Christian Nationalism Is Not Christian And Why The Worship Of The Past Is Dangerous

THE SHORT ARTICLE, Why Christian nationalism is unchristian by Thomas Reese, SJ, a Jesuit, had a quote from a letter from John Adams I found interesting to think about, I'll give you the setting of it because it is relevant to things I posted recently.

Today, many Americans embrace Christian nationalism, arguing that the founders of our republic were Christians and they meant us to be a Christian nation. While it is historically true that most of our founding fathers were Christians, it is also true that they wanted a secular government, free of religion. They had seen how uniting politics and religion in Europe led to religious persecutions and wars. These wars and persecutions led many to flee Europe for America. The founders wanted a government that would treat people of all faiths equally.

For John Adams, that meant even allowing the Jesuits asylum.

"I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits," he wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1816. "Shall we not have regular swarms of them here, in as many disguises as only a king of the gypsies can assume, dressed as printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters? If ever there was a body of men who merited damnation on earth and in Hell, it is this society of Loyola's. Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum."  

I would like to know more about just what John Adams knew or believed he knew about the Jesuits and whether or not it had a factual basis in the activities of the Jesuits.  Since the article that quotes it, positively, was written by a Jesuit, it would be interesting to know what Reese knows about that. Considering the Protestant religious establishment by that time in Massachusetts, a state which Adams was deeply involved in, included from more than a century earlier, Protestant "printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters" it was pretty rich of him to say that as if it was sinister. Considering Harvard University which Adams and his children were educated at was founded by ministers of religion, he certainly should have seen the illiberal hypocrisy of his statement. And the Calvinist-Congregationalist complex in Massachusetts was matched with other Protestant establishments, including actually tax-payer establishment of religion even after the adoption of the Constitution.  We're still years seventeen years away from disestablishment in Massachusetts and more than several of the several states. It is especially rich considering if you translate that into the terms of a few centuries before, you would pretty much describe the entire means by which learning and education happened everywhere in the Western world, no doubt things which both Adams and Jefferson would have considered some of the actual best things about European culture.  I would also want to know what actual knowledge of "gypsies" Adams had to include them in his accusations.  And among the "founders" John Adams was among the most generously liberal in his point of view. John Jay certainly wasn't so liberally inclined toward Catholics, having been among those in the Continental Congress to more or less call for measures that would ban Catholics from having full citizenship.  

I think a lot of the animus toward the Jesuits tended to come from the fact that they tend to be very well educated and well trained at argument and debate.  Something you'd think a lawyer like Adams would be expected to admire.  Though I'd be ready to say there have been some really awful Jesuits and still are, just like any other category of human beings.

The article goes on in a way that fits right in with what I said about the discrepancy between the Golden Rule and the U.S. government as it is, my contention that Republican-fascism with its large "Christian nationalist" contingent is an appendage of the Mammonist anti-Christ.

Christian nationalism is also wrong theologically. True, as Christians we should love our country, but Jesus tells us that we must love everyone as our brothers and sisters, even those of other creeds. This includes our fellow citizens and those of other nations.

We cannot ignore the poverty, hunger and sickness that afflict people outside our country. We cannot ignore violations of human rights and the rights of workers that provide us with cheap goods from abroad. We cannot ignore global warming because we have air conditioning. We cannot ignore exploitation of the environment because it is not in our neighborhood.

As Christians we cannot turn our backs on refugees from Haiti, Africa, Mexico and Central America. All are our brothers and sisters.

I'd start by noting that by the time Adams wrote his letter, the man he wrote it to, Thomas Jefferson had begun the long campaign against Hatian democracy which has blighted what might have been a far more successful Black republic than that oppressed country has been. Jefferson certainly thwarting that because he and his fellow slave-holders would not want that as an example to those African-Americans they held in slavery here.  The legacy of that effort in all of the other places mentioned by Reese would take a library to document and comment on, as well as the treatment of People of Color and other minorities in the United States.  A pattern that would be repeated over and over as Latin American and Central American countries gained their independence and American slave owners dreamed of conquering them as a means of extending U.S. slavery to its ultimate protection and which has as recently as the Reagan and Bush I administrations characterized American foreign policy toward Central America. Those policies of the 1980s driving, among other things, the violence and economic crises that drive illegal immigration into the United States, you would require another vast library to document that.  The subsequent 19th and early 20th century history of, at times, violent hatred of Catholics would take a much smaller libarary but the matter was hardly settled by the time of Adams' 1816 letter. Anti-Catholicism was a serious factor in American politics in that period up to and including the election of Kennedy and, today, in a far more muted way, Joe Biden.

More generally consider the first sentence in the passage, "Today, many Americans embrace Christian nationalism, arguing that the founders of our republic were Christians and they meant us to be a Christian nation."  

I have to ask why what those often racist, often bigoted, often far from honest or entirely wise and certainly entirely inexperienced in 21st century life dead white men wanted should be of any more concern to us today than what a far wider group of Americans wanted in 1964 and 1965 in the high point Congressional egalitarian democracy was reached.  Why should what they wanted concern us any more than the enormous number of Americans who voted for Joe Biden and his campaign's stated intentions?  Any election ratifying the Constitution, those who elected the Congress and legislatures which adopted the Bill of Rights was no more a valid expression of the popular will of the American People than the far more inclusive election that overturned Trumpian fascism by putting Joe Biden in office.  If looked at objectively, the elections of the late 18th and early 19th centuries don't pass any kind of honest evaluation as an expression of the will of the American People.

A similar attitude among areligious or even anti-religious, devoted secularists among liberal or even lefties who hold themselves up as the biggest most devoted devotees of the Constitution is even more baffling.  Idolatry among those who are largely members of heretical pseudo-Christian cults such as abound among Republican-fascists might be more understandable then those who believe that all that remains of those long dead founding fathers is their constituent molecules who proclaim a similar form of idolatry.  I think that Luke Timothy Johnson's theory that the creation of idols is a intrinsic aspect of human thinking has some merit, something which even those who believe themselves to be materialist-atheist-scientific stalwarts inevitably and cluelessly do, something which it is a moral obligation of religious people to always review their thinking for.

Many more Americans of vastly different backgrounds and identities wanted what Joe Biden advocated, not much of what the white, exclusively male, almost exclusively Protestant, exclusively rich aristocrats who met in 1787 in Philadelpha wanted. Certainly Women and People of Color didn't want much of that.  It is absolutely bizarre that so many of us hold as an unquestionable article of faith that that group of most certainly non-democratically chosen rich white guys wanted MUST govern us today when none of them have wanted anything for a long time due to having been dead two centuries.  The way the Constitutional Convention was filled is everything from obviously not the choice of more than a tiny fraction of the population to even shadier than that should be more widely known. The popular conception of that today is about as dangerous a superstition as has ever been the focus of a mass delusion.  As I've said before the presence of a Hollywood-TV series conception of "1776" and junk like the Gadsden flag at American fascist rallies and the January 6th insurrection is more than just a symptom of that, those trappings of current American-fascism really expose the basis of the danger in that mystico-historical superstition.  

Now, that's something Adams might have taken as a serious danger to the country, it certainly worked out that way.  Other than running a number of the elite prep-Ivy Equivalent institutions which join the Harvards and Yales of post-Protestant Ivy elite education, credentialing the high end and not a little of the lowest end of establishment fascists (Cruz, Hawley, Kavanaugh, Alito, Roberts, etc.) lots of other Jesuits have been quite radical egalitarian democrats, far outdoing Adam's friends Jefferson and Madison in that regard.  And it is something which is the excuse for the Republican-fascists on the Roberts Court to overturn all of the progress of not only the civil rights struggles of the post-WWII period but even going back far into the 19th century.  

In contradiction to Adams, I remember the fine Congressman, the late Fr. Robert Drinan SJ OF MASSACHUSETTS with enormous respect, especially his notable calls for equality and justice in American foreign policy and in the United States.  I suspect his election in Adam's old stomping grounds would have made him turn over in his grave.   I should mention that after Pope JPII forced him to retire from electoral politics, Fr. Drinan taught at one of those Jesuit universities I've been most critical of, Georgetown.  Which doesn't much decrease my esteem for his memory though I'd never turn him into an idol.

 

Galileo Must Weep When He Sees What They Did To His Philosophy - Yeah, more of that

ONE OF THE MOST important events in my late-life reconversion to religion and guarded confidence in human reason was reading the statement of a Rabbi whose name I wish I remembered that "reality is real."  It was a response to some, probably, pop-Buddhist assertions but reading it it put into an aphorism kind of woke me up.  Having always realized that materialism was a road to complete nonsense, I might have gotten here by another route but reading that phrase put a lot of things together for me and led me out of the absurd and cowardly agnosticism I'd been stuck in.  

Another step was reading the atheist and early computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum who noted that all knowledge, even that of mathematics was, in the end, dependent on persuasion, on the choice to believe in early childhood what we go on to consider the basis of knowledge.*  Arthur Stanley Eddington's observation that the direct experience of our own consciousness is the primal educational act in our lives, all else being inference based on that may have completed the basis for most of what I've thought since I was in my early 50s.  

Mentioning eliminative materialism the other day, it is, actually, about the nadir of academic intellectualism in service to ideological scientism, as decadent as could possibly be imagined.  Since you don't seem to know what that is, here.

Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all [underlining by me] of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist and have no role to play in a mature science of the mind. Descartes famously challenged much of what we take for granted, but he insisted that, for the most part, we can be confident about the content of our own minds. Eliminative materialists go further than Descartes on this point, since they challenge the existence of various mental states that Descartes took for granted.

I will say in passing that it eliminates much of what one of the founders of modern science based his scientific philosophy on is significant in appreciating the decadent degeneracy of that ideological production.

That it is held as a respectable intellectual stance in modern universities, expensive, tax-exempted or supported educational institutions supposedly dedicated to the cultivation and elevation of and educations of the very minds that eliminative materialism wants to dismiss as either insignificant or really existing at all, should be held as discrediting them as honest brokers.  It is an intellectual position that means that the very activity of the university is meaningless, INCLUDING WHAT IS DONE IN THEIR SCHOOLS OF SCIENCE, THE VERY CLAIMED INTELLECTUAL BASIS OF ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM,  it sort of takes the cake in terms of intellectual absurdity.  Yet the holders of that position are well paid, even honored faculty members in some of our best universities and regularly presented in both academia and the media as having an honorable, even favored intellectual position.  Always suspect that behind a pose of respectability in such instances, there will only be more pose based on appearances. I attribute a lot of that to the gross ignorance of science among the college-credentialed who run those things.  Including many of those employed in those schools of alleged science who are, as well, philosophically inept.

You would have to give me a lot of evidence to convince me that anything in the most benighted aspects of medieval universities could begin to match it for the most absolute of intellectual decadence right now in the alleged enlightenment, modern period.  Materialism is the most absurd ideology which could only possibly be true if it were false, it is always bound to produce decadence.  Being amoral, empowered in human history, it produces oppressive violent amorality, whether fascist, national-socialist or Marxist or capitalist.  

And it is, actually, an intellectual position born of that displacement of the merely methodological rules of science done to observe and describe the motions of planets, later smaller objects, still later atoms and  their combination into molecules and, much later, subatomic particles, from being a method that isolated what was needed to efficiently describe those limited aspects of them, a displacement of that methodological efficiency into an all-encompassing ideology that claimed those methods, or, rather, what was increasingly turned into a parody of it was an all-encompassing explanatory framing that could not only explain everything but to also exclude from existence anything it could not explain.  Human consciousness escaping the nets of the methodology of science, it had to go even as the pseudo-scientific extension of that parodistic "methodology" in psychology and, even more irrationally, ethology, was a profitable business in university "science".  When you call it "science" it is granted a presumption of validity that even its history of catastrophic failure disguises for purposes of funding and mendacious utility to power.  If Galileo had foreseen his tool for seeing and describing the moons of Jupiter would be turned into an all-encompassing hegemonic ideology pretending to see what cannot be seen (even that producing some of the least valid and durable of any "science," though treated as if it were classical physics) and dismissing what it couldn't, of the sort science has been distorted into in the subsequent period, I am certain he would have been appalled.  

If you don't come up with something that says why that position and the several rest-areas of modern pseudo-science and modern degenerate philosophy in their way to it follows the actual methodology of science or why institutions that are allegedly in the business of elevating and improving what those degrade into a deterministic meaninglessness or non-existence, human minds, are not benightedly degenerate and, worse, dishonest, you got nuthin'.  

* The pretense that there is a hard line between what is believed and what is known is an illusion, as many of the imaginary bright lines dividing up our mental lives are.  Another of those is the idea that sincere belief is something that happens involuntarily to us which is unrelated to an act of choice, that what we "choose to believe" is different than what "we really believe." I think agnosticism is related to a choice to believe that what we "know" is some kind of natural process which has no element of volition involved, that it just happens without our intention being involved.  I think that is a delusion based in something like the choice to believe scientific methodology is an all encompassing tool for determining everything.  When you hear that said by someone like Bertrand Russell who certainly knew his scientism was intellectually unsupportable, the power of that elite delusion on some of the most acute of minds is quite impressive.
 
Update: The biologist and champion of classical scientific method, Rupert Sheldrake's challenge to debate the Harvard CSI(COP) champion of ideological pseudo-science, Steven Pinker, is worth reading in regard to the trashing of honest intellectualism and even scientific method by the "science" faculties of our most esteemed universities.

Someone Doesn't Like Me Calling America's Indigenous Tradition of Fascism What It Is

I'd Rather Live Under A Government Imperfectly Based On The Golden Rule Than Under Any Modern, Pseudo-Scientific Constitution - Hate Mail

I FEEL LIKE I HAVE gotten someplace with the idea that the scientism of modern thought following the merely clerical choice to exclude questions of moral responsibility as the equal if not the absolute prerequisite for wisdom and "rights" to assume the character of goodness and virtue instead of the characteristics of evil and harm, is one of the most serious of ways in which things have gone to hell.  

The scientific exclusion of moral responsibility is something that works well when you're talking about unconscious objects in space* which exhibit no understanding of moral responsibility or the value of consequences or even an ability to choose a different outcome, using that merely clerical exclusion and making up laws to describe their movements and combinations with other objects, laws which work very well, but an exclusion which doesn't work at all when you're trying to make laws to produce a decent, sustainable life among human beings which are far more complex and likely not ever susceptible to the successful making of similar laws.  

The elision of moral responsibility in science when it was taken as an ideological framing of reality has dangerously distorted modernism into something which cannot sustain a decent life and, in its worst manifestation, never had that intention to start with.  And many if not most of those who framed the American Constitution, at least in principle, did adopt that 18th century materialistic superstition.

I have been opposing that with the assertion that the formula of The Golden Rule is actually a sounder framing for creating a governing egalitarian democracy and a far more decent society, it seems to me that idea has a lot more potential for doing that than any of the approved theories of modern, academically authorized, pseudo-scientific political "science" or economic theories.   It should certainly not be an objectionable idea to those who profess one of the Abrahamic religions, as it is central to the moral holdings of all of their Scriptures and, since it is one of the long-standing and totally irrational barroom style atheists' refutation of Christianity that something similar has far more universal presence in different religio-philosophical traditions,** should be acceptable to the human population far beyond those of the Abrahamic faiths.

The extent to which "white evangelicals" hold with "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," in all aspects of politics and the law is the extent to which they are not Mammonist hypocrites, servants of the anti-Christ.  

It should certainly not be objectionable to anyone who wants others to do to them as those others would want them to do to them, which is, of course, anyone who is not pathologically masochistic.  What most people don't like is the reciprocal obligation that they do the same.  

While no one who tries to do that to others can be responsible for making more than their end of it happen, civil law can be written to require it of those who are reluctant or unwilling to or, in the end, refuse to do so.  Of course when those enlightenment 18th century figures. all white-men of property, most of whom were financiers or slave-holders, who wrote the Constitution and adopted the bill of rights were making the Constitution, they had absolutely no intention of holding up their end of the bargain, so they limited who they were required to do unto in that way and excluded all of those they certainly didn't intend to do right to.  That is absolutely clear in the language of the Constitution, the anti-democratic corruptions baked into it and still present, the permissions for courts and, especially Supreme Courts to go hog-wild in extending inequality.  I think the history of the "enlightenment" and pretty much the entire modern period could be written in the rejection of the Golden Rule on the basis of science and instrumental reasoning.  Of course, you could write the history of the entire medieval period on a similar theme, a theme that goes back in Western history to the treatment of the Children of Israel under the genocidal oppression of Pharaoh.  The "historical" books and the books of Prophesy contemplate the problems that come from refusing to do so and the refusal of those who rule the egalitarian reciprocation of that as a legal obligation.  

The campaign to discredit Christianity and, to some extent, Judaism and religion in general in the modern period is an attack on egalitarian democracy because that has been the foremost source of an effective assertion of that moral basis for egalitarian democracy.  The source which has had the greatest part in producing whatever success there has been in making something in that direction the law of the United States and other countries.  And I think that the source of that discrediting in either the economic elites and their scribes in academia and, even more so, entertainment writing is quite likely to have been motivated, in no small part, by a rejection of their obligations to do to others what they would have done unto them.  The material, Mammonist rewards for shafting other people certainly makes that rejection very seductive to those who love money.  It is matched in the overtly racist white-supremacist strain of American indigenous fascism with the same desire to exploit, rob and oppress People of Color for economic advantage - not a little of the common received racism of the American white underclass was at the encouragement of those who exploited them as well, taking advantage of their cowardice in opposing those who were really robbing and exploiting them.  I have come to believe cowardice of that kind is of far more explanatory power than other psychological theories of lower-class racism.  But I think there is always a motive of not wanting to treat people as you would want to be treated is at the bottom of it.  Though, in the corrosive effects of long-term racism, resentment of those oppressed and the reaction to that is another component of why things have gotten so bad.

The Golden Rule has certainly never been the basis of despotic, dictatorial governance any more than that it has been the law that governs organized crime gangs.  Such despots, dictators and gangsters have often been very smart, very knowledgeable, very rational and logical, they have sometimes made great use of science and other tools of might and wealth.  None of them could operate as they do if they suddenly adopted an intention of equality and insisting that all of the gangsters do to others what they would have done to them.  Religious establishments, sects, denominations, "most Christian kings" who don't hold to that law of reciprocal justice are little better than crime gangs, themselves.

The motivations behind the invention of science are intimately tied up with the "triad of control and pride" the Prophet Jeremiah came up with of might, wisdom and wealth, wisdom to more effectively exploit physical resources and power to enhance might and wealth.  Especially in the context of science as a social, political and legal entity, I don't think you can ever really cut it out of that triad. And while power and wealth could be distributed in a way that would produce material equality, that requires a morality that the method of science excludes from consideration. The moral responsibility that is necessary for producing and sustaining decent human life is an insoluble hard problem when you start by cutting that out and insisting that it is irrelevant.  When you pretend that science has all the answers, something that is not, itself, answerable through science, then you guarantee that inequality and an indecent, unsustainable hell will be the result.  Knowledge that doesn't make you free is incomplete knowledge.  Modernism insists on keeping it that way. I stand by what I said about the vulnerability of the idea of rights to be as wrongly used as wisdom in that context.

* Though the idea does have problems even for science as the factor of consciousness impinges on the activity of science. A product of the fact that science exists only in human minds and, therefore, the conditions of human thought are inevitably relevant to the results, especially the more subtle the objects of physical science get.  I have an enormous skepticism for the retreat of some of the, actually, somewhat more honest atheist-materialist philosophers into panpsychism, which tries to skirt the "hard problem" of consciousness, what it is, where it comes from, how something which materialism cannot account for or deal with arose as an aspect of life arising and evolving, the inevitable discrediting of minds by an assertion of materialist determinism of our minds.  What they're doing is just kicking the can down the road so they can pretend they've solved the problem.  I think the problem is that consciousness is quite a different thing from material objects and, so, it has qualities and abilities and conditions that physical science - developed under a set of assumptions about unconscious objects moving and combining - was never designed to address.  I think Roger Penrose's assertion that consciousness is an entirely different realm than physicalism just as mathematics is a different realm form matter makes more sense, though I doubt he'd agree with a lot of what I think.  I think eventually, even in the unlikely event that panpsychism is adopted as the hegemonic framing of science and, so materialistic scientism in the broader culture, problems like those panpsychism is resorted to to address will arise despite of that nifty idea that temporarily distracts clever people from that.  No human framing is going to avoid those problems, that's a real hard problem for scientism as it is for all of human culture.

** That line of thinking, that the assertion that "the Golden Rule" is some kind of humanly noticed universal moral truth discredits those religions which have made it the overt summation of "the Law and the Prophets," is far more rationally seen as discrediting the pop and elite atheism that makes such an assertion.  It is remarkable how the universal noticing of that central moral holding of Jewish and Christian Scripture is held to discredit the truth of Judaism or Christianity is such a central pillar of modern, scientistic anti-religion.  I'd like to see what other universally held truths are used to discredit those entities which hold with them.  

That Christans, for example, have had such a hard time following the Law and the Prophets in practice being used to discredit the truth of Christianity makes about as much sense to me as discrediting mathematics on the basis of how few people really master long division or basic algebra. I've known many materialists who were lousy at math, probably even more now in the calculator dependent generations.  [See discussion above of the differences between physical law created to describe unconscious objects and that which is invented to regulate human choices acted on without a single result.]  

I would say that if you are going to claim logic and reason as the basis of your ideological framing that failure to practice those to the extent to which you want to claim that Confucianism or ancient Babylonian legal codes noticed the same moral principles as the Mosaic Law and the Gospel of Jesus is to fatally discredit Christianity is a far more important and definitive discrediting of modern popular or would-be elite atheism.  I would cite such claims of ancient, universal, non-Abrahamic noticing of that principle of the governance of human life as support for my claim that it is a sounder basis of a Constitutional order than "enlightenment" scientistic, allegedly impartial and "even handed" amorality.

In the end I really don't find there is much of a difference in quality between elite and cheap and dirty pop atheism.  That of the Churchlands or that of The Amazing Randi.

Trump-appointed-judge Aileen Cannon grants Trump's demand for special master BEFORE DOJ weighs in

 

 

This stinking, rotten judge should be removed from the bench, if there is no legal means of doing that, the state of the law is extremely inadequate and dangerous. 

Dreams Of Violent Revolution Are The Milquetoast Fantasies Of The Scribbling, Tenured Class - Hate Mail

MARXISM IS NOT the most radical* form of socialism, the socialism that insists that the workers rightfully own the means of production and the profits of their work is entirely more radical.  So radical that something like that was Marx's dreamed of end of things in which even the state would disappear in an era of harmony and cooperation among People.  Some anarchists preach something similar, though anyone who expects human beings will ever live peaceful lives without some form of civil authority of some kind are unrealistic romantics.  There has never been such a thing in groups of people larger than a few dozen and I doubt there has ever been anything like it even in groups that small.

Marxist socialism in practice replaced the investor class with the gangsters who ran undemocratic governments, the history of Marxists with power is a history of worker oppression from the time when Lenin and Trotsky suppressed unions with bloodshed worse than the worst union suppressing atrocities that happened in the gangster gilded era in the United States and as they were beginning to take power in Russia.  It is remarkable how clueless those dear old American commies were as to why they couldn't gain a real toe-hold among "the masses" in the United States who, for some reason, passed up the chance to have what their heroes in the Soviet Union (later China) were giving The People in that imaginary worker's paradise and unimaginable oppression and terror. It's almost as remarkable how few of America's commies chose to flee this terrible place to live in Lenin's then Stalin's, etc. worker's paradise.  Of course, most of them were in the scribbling class, not the laboring class so it was all imaginary.  And not a few of them had tenure at American universities and colleges or good jobs on the movies, with a good package of benefits.

Imperfect as it is, as fraught with gangsterism as it is, the minimal democracy of the United States was always a better deal even for its beleaguered underclass than what communist rule brought virtually everywhere it was tried.  I will admit that Cuba, in some limited ways, did some good things there but at such a cost, I might not choose to live there but I would bet lots of Americans would, at times, like to access their medical system, ours given way to investors and managers and physician-gangsters.  Marxists are just more ruthless gangsters than those of the past in the United States, who had to contend to an extent with voters and who, some of them, retained some vestiges of Abrahamic religion either through family heritage or through even some of the more twisted forms of the Baptists, Calvinism or Catholicism.  That has certainly diminished in the succeeding generations of America's indigenous criminal classes, the old money rich, the new money rich, those in the white supremacist branch of America's indigenous fascism.  Now the modern sci-tech-age billionaires are, for the most part, inoculated with scientistic materialism and, so, are unbothered by Abrahamic morality as the worst of the Marxists were, even those who profess a religion or came from it like that poster boy for American gangster-billionaires, Peter Thiel, who came from an "evangelical" background.  I have no doubt that if our billionaire gangsters succeed in what they've partially achieved under Republican-fascism and in the Roberts Court, actual governance of the country, they will be as bad as the worst Marxists have been.

I don't think even the democratic-workers own the means- socialism I believed in is sufficient as more than a subsidiary tactic, in the end. I've had some experience of cooperatives and some of those who participate in them are pretty self-seeking and ruthless.  Some of them are as cold and stingy as the coldest tech-billionaires.  It takes more than some kind of nifty economic-legalistic scheme to produce a decent life for all.  I don't think there is any prospect of a decent life unless it is based on what The Law and the Prophets said, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, as both Jesus and Hillel confirmed was the basis of Abrahamic religion. That's my bottom line, that and the commandments to do to the least among us as we would do for The Lord.  You do that, you get equality, democracy and the possibility of as decent a life as it is possible for humans to produce, the only legitimate goal of all labor and wealth creation, the only legitimate goal of government and civil law.

* Re-reading this to edit it, I wonder if it isn't the extreme violence of Marxism that leads foolish People to mistake that for "radicalism" in that context.  From my considerations of Darwinism and the place that violence has in its imaginary force of progress and quite similarly in Marxism, I wonder if the bizarre notion that violence adds to that twisted sense of virtue, the delusion of of manly facing up to things doesn't have way too strong a hold on the imaginations of would-be radicals, so many of them buffalo-butted scholars whose only utility on a barricade would be to provide the enemy with a better target instead of someone who might fight.  If you took all of the actually productive work of all the academic Marxists put together, I'd bet it wouldn't buy lunch from them from a food cart.  There is nothing more radical in any political-economics than the teachings of Jesus, nothing more radical in its means or, especially, in its goals.

That Imaginary Purification Is Just That, Imaginary. So Is The "Purity" Of The Results - Hate Mail

JUST HOW DOES THAT WORK?  Please explain it.  Every single instance of "data collection" in sociology is fraught with subjectivity, either the subjective judgement of a person reporting their own alleged experience or situation - which the researcher almost never can check or goes to the bother of attempting to check for accuracy or honesty - or the subjective judgement and description of the researcher.  Since it is impossible to review just about any individual datum in that kind of "research" it is fraught with subjective inclusions, not least of which are the desires of the person or group of people conducting the research to achieve a publishable result - hopefully one that will create lots of media splash.  Or at least in the profession. I don't think it's even possible to measure the amount of such subjectivity or if it is of any predictable percentage of the raw material. You can't observe it like insect body parts in a batch of food in a factory or e-coli at the water-works.

How is that forest of subjectivity made to disappear from the results?  I'd really like to know and have identified the mechanism by which that element of subjectivity is supposed to disappear, what with the combined subjectivity of all of those involved in the process.  It would seem to me to be a far, far more likely thing that the subjectivity adds up if not increases by multiplication in the process, no matter the motives to ignore that.  Any claims that that process produces objectivity would certainly require identifying the magical means of sifting that out.  What that claim is, is a sort of meta-subjectivity based on the common interest in denying that.  That denial of the problem is what drives that along with the desire to pretend it disappears. Or the even greater shared goal of pretending what they are doing produces "objective knowledge."  If that were the case then their research should be verifiable at the same rate and in similar ways that traditional physics and chemistry could be verified and the results would be as durable and long lasting as reliable, workable knowledge.  Let's get it clear, though, I'm talking of the old days when physical theory was proven by careful observation and replication of experiments or from nature, not now when the theoreticians come up with stuff that not only can't be verified now, but for which there is no prospect of it ever being verified by human science and they claim a right, by assertion, that they don't need to follow scientific method for it to be science.

It's like the magical means with which the overt teleology in animal husbandry and plant breeding is used as "proof" that something claimed to be quite similar happens in nature with no planning and with a claim that there is no teleological component of it.  When Darwin used animal and plant breeding as support for a theory for a "force" of nature which explained how new species arise, a force which it was claimed had entirely different characteristics from human breeding, no planning, no goal, but was mere accidental happenstance, it was a logically inept claim.  Though a claim which gained favor and still holds hegemony in science even though the logical bases of it in both conducting experiments which are the result of intelligent design and the whole thing having the most overt of teleological goals.  And also with the far from disinterested, ideologically colored observations - often of a quite unnatural captive group of animals, many of which never experienced life in the wild for many generations under whatever vicissitudes wildness includes - claiming to demonstrate, even "prove" the validity of natural selection outside of the lab.  But if you're going to use those to "prove" that natural selection is a thing you don't get to claim that your research only includes those aspects of your examples you like while pretending the ones you don't like were no part of the results you cite in that argument. By the way, the human breeding which Darwin claimed as a model of how new species arose didn't produce new species - if by that you mean animals which can breed and produce a permanent line of animals or plants of a new species which is biologically stable, by some definitions the impossibility of interbreeding the definition of a different species.  So the claims for it are multiply inept and dishonest.

I don't think science knows now or likely will ever know the various means through which new species have arisen in nature. I very much doubt there is any one "force" that made that happen. Though it's obvious that new species did arise from old ones and it can be said that older species "went extinct."*  I doubt there is any one mechanism and I am absolutely convinced that "natural selection" as defined by Darwinism is not a real thing.

There's no reason for a reasoning person who doesn't choose to buy the snake oil of such "science" to ignore or deny the problems with it, I'm under no moral obligation to sociology or Darwinism both of which have records ranging from dubious benefit on one hand to being a producer of total evil and depravity on the other one.  I have demonstrated exhaustively the links between Darwinism and eugenics, including the genocidal Nazi eugenics through the most highly credentialed and even lauded scientists of the period between Darwin and 1945 - I've also shown that scientists since then have not only NOT given up eugenics and scientific racism based in the theory of natural selection, many of those who have promoted both have been and are still holders of honored faculty appointments and the editorship of journals and the leadership of professional organizations.  Many of them have been as supportive of both eugenics and scientific racism as anyone was in the 1920s or 30s and even as the Nazi genocides were happening.  Similar things could be said for those in sociology, psychology, anthropology and, perhaps most tellingly of all, the dismal "science," economics.  I have demonstrated through their own words the Darwinian origins of the cold-bloodedly eugenic "herd immunity" theory that got tens of thousands and not improbably hundreds of thousands of us killed by Covid-19 under Trumpism here and under allegedly socialist government in Sweden.  I have repeatedly given the quotes from Darwin that support such scientific claims.

I don't trust any of it, there is no logical or moral obligation for me to pretend not to see the problems with them I see and not to call intellectual dishonesty just that no matter what the pedigree or position of the claims and those claiming them.  I'm not worried about having your totally imaginary cooties.  For Pete-sake, I left 7th grade much more than a generation back.  Lots of you guys have hung around schools too long, you never get past acting like kids.  Grow up.

Since you claim to be a professor, I wonder if anyone has studied the infantalizing effects on college faculties of constantly dealing with immature near adults and trying to get their approval or liking or more.  Not that I'd trust such a study to tell us anything much about it.

* The idea of extinction of species is too inspecific because if a species gradually, through changing generations, produced a still living line, it's quite a different thing from a species all being killed off without any surviving line going on into the future. Those are two very different entities.  If "natural selection" is supposed to be an explanation of how biological diversity came about any lines of life that got cut off in the past or today are not a part of that production of new species.   The scientific ineptness in not distinguishing the two seems, to me at least, to account for some of the most depraved of murderous claims made under natural selection,  

An especially bad example of which was the lauded, even idolized biologist Karl Pearson and his fascination with "the death rate" which he gave as a definition of Darwinism.  Just one example is his criticism of the use of cesarean section to deliver babies because it kept too many babies with big heads born to women with pelvises too small to deliver them alive was about as depraved an idea as I've ever seen.  He certainly favored the deaths of the children and the women because of his favorite theory of natural selection and his entirely imaginary results which he was sure would "bring down the race." And especially bizarre considering the role that "big craniums" had in Darwinist assertions of human superiority, I may look for the possibility Pearson made such claims, which wouldn't surprise me.   

Given what was said about "herd immunity" above, I could have given Charles and Leonard Darwin's certainty that universal vaccination would bring down the race by keeping too many of the victims of smallpox alive, though I see no evidence that Charles Darwin kept his own brood from being vaccinated. Leonard died without issue, an irony in the most active eugenicist of Darwin's eugenicist children.  It was always other kinds who were to be eliminated, not the rich, the white, the "favored race."  It's remarkable how many totally imaginary crisis scenarios the Darwinists came up with to favor the elimination of this kind or that kind of person from the species, preferably in a particularly terrible way.  It's a symptom of the endemic mental depravity of the British upper class - who they never seemed to find at all in need of such pruning by eradication, not even a socialist like Pearson.  I think Darwinism was born of the attitudes of the Brit class system, a component of it from its conception and it has never developed immunity to it.  It's more than a viral infection, it's part of its DNA.

I'd like to go farther into that area of researching the real history of Darwinism but I'm not sure I've got the time for it.  The more I look into that "socialist," the fixture in British Fabianism,  Karl Pearson, the more sinister and depraved his mainstream science is. As someone who evolved out of the more radical end of socialism into the far more radical religious economics of charity, I'd recommend my socialist friends that they really consider the primary source claims of some of those they once held up as heros.  Lots of them were quite depraved.

A Republic If You Can Keep It

MUCH AS I RESPECT the post-presidency of Jimmy Carter and even his sand-bagged presidency, in retrospect, I don't think any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson's attempt to outdo FDR in creating equal justice (whose greatness was overshadowed by Vietnam) has been as satisfactory to me as Joe Biden has.

If Joe Biden had a real Democratic majority in the Senate for the past year and a half he would have taken up the ball that has been lying motionless on the court since Johnson left office and played it.   I think the attempt of the DC-NYC-cabloid servants of billionaire fascism to sink him over the hard, fraught and entirely correct decision to fulfill the commitment MADE UNDER TRUMP!  to end American fighting in Afghanistan can stand in as an example of what Lyndon Johnson knew he would face if he ended American involvement in Vietnam, the real reason that he got caught up in the Harvard boy's war that he inherited.  

If Biden gets a real Democratic Senate this fall and retains a Democratic House, I think he may prove to be a great president against all expectations and against all the lies and discrediting of the media and the pundit class.  See post below about as it concerns "wisdom." 

I think that the greatest part of Lyndon Johnson's program of equal justice was in terms of an attempt at economic justice, his Great Society programs, in that I think that his fellow non-Ivy product, Joe Biden, understands things a lot better than the Ivy Leaguers, Clinton and Obama.   In the whining about the great student-debt relief a lot of the idiots online and on the media don't seem to understand that a lot of "plumbers" either had or have student loan debt themselves or they have kids do and that THEY ARE ON THE LINE WHEN THE KID'S CAN'T KEEP UP WITH THEIR DEBTS.   If Democrats want to win they will directly appeal to parents and young people who have student debt because there are a hell of a lot more of them than there are pundits and seven figure cabloid talking heads.

But, of course, when rights are situated amid might and wealth something happens to rights

"facets of having one's way in the world"

IN THINKING ABOUT THE PERVERSION of the idea of rights divorced from moral responsibility which I have been writing about I remembered a sentence in the following passage from Walter Brueggemann's lecture Slow Wisdom As A Sub-Version Of Reality, the sentence I altered for the title.  Before you read the passage, consider what happens if you replace the word "wisdom" with the word "rights" and the situation of "rights" within the same triad with might and wealth when you really think about it in terms of what happens to the habitually considered virtue of the words in that context.  The implications of virtue in our habitual way of thinking about wisdom in that triad is a lot like the ill considered reality of rights divorced from any moral responsibility and that restraint on their perversion into something far removed from good.  Especially consider the role that the "free press" and their legal representatives have played in that perversion of the concept of equally endowed rights to the place where "rights" granted to artificial entities and the creation of money as the equal of speech was the Supreme Court rigging the biggest "rights" lottery for wealth and so might, the rich and so powerful.  And even more so the entertainment that is what most poeple spend most of their time consuming so it is what really bends and distorts the thinking of far more people, far more so than the "news".  

The poet focuses upon the great triad of control and pride, the three facets of having one's way in the world, might, wisdom and wealth.

Might here means military force, the capacity to control markets and natural resources.  Wealth means the capacity to manage capital and impose requirements and restraints and leverage on all of the others so that the whole of the global economy is ordered to flow toward us.

But, then, wisdom.  We had not expected wisdom to come along with might and wealth. Especially because our theme is wisdom and the work of the university is wisdom. Who can speak negatively of wisdom when we remember our great intellectual inheritance from the Greeks?  But, of course, when wisdom is situated amid might and wealth something happens to wisdom. And, of course, that is what has happened among us. We have understood with Bacon that knowledge is power and we have transposed wisdom into knowledge that could control, that strange interplay between wisdom and knowledge has brought us the gift of the great scientific revolution in Bacon's time.  And in its wake the great technological advances that have moved toward control that is never disinterested. And before we knew it Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas have entitled a book "The Wise Men," a study of six of the titanic figures who have managed U. S. foreign policy with Niebuhrian realism and have produced the abiding superpower, ample wisdom, ample might ample wealth in order to be the chosen race in the modern world.

Perhaps inevitably the great universities have signed on with that wisdom, have entered into compacts of wisdom that has bought the universities the wealth of research grants and the power of connectedness. And now we are sobered as we are in this consultation, needing to take a deep breath concerning the way of wisdom-enlightenment-knowledge to which we have been pledged. That wisdom has led us to immense power and wealth.

If you went through the exercise of considering "rights" in the same place in that triad with might and wealth you would, I think, find that in a very simliar way as "wisdom" you will find that the habitually considered virtue of "rights" becomes very problematic when you consider the actual inequality of the distribution of those due to the manipulation of those with wealth and, so, power and their servants in the judiciary, legislative bodies and in the executive branch.  

Consider what happens to this later passage from his lecture when you replace "rights" for "wisdom" and what really happens when you replace equality with inequality, whether you lie about that on the basis of "merit" or some other excuse.  When, like wisdom can, "rights" are turned from a necessary restraint of moral responsibility into a mere tool of having your way.   As any assertion of rights is inevitably tied in with or, rather, mistaken with MERELY "having your way in the world," they are probably even more problematic than "wisdom" when located within that triad of control.

Second.  The triad of fidelity focuses on the neighborhood as the triad of control is drawn to the club. The club is a staging ground for exclusion so that one need deal only with one of those one chooses who are most like us. It is a mark of privilege that brings with it the sense of knowing best and being right. It proceeds by excluding the other, variously Women or Blacks or Jews or the Poor.  And, of course, the best universities have been no more hospitable than the clubs with their exclusionary quotas.

But the neighborhood takes in all of us who move up and down the street. There is an egalitarian assumption about the legitimatcy of all its members and the sharing of resources to which all are entitled.  Historically, without romanticizing a rural community before social stratification and division of labor and the development of surplus wealth - with the exception of the doctor - was more or less an egalitarian community.

But the urban reality of social stratification, division of labor and surplus wealth has largely destroyed that sense of neighborly egalitarianism. And, of course, the university is deeply enmeshed with that crisis. For admission is a ticket to entitlement.

We can no longer have affirmative action the urban elite court has ruled, so that the privileged who come from better schools are better prepared for applications and, so, on the basis of socially constructed merit can occupy the space and the fellowships.

We produce a class of managers of social symbols - of which I am a member - marked out at best by only a vague memory of having done real work. The process of privilege and entitlement evokes a stream of influence that culminates in might and wealth and a certain kind of wisdom.  And, of course, such a trajectory of control will hide behind a hundred defenses of pedigree and certification and gated communities and tenure and all the rest.

See how that passage works when you replace notions of "rights" for notions of "wisdom."

I think the motives of how the idea of wisdom or the idea of rights are perverted through the accumulation of petty privileges in even the only slightly more favored population who want to get a first foothold in the climb to the top (as if any but a handful of them will get anywhere near that) and the ease with which their consciences can be numbed from what it gets them in regard to that inequality turning the amoral wisdom or denatured right into a virtue is worth thinking about.   

The idea of so-called merit, especially when you attribute that to an allegedly natural inequality in intelligence or  biological "fitness,"  is a very seductive temptation among the college credentialed who most certainly believe themselves and, so, their children will be so favorably endowed.  Story telling, especially the debased form of that in novels and movies and stage plays often interchange all of those singifiers of "virtue" in ways that pervert all of our thinking.   When you add the refusal to distinguish between rights as an equal endowment by God to God's creatures, which People are, to a mimicry of having the power to declare such endowments by jumped-up, often basely motivated or merely deluded judges, justices, legislatures, heads of state, etc. you get something very similar to the official designation of wise ones through academic credentialing and media publicity.  But if I go on in that line I'll get into the designated "public intellectuals" and that would turn into a rant.  


P. S. from the next day.  I decided to give you a small sample of how that would go.

The extent to which equality and democracy and any organized or group attempt to make life decent for all is dependent on the moral restraints of malignantly claimed and used freedoms or "rights," an attempt which is absolutely dependent on and even defined by an intention to follow moral precepts of the kind that will do that is as at odds with the conceptions of modern, materialist, secularism as it was the feudal notions of divine rights of kings.  

Kings, princes, legal frameworks of hereditary family dominance (such as the "democracy" of classical Athens was set up to benefit) were notorious for exempting themselves from the same kinds of moral restraints I'm talking about which were more often, haphazardly, demanded of those lower down in those systems.  As has been pointed out here, many times, the results of that were what God told the prophet Samuel to warn the Children of Israel would be the results if they turned to a king, he would rob them and oppress them and steal their livelihoods and even children and they would be their slaves.  Not unlike what the American financial and legal system is doing to what used to be the middle class. If republican government, even one allegedly a democracy, replaces our modern billionaire oligarchs for royals, nobles and other gangsters, it's not much of a deal for the rest of us.  

Unfortunately, when American and other modern "democracies" or just republics were being invented in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the role of prophet was given over to things like science which, by common agreement, excluded moral consideration because its laws were not laws for governing the lives of people but describing the movements of planets and bodies in motion, things which could be shown, on average, to mindlessly and predictably follow such laws.  The material success of that limited effort blinded the elites of the time to that exclusion of sucn an essential moral framework and intention necessary for the creation of laws to produce a decent life among we people who are reduced to the same category of atoms and molecules by the most extreme extensions of that materialist superstition in things such as the terminally decadent notion of eliminative materialism by a similarly deluded misidentification of the methodology of science with the ideological insistence that those are an all-encompassing, all seeing, all knowing seer when they so obviously cannot function as that.  The idolatry of science, in some, especially, academic contexts and certainly in a judicial one is matched or replaced with the idolatry of legalism, in the United States Constitutionalism, in a similar pseudo-historical ideological process. Many lies must be told in the process.  Some of them bald-faced lies.

Also See what I said the other day about the perversion of the framing of the U.S. Constitution by the slave power and the financiers who certainly never intended to establish equality for People of Color, Women, etc. and how we still live with the consequences in the very institutions created by the slave-holders and financiers to prevent equality and, so, any democracy that in a modern context deserves to be called that. Gaetz, Greene, Boebert, etc. are just the vulgar white trashy elite wanting to return to a time when People of Color are excluded, once again.  The entire focus of Republican-fascist politics since the election of Bill Clinton has been increasingly obvious as a force to reestablish that, the original scheme of the financiers to harness the fascists has resulted in the white supremacist fascist strain gaining dominance as it could have been predicted they would.  It costs nothing to be a racist, you've got to have money to be a rich oligarchic fascist.  And racists tend to be rather stupid, blaming those less powerful than themselves, or more cowardly because they are afraid to face who really robs, cheats and enslaves them.  The extent to which monarchies depended on the cowardice as much as the ignorance of the majority of "their subjects" could probably not be over-estimated.  Happens in "republics" too.

Get Liz Cheney On Record As Opposing the Unitary Executive Theory Before Beatifying Her

ONE OF THE THINGS that Liz Cheney must be grilled on before her media canonization as a presidential candidate - who will result in splitting the opposition to Trumpist Republican-fascism and, like all third party candidates who have any impact at all, put the worst candidate with any chance in the presidency - is her relationship to the elite-fascist theory of the unitary executive that her father and his ward, George W. Bush elevated during his regime.*  NO ONE WHO SUPPORTS THE U.E. THEORY HAS ANY BUSINESS BEING CONSIDERED AS PRESIDENTIAL IN A DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC.   If you want a reminder of that and the role that Dick Cheney played in elevating the powers that Trump repeatedly asserted during a less flashy but no less ruthless era of Republican power, you should read this paper by Mark J. Rozelle and Mitchel A. Sollenberger, The Unitary Executive Theory And The Bush Legacy.  That should be rightly considered to include both W and his dad, the earlier infamous pardoner of his criminal associates in the waning days of his presidency, another tie in with Trump's practice of the ill considered presidential power which the framers of the Constitution clearly didn't think through to account for a George H W Bush or a Donald J. Trump.  

The absurd faith, absurd in the face of the most conclusive of contradicting fact evidence and the extreme dangers of it, that the American system of government set up in the Constitution is a work of perfection that should never be changed, is just that, absurd.  That the language of the Constitution could be used by sleazy, American-fascist, corporate lawyers and poly-sci guys to create the blueprint for the president to wield powers more in line with an overt dictator than with the express concepts of modest and limited powers the majority of the framers and the ones that most Americans have assumed were there, proves beyond any doubt that we really are in desperate need of a Constitution that kills those fascist dreams in the bud explicitly and disallows the "freedoms" that have gotten us where we are now.  Like that "right" to lie which I've been pointing out so often.

I could have included "political science" in that list of pseudo-sciences that I called for demoting the other day because it is on the same level of stupid as economics or psychology.  One of the most obvious things about the United States, one of the most dangerous facts about the United States is that we have had a flourishing and indigenous fascist ideology which precedes the framing of the Constitution and which, through corruption and blackmail, was embedded directly into the Constitution in ways that were merely partially and, to an extent superficially overturned by the Civil War and in structures and language so basic to the form of government that it sets up that it is not only still there but it runs things.  

White supremacy, the slave-power which merely transformed into the American apartheid of Jim Crow, which the Roberts Court is reviving right now, is only one of two strains of indigenous fascism which not only is influential, it has ruled large parts of the country with the merest of intervals of something more democratic during the Reconstruction period and in the period after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts came into effect, only to be destroyed by John Roberts and his concurring associate "justices".  It embedded the extremely dangerous anti-democratic constitution of the Senate, giving it confirming powers over the federal judiciary and a veto over the more democratically constituted House.  It embedded the extremely dangerous Electoral College which has insured some of the actual losers of presidential elections were put into office, never once with good effect - Rutherford Hayes and George W. Bush were both products of that and pretty terrible presidents - and providing billionaire fascists and foreign despot-billionaires a rich opportunity for ratfucking our elections.  

The competing fascist force among the financiers, originally associated with the Northern colonies and early states but which, despite that lore and encouraged regional bigotry, is ubiquitous in every state and region, originally embodied in the proto-fascist Hamilton and the likes of John Jay, had, at times, been less extreme in their operations and more genteel in their claims.  Until Trump disgusted them with his uncoothness and his too open willingness to overtly claim the kinds of powers with full vulgarity, they were all in when it was George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who were doing the same and earlier when it was the Bush v. Gore five in the Supreme Court working in concert with Jeb Bush to put his brother and Cheney in power.  While I am sure there are some "never-Trumpers" who are sincerely reformed into supporting democracy, you will forgive me if I am skeptical as to their ultimate position once he is gone.  I would bet you anything that if it were a more acceptable white-supremacist, unitary executive fascist, they would be all-in with them against even a moderate Democrat who had an intention of steering the country to the democracy which has been thwarted from the start.

The use of the mythology of the United States, a mythology primarily created by white talkers and scribblers and media figures, academics, etc. has never faced the fact that from the start white racism and oligarchic financiers were an active and influential fascist strain in American society, politics and life.  White People except in so far as they could be held in debt-slavery or wage-slavery were not the primary focus of the indigenous American fascists, that would be the Native Americans who they killed and robbed of their land and the Africans who they enslaved and their African-American offspring who also provided a rich opportunity in setting poor-whites against them so as to avoid the more numerous and voting rich-withes a target when they opted to kick down instead of up.  The Constitution provided the property-owning poorer whites with anything from a chance to actually be represented in government to, at best, an illusion that that was what was going on, state constitutions did the same though, in some cases, they actually did provide more of the democracy that the federal Constitution was sold as providing.  In the well over two centuries after the thing was set up, few if any scholars of the country and the Constitution and its laws has honestly called these things what they really have been and are becoming again under the Roberts Court, Republican-fascist-Trumpism and whatever the evidence to that effect.

----------------------

A Short Modern Political History Of The Post WWII America I've Lived My Life In

America in the post-WWII period made such a fetish of "liberty" and "freedom" that it gloried in the liberty to destroy freedoms for other people and the most obnoxious and irresponsible of freedoms and liberties exercised to the destruction of liberty and freedom for those with less power or more of a sense of moral responsibility.  The show-biz, Hollywood, block-buster "American Psycho" style of "art" as a flower of such liberty of such freedom should, by now, have led people to notice that there is something wrong, something very dangerous about it.  The asshole Supreme-Court enabled automatic-wielding mass murderers are a product of that libertarian psychosis.

It is one of the worst of ironies that not a little of that corruption of the aspirations of freedom were due to the legitimate demand of People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, working People to have their rightful measure of the freedom that had been, from the beginnings hoarded by white men of property and wealth, those who Roger Taney said the Constitution was written on behalf of and who were the sole owners of any legal rights claimed under it.  Like all good things that come from the economic underclasses, once those have gained currency, those with wealth and property or merely a larger amount of that, will steal it and turn it to their own, exclusive advantage.  The advocacy of civil rights turned into the demands of white-guy and gal libertarian, racist-fascism.  The kind of freedom which is not in conflict with and quite salable by the real white power of wealth and commerce was never at any rick, especially the marketing of alcohol, other addictive and health damaging and resolve weakening substances, was a freedom which was never at risk.  Neither were those petty freedoms which the white underclass had never been denied, as long as they didn't endanger the maximum profitability of those with wealth.  Nor the exercise and encouragement of character defects, certainly not the expression of racist, sexist or other bigotry, nor the lies that enhanced the power and position of the rich.  In the meantime, any aspirations of responsible and so real and legitimate freedom, especially by the Black underclass, other People of Color, Women who were not wealthy, was unprofitable, an undermining of the utility of racism, sexism, etc. The extent to which the Voting Rights Act, especially, made things more democratic and, so, endangered the political power of the party of indigenous fascism and the wealthy, the Republicans, it had to go and the Roberts Court, building on the Rehnquist Court, did that and the Constitution cannot be held to have either been violated in the process.  That alone proves that the thing is now a menace for all of us except the fascists.   Fascists and Nazis always have complete freedom to do what they want under fascism and Nazism, as long as they act like fascists and Nazis.

* No presidency which is not a product of the majority of the vote in the election should be called an administration, it is a regime if not a junta.  I do think, given the role that the banana-republican moves of Jeb Bush in Florida, with the collusion of FOX with his cousin John Ellis and the corrupt Rehnquist Court played in putting him in the presidency that Bush II was properly thought of as a junta.  That such a thing could happen under our Constitution impeaches its legitimacy, though you'll never hear the media or polite society admit that.

The Goddamned Media Is Not The Friend Of Equality, Democracy Or Even The Survival Of The World

 

Night Thoughts And Hate Mail

INSOMNIA And NIGHT THOUGHTS CAN be an opportunity for serious thinking and last night it helped me do what I hadn't done while fully awake, put together the thoughts from two posts on the difference between owning our bodies and owning money and what Fr. Dan Donovan said about the ways in which great wealth impedes us fulfilling our moral obligations and, so, "makes it so difficult for those who possess a great deal of it to fulfill their human and Christian responsibility."  Not only that but Fr. Donovan said great wealth, "makes it so difficult for those who possess a great deal of it to fulfill their human and Christian responsibility."  Think about that the next time you think about what Peter Theil or Elon Musk is up to, or the recent tax-cheat 1.6 billion dollars that a billionaire gave to the legal-sleaze who ratfucked us into a Republican-fascist Supreme Court majority.   That our Constitutional system allows that level of financial corruption of our basic governmental institutions proves that it will either be changed to prevent that or American democracy is doomed.

We use words and ideas like owning something without ever really thinking about what that means and how much of it is actually based on nothing much but artificial and imaginary rules behind human practices.  The ownership of an investor in the gain they get from their speculations and manipulations is entirely artificial.  There is no law of nature, no law of God that gave any of the billionaires a "right" to claim ownership of the wealth generated by the workers who actually produced anything that was sold or to a cut of everything the artificial entities that are the companies and corporations workers produce wealth under "earns".  The entire structure of capitalist economics is an artificial structure to organize the generation of profits and to extract as much of that wealth for those who are said to "own" them through lending money under laws that will always tend towards the runiously usurious, something which there is quite an obvious ban on in Scripture.  Beware the virtues claimed by those who spend years mastering the mythology and lore of moneygrubbing that both economics and such a huge amount of the civil law is.  Even the nicest of them are apt to unnoticingly support the worst moral atrocities due to their mastery and what it gets them.  Be even more careful when it's the corporate media and those who would like to get well paid in it.  

The habits of thought we get into by never considering what owning something means and the imaginary structure that most ownership concists of while we use the word to mean very differnt things, a muddle that someone as sophisticated in thinking as Stanley Hauerwas got in with an inapt comparison of the entirely natural ownership of someone to their own body and the ownership of the artificial entity, money, which is a creation of generally artificial and generally very corrupt legal schemes, espcially in how those with more of it can con or weedle or force those with less of it to give it to them.  The extent to which that structure of imaginary legalism is always to be suspected of corruption reaches something like an ultimate degeneracy when it comes to the enslavement and wage-enslavement of other people compelled under legal penalties, punishments and, ALWAYS IN THE END, VIOLENCE, which underlies all of slavery and only to a lesser extent wage-slavery.  

Balzac famously said that there was always a great crime behind the possession of great wealth, something which would have been even more impressive if it were not an observation of the Scripture that had been the basis of most of the moral civilization that someone like Balzac was still reflecting.  Still, considering how the hundreds of millions and billions of us go about our entire lives trafficing in these fictions and putting up with the appalling results and the incredible injustice of it, it's impressive that he noticed that.  The extent to which you can life a life compromised to Mammon while others and you think of yourself as good and viruous is on full display when the white-washing, white-supremacist, whited supulchres like any Republican-fascist who professes Christianity while being a full blown temple whore in the cult of Mammon.  Male and female temple prostitutes, such as the entire Republican-fascist caucus in the Congress, yes, including Liz Cheney, though some of them at least have the taste to not call attention to their hypocrisy quite shamelessly as Boebert or Taylor Greene.  I would say that at least a half or more of "white evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics" are fully in with the Boebert-Greene side of things in that regard.  So are a number of the Democrats.  

I think that possessions tie us to the limits of life, especially lots of them, especially great wealth.  You can't carry that baggage to heaven.  Being tied to it in life, more tied to holding that excess than in sharing it with people who need basic sustainance - the poor who Jesus told the rich, young man to give the proceeds of selling his possessions to - is like the boxes chained to Marley in Charles Dickens story, they enslave you in life and enslave your soul till you purge your sins of omission.  It's like the mud on a rope that can be cleaned by pulling it through a knot hole, St. Macrina's analogy made on her death bed while she talked to her brother St. Gregory about the Soul and Resurrection.  Jesus said it was better to get rid of it and share the wealth now and avoid that.  David Bently Hart, currently one of the most prominent advocats of Christian universalism said that he believes in a hell of limited duration - making good arguments from Scripture for that point of view - but that hell is a terrible place and he hoped everyone avoided it.  I have to admit that I kind of like the idea that Bobert and Green and their ilk will have to get it purged from them, which I'll probably have to have purged from me.  Not everything that has to be given up like that can be sold for charity.

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"you sound as if there's something wrong with abortion"

Someone complained that I presented abortion as if there's something wrong with it even as I said it should be safe and legal and that no one had the right to tell a woman that she must remain pregnant and force her to be. 

I remember back in the primary season of 2008, when Hillary Clinton (my candidate in that election) was running for president, there was a similar slam against her when she sensibly said that abortion should be safe, legal and rare, implying that needing or wanting an abortion was something to be avoided.  

I asked one of the Women who were slamming Hillary Clinton (as I recall she was an Obama fan) if she really believed anyone ever aspired to be in the position of someday needing or even wanting to have an abortion, if any woman who was not pregnant wanted to be in a position to have an abortion.  As I recall the question went unanswered.

I doubt such a woman exists but, clearly anyone who aspires or wants to get into the position where she will need, want or have an abortion, to need such a medical procedure that could certainly not be considered as pleasant, would be rightly suspected of having rocks in her head.  

Wanting to be in such a position is as bizarre an idea as the rumors of "bug chasers," the gay men who allegedly wanted to be infected with HIV so they would . . . and I don't believe there were any . . . some of them reportedly wanted to "fit in" with the "HIV positive community."   Which thinking would have to rank as a really pathological mental disorder and resulting irresponsibility would mean that such people should probably be under custodial care.  I was never really convinced that such a thing really existed though if there's something the internet and unfiltered comment proves, practically every sick way of thinking is practiced by someone with access to a keyboard.  The Republican-fascist cult cultivates that among superannuated boys who spend all of their time online and can't get dates and spend their lives online whining to other such boys who obsessively blame all the wrong people for their unhappiness.  Such online whiners are certainly ubiquitous online, I spare you lots of such comments here because answering them all isn't healthy.   Just for completeness, there were also rumors of HIV people who aspired to infect others, which may have happened but I doubt it was more than a few extremely sick individuals.   Most HIV infection happen pretty much the same way that most unwanted pregnancies do.  Only I doubt anyone would present avoiding infection as a political controversy.

The challenge should always have be made to anti-choice people in the past fifty-years of trying to get the law to revert to forcing pregnant women to remain pregnant, if they were so opposed to abortions, why didn't they demand and encourage education and provision and use of effective, science based contraception after the passage of Roe v. Wade instead of opposing it. Why don't they now when it's AGAIN becoming obvious that when you make abortion illegal that only means that the abortions performed will be illegal, unsafe and deadly?  Clearly they don't really want to prevent as many abortions as possible because the widespread use of effective contraception is the only means of preventing as many abortions as possible.  If they really wanted to "end abortion" they would be the biggest, fattest proponents of universal education and provision of and encouragement to use contraception. When they were not and most certainly are not.

Certainly Women who don't want to be pregnant would be better off if a pregnancy that would result in them choosing to have an abortion never happened, if they weren't ever in a position to have to make the decision of whether or not to have one.  And, by the way, BOYS AND MEN WHO DON'T OR WON'T BE RESPONSIBLE PARTNERS AND FATHERS WOULD BE BETTER OFF NEVER HAVING MADE SOMEONE PREGNANT.  I don't see any huge movement among men to be responsible in their role in it, especially those who are anti-choice.  Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump. . .  I would bet that a large number of wealthy, conservative male opponents of legalized abortion would not act according to that position if they or their sons impregnated someone they didn't want to spend their money supporting or risk their reputation on.  I think it's a safe speculation that a number of them have coerced or paid Women to have abortions in those scenarios, though more have just abandoned their responsibility, which also contributes to why Women choose to have abortions. Clearly they should have been using condoms but didn't want to.

So the position I took, that the best outcome would be if no woman who didn't want be pregnant never was to start with makes the most sense.  The kind of sense it would take for someone like Hillary Clinton to express but which, even now, I hardly hear anyone expressing.  Any "pro-choice" advocate should certainly be able to navigate the issue to the point where they would understand that even better than the choice to end a pregnancy through abortion would have been to avoid ever being pregnant to start with.  To understand that is certainly not the same thing as or anything close to wanting to make abortion illegal, it is to face the full reality of the issue.  But, since I know the people who got mad at Hillary Clinton over saying that were, almost exclusively, college-credentialed, it's clear that people with that educational background can find navigating to such a conclusion something of a challenge.  I find that's generally the case when you allow ideology to determine the direction of your thinking.  When the consequences for other people of your lefty position end up in the same place as your opponents' you really should notice that you really aren't that far apart from them.  The consequences are what counts.

Camels And Needles - A Sermon By Fr. Dan Donovan

THE MOST IMPORTANT thing I did on a computer this weekend was to transcribe a sermon that Fr. Dan Donovan gave last Tuesday on The Daily TV Mass from Toronto.  I will risk posting it as I transcribed it, hoping I did it right.  I'm going to forego extensively commenting on it because I couldn't do it justice except to say this way of seeing things with its consequences for economic inequality is more likely to produce equal justice than what I've been criticizing for the past week.

Today's Gospel follows immediately on Matthew's account of the rich, young man who asked Jesus what he must do to enter into eternal life.  When Jesus answers keep the commandments, the young man answers he has done so all his life.  Jesus then invites him to sell all that he owns, give the money to the poor and join Jesus as he travels throughout Galilee proclaiming the good news of the nearness of the Kingdom of God.  When the man heard this, Matthew tells us he went away grieving for he had many possessions.   That the man grieves is revealing.  He clearly is not indifferent to the invitation that Jesus has made to him but he's unable to accept it.  His wealth means that much to him.

As the young man turns Jesus turns to the disciples and says, "Truly, I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven." To underline just how difficult it can be for those who possess great wealth to enter eternal life Jesus declares that "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God."

Taken literally the saying seems to affirm that for the rich salvation is impossible. 

Over the centuries People have tried to soften  what Jesus is saying by claiming there was a particularly narrow niche in Jerusalem called "the needle," a gate through which a camel might pass with great difficulty. In fact there was no such gate. What we have here is the kind of exaggerated and shocking language that Jesus sometimes uses, for example like cutting off one's hand or tearing out an eye if they cause us to sin. Such language is meant to catch our attention, to stop, make us think. In this case think about how money and great possessions can undermine our relationship with God.

This is the way in which the disciples understood what Jesus was saying. Hearing it, Matthew says the disciples were greatly astounded and said, then who can be saved? For mortals, Jesus declares, the salvation of the rich is all but impossible but for God all things are possible. Salvation is ultimately a gift, something that God pours out on us if we turn to him and recognize our need for that gift.  

As crucial as this reference to grace is, it does not take away the difficulty Jesus said the rich have to enter the Kingdom.  The issue of wealth and riches and the way they can make our relationship to God more challenging comes back a number of times in the Gospels. They report that Jesus spoke about it on various occasions. The early Church, for its part, struggled with and sought to integrate it into its teaching.

It is not easy to apply what Jesus said here to ourselves, given the world and complex culture in which we live.  With the exception of the very rich it is by no means self evidence who in our culture might be among those of whom Jesus is speaking.  What is it about wealth, we might ask, that makes it so difficult for those who possess a great deal of it to fulfill their human and Christian responsibility in regard to it. The basic challenge in what Jesus said is something we have to deal with as individuals, families and societies.  

We need to begin by thinking of what we possess and what we might be being called on to share with others. The more we focus on money and on our efforts to amass ever greater sums of it the more we will be tempted to think of ourselves as different from others. To think of ourselves as superior to them. We can begin to think and act as if we were the source of our own wealth, we lose a sense of how much we have received from others, from God and family and from the culture and country in which we have been born and educated.  And in which we have been able to be as successful as we have been from a monetary and from other points of view.  

In spite of the many differences among us, including differences in wealth, education and influence, differences, too, in health, general well-being, we all share a common humanity.  Made in the image and likeness of God we all have the same dignity the same rights the same needs and longings.  The same ultimate destiny in God.  The good things we have, family and friends, education and a rewarding job or profession, sufficient funds to provide for our needs and those of our family, these things should be available to everyone. While great wealth puts us in a position where we can help others and contribute in a significant ways to the creation of a society that cares for the poor and the disadvantaged it can also cut us off from such People and from efforts to build up a culture that is more sensitive to their needs.  

What Jesus has said about wealth and great possessions and the difficulty they create for entry into the Kingdom of God leads Peter to ask about the situation of the disciples, they have in many cases given up everything in order to join with Jesus. What will they receive in return?   Jesus evokes the end-times and the judgement that will be a part of them, those who have left family, home and much else in order to join with him, he says, will receive good things in this life and even more in the life to come. The life of those who embrace the Gospel and who commit themselves to living in accordance with it will bring in its wake a host of good things including peace of mind and heart and a sense of meaning and of purpose in their life.  Whether our means are great or modest a saying of Jesus quoted by Paul remains true, It is more blessed to give than to receive.

The Weird Things That Are Sins In The Kulcha Of Materialist Atheistic Scientism - Yeah, More Hate Mail

or, Skepticism The "Skeptics" Will Not Put Up With 

OF COURSE I accept that the only theory of how biological diversity arose in the history of life on Earth that makes sense of the evidence is that modern species evolved from what scientists would classify as different species, over millions, tens and hundreds of millions and billions of years.  The idea that makes the most sense of the currently available evidence of that evolution - which is only the tiniest fraction of evidence that must have once existed but now is not and never will be available for scientific study - is that all present day life is descended from a single, original organism.  Though that last theory, which I assume as a concept that doesn't even really arise to the level of a theory, isn't really based on the soundest of foundations.  I fully believe it as I fully admit that it is entirely conjectural because there is no real and direct physical evidence to base it in.

Even the broadest of the fuzzy details in evolutionary theory are based on far less of the necessary evidence than is available to physics or chemistry in the things that they study.  Its status as reliably durable and secure knowledge is absurdly less than that of the really hard sciences, especially considering the position it holds in the broader culture and even within the culture of scientists. "Hard" should be understood as in the hardness and durability of the conclusions reached.   Much of biology approaches the durability and reliability of physics and chemistry and is based enough on well done observation and quantitative analysis and so deserves to be considered as proper science.  Most of what gets said about evolutionary science is more properly seen as one or more of the following, conjecture, lore, wishful-thinking, ideological claims and posturing, in descending order of quality, honesty and deserving of respect as "science."  In the inverted morality of modern academia, that order is inverted and the shiftiest of it is granted the highest status.  Natural selection was born in and remains one of the sleaziest of ideological claims with the clearest of base motives found embedded in what is, largely, otherwise genuine science or close to it.  

I suspect that if you understood what I just said you will be morally outraged and if you were in my presence and heard me say that in a group of your fellow college-credentialed boobs you would be apoplectic and denounce me in what I'd then note is a parody of a Brit-costume-drama Inquisitor.  You would want to be seen and heard making that denunciation as gaining you status.  You probably would if you didn't understand more than that I had dissed Darwin with that and called into question something that has been, in its second most significant cultural presence,* nothing more than an anti-religious, specifically anti-Christian ideological weapon.   A weapon which those who use it can only attack a specifically modern heresy of Biblical fundamentalism which is not held by many, perhaps most of those who are religious or Christian by profession.  I grew up as a Catholic with parents who fully believed in evolution and who understood the Bible is not what fundamentalists or their foils, the materialist-atheist-scientistic hold it to be, a science textbook or a modern style history.  My mother had a degree in zoology, it never much had a negative  effect on her religious belief. We never discussed natural selection or Darwinism, though I have with other members of my family and I've even convinced one of the working biologists I'm related to to admit there were some pretty serious problems with it.  They work in an area in which there is little to no need for evolutionary conjecture, lore, wishful thinking or ideological claiming or posturing, there are many, many working biologists who are too busy looking what can be looked at, counting and measuring, etc. to bother with that ideologically polluted stream of their science.  

Just why the college-credentialed crowd puts so much moral stock in Darwinism is one of the more entertaining curiosities of the ubiquitous and decadent modernist culture of the college-credentialed.  In that, you must rigidly adhere to a belief in natural selection and elevate a rather unattractive and frequently dishonest man, Charles Darwin and his colleagues and heirs, inexplicably in the cases of those like Huxley, Pearson and even (according to Robert Richards and his publisher) the proto-Nazi  Haeckel, who are frequently morally atrocious, to positions of sanctity that require lying about them.  

Why that area of science?  One of the least impressive for the expression of durable, reliable or even practically important ideas is held onto as such a struggle worth our limited and so wasted time and effort and our limited and far from secure credibility?  One that is of little to no practical use in trying to save life on this planet from the effects of modern industrial pollution of the planet and from the weapons of mass destruction that science and technology have given us?  Those are the pressing questions, not if ol' Chuck Darwin was a saint among men.  Which he wasn't.

Why should it matter to anyone who wants to save bio-diversity - Darwin certainly didn't favor the diversity of the human population, read The Descent of Man and you'll see that, by the way - or even the future of the human population waste so much of those on that question?  It's as if reality and even the truth of the record of it didn't really matter to them, which, since their conception of "science" is so shoddy as they hold themselves as the great champions of science, isn't surprising, on reflection.  

That's the area of what you want to defend in which you have the strongest case, the attack on psychology, sociology, economics, etc. as pseudo-science is far easier to make.  

Economics is never sufficiently honest in what its claims are and is never done without being thoroughly enmeshed in ideology and self-interest and greed.  That Darwin based his theory of natural selection on a murderous  economic theory that elevated the British class system and the artificial, human made, very teleologically  motivated laws that created it to the status of a natural phenomenon is a line of attack on natural selection I have made and which does nothing to elevate it.  The embedded teleology of most if not all of the supporting arguments Darwin made for his allegedly non-teleological theory is an area I should go into more, someday.

Psychology alleges to study things that can't be observed, measured or analyzed, and when they can't and that incapacity is raised as a challenge, pretends that those things it can't do don't exist or don't matter.  Behavioral psychology and the psychology that demotes human consciousness to unimportance or even non-existence in the alleged study of psychology is something of an ultimate academic absurdity. That it could stand as an acceptable stand to take in a university impeaches the seriousness or integrity of modern academia.   Its history feeds off of the same roots that Darwinism does and it shares in every defect that the theory of natural selection has and adds myriads of others.

Sociology is based on a superstition that you can pretend to gather data which can never really be guaranteed to be accurately reported or accurately representative of a diversity within human populations and to figure out by statistical analysis something about the group allegedly described, usually presenting a numerical abstraction as "typical" of the population and, inevitably, presenting that as being good or at least some aspect of underlying natural conditions.  That superstition was also adopted by psychology.  

It was all part of the more general superstition that I laid out when I criticized the superstition of the "enlightenment" which took the validity of physics and science and turned it into the absurd belief that a parody of the same methodology that produced their discoveries was generalizeable to areas of far greater complexity in which that methodology would neither work nor the conjectures and substitutions required to pretend to apply them produce anything like reliable knowledge, replacing ideological claims for the reliable and testable conclusions that physics and chemistry and even biology could achieve when they were honest and diligent.

That ideology gained social status, probably most so through the economic, wealth and power enhancing utility of science, and, so, became more generalized in the culture of educated people and those who wished to be taken as such. If I had a dollar for every academic or scribbling, babbling "champion of science and reason" who probably couldn't balance an algebraic equation of one variable I'd probably be rich enough to be as obnoxious as a tech billionaire.  I could go into the shared ideological interests among them which had far more to do with economics and class than it did a real respect for the physical sciences.  That's ultimately why the boobs who wrote the First Amendment didn't make a distinction between The People having a right to the truth and that there was never and is not still any right to lie. Why they rejected the moral basis of any decent government that could ever be established in favor of the oligarchy favoring amoral, scientistic, secularist pose they took.  Rich people, those who aspire to be rich, most of all want to be relieved from moral responsibilities to the least among them, they don't like Jesus and the Prophets telling them to. They're who get power in non-egalitarian government and other centers of might, wisdom and wealth.  Academics also don't like being told not to screw their students, that accounts for part of it in that milieu.  

If you want me to post your comment, drop the invective and deal with what I said.  I'm not required to post anything I don't choose to.  If it amused me to fight with you as it sometimes does, I might do that too but I'm not in a mood to do much playing right now.  Global warming and the drought we're having is leaving me with little time for that.  The science behind global warming, the necessity of changing human activity drastically or it will end much of biological diversity and maybe finish us off is infinitely more important that re-fighting the fucking Darwin wars or defending the amoral and so immoral, indefensible pseudo-sciences or the cultural hegemony of materialist-atheist-scientism.  

* Its most significant cultural presence is as the origin of eugenics, modern scientific racism and the modern biological genocides of the Nazis and others.  In the United States, now, it is the basis of the "Bell Curve" style attack on equality and the struggle to right the wrongs of American apartheid.  It is basic to those who are pushing hard to reestablish Jim Crow, many of them with full academic credentialing and even many who sit or sat on eminent faculties.  I doubt one of them would agree with anything I said about this and I'm glad to disagree with them.  I don't want to be any part of that cultural milieu.