremonies, or traditions, compatible with each other . . . [By comparison] when one sole object of devotion is acknowledged, the worship of other deities is regarded as absurd and impious.”
It is striking to see how the cultural discourse is circling on itself. Perhaps the real familiarity of their arguments explains why these writers I have looked at offer so little in the way of evidence. For example, Assmann, the most scholarly of them, says the Old Testament is deeply informed by aversion to Egypt, then offers no support from the text. And, coincidentally, perhaps, little evidence is to be found in the text. One Mosaic law of unambiguous relevance, which goes unmentioned by him is Deuteronomy 23:7, “You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother, you shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were a sojourner in his land.” This law provides that both Edomites and Egyptians may enter the assembly of the Lord on favorable terms – after three generations that is, which seems long, but which is liberal by comparison with the ancient Athenians, for instance, who never naturalized the descendants of foreigners. Nor, as I understand, do the modern Germans. This one verse is sufficient to demonstrate that there was not hatred but in fact a certain bond between Hebrews and Egyptians.
The idea that the hatred of the Other is the signal preoccupation of the Old Testament is carried to great lengths by Regina Schwartz in The Curse of Cain The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (1997). The following passage gives a fair sense of the book:
“Western culture is laced throughout with a variety of institutions, marriage laws, laws concerning the right of so-called minors, sodomy laws, and a less overt but equally insidious bourgeois morality that specifies which sexual practices and partners are permissible as strictly as Leviticus. These institutions that reduce women to property – wives owned by their husbands, daughters owned by their fathers – are stubborn institutions that are the heirs of monotheistic thinking about scarcity that have kept misogyny alive and well long after the biblical period, institutions that regard a sullied property – a land shared by a foreigner, an adulterous woman – and other variations of multiple allegiances (multiple gods, if you will), as anathema. The tentacles of the injunction “you shall have no other gods before me” reach throughout our social formations, structuring identity as a delimited possession with a remarkable grip”
If there are Eastern polytheistic cultures which cannot be described in the same terms, or in much harsher terms, Schwartz does not name them. So we must take her word for it that monotheism has created misogyny and xenophobia and all the rest of Western culture. For her, monotheism functions as original sin has done traditionally. It is the ultimate source of every evil. And it is entirely located in the Old Testament – the New Testament is mentioned once, in a note. This is an extraordinary burden of opprobrium to place on a literature that was of distinctly secondary significance during the formative stages of Western Civilization, beside civil law and canon law and common law and natural law, beside the New Testament and the teaching of the Church, beside the customs and prejudices that survived Christianization. I think it is unlikely that the Norse or the Franks turned misogynist under the influence of Moses. For some reason the grim prehistory of Christian Europe seems to deserve not a glance Considering the view Christendom has taken of Mosaic law, there is no great reason to imagine that its princelings were deep students of Leviticus.
Schwartz draws attention to the striking perdurability of attitudes and approaches to biblical scholarship that arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This scholarship was the work of Germans for the most part and it was profoundly influenced by emerging nationalism and anti-Semitism – and often brilliant, like so much that was done in Europe in those years. Schwartz draws attention to some highly questionable assumptions that survive and flourish in biblical criticism on the strength of that old prestige. Source criticism, which has given us J, E, P, D, and other such artifacts of learned speculation, was pioneered by Julius Wellhausen in the middle of the nineteenth century. This analytical method is so perfectly suited to conforming the text to the critic's assumptions about it that it establishes nothing. Yet it has profoundly conditioned the reading of the Bible, which is now assumed by many to have been patched and botched and redacted until its intelligibility is at best merely apparent. It is refreshing to see attention drawn to the extremely tenuous nature of so much of the seeming learnedness that cumbers writing about the Bible. Bishop Spong tells us in what order and for what reason the books of the New Testament were composed. Not surprisingly, his hypothesis – which is all in the world it is or can be – make his interpretation of these texts seem downright inevitable. To offer hypothesis as fact is not fair to the nonspecialist readership for which his book is clearly intended. In doing so he is typical rather than exceptional among popular writers.
On the other hand, Schwartz's own approach is full of the mannerisms of contemporary scholarship, eager to indict, indifferent to the strengths and pleasures of the text. It is perhaps this approach which makes her insensitive in her own book to the worst tendency in the nineteenth-century criticism she is so right to consider suspect. That is, its tendency to primitivize and demean the Old Testament, encouraging the belief that it is full of ideas Western culture could be well rid of, that it revealed the “negativity and intolerance,” in Assmann's words, of the Jewish mind. A favorite disparagement has always been that the Hebrew scriptures have little religious meaning and reflect no spiritual aspiration. Every book I have looked at proceeds from these assumptions without comment, as if no reasonable person could take another view. It is perhaps worth noting that the contemporary literary-critical sensibility is rooted in a milieu not so unlike the one that produced nineteenth-century biblical criticism and which was surely influenced by it – in, for example, Nietzsche and Heidegger.
The glaring lapses in the scholarship and the assertions made about the texts of the Old Testament as well as the absurdly unrealistic attribution of such malign power to them in a Western Civilization which, as Robinson pointed out earlier, doesn't seem to have taken any of the radical economic egalitarianism that permeates the entire text at all seriously - discounting the clearly more powerful influence of the pagan cultures which never were entirely expunged in Western Europe or wherever Western Europeans colonized - all of that is typical of anti-Jewish-Christian and to some extent anti-Islamic polemics in the materialist-scientistic, atheist would be elite culture of academia and its seepage into popular, especially mid-brow culture. If you want an example of that, look at how the Ayn Randian thinking of such people as Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, and so many others who claim to be primarily motivated by Christianity and the scriptures are the real motivation behind their actions. If The Law, The Prophets and the Gospels are of so little influence over those who claim that they rule their lives, as they violate all of them, continually, claiming that Moses is all to blame for everything is as absurd a deflection of responsibility as is ubiquitous, today. I think it is bad enough that it should be considered an expression of real but permissible and blatant animus to Jews and the Jewish tradition.
I'll remind you that the entire essay appears in the book "When I Was A Child I Read Book". I've tried to keep up with the publication of Marilynne Robinson's essays but I'm not only one book of those behind, I noticed the other day, another collection is soon to be published. I'll have to catch up but I'm too busy re-reading the earlier ones. She is one of the most important of today's intellectuals, that is beyond any doubt the case.
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Notice
Had an appointment this morning, I will post something later this afternoon. Probably calling for Paul Ryan and Devin Nunes to be investigated for leaking classified information to unauthorized parties. Apparently that letter from the Justice Department (from one of Sessions former staffers!) mentioned that's what Nunes and the other Putin assets in the Congress are doing.
Nub-o Thub-ank Yub-u
I've started to answer any phone call that I suspect is made by one of those bots that mimic a human being in ubbi-dubbi. It's amazing how well they seem to take it, as if I wasn't doing that at all. They just keep going. I think I'm going to respond to them with random sounds next and see what happens.
If it turns out to be a real person I'll, of course, be cooly polite to them and explain what I'm doing before telling them I never do business over the phone. Must be a really shitty job to have. I remember Miss Manners on hanging up on message machines, there's no holding of etiquette that you have to be polite to a machine.
If it turns out to be a real person I'll, of course, be cooly polite to them and explain what I'm doing before telling them I never do business over the phone. Must be a really shitty job to have. I remember Miss Manners on hanging up on message machines, there's no holding of etiquette that you have to be polite to a machine.
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
Wednesday Night Radio Drama - Lucy Catherine - Mablethorpe
Alison, with her life ahead of her, wants to discover the past, while Mrs Gawkrodger, too old even to plant her window box, thinks only of the future. They are drawn together by an old photograph, labelled `Mablethorpe 1952'
Cast:
Lia Williams as Alison
Anna Wing as Mrs Gawkrodger
Producer: Tracey Neale
#MeToo Needs To Do Some Hard Thinking About The Causes Of The Problem Without Changing Those Nothing Will Come Of This
If you want more detail about why #MeToo is in danger of imploding because the problem it addresses is ill defined and the general lack of evidence available to judge accusations you can read more in Matt Kaiser's piece in Vox about the accusation "Grace" made about Aziz Ansari. Such a thing is bound to continue to happen because in most cases, there are only two people who can say what happened, the accused and the accuser They being the only two witnesses able to give evidence as to whether or not there was consent, you can't tell who is telling the truth. I'd go into the specifics given in the piece that match what I said about this issue the other day but you can read the piece. Considering the mess it is, maybe that should be "about these issues".
I will say that the process he describes as the way that colleges and universities are handling this won't continue because in some cases, maybe most of them, there is no real process of determining guilt or innocence. What it looks like to me is that in cases without physical evidence or third-party witnesses, and the fact is there won't be in many, guilt is being declared on the basis of who those making that decision decide to believe. They might get it right or they might get it wrong and that process can as easily let a rapist off as punish someone who is innocent of nothing more than being stupid enough to go into a room with someone he doesn't know and who later falsely accuses him. What might favor women who make accusations can as easily turn around and favor the accused, especially as people have a right to be judged on evidence and in its absence, there has to be a presumption of innocence. I'll bet that within the next few years that is the conclusion of some very expensive lawsuits.
This isn't going to change and it's only going to get worse because we've had fifty years of people being encouraged to screw around and screwing around with strangers or people they don't know while drunk. The idea that casual, semi-anonymous sex indulged in with many different people won't lead to trouble is incredibly stupid, the pubescent, tumescent day-dream of horny 12-year-olds as encouraged by the media and the movies, sex advice columnists and TV sitcoms. Years ago I wrote about a public health nurse I knew who said she could always count on an increase in very young girls with unexpected pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases the weeks and months after the fair, these days I doubt she'd have been able to discern much difference from the generalized irresponsible sex.
It's not going to get better because people aren't going to stop doing the stupid stuff that will inevitably lead to women and men going places to have sex with men who are going to penetrate them and either getting raped on the one hand or the one doing the penetrating being accused of doing things that he either knowingly did or believed he wouldn't be accused of because he believed he had consent. I don't have any more sympathy for Aziz Ansari than I do "Grace" except to say that I am entirely not a fan of anonymous accusations of named people, anonymous accusations should not be published or broadcast because I believe anyone accused, guilty or innocent, has a right to know who is making the accusation against them. I think any media entity that publishes anonymous accusations against specific, named people or people otherwise definitely identified should be liable for being sued. Especially if it's a website that encourages the kind of behavior that is guaranteed to generate rapes and false accusations of rapes because it encourages the behavior that will inevitably lead to that.
You won't stop the harassment and rape until you stop encouraging behavior that will lead to it, corporations might be sued into doing something to restrain the men who work for them, that won't work with other institutions. Universities and colleges might be able to do the same with faculty and staff though threats of firing for having inappropriate social interactions with students. But between students and students and non-students, they won't be able to deal with the consequences and will eventually stop trying to. Then things will go straight to hell.
For crying out loud, DON'T WILLINGLY GET INTO A SITUATION IN WHICH YOU'RE ALONE WITH A STRANGER, ONE WHO MIGHT RAPE YOU OR WORSE OR ONE WHO MIGHT CONSENT AND THEN ACCUSE YOU OF RAPING THEM. And, for crying out loud, don't do it with someone you don't know, especially if you're drunk, you idiot. Grow the fuck up.
I will say that the process he describes as the way that colleges and universities are handling this won't continue because in some cases, maybe most of them, there is no real process of determining guilt or innocence. What it looks like to me is that in cases without physical evidence or third-party witnesses, and the fact is there won't be in many, guilt is being declared on the basis of who those making that decision decide to believe. They might get it right or they might get it wrong and that process can as easily let a rapist off as punish someone who is innocent of nothing more than being stupid enough to go into a room with someone he doesn't know and who later falsely accuses him. What might favor women who make accusations can as easily turn around and favor the accused, especially as people have a right to be judged on evidence and in its absence, there has to be a presumption of innocence. I'll bet that within the next few years that is the conclusion of some very expensive lawsuits.
This isn't going to change and it's only going to get worse because we've had fifty years of people being encouraged to screw around and screwing around with strangers or people they don't know while drunk. The idea that casual, semi-anonymous sex indulged in with many different people won't lead to trouble is incredibly stupid, the pubescent, tumescent day-dream of horny 12-year-olds as encouraged by the media and the movies, sex advice columnists and TV sitcoms. Years ago I wrote about a public health nurse I knew who said she could always count on an increase in very young girls with unexpected pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases the weeks and months after the fair, these days I doubt she'd have been able to discern much difference from the generalized irresponsible sex.
It's not going to get better because people aren't going to stop doing the stupid stuff that will inevitably lead to women and men going places to have sex with men who are going to penetrate them and either getting raped on the one hand or the one doing the penetrating being accused of doing things that he either knowingly did or believed he wouldn't be accused of because he believed he had consent. I don't have any more sympathy for Aziz Ansari than I do "Grace" except to say that I am entirely not a fan of anonymous accusations of named people, anonymous accusations should not be published or broadcast because I believe anyone accused, guilty or innocent, has a right to know who is making the accusation against them. I think any media entity that publishes anonymous accusations against specific, named people or people otherwise definitely identified should be liable for being sued. Especially if it's a website that encourages the kind of behavior that is guaranteed to generate rapes and false accusations of rapes because it encourages the behavior that will inevitably lead to that.
You won't stop the harassment and rape until you stop encouraging behavior that will lead to it, corporations might be sued into doing something to restrain the men who work for them, that won't work with other institutions. Universities and colleges might be able to do the same with faculty and staff though threats of firing for having inappropriate social interactions with students. But between students and students and non-students, they won't be able to deal with the consequences and will eventually stop trying to. Then things will go straight to hell.
For crying out loud, DON'T WILLINGLY GET INTO A SITUATION IN WHICH YOU'RE ALONE WITH A STRANGER, ONE WHO MIGHT RAPE YOU OR WORSE OR ONE WHO MIGHT CONSENT AND THEN ACCUSE YOU OF RAPING THEM. And, for crying out loud, don't do it with someone you don't know, especially if you're drunk, you idiot. Grow the fuck up.
The choice between cynicism and exhaustion is not an inviting one because both are forms of death.
I have pointed out before that the book, The Bible Makes Sense was written by Walter Brueggemann about forty years ago, when Jimmy Carter was in the first year of his administration and already, then, his discernment led him to predicting that American society was on a path that would go through where we are now. Obviously, it wasn't Jimmy Carter who he saw steering us into disaster, it was the general trend of the modern-industrial-scientific culture in which that would seem to be inevitable. I can't say that he foresaw something as base as the Trump regime but his professional study had certainly exposed him to the potential of even a more promising beginning, as is found in The Law, turning into something as corrupt as we live with now.
Life Is a Gift
The other side of the tension is that life is a free gift. In the sixth century B.C., two hundred years after Amos and Isaiah, Israel was no longer proud and secure. Now her institutions had collapsed and her nerve had failed. She now doubted whether sustained life was possible. Perhaps we are on the edge of such doubting in our society. Disintegration seemed very near to Israel. There was (and is) a frantic tendency to want to prop things up and, by being a bit more ingenious, to keep things going. But to no avail.
The prophets in the sixth century aserted the radical notion that a community cannot manipulate life because it is a gift from God, and he has not placed the gift of life at our disposal. That is a warning for every community which takes itself too seriously or values its own resources too highly. So Ezekiel announces that life for this community of despair is a free gift from God:
Behold they say, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is lost,
We are cut clean off” . . .
Thus says the Lord God:
Behold, I will open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people: and I will bring you home into the land of Israel And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will put my Spirit within you , and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land (Ezekiel 37:11-14)
The prophet uses resurrection imagery to speak of restoration of the community and rehabilitation in the land of well being and security. It is pure gift. It is new life in renewed relations.
And his later contemporary also announced to exiles (lost, excluded, dead) that life is a free gift:
Ho, every one who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
Why do you spend money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Harken diligently to me, and eat which is good,
and delight your souls in fatness,
Incline your ear, and come to me;
hear, that your soul may live . . . (Isaiah 55:1-3)
It is the continuing task of maturing for every faith community to embrace both realities that life is task and that life is free gift. Unless they are kept in balance either we will be complacent people who are cynical in presuming too much, or we will be weary people who exhaust ourselves to no avail. The choice between cynicism and exhaustion is not an inviting one because both are forms of death.
In listening this morning to Stephen Colbert's monologue - and I love Stephen Colbert - his saying that the Democrats caved did seem a bit uncharacteristically cynical for him, it's a cynicism that would seem to be the house mindset of the lefty chatosphere, online. I wrote an early blog post in 2006 about why Democratic politicians don't do what we want them to do, asking people to try to consider it from the point of view of a Democrat who needs to be in office to do anything. For Democrats who want to be in office so - if they are a majority - they can pass things like DACA into law, they have to listen to people for who that is a make or break issue but there are other make or break issues for other people whose votes they need to get elected. There has to be a calculation of what they CAN DO out of the things they would love to do and WHEN THEY CAN GET THAT DONE. I like Chuck Schumer a bit less than I like Steve Colbert but his explanation of how he and other Democrats faced the facts they have to deal with made more sense. Anyone who wants to pursue the hard work of making the traditional American liberal agenda - exactly consisting of those teachings Marilynne Robinson pointed out were the hardest part of The Law to live up to - they can't take either of those alternatives of exhaustion or cynicism that blog blatherers and tweeting venters indulge themselves in. I don't think going here is as out of line with what Brueggemann said in that passage as it might seem, I think it's not even that far removed from it. In any case, that's the reality of what we face to welcome the sojourner among us and to treat them as we would want to be treated ourselves. Not to mention the poor who are already here.
Life Is a Gift
The other side of the tension is that life is a free gift. In the sixth century B.C., two hundred years after Amos and Isaiah, Israel was no longer proud and secure. Now her institutions had collapsed and her nerve had failed. She now doubted whether sustained life was possible. Perhaps we are on the edge of such doubting in our society. Disintegration seemed very near to Israel. There was (and is) a frantic tendency to want to prop things up and, by being a bit more ingenious, to keep things going. But to no avail.
The prophets in the sixth century aserted the radical notion that a community cannot manipulate life because it is a gift from God, and he has not placed the gift of life at our disposal. That is a warning for every community which takes itself too seriously or values its own resources too highly. So Ezekiel announces that life for this community of despair is a free gift from God:
Behold they say, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is lost,
We are cut clean off” . . .
Thus says the Lord God:
Behold, I will open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people: and I will bring you home into the land of Israel And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will put my Spirit within you , and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land (Ezekiel 37:11-14)
The prophet uses resurrection imagery to speak of restoration of the community and rehabilitation in the land of well being and security. It is pure gift. It is new life in renewed relations.
And his later contemporary also announced to exiles (lost, excluded, dead) that life is a free gift:
Ho, every one who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
Why do you spend money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Harken diligently to me, and eat which is good,
and delight your souls in fatness,
Incline your ear, and come to me;
hear, that your soul may live . . . (Isaiah 55:1-3)
It is the continuing task of maturing for every faith community to embrace both realities that life is task and that life is free gift. Unless they are kept in balance either we will be complacent people who are cynical in presuming too much, or we will be weary people who exhaust ourselves to no avail. The choice between cynicism and exhaustion is not an inviting one because both are forms of death.
In listening this morning to Stephen Colbert's monologue - and I love Stephen Colbert - his saying that the Democrats caved did seem a bit uncharacteristically cynical for him, it's a cynicism that would seem to be the house mindset of the lefty chatosphere, online. I wrote an early blog post in 2006 about why Democratic politicians don't do what we want them to do, asking people to try to consider it from the point of view of a Democrat who needs to be in office to do anything. For Democrats who want to be in office so - if they are a majority - they can pass things like DACA into law, they have to listen to people for who that is a make or break issue but there are other make or break issues for other people whose votes they need to get elected. There has to be a calculation of what they CAN DO out of the things they would love to do and WHEN THEY CAN GET THAT DONE. I like Chuck Schumer a bit less than I like Steve Colbert but his explanation of how he and other Democrats faced the facts they have to deal with made more sense. Anyone who wants to pursue the hard work of making the traditional American liberal agenda - exactly consisting of those teachings Marilynne Robinson pointed out were the hardest part of The Law to live up to - they can't take either of those alternatives of exhaustion or cynicism that blog blatherers and tweeting venters indulge themselves in. I don't think going here is as out of line with what Brueggemann said in that passage as it might seem, I think it's not even that far removed from it. In any case, that's the reality of what we face to welcome the sojourner among us and to treat them as we would want to be treated ourselves. Not to mention the poor who are already here.
How Much Is The Big Davos Junket Costing Us?
Are all of the dozens of Trump crime family members (and spouses?) going to Davos going to cost us the $70,000 admissions fee? And that's just admission to the den of thieves, I doubt they're staying in cheap digs. I'd really like to know that.
Getting to go to the big meeting of the Billionaire Boys Club doesn't come cheap, I want to know how much it's costing us as they shaft the poorest of the poor.
Billionaires are the greatest danger to egalitarian democracy, equal justice and economic justice, they are the biggest danger to us, short of Trump blustering and bumbling the world into nuclear war. The Billionaires are the reason we aren't doing anything about global warming, they are criminally insane.
If I were in Congress I'd be demanding to know how much the Davos junket is costing us, in total and per person. How much is it going to cost for Mnuchin to go? Is that skanky Louise Linton, his wife, going?
Getting to go to the big meeting of the Billionaire Boys Club doesn't come cheap, I want to know how much it's costing us as they shaft the poorest of the poor.
Billionaires are the greatest danger to egalitarian democracy, equal justice and economic justice, they are the biggest danger to us, short of Trump blustering and bumbling the world into nuclear war. The Billionaires are the reason we aren't doing anything about global warming, they are criminally insane.
If I were in Congress I'd be demanding to know how much the Davos junket is costing us, in total and per person. How much is it going to cost for Mnuchin to go? Is that skanky Louise Linton, his wife, going?
Investigate Nunes
Devin Nunes should certainly be under investigation for an attempt to obstruct justice over his antics of the past year. His position in the Trump transition during which many of the crimes and acts of treason against the United States would make his possible criminal involvement the most probable of any explanation of his stunts to try to impede the investigation into those crimes.
If other Republican members of the house, such as Trey Gowdy who are participating in the congressional Republican attempt at cover up should be similarly suspected of wanting to cover up their own possible criminality, I don't know, I do know Devin Nunes is exactly the kind of person you would expect would have at the very least known of possible crimes he should have reported as part of his obligations as a member of Congress. I think the extremity of his own behavior over the past year makes it very likely that he broke the law and wants to cover it up by further obstructing justice.
If other Republican members of the house, such as Trey Gowdy who are participating in the congressional Republican attempt at cover up should be similarly suspected of wanting to cover up their own possible criminality, I don't know, I do know Devin Nunes is exactly the kind of person you would expect would have at the very least known of possible crimes he should have reported as part of his obligations as a member of Congress. I think the extremity of his own behavior over the past year makes it very likely that he broke the law and wants to cover it up by further obstructing justice.
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Someone Tells Me I Should Title All My Pieces Because They're Easier To Find That Way
I am more and more convinced that the actions of Devin Nunes in his bizarre series of wild cover up stunts isn't trying to cover up for Donald Trump's and his regime's crimes, I'm convinced he's doing it because he is afraid the FBI or the Mueller investigation are going to find out something he, Devin Nunes did that could put him in prison. I'm convinced that Nunes isn't the only member of the Republican caucus in the House who is worried about their own crimes being uncovered by the investigation, I think there are probably a number of those who were close to the Trump campaign and transition who either knew of illegalities or things they suspected were illegal and didn't report them to law enforcement or which they participated in.
I think from now on when you look at the kind of stunts they are engaged in "release the memo" which is a totally Nunes created deflection stunt as was the "unmasking" "scandal," those kinds of things, you should ask what crimes the house members pulling those stunts are anxious to hide.
I think from now on when you look at the kind of stunts they are engaged in "release the memo" which is a totally Nunes created deflection stunt as was the "unmasking" "scandal," those kinds of things, you should ask what crimes the house members pulling those stunts are anxious to hide.
Hate Mail
Of course I oppose the teaching of intelligent design in public high school biology classes in exactly the same way that I oppose the teaching of the materialist-ideological and extra-scientific holding that evolution happened by random chance events acted on by the thread-bare theory of natural selection and that evolution is non-progressive (something which virtually no scientist involved with evolution really believes) and for the same reason, all of those are extra-scientific assertions of the nature of evolution which aren't supported by any physical evidence or any legitimate scientific study of evolution. It couldn't be done with science because by an incredibly large percentage, so much larger than 99% of the actual events and substance of evolution over more than three-billion years, the evidence you would need to scientifically demonstrate those assertions is not available and never will be. The use of evolution to promote atheist-materialism is as anti-scientific as the effort to shove the same scanty evidence of what happened into a fundamentalist 6-day distortion of the first chapters of Genesis.
Twenty years ago I was a fairly conventional, passive acceptor of the claims about evolution, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, though I never, for a second bought that biological determinism of our minds was true. Because I passively accepted, without any serious look at the scope of the problem of evolution and, especially, the origin of life on Earth, I passively believed lines on the idea of intelligent design - as a general idea and NOT as set out by the ID industry - was illegitimate.
The idea of intelligent design isn't properly scientific and it has, by court order, properly been excluded from public school science classrooms, at least legally. Neither is the atheist ideological claim that there is no evidence of design or directionality and that everything is all a matter of random chance and probabilities and the silly putty theory that can be stretched any which way and pick up any image it's pressed into, natural selection. The atheist assertions have not been litigated, of course, but that doesn't change the nature of what they are, an ideological framing imposed on physical evidence for non-scientific purposes. And I will say that whether it's Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne doing that or the side I like better, that of people like the late Stephen J. Gould.
There is not and never will be enough evidence of the billions of years long history of evolution to support such claims. The extent to which the professionals making a living out of saying things about evolution hold with such things the less legitimate it will be as science and the less reliable anything they say about it will be. Though, since there is no evidence of much of what they assert ideologically, there is no evidence to use to attack them with, either except on the basis that all such stuff is not supported by physical evidence that can be rigorously analyzed and subject to rigorous logical analysis.
At least that's what I've come to conclude is inevitable from the fact of the paucity of evidence as compared to the enormous size of evolution. Prove me wrong about that.
Twenty years ago I was a fairly conventional, passive acceptor of the claims about evolution, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, though I never, for a second bought that biological determinism of our minds was true. Because I passively accepted, without any serious look at the scope of the problem of evolution and, especially, the origin of life on Earth, I passively believed lines on the idea of intelligent design - as a general idea and NOT as set out by the ID industry - was illegitimate.
The idea of intelligent design isn't properly scientific and it has, by court order, properly been excluded from public school science classrooms, at least legally. Neither is the atheist ideological claim that there is no evidence of design or directionality and that everything is all a matter of random chance and probabilities and the silly putty theory that can be stretched any which way and pick up any image it's pressed into, natural selection. The atheist assertions have not been litigated, of course, but that doesn't change the nature of what they are, an ideological framing imposed on physical evidence for non-scientific purposes. And I will say that whether it's Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne doing that or the side I like better, that of people like the late Stephen J. Gould.
There is not and never will be enough evidence of the billions of years long history of evolution to support such claims. The extent to which the professionals making a living out of saying things about evolution hold with such things the less legitimate it will be as science and the less reliable anything they say about it will be. Though, since there is no evidence of much of what they assert ideologically, there is no evidence to use to attack them with, either except on the basis that all such stuff is not supported by physical evidence that can be rigorously analyzed and subject to rigorous logical analysis.
At least that's what I've come to conclude is inevitable from the fact of the paucity of evidence as compared to the enormous size of evolution. Prove me wrong about that.
Monday, January 22, 2018
Constant Complaining From The Constantly Consternated
I hate to point it out but if there's one thing I learned from years as a regular at a few blog with established blog communities, if what they predicted was certain to happen came true, virtually everything would have come true, including complete opposite events at the same time.
Getting tired and fed up with the stagy outrage, the histrionic tantrums declaring that such and such a Democrat or the Democratic Party were a bunch of bums was one of the reasons I stopped frequeting such blogs.
No one knows how any of today's events are going to turn out. No one knows what Chuck Schumer knows except that whatever it is it's more than a bunch of self-reinforcing blog rats do. I don't care what prep-schools they teach at or Ivy League degrees they have, those jerks have never sat on a local school board or municipal council and few if any of them ever tried to get elected to the most minor office. I think you'd probably do as well depending on what you discern from a Magic 8-Ball toy.
Getting tired and fed up with the stagy outrage, the histrionic tantrums declaring that such and such a Democrat or the Democratic Party were a bunch of bums was one of the reasons I stopped frequeting such blogs.
No one knows how any of today's events are going to turn out. No one knows what Chuck Schumer knows except that whatever it is it's more than a bunch of self-reinforcing blog rats do. I don't care what prep-schools they teach at or Ivy League degrees they have, those jerks have never sat on a local school board or municipal council and few if any of them ever tried to get elected to the most minor office. I think you'd probably do as well depending on what you discern from a Magic 8-Ball toy.
Ayn Rand - How Is This Still A Thing? - Something To Think About As You Watch The Republican Politicians Make Speeches Today
I can say that this video contains the most comprehensive and spot on definition of "Objectivism" that could possibly exist in English.
Gary Burton - Ralph Towner - Matchbook
Some Other Time
I will confess that this is probably the only song by Leonard Bernstein I actually like, written in the period when Gunther Schuller said he was at his best, before fame spoiled him.
Last Hate Mail I'm Answering On The Fate of Ideas:Moses
Oh, dear, I thought I'd answered that last night. Haven't you gotten the clue yet that when Marilynne Robinson writes an essay like this one that she would have thought of the strife between right-wing Christians and LGBT people such as myself? She makes this point in the last two paragraphs of the essay:
If one were to argue that the attack on Moses is and always has been an attack on the very idea of ethical obligations, one could adduce by way of evidence, first, the fact that where Moses has been rejected, virtue has been of the kind Jesus described as tithing mint and cumin – a devoting of much attention to minor things. When the Bible was finally unleashed on Europe, it set off revolutions.
A second, graver point might be made, too. Every one of these books [those which slammed Moses and the Scriptures that deal with the Law] displaces ethical responsibility away from Christian or modern civilization and onto the Old Testament. It is useful, it is even rational, to excuse oneself and one's own from ethical responsibility by any means at all, let alone by means that reinforce this worst prejudice? And in fact would not justice to Moses restore to this mysteriously religious society something urgently needed, a sense of the absolute biblical imperative to respectful generosity toward the poor and the stranger? When Jesus describes Judgment, the famous separation of the sheep from the goats, he does not mention religious affiliation or sexual orientation or family values. He says, “I was hungry, and ye fed me not” (Matthew 25:42)*. Whether he was a rabbi, a prophet, or the Second Person of the Trinity, the ethic he invokes comes straight from Moses.
* Here's the complete passage Matthew 25:31-46. No where in the Gospels does Jesus condemn anyone for sexual transgressions that I'm aware of.
If one were to argue that the attack on Moses is and always has been an attack on the very idea of ethical obligations, one could adduce by way of evidence, first, the fact that where Moses has been rejected, virtue has been of the kind Jesus described as tithing mint and cumin – a devoting of much attention to minor things. When the Bible was finally unleashed on Europe, it set off revolutions.
A second, graver point might be made, too. Every one of these books [those which slammed Moses and the Scriptures that deal with the Law] displaces ethical responsibility away from Christian or modern civilization and onto the Old Testament. It is useful, it is even rational, to excuse oneself and one's own from ethical responsibility by any means at all, let alone by means that reinforce this worst prejudice? And in fact would not justice to Moses restore to this mysteriously religious society something urgently needed, a sense of the absolute biblical imperative to respectful generosity toward the poor and the stranger? When Jesus describes Judgment, the famous separation of the sheep from the goats, he does not mention religious affiliation or sexual orientation or family values. He says, “I was hungry, and ye fed me not” (Matthew 25:42)*. Whether he was a rabbi, a prophet, or the Second Person of the Trinity, the ethic he invokes comes straight from Moses.
* Here's the complete passage Matthew 25:31-46. No where in the Gospels does Jesus condemn anyone for sexual transgressions that I'm aware of.
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