How Did The Idea of "Rights" Come To Mean Enabling So Many Wrongs?

THE SUPREME COURT of the United States in an act of monumental stupidity gave the media a "right" to lie about politicians and other public figures in 1964 and it is one of the least realized corruptions of our society and, so, our politics in every year since that. You may have caught me harping on this before because even as I do that I see every evidence it is the key to understanding the corruption of American life and, so, politics.  

The criminal who lost the presidency in 1960, Nixon, won the election in 1968  largely on the power of media lies told about Hubert Humphrey.  The common analysis that he lost it due to American involvement in Vietnam is certainly discredited by not only by Nixon's continuation but entirely illegal expansion of the American war into Cambodia and Laos, not to his political harm.  He won the next election in 1972, against the anti-war George McGovern, one of the most decent men to ever have gotten a major party nomination, even as Nixon's crimes were becoming obvious through even more lies told through and by the media. Lying has certainly worked far better for the oligarchs and the Republican, now Republican-fascist party who own the media and whose interest against the majority of The People needs lying to succeed.  Though that idea would have seem to have failed to gain the notice of the Warren Court who had lifetime tenure and didn't need to run for election or reelection to sit at a bench in position to make such stupid decisions.

I would like to get around to trying to research the etymology of that use of the word "right" to mean things we are entitled to do and have and how it once related to doing what was morally right and providing the necessities and goods of life to those who lacked them, trying to trace how that connection was corrupted to the point where "rights" are claimed by those who clearly are in the wrong and who are permitted by judicial pretenses of moral neutrality to get away with everything from petty conning right up to and including murder as a matter of "rights."  Especially when there is a demonstrable destruction of real and the most consequential of rights for far more People when such "rights" are invented.  Whatever that relation  is the whole notion of "rights" as they exist in the United States, under our federal and state Constitutions is seriously and dangerously screwed up.  

Our idolized Bill of Rights is highly problematic, even if my critique of the First Amendment makes you jittery consider the use of the Second Amendment by Republican-fascists to turn our schools into the shooting galleries of psychopaths.  If, as I suspect, that game is a consequence of 18th century enlightenment refusal to admit the practical consequences of immorality under the guise of judicial impartiality, such a study might be far more useful than it might seem at first.  Judges and, especially Supreme Court "justices" are never as impartial as they pretend to be, that's just another lie told with impunity like the ones Republican-fascists told during their confirmation hearings to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The idea that lying could exist as a right held, not only by individual human beings but the artificial corporate entities that "the press" are is an extreme danger to anything that depends on an effective majority of Americans knowing the truth.  We saw an extreme example of that in the media carried Trumpian-Republican-fascist lies surrounding Covid-19 and the efforts of those with the widest knowledge of what truth could be known about it to reduce and diminish the dangers and public and personal health consequences of the pandemic.  That is an ongoing consequence of the Courts and others pretending that there is a right to lie in the media which, fuck all else, will be the law of the land no matter how many tens and hundreds of thousands die as a consequence, no matter how long the promissory note of equal rights issued in the actual founding of the country is put off for members of oppressed minorities and Women and the working and unemployed poor.   And the American media, by and large, have been entirely irresponsible in that regard.

The lies in everything from the lowest of the gutter press to the New York Times against Hillary Clinton resulted in the United States having the loser of the 2016 election take the presidency.  Someone recently said Donald Trump was the man most investigated and least prosecuted in our history it is perhaps notable that known and proven con man and criminal that he is someone as obviously sleazy as he is was able to, even getting fewer votes, defeat the woman who is certainly the most investigated and most exonerated person in American history, and even more lied about than investigated.  The power of lies over the truth is something that is certainly proven in our history, our lived, experienced recent history, the danger of permitting the enormously powerful mass media and the social disease of social media to lie with impunity is as proven as any other mortal danger.  It is supremely ironic that telling the truth about the danger of free-speech-press absolutism is, effectively, one of the most forbidden areas of speech that there is.

The present regime of enabling and so empowering lies, especially lies amplified in the mass media and peddled by the expertise of advertising, a career of conning and carnival barking more effectively will destroy American democracy on behalf of organized criminals and billionaire gangsters intent on destroying democracy.  Even in issues where a majority of Americans seem to want one thing, the media and its effects on elections - mixed with the gaming of the corrupt American structure of government which has been so effectively gammed by those hired by the oligarch-gangsters - has thwarted equality, gun regulation, climate change policy, health care, etc. etc. etc.  Only a media freed from the entirely visible hand of the oligarch-gangsters has any possibility of telling the truth consistently. Though even such a press not required to try to tell the truth will be little to no help and will often be counterproductive in effect.  I would point to the old lefty media organs who were as apt to champion stupidly counterproductive policies and carry water for anti-democratic ideologies like Marxism as they were to really help in the struggle for equality and equal and economic justice.  We need a new lefty media that is totally and consciously free of that baggage.  Outside of some little financed and little read religious left sources, I can't think of a single one which is free of it.

I am not the most experienced reader of Scripture there is but I don't find much in the way of the promotion of the mass delusion present in our secular society that there is anything right about lying. About the only thing I can think of off the top of my head was the deception of the prostitute Rahab in concealing the spies Joshua sent to scout out how to take the city of Jericho.  And that's not exactly a good fit.  Perhaps there is something someone would like to point out in Scripture that gives the massive liars, the "christian nationalists" their Scriptural warrant to lie their heads off, not least of which is lying about who Jesus was and what Jesus said.  If there is something that shows just how reliant on a "right" to lie American-fascism is, that certainly makes the case.

The Re-Return of Saturday Night Radio Drama - Gerad Freixes Ribera - Escapism and Dime Novels

Escapism And Dime Novels 

 

Escapism and Dime Novels by Gerard Freixes Ribera tells the story of two writers, both working in a Spanish prison in the reign of General Franco - but on different sides of the bars.

Featuring a cast hailing from Spain, El Salvador, Chile and San Francisco,

Antonio Gil Martinez
José Miguel Jiménez
Leticia Vaquero
Fede Gonzales
Marcos Isla
Roger Gregg

Sound Supervision Mark Dwyer

Directed by Eithne Hand

This is one I just started listening to and haven't finished so we're kind of discovering it together.   The premise was different enough to make me decide to try it while I'm canning tomatoes. 

That This "Judge" And Her Self-Promoting Ruling Shows Why The Constitution In Regard To The Federal Judiciary Is Dangerously In Need Of Amendment

 

As An Egalitarian Democrat The Talk Of The Kingdom Of God Troubled Me Until I Remembered Just WHO Would Be The King of It

THE KINGDOM OF GOD that a reader found troubling IS a troubling phrase for an egalitarian democrat.  It becomes less of a problem if you remember that The Kingdom of God wouldn't be a human kingdom ruled by a human being, it wouldn't be subject to the evils that human kingship inevitably include, the injustices that God had Samuel warn The Children of Israel would come with them adopting a monarchical system would not be part of it, there would certainly be no injustice under the rule of God, God wouldn't be a human king with all of the nastier aspects of human personality coming with making a human being king. Or, rather, allowing a human being to make himself king.  We're not God, in case you forget and you shouldn't because human kings, whether Nebuchadnezzar, Pharaoh, Henry VIII, the Czar, Bush II or Trump or whoever the next Republican-fascist Ameriking crowned by the damned Electoral College or by the imperial Supreme Court and abjectly, cowardly and opportunistically proclaimed Ameriking by the "free press" are anything but divine.  

The Kingdom of God like so many other such terms in Scripture,  is a human term that tries to give a hint as to things that are not part of human experience and culture.  There is no human term for what the Prophets are talking about when they talk about the ultimate good.  Those metaphors are given given in a time and in a place where largely uneducated People and what they could understand were the audience of and the vehicle to bring of the Gospel to human minds and history.  Just as metaphors fill the Prophesy in the Old Testament. I'm not sure, given what I've seen, that educated People are any more equipped to understand than uneducated People are.

As human cultures have changed and human experience has varied, those metaphors take more effort to understand. The conditions of human minds that are continually mistaking metaphors for what those are supposed to elucidate is probably related to the fact that any human king is going to be anything from highly fallible to resorting to evil to maintain power to what Trump would have been if he'd pulled off the coup that CNN under new management, looking for new audience members in the minority who are Republican-fascists seems to want its viewers to think isn't such a big deal.  

God's kingdom won't come through the use of fear and the violence which are behind any human monarchy and which even the best egalitarian democracy we ever manage to construct would still require as long as human moral failure is a fact.*  I would guarantee you that anything that claims to be The Kingdom of God among human beings could be known to be false through a use of violence and fear to enforce what it was.  If the Kingdom of Jesus could not be found on Earth, we should not expect any governance of humans in life as we know it should ever be mistaken for God's rule.  Such rule would not require a staff of thugs to enforce it with violence and threats (royals, nobles, knights, lower-level feudal functionaries, judges, "justices," etc.) the laws will be written on the hearts of all People and they will choose to follow it without violence and without threats.  Here they had to depend on the Czar being far off and of little power, the Kingdom of God will be based in the imminence of the experience of God.  

It may not be fashionable to read Scripture to consider some of that Kingdom talk was talking about a "Kingdom not of this world" in the afterlife but to place the entire scope of Prophesy here, on Earth in human experience in time.  But I don't think it works as anything but an unachievable aspiration within the human experience of the material realm in which we need what we need to live but, above and beyond that, we WANT and want and want ever more than we need and we want luxury and, most of all, status above others around us.  I don't see the Peaceable Kingdom on Earth though we are charged with trying our best to accomplish something far closer to it than has ever been accomplished in the past.  I do think that that is part of the use of the metaphor though putting it all in the afterlife is no where near ambitious enough in terms of human life and action here on Earth.

I think of the phrases in the prayer Jesus taught "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven," as about the only evidence given of The Kingdom that is had in mind might be achievable on Earth and the Kingdom would certainly be a result of us doing God's will, of following The Law.  What it would consist of in terms of human will and action is something I can't imagine, those having produced more hell than heaven in my experience but it would have to be something far different than in our history. Everyone having their daily bread would certainly be part of it. Even when People are motivated by the best of intentions and even love, humans carrying the Commandments out well, never mind perfectly, isn't anything I've seen.  The prayer, itself, tells us we are to forgive the wrongs done to us as we would want our wrongs forgiven by God, so it includes the acknowledgement that such wrongs will be inevitable.  We have to ask to be led away from temptation and delivered from evil by God, that we will all encur "debts" (so there will be need and inequality on Earth) or, in the Catholic metaphor that is translated into, "trespasses," into other people's things.  So I think what is meant by that phrase is that we have a moral obligation to make as much of the real Kingdom of God present in the world according to our limited abilities expanded by grace.   I think many of the metaphors in Scripture are better read as applying on Earth and that they are talking about heaven too. I don't think Isaiah's vision of herbivorous lions eating grass next to lambs meant that carnivores were going to all become vegans, think of the problem of the balance of nature and what would happen to the limited grasslands on Earth.  Though maybe they'll all stop having offspring that risks the result of more than replacement levels of reproduction.   See, metaphors for things we haven't seen or experienced. 

* The problem with the police isn't that they exist, the problem with policing is that its culture is  corrupted with racism and other forms of bigotry and an internal culture which encourages that.  Not a little of that the product of the gangsters who run police unions and their appeal to the worst among their members to maintain their power.  The fact that the Supreme Court and other courts have made the job of policing impossible due to their putting automatic and other powerful guns and weapons in the hands of those who commit mass murder has more than a little to do with the deterioration of policing in the United States.  A lot of that was encouraged by programs such as C.O.P.S. and entertainment shows which are entirely unrealistic and the fascist vision of the Dirty Harry franchise and its spin-offs.  The part that the civil liberties industry played in it by getting such things as the Miranda warning which the Roberts Court just knocked down is a minor mitigation compared with what the gun industry, fascists on the Supreme Court and entertainment have done.  The extent to which the ACLU participated in that through its myopic advocacy is probably of much lesser import but it is very real and, because of the court rulings it gets, not insignificant.

Not an insignificant part of it is a product of discriminatory hiring in the past and the present. No police force should look so little like the population it is supposed to serve and protect as so many do.

And then there is the actual system of education, the formation of minds of the population of the United States, media, especially entertainment media. I have marveled at the oddity that so many novels, TV shows, movies, etc. have policemen as central characters when they really aren't that big a percentage of the population. In some ways I think they have been made into a sort of unintentional report on the anxieties and mental debility of the largely white, largely male, largely middle-class or affluent writers, directors, producers and actors who run entertainment which is then presented to a less pathological population as sex-violence entertainment and so has infected its audience, including law enforcement officers with a higher percentage of evil than you'd expect from those choosing to go into a helping profession.  That's my theory of the origin of the epidemic of bad policing, including murder, that we see around us.  

Some of us started predicting such bad consequences in the shift in entertainment starting in the 1970s reaction to the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and early 70s and downward into the Hollywood-TV fascist chic that deserved to be called that in the 1980s during the Reagan years. The explosion in the number of channels on TV and now online has only made it ever worse. Digital gaming and whining by the likes of Incel boys has made even that much worse.  Entertainment corrupts except on the rare occasions it chooses to promote good. And so bad are the writers, etc. so much more used to cynical negativity than in charity are they that the results are usually cloyingly nauseating.  The percentage of it that is not garbage has certainly gone to less than one percent of it, now.  

Note: I was going to post this yesterday but events led me to hold it.  Re-reading it I've decided to post it today.

A 96-Year-Old Woman Died

 and all that keeps going through my head is the brilliant Stanley Baxter doing Rose and Mrs. Bridges . 

No disrespect for someone who had more class and humanity than literally just about every Brit PM in her entire lifetime but it's a good bit of imitation.   That said, I hope Charles is ready for the brick bats that are going to be heaved onto him and probably are already. 

My Difficult Admiration For And Critique Of The Late Barbara Ehrenreich

LIKE MOST PEOPLE when I think of Barbara Ehrenreich I always think of her best known book Nickled and Dimed in which she did some Nellie Bly style reportage by taking some minimal wage, awful jobs and trying to live on the money she made while reproducing the living conditions, travel, etc. that are the daily experience of the working poor.  I admired the book very much and still find some of what she said in it insightful, especially her admission that she could only approximate the mental experience of People who knew they were trapped in that life because she knew it was a time-limited project and she would return to her life as a writer and intellectual.

I had more of a problem with her materialist-atheist-scientism, in fact encountering what she said and claimed out of that, the attitude it gave her to anything that she noticed might challenge her base ideology and most of what I've written and said about her has been about that.  I noted that given her hostility to Christianity and religion in general, it was probably an irony that her greatest audience were probably among religious book readers and book clubs seriously reading Nickled and Dimed as supplementary material in their following of The Gospel, the Law and the Prophets (at least in my experience and my observation.)   '

I did find reading about her book, her late-life memoir, "Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything" in which she approached what might be interpreted as her religious experience kind of amusing.  I noted that one thing was sure about her, she knew how to sell a book.   

Just the end of last February I slammed a disappointingly lazy, typical, lazy Lynn White inspired and very sloppy conception of human history, religion and the extinction crisis that she had in The Guardian.  I'll not quote from it here.

While I believe she'll probably have made her own peace with her career and life as she was surprised to find there is an afterlife, I don't feel any problem with what I've written about her.  I do admire some of her work, especially when her ideology was not foremost in what she did.  I think she was involved in some projects that may have seemed like a good idea at the time but which were anything from meaningless to unhelpful, such as the Socialist Scholars Conference which morphed into the comic "Left Forum."   Marginally more respectable she was involved with the abortive Students for a Democratic Society.  She had a typical white American lefty cum Marxist set of blinders for the mass murder that the Cultural Revolution in China was, something which is still typical of many of the scribbling class white lefties of that and the next generation.   Along with my realization that anyone murdered under Stalinism was as murdered as anyone murdered under fascism or Nazism came a realization that that was as true of those murdered in China, Cambodia, etc. under those variations on Marxism,  I've never looked back from that experience of shame and I never overlook it in others.  Especially those in the scribbling, babbling, publishing classes.  I could go on with other projects.

In the end I think her major work praised above has more than its match in far lesser read, far lesser promoted books, not a few of them from People who lived in those conditions and documented them from their own despair.  Though they didn't have lunch with Lewis Lapham but she did write her book and I honor its intention and whatever influence it had.  I think, unfortunately, her other activities did nothing to enhance its influence in politics and life. 

Senator Whitehouse on "Originalism"

 

 

People Are Equally Endowed With Some Rights, Their Ideas Are Not And We Shouldn't Pretend They Are - Hate Mail

THE POINT MADE by a philosopher who I disagree with about much, George Moore, that there are hardly any of the points of the most exacting of philosophy which people can know as experientially and reliably as something like 2+2=4 is something I agree with  wholeheartedly.  That some of the most exacting philosophy takes enormous pains and extremely long chains of symbolic statements and conclusions to reach the point where it can admit that 1+1=2, and even then it is something you would have to choose to believe makes me wonder why a more reasonable  conclusion to reach is that there is something deeply problematical with that particular philosophical specialty.  The refusal to admit that we know some of the things we know because, in the end, you can't reach a formal "proof" of it is one of the mental dysfunctions caused by setting an impossible standard, a refusal to admit that what we can know is known within the contingent limits of our abilities and those don't produce a satisfyingly final conclusion beyond any ridiculous question, finally answering all things.  

I will note that the conclusion that the exacting logical thing which pure math is does not produce a self-closing system certainly should call into question that the less exacting field of physics will ever have one for itself.  Having once gotten a particularly arrogant materialist fundamentalist to admit that there is not so much as a single electron which science knows completely and exhaustively (which admission, I'm still proud to have forced him into admitting, it was like pulling hens' teeth)  perhaps I should ask someone in the foundations of mathematics if there is a single number or other mathematical object which mathematics has a complete understanding of.  Even the number 1 would seem to be intimately tied up with every new facet of mathematics that is published and so those reveal new aspects of the number.  Which is a cheering idea, there will never be an end to what there is for professional mathematicians to discover.  That is if you take any of it as either true or significant and if you don't, so much for science.  And, therefore, someone might be willing to pay them while they do it. Many an academic gets paid to do far more dodgy stuff.

That said, even in what is seemingly an infinitude of possible facets to the number 1, there are certainly statements you can make about the number 1 which are knowably true and statements containing it which are certainly false.  And if you deny that, again, so much for science.  If those statements about the number 1 are not knowably true or false then there is just about literally nothing in philosophy or science which can be justifiably asserted to be known, including the validity of the mental apparatus of stuff used to deny that such self-evident and provable truths about numbers is knowably true or false, their debunkery exists as much within the contingent limits of minds as the things the debunkers want to debunk.

Even more basic than the idea that the basic addition facts are valid is that the mind containing and manipulating those facts is real, the reasoning of the mind, its evaluation of the truth value of its conclusions, that it does something which requires meaningful thought and produces meaningful and true results as understanding of things is there to do that, no matter what enormous chains of ideologically motivated and far from obvious argument seeks to convince you that minds in general, including yours, is not engaged in any meaningful activity which arrives at true conclusions those philosophy professors or those who prefix cog- or neuro- appended to their fields of speculation as science want to claim for publication to support their ideological preferences.  

If their conclusion is true the very activities they were engaged in to produce that work is as discredited as any other conclusions that anyone else engages in in contradiction of them. Their own work is as stripped of significance or the likelihood that it enjoys the value of truth.   Their idea has exactly the same status as the ideas denying their conclusions.  And of course, their own claim's validity is as debunked as anything they don't like in that philosophical two-step. Their conclusions have exactly the same truth value as the "folk psychology" which they dismiss.

But many of the ideas that claim that Peoples consciousness, that minds really exist and that their activities and conclusions have at least a chance to arrive at a meaningful truth are not self-discrediting in the same way.  Such ideas of minds and their activities include the possibility of arriving at truth or untruth so they permit the possibility that their conclusions are true. That's the difference between a self-set ideological trap and an attempt to find the truth.  I have never suspected the eliminative materialists to have not started out firmly holding onto their desired conclusion by which their claims are forced but they really aren't very good at thinking things out to the endpoint.  Like all ideologues, eventually they want to have an exemption from their own universal claims.

I hold that any idea that contains or forces its own contradiction or forces a conclusion of its invalidity is rightly held to be too stupid to publicly fund or support the promotion of and any institution or, especially in this case, school that does that is rightly questioned and held to have fallen into nonsense and, so, is unworthy of support.

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

. . .  that possibility of danger is no rational reason to make it far more dangerous by allowing the free expression and advocacy of ideologies and lies that ensure those dangers are more likely while their suppression will make them less likely

Not only in spite of but because I hold that all People are created equal and equally are endowed with rights, I reject the idea that all ideas are equally deserving of respect and to respectably hold a place in academia or science, no matter how nicely grammatical their writing and speech is, no matter how nicely they dress, how nicely they have gained credentials that allow them to put letters after their name or to insist that people call them "Dr.".  

Certainly any idea that debases or denies the validity of the very categories of respectability and even truth (which is certainly among those things which should render an idea under consideration as respectable and gain it a place in academic life) cannot then be said to deserve what it denies any consequential status to, it being claimed as being a respectable idea that might be true.  I think the consequences of materialist-atheist-scientism which include some of the most decadent claims and conclusions and consequences of those sort ever bull-shitted as intellectualism earns them a place on a roll of ideas that aren't deserving of respect or a place in anything respectable. I'm unaware of any formal logical fallacy that labels an argument that not only debases its claimed goal but also debases the very means by which its conclusions are reached but it would seem to me that there needs to be one invented to express just how much is wrong about eliminative materialism and its philosophico-ideological cousins.  That it is held to be an academically respectable idea is an emblem of just how absurd modernism becomes.  Given the importance of egalitarian democratic government, it is far more urgent that any idea which destroys the basis of it should have a special categorization as disreputable and unworthy of respect,  those which have a history of getting People killed and oppressed should be forbidden and actively suppressed.

People have equal rights in that it is a right to have a decent, peaceful, secure life in so far as People and societies can provide that. Their ideas?  Ideas don't have rights, I no more have to respect or hold as equal or as equally deserving of legal protection a political ideology that promotes evil treatment of entire groups of People, denying that they be allowed a peaceful, decent, secure life any more than than I do to the idea that 2+2= the recipe for original Coke or the ravings of some Biblical numerologist that a late night host picks up off the street to fill air time, only those would be innocuous whereas the ones you can expect the ACLU to mount a defense of get people killed.  

The absurd idea that an idea that targets an entire race, religion, gender or gender identity for discrimination, violence or murder is more allowable than the advocacy of violence against a single individual is just that, absurd. That judges, "justices," legal hacks, misguided Civics teachers, and the rest of us have been sold the idea that even in the face of the 20th century materialist-atheist-scientistic dictatorial regimes and the mountains of those murdered by them that we MUST allow them another chance to do it again is the most decadent of current superstitions.  Beside that the ludicrous notion that Noah put two of every animal in a big boat during a flood that drowned all the dinosaurs is harmlessly naive.  One gets millions murdered, one produced a wacky theme park with finances that make people whine.  Yet I know which one would never be considered as belonging in a university or defended on NPR or get respectful treatment among those held to be respectable outside of some particularly benighted areas of Protestant fundamentalism.  And it isn't the one that got millions murdered.

The idea that egalitarian democracy, on the basis of some wacky idea of "justice" or "fairness" must tolerate the now billionaire - foreign dictator-gangster as well as our own indigenous gangster class-  financed cabloid and webloid profiting promotion of ideas that deny equality and which are destructive of the absolutely essential prerequisites for democracy, giving them a chance to dupe and corrupt the electorate into giving them a chance to do what they proclaim they want to is one of the stupidest ideas to have gained currency in the modern period.  

It is also an idea that those who proclaim it tend to violate whenever it suits them.  That someone like James Madison or Thomas Jefferson or even John Adams may have promoted the idea that all ideas MUST be allowed is certainly contradicted by their lives.  Madison and Jefferson would certainly never have supported the communication of the idea among those they held in slavery that they had the same rights of rebellion against tyranny that they claimed as a natural right when it was a group of aristocratic white guys gathered in Philadelphia to break the ties to the English government.  

Though the infamous Alien and Sedition Act is held by polite college-credentialed People to be a far worse thing than the hypocrisies of Madison and Jefferson, Adams certainly didn't seem to think that when he was President dealing with what he had good reason to fear was an importation of the ideas that were leading to the Reign of Terror as "liberty, equality and fraternity" in France, with the support of not a few of his political opponents who were not in power but wanted to be.  The idea that resurgent fascism, our indigenous form of that in the Supreme Court enabled white supremacy which still oppresses and kills so many and the male supremacy which the Roberts Court has, as well, again made the law of the land, giving predominantly male, Republican-fascist legislators power over the very bodies and lives of Women that slave-holders held over slaves, to deny the ancestors of slaves the right to cast a vote, that that and Nazism or Stalinism or Maoism or even lesser demented forms of anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian MUST be allowed a chance to take hold here and flourish as Trumpism has is absolutely morally irresponsible and insane.  For the large majority of People who would suffer under those, there is absolutely no reason for them to agree that because Jemmy Madison said we must allow that the chance to happen.  If Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, our indigenous forms of fascism such as white supremacy were forbidden, suppressed and never advocated here would be all for the good.  

If you ask who gets to draw the line, the answer is as plain as it is for every law that is made, rightfully, we the People do.  There is no absolute safety in any human activity, there is certainly possible danger in establishing and maintaining a government but that possibility of danger is no rational reason to make it far more dangerous by allowing the free expression and advocacy of ideologies and lies that ensure those dangers wielding power are more likely while their suppression will make them less likely to.  Especially those ideologies that announce their intention of endangering, oppressing, murdering such as a good little ACLU contributor will feel very self-satisfyingly virtuous about paying to give them a legal representation on the insane belief that that's the best way to prevent what they admit they intend to do happening.

Anyone who cannot distinguish between the desire for all People to have the right to a decent, peaceful life and Nazism, Stalinism, American apartheid, Trumpism etc. is too stupid to be granted any benefit of the doubt and certainly should be held to hold an idea that is dangerously deserving of suppression.  The lives of scores of millions dead just within still living memory attest to that danger as the millions killed by white supremacy in the United States stand as testimony against our indigenous equivalent of that.  Yet it is the pretense that we are all incompetent to make that decision, that judges and "justices" and jurors who are given the responsibility to make life and death decisions when it is merely the very lives of human beings are incompetent to judge the difference between Nazism and equal justice for all.

Nother Busy Day So A Quick Answer

AGAIN, I CAN'T FIND the book which I was thinking of so I transcribed this short piece from a Youtube interview of Luke Timothy Johnson in which he gives an example of how idolatry in one definition of it is a habit with all of us.  

It's also important to distinguish sin from idolatry because for a long time I tended to equate them.  And the Bible has all kinds of stuff to say about idolatry. You know, "making false gods,"  taking something contingent and treating it as if it were necessary, making something the center of your universe and revolving around that. But I've come in my (old) age, I've come to understand that idolatry is the way we're constructed. We really can't not be idolatrous because we're instinctually  impoverished.  We don't molt, we don't migrate, you know, we're cursed with freedom.  And so since we're not centered naturally we have to center on something. Problem is, idolatry is, "I want to be the world's best scholar, that's what I want to be" that's my goal, that's what I'm centering on.  Now, there's nothing wrong with that. But my eight-year-old child calls from the other room daddy come play with me, I'm lonely. Idolatry is natural, sin is choosing the idolatry when a gift is available. My daughter's plea for company is a gift to me. She wanted to be with me. My making my scholarly paper more important is a refusal to discern that. 

I would say that's not that unrelated to the habit of those those impressive idol makers who would certainly deny that's what they do when they "instinctually" (I'd say "habitually") reach for the idols of scientism such as "DNA," "natural selection," "random-chance,"  "probability" and a very naive and superficial resort to the billions of years they hold that those had the chance to produce this or that phenomenon, not taking into account that, for example, they would all have needed the age of the early Earth capable of sustaining any life and not the age of the universe to give them their actual time-span in which to work their creation mythology and not the theoretical age of the universe.   I remember the time I pointed out to one of them online that "natural selection" couldn't have had the chance to do what they claimed it did before there was reproducing, mutating life so they didn't have the "13 billion years" that they cited as the time span it would have had to do what they claimed it did.  The construction of idols even among those self-defined materialist skeptics is always an act that eschews the actual complexities involved. 

The Bizarre Intersections of Right-Wing Religion, Body Builders, Woman Abusers And Popular Atheists - Two Pieces

HAVING WRITTEN A response to a piece of hate mail the other day, I decided I probably wouldn't post it but this morning this piece about the interview the misogynist media bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota with an actor I'd never heard of before, Shia LeBeouf, which discusses the psycho-misogyinist masculinity as muscular Catholic integralism is the topic.  I'd thought that Pope Francis appointing the media darling Barron to what is a rather out of the way bishopric might mute his media presence and tone down his masculinity obsessed media operation (he's got a real thing about hiring body-builders who have lots of issues and get into trouble) but apparently not.  The Bish's got issues.

The hour-and-a-half conversation between actor Shia LaBeouf and Bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, lasts only seven minutes before the tension surrounding the Latin Mass comes up.

While the motive of the interview is primarily to discuss LaBeouf's portrayal of the titular saint in the forthcoming feature film "Padre Pio", the major revelation of the dialogue is LaBeouf's conversion to Catholicism, which is first brought to light through the discussion of, essentially, the role of the secret within the sacred as it pertains to differences between the Catholic liturgy's ordinary and extraordinary forms.

LaBeouf's own words praising the Latin Mass are, for lack of understanding Latin: "I can't argue the word, because I don't know what the word means, so I'm just left with this feeling." Barron himself brings up that a secondary purpose of incense at Mass is that it obscures the action in the sanctuary.

"I don't know what the word means, so I'm just left with this feeling."  is actually a good summation as to what was so bad about the Latin Mass in the period after almost everyone except the ordained clergy (Women religious were not typically taught Latin for most of the history of Catholicism) understood what was going on.  It was useless for much more than giving vague or often pathologically twisted feelings.  Much, though not all, of the Protestant critique of that is far more valid than anything the Latin nostalgics have to say about it.   If they want a feeling without understanding, what else do they make crappy religio-sentimentalistic Hallmark equivalent movies for?   His religion doesn't even get to the levels of the cloying Going My Way or the Bells of St. Mary's.   Clearly both LeBeouf's and Barron's Catholicism has more in common with a Chick Publications style idea of The Book of Revelations.

LaBeouf also says, before his conversion, he did not initially feel compelled to have a relationship with Jesus because he only knew the "soft, fragile, all-loving, all-listening but no ferocity … meek" Jesus (Barron immediately offers the word "feminized"), and it was only when LaBeouf encountered what he considered to be "masculine" — "cape, dipped in blood, sword" — that Jesus felt "appealing."

We should be concerned about anyone who finds the Gospel most compelling in its violence or who is put off by the femininity of Jesus. If we are to understand Jesus as the savior of all, we must embrace his full divinity that has no gender, and we must confidently identify the goodness of both the masculine and feminine in the incarnation.

Throughout the interview, LaBeouf cites a number of tropes and returns to them often: cowboys, cavemen and gangsters. He repeatedly expresses gratitude for the men who accompanied him and "masculinized" his journey, "the hero's journey."

LaBeouf also discloses the heart of this pull to the masculine: He is drawn to those who treat him in a fatherly or grandfatherly way, and he is lonesome for friends. He finds all of these things in the Catholic world.

Someone's been watching too much Joseph Campbell.  I have more than just a suspicion that both the Bish and the guy who works in makeup and make believe have a conception of Catholicism which has little to no use for those who Jesus put at the center of his ministry,  perhaps their devotion of a liturgy in a language which the either understood not at all or not very well has something to do with that.  I have to say, every time I dip into the activities of Robert Barron I'm left without many good feelings and in the Latin mass cult of today's American Catholic-fascism, I've developed an almost Protestant level of hostility toward it, which is too bad because I really do love medieval and renaissance Latin language religious music.  

I'll leave it to you to read the rest of the disturbing article, here's what I have held back posting. 

 "Irish Catholic Fundamentalist" - Hate Mail

IN THE RECENT PACKING AND UNPACKING of my books, due to my moving to and back from my very little house, I can't find the book in which was noted that Biblical fundamentalism as an organized movement in Protestantism was intimately tied in with the 18th-to today Scottish "common sense" school of philosophy, which started that delusion called "the enlightenment."  If that is correct it is ironic because most of that so-called "enlightenment" thought was and is quite opposed to Christianity and religion in the atheist-materialist branch of that fashion which so influenced the framing of the U.S. Constitution.  The idea that you could just read the enormously complex, enormously varied, Scriptures, the product of an extremely long, very complex history and many, often not agreeing minds, many of them entirely unknowable to us as if it were a simple work of 18th century expository writing by a single author is and always has been ridiculous.  In the long history of serious consideration of Scripture in Christianity, it has often been considered to be extremely complex.  Even in the understanding of Scripture which I have gotten, mostly from Walter Brueggemann who notes that all of it revolves around the liberation of The Children of Israel from slavery, notes how extremely complex it is.

The idea it could be read in a "common sense" manner is so ridiculous that even some of those who were considered part of the "enlightenment" commented on the complexity of the least opaque and complex part of Scriptures, created in a very condensed period of time among a relatively related group of writers, the New Testament.*  The complexity of it was one of the things that the anti-Christian side of the "enlightenment" used as an argument against it, though they certainly didn't find that a problem with other things which were complex and far less productive of good like the English Common Law.  

Always beware of hidden motives and intents when people want to make such appeals to simplicity and "common sense."  I will set aside the temptation to go into a diatribe about Thomas Paine and the demonstrable lack of "common sense" in his biography at this point.  Scribbling is so much easier than living.

"Fundamentalist" is one of those words which began with a fairly limited range of meaning, in terms of Biblical fundamentalism, it named those Protestant denominations and individuals who signed on to a rigid, bigoted, and pretty awful set of claims published as The Fundamentals.  Unfortunately, largely at  the hands of some academics writing secondary, tertiary, etc. stuff about conservative Protestantism, the actual meaning of the word was expanded and distorted, often quite wrongly.  I would guess that it was from them that it filtered through those in "journalism" and even more popular writing and babbling, they having learned the word, first, from those secondary (etc.) sources and having further generalized its use into no more than something for "fundamentalists" to say yea to and those who didn't like conservative Christianity or real Christainty to slam.  It's expansion to cover Islam and Judaism and other things totally unrelated to any religious scripture reached the point where Stephen Jay Gould (from who I got it) talked of the pseudo-scientific fad of the 1970s-today of Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology as "Darwinian fundamentalism."   I've used that term quite a lot so, you see, I'm as much a sinner as anyone.  The inability of People to live up to their most definite professions is one of the reasons we should all practice mercy to others, they might get into the habit and return it on us.  But don't count on that as a sure thing.

I have gotten some use of the original meaning of the word when I mock people who talk about "Catholic fundamentalists" as you did because if there's one thing that is characteristic of The Fundamentals and many of those who pledged allegiance to that mock-scripture, it is its vicious anti-Catholicism.  The now billionaire-astro-turf bull shit of "traditional Catholicism" is more related to a particularly awful early 20th century phenomenon of "integralism" among right-wing Catholics.  It is now a neo-fascist-capitalist cult which, like all "Christianity" that makes common cause with the rich and hateful, has no real dedication to the Gospel, the Law or the Prophets, it has little to nothing to do with Scripture at all but feeds off of the detritus of the worst period of Catholic history when the Papacy and many local bishops held medieval type power in kingdoms of this world and alligned themselves with the degenerate feudal rulers of kingdoms of the Earth who, likewise, never intended to follow the teachings of Jesus, the Law or the Prophets. Though a lot of it is even more in line with the putrid cabloid network of "Mother Angelica" or, as I called her, "that Nazi-nun" and its cloying nostalgia for a Hollywood "religious picture" conception of what Catholicism is supposed to all be about.  Bing Crosby or Spencer Tracy playing a priest always made me gag.  They hate Francis because he thinks Catholicism should be about the Gospel, Acts and the Epistles.

There is nothing more radical than the Gospel, the Law and the Prophets a close second to that in a graph of radicalism.  And, with what has been done to the word "radical" I have to stipulate that as radical in a good way.

* It's telling how many of the atheist-fundamentalists insist that that the Fundamentalist style of Scripture reading is the only valid way to read them.  Of course, that's because "Fundamentalism" turns God into a series of idols which are easy to knock down in argument. The reason that reading so much of the pop-atheist lit reveals how shallow it is. Perhaps since the "common sense" philosophical school is intimately tied in with the extension of the method of science into an ideological framing of reality and its morally catastrophic results, that isn't any big surprise. I think modern atheism in the European style, especially the Brit-English-Language style is as much a product of that simplistic methodology of "common sense" philosophy as Biblical fundamentalism is.  Given enough time I might relate that to the degeneracy that pseudo-science and academia fell into in the "enlightenment" imposition of scientism as the only respectable intellectual position and its invasion of popular culture among the mid-brow, college-credentialed population, the ones who so futilely war with the "fundamentalists" who certainly have had a far greater success in terms of politics and influence.   

It's remarkable how dumbing stuff down is so much a part of that "enlightenment."  And if there's one thing that might be a truism, stupid sells when you scrap moral responsibility.

A Classic Example Of Why Ranked Choice Voting Is A Better Deal For The Majority Of Voters Of All Parties

AMERICAN APARTHEID future Presidential candidate Tom Cotton has been trying to make hay over the Alaskan election which the Democrat Mary Peltola won over the putrid carny show spectacle candidate of the kind Republican-fascists have been putting so much stock in, Sarah Palin, whining that a majority of those in the election voted for a Republican but the Democrat who "lost" will take the seat.

What happened under the great practice of ranked-choice voting is that the last choice of a majority, of those who voted for Peltola and for Nick Begich, the one who placed third would rather have had Peltola than the concussed Palin in Congress.

What happens in ranked-choice is that the majorities least favorite candidate loses,  which is certainly better than the majority having their least favorite candidate take office.  That is something that an American apartheid creep like Cotton can't live with because, given a choice to avoid the worst, most voters will opt for their second choice over the worst and Tom Cotton's Republican Part is the worst that wants the worst.  

I am certain that the second choice of those who voted for Mary Pelota put Begich as their second choice.  Though its conceivable some of them might have opted for the insane clown Palin.  A dangerous number of Alaskan voters seems to have wanted to send her to Washington to "represent" them.  Though she certainly would not have represented anyone but a small minority of the rich and corrupt, a  dangerous percentage of American voters are either too stupid or too full of hate to vote even their own best interest and ranked choice voting protects most of us from them and their gullibility.   Would that the damned Maine Supreme Court and the stupid Maine State Constitution had allowed us to have it in the election of the Maine governor because we are in real danger of having  the hating-stupid minority put Paul LePage back in office next year.

Rejecting "nostalgia for a sacralized world, a bygone society" As Well As "Secularism" As A Requirement Outside Of Governmental Administration

A BUSY DAY for me so I'll leave you with this passage from a piece by Michael Sean Winters which contains an excellent passage from Pope Francis on the difference between secularization and secularism which is certainly a useful refinement of ideas I've been giving in a cruder form.

The Spirit of God is at work not only in the lives of the faithful, but beyond the walls of the church as well. This is one of the Holy Father's most provocative and important themes, one he touched on in his address to the bishops, clergy and religious of Quebec. There, building on quotes from Pope Paul VI, he said:

    "Saint Paul VI distinguished secularization from secularism, a concept of life that totally separates a link with the Creator, so that God becomes "superfluous and an encumbrance", and generates subtle and diverse "new forms of atheism": "consumer society, the pursuit of pleasure set up as the supreme value, a desire for power and domination, and discrimination of every kind" (ibid). As Church, and above all as shepherds of God's People, as consecrated men and women, seminarians and pastoral workers, it is up to us to make these distinctions, to make this discernment. If we yield to the negative view and judge matters superficially, we risk sending the wrong message, as though the criticism of secularization masks on our part the nostalgia for a sacralized world, a bygone society in which the Church and her ministers had greater power and social relevance."

Instead of wringing our hands about the secularization of the ambient culture, a process that has been ongoing for centuries, Pope Francis invites us to accompany those outside the church, mindful that the Spirit is at work in their lives too, that our Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation demands we stipulate that God is at work in their lives.

I've made a cruder distinction between secularism as an entirely necessary formal practice within governments in an egalitarian democratic pluralistic country and the kind of cultural atheism that that secularism has been opportunistically distorted into and demanded by those who hate religion and, most of all, Christianity.  I think the distinction that Pope Francis and Paul VI made is compatible with the one I made, though it contains some important nuances missing from my idea of it.   I will note who Francis lays that responsibility on, the clergy and religious most of all.  I think a political blogger should try to, as well.

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.