I'm told I can't write - Hate Mail part of an ongoing series

I'M TOLD I can't write. I'm told that for years.

 

I say I never claimed to be a writer. I've said that over and over again.

Last fall I decide to ask my only close relative who writes for a living,  telling her that I write stuff.    

 

She didn't know I've been writing stuff online for going on fifteen years.  The only person in my family who knew that before is my brother and he NEVER looks at what I write online.  He's my brother, after all.  A prophet not getting any respect in his home town is nothing compared to an Irish Catholic brother who thinks, "meh".

She was surprised, said I had potential.

I remind her of my age.  Surely it's too late.

She says I should try a writing class, see what the teacher says.

I remind her of Covid.  She sends me a URL for an online adult-ed class in creative writing, more or less daring me to take it.

I do. I get the list of assigned writing. The first one was to write a short story about football, I consider dropping out of the course, ask the teacher if I can write about something else. Tell him I don't know much about football except I hate it. He tells me to write a story about what's wrong with football. I tell him I never knew much about it except I hate it, he says research it.

Research is my weakness. I love to research stuff I don't know anything about. I look up stuff about football and find out I hate it as much as I thought I did but I find out some stuff about it to use in the story.  Only one scene is about that.

 

I hate football stories with their cloying sentimentality, I talk to the teacher about that and he says, Write one like

that but which twists that convention a different way, one that expresses your hatred of of football. 

 

[Update: I forgot, he said you should never go against how you really think even in fiction, that you have to have the courage of your convictions.  Might be a good tip.]

 

So I did, it ended up being 45 pages long, he said almost no one else had one five pages long.  No heroes winning games or making valiant efforts, the team doesn't win the season, the kid doesn't end up playing football, he hates it as much as I do but he's a lot less rude about it.  All of the football jocks in it are assholes.  The coach ends up leaving the game and being the better for it, he's the central character of the story. It's told from his POV.

I'm thinking of posting it but the teacher says, Make sure you've got your rights protected.   I don't know how to do that. Maybe I should research it.  He said it's not a bad story, it has potential.

He likes my writing. I tell him I'm not a writer, he says anyone who writes is a writer. 

 

He's published, he teaches writing at the college level. He shares my disdain for people who make their living writing as pop-level critics. "Critics are people who can't write and want to discourage everyone else from doing it." I told him Virgil Thomson said a similar thing about failed composers who went into music criticism.  He said,  Great minds think alike.   I almost point out that's a cliche, but he was making a joke by using a cliche.  He's big on not using cliches,  I don't point out that if you don't want those you shouldn't ask for stories about football.

 

Maybe I was wrong about me not being a writer but I don't know. He's the professional. 

 

He said he includes that football assignment because if there are men taking the class it's something they can relate to.  It could be worse, he could have asked for a romance story.  Maybe the women who are most of the students for the class are smarter than the men who take it.  Too smart for those.  He didn't ask us to write a critical piece.  He respects his students too much.

So You Figure I Don't Know My Harry Potter, I'll Bet You Only Watched The Movies

I READ all of the Harry Potter books, I read the first four or five of them numerous times to two of my nieces and the last two at least once to them.  I started when the older one had read the first one at the age of five (she's the best read person I know under the age of 70) and the younger one didn't read yet.   Editing things I didn't want them to think about on the fly like making fun of Dudley's obesity, some of the other things I didn't want to expose them to thinking about.   

They liked me doing the voices, Hagrid's presumably "Onslow" voice, McGonnagal's burr, Dobby's beleaguered squeak, Snape's quiet, low level menacing sneer, Voldamort's hiss (had to change it for when he was a kid and teenager, tough character to figure out) - kids that age aren't as cynical as they'd be older and they were a captive audience.  Uncle Anthony wouldn't let them watch TV.  The older one asked me to record some of it for her - she's applying to law school this year.  She said she liked the way I read them.  I don't know if I can do the voices anymore.

I'd match my knowledge of the books against you any day though, as I said, I didn't watch the movies.  I haven't read any of them since the day I read the last chapter of Harry putting his kids on the Train to Hogwarts to my nieces the last time.  I picked up one of them in the English edition and looked at it but figured I was done with them.  Maybe I'd read one of them in another language if I had it.  I really liked the German translation of book 1 and the French translation of book 3, though I don't know why Snape became "Rogue" in the French translation.   Bet you didn't know that, Mr. Pop Culture IQ.

Lent Continues

Dear God, thinking about Good Friday and the longer and lesser crucifixion of this illness and our own cross we will die on, the one we all will have, no matter how we avoid it, help us through it to the end, help us through it to our lesser resurrection in YOU, lesser in comparison to the one on Easter but everything to us in our limited lives.  Even more than my little salvation is the final Resurrection of all life in you, eternally.  Without that mine would be worse than nothing. 

Few Days Late But I Figure It's About Time I Started Doing Lenten Penance Here

Dear God outside of time and causation,  please heal those things I did that can't be fixed in time and causation, the mean things said, the mean things done. Repair those, working them out in the process or end of all things in you.  Heal those I've wronged better than new, and so me as well.  Or better, us.

Degrees of Stupid - Hate Mail

Positive: Hallmark Channel Stupid

Comparative: Spike Channel Stupid

Superlative:  Play-lefty-Green Party  Stupid 

Note:  This is based on a conversation I had with my brother when I was still exposed to cable TV.  I dropped it ages ago so I'm not sure if there are more apt current adjectives. 

I Would Bet Everyone Who Read The Phrase "Legalistic Legillimency" On My Blog Understood Exactly What I Meant By It, That's My Goal

I'VE gotten some flack for using the word "legillimency" in a title a few days ago, I make no apologies for using it, I do it boldly because the word conveyed both by denotation and connotation exactly what I meant to use it to convey.  The book, if I recall correctly, in which J. K. Rowling introduced the word for the first time was "Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix", the fifth of the books, I believe it was used in the next two books.

HP&TOOTP sold five million copies on the first day of publication and, Harry Potter fans of the day being what they were, I would guarantee you that it entered into the recognition if not use vocabulary of at least five million English speaking readers hours after the book was released - Harry potter fans didn't buy the books to leave them unread for a day -  probably many times that within the first month after publication.  I don't know what the sales figures of the book have been in the last seventeen years but I'm sure many more millions of copies of the book have sold since then in English alone.   I never read that one of the series in any other language but I'd guess that as soon as it was translated into most if not all the languages it was translated into, that word entered into the recognition vocabulary of many millions of more people in other language communities around the world not long after that. I would doubt that many neologisms in most "high literature" or scholarly works or essays could match that word for number of literate people who could tell you a precise definition of it is.  

A word becomes a "real word" through its use by people, that use is later recognized in reference works but it is the use of it that confers its status as a real word, I am not a Harry Potter fanatic, I know there are many of them, I'm sure that a large, though smaller group of the human population have used the word "legillimency" many times, on online and other forums, probably in scholarly works, even, use of a word also confers the status of it being a "real word" on a word.  I would bet you that that particular word is used far more often by far more people who understand it to have the same meaning than most of the more and less obscure words in a collegiate or unabridged English dictionary.   

The Merriam-Webster website (I love the Merriam-Webster website)  has an article about "real words" that are used in the Harry Potter series, in the listing  of "Arithmancy" it says,

The most important feature of the wizarding world is not it flora or fauna, but magic itself. Divination, charms, potions, alchemy: all of these are words that we’re familiar with, and words that we already associate with magic. But there are other magical words Rowling uses that may pass you by.

Arithmancy is one such word. It is, as any fan of the books will tell you, Hermione’s favorite subject: it is divination using numbers and numerology. The word dates back to the 1500s and is a combination of arithmetic and the suffix -mancy, which means “divination.” Arithmancy wasn’t just fictional: there are numerous 17th-century records stating that arithmancy was not just magical, but also religious and philosophical. In fact, arithmancy was common enough that the word arithmancy has an entry in a very early English dictionary:

Arithmancy (Gr.) divination made by number, which hath consideration and contemplation of Angelical vertues; of names, signacles, natures, and conditions, both of Devils and other Creatures. —Thomas Blount, Glossographia: Or A Dictionarie Interpreting Hard Words, 1661

Blount also mentions arithmancy in his entry for cabala, which he defines as “a hidden Science of Divine Mysteries”:

Arithmancy, Theomancy and Cosmology, are said to depend on the aforesaid Cabala, which (to give you also Reuclins definition of it) is nothing else but a kind of unwritten Theology.

You’ve probably already figured out that Rowling also used the suffix -mancy in naming two other types of magic that are important to the series: occlumency, or the magical art of shielding one’s thoughts (a likely blend of the word occlude, or “to hide,” with a slightly altered -mancy); and its comparative term, legilimency, or the magical art of reading one’s mind (heavily influenced by the word legible, or “capable an article about "real words" of being read,” with the altered -mancy).

If Rowling had not included the word  "arithmancy" in the series, I bet not a fraction of one percent of those who would have known exactly what I meant by using the word in the title as I did would know the "real word."  Though, due to her use of the suffix in question, they may well have figured out what it meant. I make no apologies for using a word that probably tens if not hundreds of millions of people around the world know and know the meaning of to communicate the idea it was invented to mean, taking advantage of the fact that if there is such a thing, it's nothing that the law of the United States should insist can and must be done in the application of the law. 

 

You may notice I have concentrated only on the use of the word in the books, not in the movies made on the books.  I only saw part of the first and all of the third of the movies, I didn't much like either - hated the music.  I would imagine they use the word in the movies so perhaps many times more people than I imagine learned the word from the books learned it from the movie, but I don't know much about that. 

 

I would bet you that many, perhaps most of the many neologisms contained in the "Shakespeare" canon don't have the current frequency in either the recognition or use vocabulary of educated or uneducated English speakers that the word in question does.  A few of them are of disputed use by even the author, at least one I'm aware of very likely being a spurious introduction by likely Dutch typesetters who didn't speak much English.  It didn't enter the language on any other basis.  Is it a real word?

 

This Passed The Stage Of The Ridiculous Decades Ago, It Has Reached The Stage of Mass Murder By Lies By Media And Republican-fascist Politicians

Still with the internet problems but that's nothing compared to the problems in Texas and other places where Republicans have destroyed the power grid, so I shouldn't even be complaining about it.  I will be trying some work-arounds so I can post something every day again.  I think it's just that and not burn-out to go with the brown-out.  

As for Texas and the Governors, since George W. Bush and various other gangsters who have run that state, anyone who thinks that lies are a necessary evil, claiming they MUST be allowed free reign else our "liberties" be lost,  while sitting at their writing desks in New York or DC or Boston where the full impact of Republican-fascist lies are either mitigated or minimized, it's easy for them to say.  As easy as it is for straight, white, affluent males generally have it as opposed to People of Color, etc.  

There is no reason for anyone to be stupid and irresponsible enough to claim there is a right for a common citizen to lie.  While some lies may be too slight in their effect to bother with something as unwieldy and cumbersome as even the civil law to be used to fight, there are many lies that are so serious in their outcome that they should be suppressed with all of the weight of the appropriate legal and judicial apparatus, from small-claims to civil courts right up to courts where the most serious of lies can get people imprisoned must be brought to bear in fighting them and their effects. 

People are dying in Texas, right now, due to lying, lies told in the mass media for the benefit of Republican-fascist politicians right up to the ones the Republican-fascists have told while they hold public office.  Those media lies should be subject to serious civil consequences and regulatory consequences, there should be a death penalty either by suing them into hell or pulling their broadcast licenses, cabloid and internet media of consequences should be held to similar possible corporate death penalties.   The ones told by elected, sworn office holders and those who are sworn employees of governments should also be liable to criminal penalties for serious lies, ANY LIE TOLD BY AN EXECUTIVE, A LEGISLATOR OR A JUDGE SHOULD RESULT IN PERMANENT LOSS OF OFFICE. 

A lot of the foundational lies that have come to their putrid and poisonous fruit in this latest Texas mass murder by Republican-fascist deregulation lies in lies told by those at elite universities and stink-tanks.  The University of Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, etc. and the push for "classical" economics in the 1970s and on is directly responsible for this.  But I don't expect academia to hold its plutocratic prostitutes accountable, getting the courts to do it is hard enough, academia is harder to get held accountable than any part of the government. 

The Dangers Of Legalistic Legillimency

THE journalist Michael Sean Winters who writes regularly for the National Catholic Reporter is one of the most underestimated writers who are currently working. Many times I've found things that I go over and over in my mind are apparently going on to more productive ends in his, sometimes it's things that he has thought of which I and those I've read haven't thought of.

His excellent analysis and excoriation of the Republicans' acquittal of Trump for fomenting and encouraging the seditious insurrection against the Capitol and the democratic form of government, Trump's impeachment: 'The cowards stand aside,' has many points I could write full posts on, I'll concentrate on one of those, the dodge of questioning whether or not Trump believed the lies he told to incite and encourage the insurrection, the assertion that if he did believe them, whatever that means, that means he's not guilty. It's a quasi-judicial form of the ridiculous claim that if a liar doesn't believe his lies are lies that means they aren't lies. Something which is impossible to prove and, so, is a permission given to those who you choose to pretend to believe that about.

Let us return to election night. In the early hours of the morning, he addressed a group of supporters in the White House. He listed some states he had indeed won, such as Florida and Texas. He prematurely claimed he had won Georgia and began casting aspersions on the decision by Fox News to call Arizona for Biden. He correctly said he was winning Pennsylvania, but failed to note that very few of the mail-in ballots had been counted. "We were getting ready to win this election," Trump said. "Frankly, we did win this election."

It was hard to know that night if he believed what he was saying. It is often difficult to know if Trump and his followers really believe the demonstrably false things that come from their mouths. One of the most dangerous qualities about a narcissist is their penchant for believing their own propaganda, which creates a variety of sincerity. As the ballots were counted and it became clear Trump had lost, his speech became more fantastical. After the votes in the states were certified and the electoral votes counted in the state capitals, he supported a bizarre legal challenge from the attorney general in Texas, which the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed without even granting it a hearing. By the fateful day in January when Congress was to ratify the votes from the states, his legal challenges had been tossed out in almost 60 cases. His last-minute effort to get the secretary of state in Georgia to "find" 11,780 votes, in a Jan. 2 phone call, showed how desperate and disconnected from reality Trump had become.

Intent is a key element in a crime but it is often difficult to nail it down when the accused is not really tethered to reality. Further, to sustain a charge of inciting an insurrection, you would think the former president's intent would need to be made crystal clear, that he wanted those people in that crowd to storm the capitol building and do … what? It is not at all clear how he thought this would play out. His defense lawyers and political allies argued that his repeated calls to fight were metaphoric, that his speech was no more an incitement than the speeches of many Democrats who sometimes use combative language.

It is a nice question: How did Trump expect the mob was going to "stop the steal"? Republicans say that the difficulty in answering that question required an acquittal because the connection between his fiery language and the actual misdeeds of the mob was necessarily too diffuse. Weeks later, we still are not sure what he or they intended. How could that be deemed a high crime?

Trump's defense, then, was that his language about fighting and stopping the steal was metaphoric. But what was the metaphor? Did he expect the mob to enter into the Senate or House chamber and put forward some amazingly persuasive argument that would convince enough of the legislators to toss out the certified Electoral College votes of the several states? Was he hoping they would make an appeal to the United Nations? Was he expecting divine intervention?

That lays it out as clearly and well as I've ever seen it laid out.

 

Of course, if Trump did believe his lies that would have meant he was dangerously delusional and should not have been allowed to remain in the presidency due to that self-serving, or rather Trump-serving claim made by the media and by Republicans. 

 

And that is true of the whole list of delusions that Trump would have had to be dangerously mentally impaired to have believed, including the effect that his words would have on his cult of fanatical followers. Clearly, as the House Managers pointed out, Trump had every reason to know what his words would incite in Washington, DC on January 6th because he knowingly and demonstrably incited some of the same Trumpzis to plot the attack on the Michigan Capital, the abduction of the Governor and her assassination, he clearly knew about that and other incidents which his words had incited, would be and attempted practice runs for what his cult did in Washington DC.

I don't buy for a second that that alleged judicial standard, that you have to demonstrate the state of mind of a liar to show that they knew they were lying, that their words would have the clearly intended effect that they would have, that you would have had to pretend that a result other than what had resulted from such language in the immediate weeks before something like the January 6th insurrection happened is a standard that is consistently applied in anything like a pose of objective equality.

I wonder why, for this, the old slogan "ignorance of the law is no excuse" is suspended so regularly for the likes of Trump, fo people in the government (though only some of them) and others who hold white-collar jobs of responsibility unwisely given to those prone to such delusion. Because that's what this standard is, it depends on something far more common and far less credibly believed than mere ignorance of statutes, though that as well.  Allowing some of the most dangerous of crimes against domestic tranquility, the rule of law, the very basis of legitimate government off because of the allegedly less than lucid state of mind of the criminal. I am absolutely certain that it isn't a standard that would be applied to a poor criminal accused of far less consequential and dangerous crimes unrelated to their job and their position in society. I'm sure judges would have no problem ignoring their probable genuine ignorance of the law or their ignorance that what they did was wrong, mistaking the sometimes less obviously untrue lies they told for a sometimes less obvious truth. I have absolutely every confidence that if it were possible to tally cases in which this alleged standard of telepathic conviction or acquittal were appplied that People of Color, the poor, the disfavored, probably even white women would not be granted the lenient standard of phony-psychological dismissal of guilt that rich, well-educated, white men, especially those who are Republican office holders, are given by tradition, by habit and by the choice of those who are lying that they believe they didn't know exactly what they are doing. 

 

It is one of the worse effects of the selling of the powerful elite on the lore and nonsense of psychology, that such uses of it as benefit the elite are allowed when it sets up an impossible burden of evidence demanded before the simple act of calling a liar a liar and stopping and punishing the most dangerous liars is permitted by the legal system or, as the abysmal impeachment and removal provisions of the Constitution puts in their power, by the Senate.  That kind of an out will never be applied evenly, it will always be a permission to get away with murder given to those favored by the established power, that's literally what the Republicans under the Constitution did for Trump, he got away with murder.   

I don't remember the name of the, I believe it was Washington Post writer who mocked a 1970s era Supreme Court ruling that dealt with the issue of the mind-set of journalists on some free-press issue.  He said when he started there were two states of mind among journalists, drunk and unconscious.  Dark humor over an issue of journalistic license to slander and libel, as I recall.  But it wasn't that much different from the absurd notion that the law, what lawyers claim in courts, what judges instruct juries as to what they should and shouldn't consider, what Supreme Court "justices" use to give out privileges to lie and to defame or to hold others accountable for telling the truth, to claim that that can hinge on the unknowable mental state of a president who lies repeatedly, flagrantly obviously knowing what they are doing by lying is as dangerous as it is an invitation for the kind of use of it we saw in Saturday's infamous acquittal.

Cut It Out

 I don't have anything to say about sea shanties and Americans or Brits or, for that matter Canadians, Australians or New Zealanders singing them that's going to make you happy.  Why do you want me to upset you?

By The Powers Invested In Me As An Old Gay Man I Hereby Dub Him . . .

"I thought the impeachment trial was not only unconstitutional, I condemn what happened on Jan. 6, but the process they used to impeach this president was an affront to rule of law," Graham opined. "We've opened Pandora's Box to future presidents."

Lindsay "Faghorn Laghorn" Graham 

Do you like the sea shanty fad?

Sea shanties should be sung only by real sailors, at sea, on a boat where I am not.  Other than that, I'm agin' 'em.

Stiff The Lawyers And The One You Can Hire One Will Turn Out To Be A Bottom Feeder From The Swamp

I was curious to look up what the name "van der Veen" means and was tickled at the aptness of it meaning "from the bog" in Dutch.  Apparently it's a moderately common surname in the Netherlands.   It's certainly appropriate to have Trump's ambulance chaser lawyer have it.

In Praise Of The Servants Of All The People And Realism About The Peril We Are In

IF ANYONE ever dares to doubt brilliant, experienced, battle hardened but still graceful and eloquent, old Nancy Pelosi's status as sharper and more focused and more rational than just about anyone should have her impromptu appearance at the press opportunity with the House Managers yesterday pushed into their idiotic faces. 

 

She had not intended to get in the way  of the House Managers, she is nothing if not graceful and would only upstage them by compulsion by events.   The House Managers under Jamie Raskin had just performed a five day virtuoso performance that will stand with any other such one at the top of such endeavors.  Then Mitch McConnell did his vile, hypocritical act of trying to rescue his name and his fascist party from the ignominy of OKing seditious insurrection done by a president of his Republican-fascist party.*

It's not to take anything from Jamie Raskin and his team of spectacular prosecutors to focus on Nancy Pelosi, their names deserve to go down in history in honor for what they did, far, far higher in such status than the classical speeches of the Roman Senators or any made in classical Greece BECAUSE THEY WERE ARGUING FOR EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY WHILE EMBODYING THE PRINCIPLES OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRATIC MORALITY AND INTELLECTUAL EXCELLENCE IN THEIR VERY IDENTITIES.

Anyone who worships at the altar of classical political discourse while ignoring the fact that it is the yet developing sense of egalitarian democracy in which the highest moral and rational levels achieved, perhaps achievable by human beings is happening during our lifetimes, the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents. In American terms that was something which did not start until the abolitionist movement began among those held in slavery and who had escaped slavery, aided by, first a few not at risk individuals such as John Woolman and later, when the promises of the Declaration of Independence were reneged on by the Constitution, by increasing numbers of white abolitionists.

Everything that is admirable in the American nation is a product of the struggle for equality and justice for all against the aspects of the Constitution and the law which either promoted slavery and inequality or merely chose to leave things as they were in the 1780s, after the revolution had failed to achieve the equality promised. Nothing about our history or our present which resists or impedes the progress towards equality and justice for all is admirable, no matter how often those things are covered up with slogans of 'freedom' and, usually with worse intent, 'liberty'.

No evil thing that people do can rationally or morally be considered to be done by some "right," no, the ubiqutious misuse of language that expresses the granted liberty, the PRIVILEGE of doing wrong by some always comes at the cost of equality and justice for other people. There is no right to harm other people, there is no right to lie to them, to cheat them, to gull them into doing evil, themselves, those things are only considered as "rights" or "liberties" through the corrupt stupidity and often complicity of those who make and, especially, those who administer laws. The Supreme Court has pretty much for most of its history been the place where such privileges to the rich and powerful and male and white have been given out or confirmed, cemented into place with the force of Constitutional doctrine. But if it had not been there to start with, if the promises that Jefferson et al gulled common men into fighting a revolution for them with had been kept, the Supreme Court wouldn't have found what they did so much evil with for its entire history, it would not have been essential to go beyond the words of that document and its writers to get past the intentional evils embedded in it, many of the worst of those not reformed out of it in the centuries of coping under it and the growing unwillingness of those who were subjugated by it to remain subjugated.

One of the first brawls I remember getting into online was over the issue of the impeachment of Bush II and, especially, when lefty bloggers and their communities targeted Nancy Pelosi when she refused to go through the futile and pointless exercise of trying to impeach the illegitimate and criminal Bush II and his Regent, Dick Cheney. She knew what I had come to believe was true, that impeachment as a means of removing even the most criminal president is a Constitutional fiction, it was never going to happen. I remember one of the most bitter parts of that long, ongoing brawl at the baby blue blog was when I slammed not only Edward and Caroline Kennedy for giving Gerald Ford the "Profiles In Courage" award for the purely evil act of him pardoning Nixon, but I also did the unforgivable, I slammed JFK for giving Edmund Gibson Ross as a "profile in courage" for his likely bribed vote to acquit Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial. JFK, a president who has done nothing but sink in my esteem, the more I learn about him, and, I suspect, his daughter and brother cared more about "the stature of the presidency" than they did the fact that Andrew Johnson was an eminently impeachable and terrible president. The presidency, especially through holding up presidents in the way Kennedy promoted during his administration, has not suffered from a realistic view of presidents as voluntary servants of The People, properly held as great only to the extent to which they serve ALL of The People, equally, promoting and extending democracy, the common good and general welfare of all.

The corrupt Republican-fascist presidencies of the 21st century, the current corruption by lies in the permission given to the media to lie with impunity, have brought all of the evils extant in the Constitution to their head. All of the skills for the evil to exploit those, all of the legalistic arguments allowing them to do that have been perfected and extended - the use of computers has aided in that to a degree where either egalitarian democracy addresses those EXACTLY IN TERMS THAT REMOVE PERMISSION TO DO EVIL FROM THE CATEGORY OF CONSTITUTIONALLY PROTECTED RIGHTS OR EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY WILL DIE AS A RESULT OF SUCH "RIGHTS".

That is the lesson of the failed impeachments of the most criminal president who has not brought an illegal war about have as lessons for us all. He came to power on the power of mass media told lies, lies told by him amplified by TV, cabloid TV, hate-talk radio and social-disease media. Anyone who holds on February 14th 2021 that we can allow the old ACLU- "Civil Liberties" lines on the right to lie to continue is, in fact, a tool of Repubican-fascists if not a fascist themselves. We make that stand against lies and hate talk now or we should just give up and let the fascists take over now. The sooner we do that the sooner the terrible, bloody civil war that will come from that is fought and we know if government of, by and for THE PEOPLE perishes from the Earth to be replaced by government by gangsters of the kind which the Republican-fascists of the Senate acquitted yesterday. 

 

Little noticed while this was going on President Joe Biden asked for the resignation of almost all of the U.S. Attorneys for their resignation except two, those two were assigned by the previous corrupt "Justice" Department to investigate the Obama Administration's investigation into election rigging, and so Joe Biden when he was Vice President and the one assigned to go looking for dirt on Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden.   I think Joe Biden shows every sign of being a greater president than the only previous Irish Catholic president, JFK.   He already has every Republican president after Eisenhower topped in that category.  Not that I trust the damned journalistic profession to come close to noticing.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Hughes Travers - Lambo

Lambo 

 

Lambo by Hugh Travers is a fictionalised account of a story that stormed the airwaves and gripped the nation almost three decades ago. It is 1987: a story hits the headlines that sends an unsuspecting Irish nation reeling in shock and disgust - a story of brutality and bloodshed, of depravity and gross deception. A story of murder. Gerry Ryan has killed a lamb! Kind of. Maybe……

A co-production with Underscore Productions and RTÉ Drama On One

Featuring Michael Ford Fitzgerald as Gerry Ryan

Writer Hugh Travers

Sound Design Trevor Furlong

Sound Engineer Richard Mc Cullough

Theatrical Producer Aisling O'Brien

Director Ronan Phelan

Series Producer of RTÉ Radio Drama Kevin Reynolds

It's kind of an off beat comedy,  with one person playing all the parts. As a suggestion of what you might do all on your own with a script and a recorder.   I've given you the link to the  RTÉ Podcast page where for now it's on the top.  If you don't like this one there are plenty of others to try. 

 Hearing the shocking case that the  impeachment House Managers made so brilliantly, so convincingly, yesterday,  seeing the brilliance and diversity of the House Managers,  realizing the incredible intellectual depth and moral stature of the Democratic Caucus in the House is, SEEING THE BEAUTIFUL DIVERSITY OF THE MANAGEMENT TEAM, I am humbled and so proud to be a member of the same Democratic Party that they are members of.

Realism In Law Making Is As Important As Realism In Religion We Have Way Too Little Of Both

YESTERDAY I hope I convinced some readers that since women are the only people who are governed in a serious way by laws about abortion that, as the governed, they are the ones who have a superior right to determine what those laws would be. If you take the principle that just laws are only just by the consent of those governed by them that is in the Declaration of Independence seriously, I don't see how you can possibly not believe that is the case.  I am not going to entertain the claim that that is not true unless the one making such a claim is read to have the state nationalize their bodies in a similar manner to that discussed.

But a large number of people seem to believe that men in general and women who oppose the legality of abortion have a right to regulate the bodies and so lives of women who do not think abortion should be illegal or who decide, for themselves, that they need or want an abortion.

Whether or not there is a distinction that anyone else has a right to distinguish between the right of a woman to choose to have an abortion if she needs an abortion or wants to not bear a child, that isn't a distinction I feel I have any right to draw, no more than I would feel someone else has the right to determine anything about my body in opposition to what I want or need to do with it. If I gave people the right to dismiss a woman's right to determine how she wants her body to be, I would be morally obligated to allow them to also have that kind of a say over how I want my body to be. I know of no man who is prepared to allow the state or even a majority or plurality of voters to exercise that kind of a right over his body. Women who are opposed to abortion certainly aren't prepared to allow other people to make those decisions for them. I would hold up the accusations against the Chinese and other governments which have forced women to have abortions they didn't want to have or men who have prevented women from practicing birth control and so forced them to become pregnant as analogous usurpations of bodily autonomy and self-determination.

That people who oppose abortion believe, or claim to believe, that a fetus or even a fertilized egg cell have full status as humans cannot change the fact that women who are pregnant and who may or may not share their belief will and can exercise their ability to have an abortion. As I mentioned yesterday, women had abortions when it was seriously illegal in every state, going to extreme and dangerous measures to have an abortion,whether self-induced or, often, in the most dangerous and exploitative conditions. Often with the knowledge that they may have died in the process.  While there is debate as to whether a fetus is a person or not, certainly not an independent human beings, there is no arguing that a pregnant woman or girl is a human being whose life may well be ended by a back alley or motel room abortion.

Clearly making abortion illegal will not end abortions. That is something that the anti-abortion rights side seldom if ever are confronted with, they certainly don't choose to bring up that fact, themselves. Nor do they ever address that they are demanding the state regulate the bodies of women in ways that the men AND WOMEN who oppose abortion would never tolerate be done in the case of what they want to do with their own bodies. There have been a number of instances of women in the anti-abortion movement who have had abortions when they chose to have them but, relieved of that possibility, they then want the state to prohibit other women from making a choice they already have made for themselves or, in some cases, those in their family. I strongly suspect that certainly many, perhaps most of the politicians who campaign against abortion would, if it was their daughter or their son's unapproved of girlfriend, would probably cut themselves and their loved ones one of the exceptions that those with power and money love to make for themselves.

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But I know there are poeple who sincerely do believe that abortion is immoral and who are prepared, in the absence of the possibility of preventing abortions, take the moral position that whatever can be done to minimize the number of them as far as is possible. Being an Irish Catholic, from a liberal Catholic family, having family members who sincerely believe that human life starts at conception, I strongly believe that is probably the position of many, most if not all of the prominent Catholic politicians who the Republican-fascists, especially those among the US Catholic Conference of Bishops, love to target using the issue of abortions.

The reality is the only way to prevent abortions in most cases is the prevention of pregnancy. The idea that you are going to do that by preventing sex is even more of a stupid denial of the realities of human life than the fantasy that you are going to end abortions by making them illegal. That wasn't the case when there were serious social stigmas and penalties and even laws preventing premarital sex, adultery, and other voluntary sexual behavior, and none of those are seriously the case now. Any priest or bishop who pretends that is possible should consider the scandals among priests and bishops who secretly farthered children out of wedlock as to what a ridiculous assertion that that is going to happen is.

There is a choice, either you can stop abortions by providing people with the knowledge and means of preventing unwanted or unsafe pregnancies and the support of WOMEN to make the decisions as to when they are going to consciously become pregnant, or you can refuse to do that and be part of why the United States has such an absurdly high number of abortions, conservatives and prudes and ministers and bishops and purity crusaders probably leading to more of those than were ever done by Planned Parenthood in their entire history. That is the only real way to stop abortions, to give women the means and knowledge of how to avoid becoming pregnant, to encourage them to take that initiative, to emphasize that abortion is not an ideal choice to have to make or to choose if you can avoid the problem to start with.* Having the Supreme Court overturn Roe, having all the Republican-fascist run states outlaw abortions will only ensure that the abortions that happen will either be in other states or they will be illegal and dangerous but they will happen anyway.

I would note that men have it in their power to prevent unwanted pregnancies, sometimes more unwanted by them than the women they have sex with, but men don't have the same level of interest in this as the women whose bodies are the ones which become pregnant and whose lives are altered by it. Men have not, by and large, practiced anything like responsibility in this area, only one more reason to demote their role in law making in this area. I will point out, as a gay man, that what can be said about that in regard to straight sex and pregnancy is also sayable in terms of having responsible sex and the spread of STDs. While noting that straight people aren't any more notably responsible when it comes to avoiding the contracting and spreading of STDs either.

Face it, people are stupid when it comes to sex in most cases, promoting responsibility is an uphill battle when the fight against unwanted or inadvisable pregnancies and STDs is taken on. Pretending you can do that by having an absurd and dubious figure of religion waving their fat finger at people is as ridiculous as any QAnon fantasy. Anyone who thinks a Cardinal Burke in his absurd clerical drag, or even the less absurdly dressed men in the Catholic hierarchy have any real credibiity on this issue should check the opinion polling of Catholics who think abortion should be legal and who practice birth control - and I don't mean the fraud of the rhythm method.

What we need is realism, not absurd poses and the lies by those who strike such poses. We need that about this issue as all others.

"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed "

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .

So said Thomas Jefferson, a claim of the basis of legitimate government that the signers of the Declaration of Independence put their names to and which has been ratified in any number of ways - however observed at least as much in the breech as in the observance as soon as the Revolution that the document started was won by those who sought independence for the thirteen colonies.

I am going to be doing something that I have at best no business getting involved in, though in reality some interest in, writing about the issue of abortion and how it has and is going to continue to play the role of a sticking point in American politics, perhaps the pivotal one in turning elections in the United States, certainly in the Senate, to Republican-fascism.

That issue doesn't properly appertain to me because I am a man and abortion is an issue that does not directly impinge on the life and body of any man. Only women become pregnant, only women either need or want to end a pregnancy, only women have abortions. Only women are governed by laws on abortion, men are not governed by those laws, arguably doctors who provide abortion may have a minor, secondary legitimate interest in those laws but those laws do not regulate or determine the most intimate aspects of their lives, their own bodies. Just as I think the legitimate right of the state to regulate things stops at a person's own body, the legitimate interest of the individual to determine what other adults do in their bodies stops there as well. 

 

That statement I made the title of this piece, when those men said "among Men" they really meant men, there is no reason we should limit the meaning of it in the same way.  We certainly know better than they did, just one of the advantages of time and learning from hard experience which the "originalists" think we're supposed to ignore for all time. 

 

Abortion does, though, have an enormous effect in who wins elections in the United States, the people who comprise the legislatures and executive branches of the federal and state governments, and, so, in that way all of us have an interest in the issue and how it is thought about.  I don't think most people think about it in a particularly productive way, that is as true for those who favor abortion being legal and those who oppose it.  Abortion as an issue has not gone away despite the large majority of Americans favoring the legality of abortion anymore than there is any real prospect of the Republican-fascist packed court really overturning abortion except in those states where people imagine they want it to be illegal.  I suspect that if the Supreme Court did overturn it and many states made it illegal, the effect may not be what the opponents of abortion believe it will be.  I remember when abortion was uniformly illegal, very illegal.  There were many abortions and there were many women injured and killed by them, many women who endured terrible ordeals.  Making abortion illegal has never ended abortions, it has only made them dangerous, deadly and the business of organized crime.  I don't remember the churches much being bothered by that, for reasons I'll get into. 

That phrase that I am certain any American who has any awareness of the Declaration of Independence or who holds with American democracy will certainly agree with, Jefferson's definition of legitimate governance, I certainly do agree with. He would have gone down through history as a far greater man if he had consistently held with it in his life and his career as a politician, though he would certainly have had to have had far larger numbers of American voters who would have practiced what they no doubt professed in so far as that idealistic statement claimed was a self-evident truth.  That majority or plurality was not to be found in 18th or early 19th century America, it's hardly reliably decisive in elections today.

But, then, the even more self-evident truth that only women are governed by any law made in regard to abortion and so THEY are the ones whose just consent to any such law is required to make any law in regard to abortion and that men, who cannot have abortions, cannot have the same standing to consent to laws made in regard to abortion as women do, those self-evident truths hardly make it into the discussion of abortion laws.

The Catholic Church, the Southern Baptists (whose shifting position on abortion is a whole epoch in hypocrisy, in itself) and other churches which presume to dictate the morality of abortion are entirely under the control of men.  Especially in the Catholic Church that issues is essential in understanding, among other things, why a majority of Catholic Lay People do not agree with the central authority of the Church. The glacial pace of inclusion of women in the effective decision making in the Catholic Church is so far behind that it is big news that Pope Francis has appointed exactly one woman in the entire history of the Church to have that kind of role and as of the other day it wasn't clear that the one Religious Sister he appointed will have equal voting rights with the men on that body. Clearly, women's' voices are not part of the decision making on much of any issues in the Catholic Church, that this one woman's appointment is world-wide news shows that in no way have women as a whole have never given just consent on any issue, never mind those issues that either entirely or almost entirely concern them, their lives and their bodies. In no way can any such laws, whether made by the hierarchy of any religion or secular government have the level of legitimacy that I have no doubt if you caught them unaware and put the question to them, every single cardinal, bishop, priest in the United States or throughout most of the world would assert is the very definition of legitimacy in governance or law.

The line that the Church is not a democracy is often recited by those who have no problem with it being an oligarchy or autocracy of men, of unmarried men, of men who have consciously and deliberately excluded women from decision making and law making from time immemorial.  If God didn't intend the Church to be a democracy, there is no evidence God intended it to be an autocracy, either.

The history of the United States is most comprehensible as a struggle between the words of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, the promises of equality and democracy made in it to those they sought to fight their war of independence, if you overlook the racist slanders against the Native People and some other passages of it, and the successful attempt by the slave power, the wealthy and the advantaged to renig on those promises and to install inequality and anti-democracy within the Constitution. The entire struggle for justice in the United States, the only thing that is great in our history and in our country is a struggle for the principle that government is legitimate only when it is a product of the consent of those who it governs. ALL OF US.

The United States has no state religion, its government is a secular one, something it must be to establish its egalitarian nature in a religiously diverse country. It has no higher authority than the will of The People, the just consent of those it governs. The struggle against slavery, against the genocide of the Native People, against the denial of the vote to women, the rights of workers to the product of their work, all of the many rights all of that is a struggle against the Constitution and, as The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. noted, it is The People who are deprived of justice calling the promissory note that was written and signed in July 1776 with a demand that the debt be paid. Any politician who has any legitimacy has taken it upon himself or herself to be answerable to The People on an equal basis. The churches may declare that they are not democracies and be satisfied with that, the American government should not have the luxury of not noting that any such church which excludes women from decisive decision making are not, by the definition of American democracy legitimate deciders of those decisions and dogmas and doctrines that impinge exclusively on women. The US Catholic Conference of Bishops have no moral standing to make those decisions and try to force them on the government and so, The People, of the United States. They may have standing to do so in other areas WHICH DO NOT EXCLUSIVELY APPERTAIN TO A HALF OF THE POPULATION WHICH THE BISHOPS EXCLUDE FROM DECISION MAKING, but not in the matter of abortion, by their own choice. 

I don't think there can be any just law making in regard to abortion if the fact that women are the ones governed by them is not the decisive factor in making those laws.

Anti-president Trump As The Mar A Lago Anti-pope of America's Flawed Democracy

DUE TO the wi-fi problem on my street, I was thinking of not writing anything this morning but I came across this article by Jamie Manson and was struck by this passage:

The church is in a remarkable position, one that it hasn't been in for centuries. We have a scenario that is akin to the rise of an anti-pope.

As most of us remember from high school history class, during the Western Schism, which began in 1378, there was a pope in Rome and an anti-pope in Avignon, France. But there was also a second anti-pope who took up residence in Pisa, Italy. The first Pisan anti-pope was Alexander V. He died early in his reign and was succeeded by another anti-pope, who, believe it or not, took the name John XXIII.

There have been more than 30 antipopes in the Catholic Church's history, and they typically had factions behind them who questioned the validity of the election of the pope in Rome.

Regardless of how cognizant Benedict is of what is going on around him, he has a vocal, well-oiled faction of radically traditionalist Catholics who do not accept the authority of the current supreme pontiff.

This widening fissure in the church is, of course, what comes with vesting one man with absolute, unchecked, quasi-divine power.

As can be seen from the scandalous behavior of traditionalist Catholic bishops and cardinals, Dolan, Burke, Strickland, and a large number of other American and even foreign cardinals, bishops, even priests, many of the same who have tried to set up the retired pope, Benedict XVI as an anti-pope as an assertion of the illegitimacy of good Pope Francis, are as all in on setting up Trump as an anti-president. Nothing much good came of the anti-popes of history, some of them were as corrupt as the worst in-Vatican Popes but few of them could outdo Donald Trump in his lavish corrupt depravity. While I have been extremely critical of Benedict XVI from even before he became Pope, minus the red shoes he loved to wear and his choices in other matters, he couldn't come close to Trump in corruption and vulgar disregard of Christianity.

I had thought I might comment on the substance of the article that passage comes from but I will wait to do that. I thought this should be pointed out.  I think calling Trump the anti-pope would stick in the craw of the Republican-fascists among "catholic" neo-integralists (that's Catholic talk for "white evangelicals" among us) but it would take some explanation for most people, including many Catholics who probably never heard of the anti-popes.  Calling him "anti-president" in lower case is probably more effective.