Yes, We Must Burn Sade And Snuff Porn And, Especially, Lies - Hate Mail

And you can throw the ACLU on to that pyre, too.

THERE IS SOMETHING OBVIOUSLY wrong with a conception of "freedom" which can contain the concept that some should be free to keep others in slavery and to commit genocide.  Yet that conception of freedom is exactly what the fabled founders of the United States Constitution not only held with but rigidly fixed into the Constitution which we still live under.  The slavery part of that is indisputable, nor is the genocide part of it, both which were not only the actual history but the official as well as somewhat unofficial policy of the United States.  Overt chattel slavery was still a part of it until just after the Civil War and genocide even after that is charcteristic of America under the Bill of Rights.  The Supreme Court, repeatedly, over that period, not only retained the slavery embedded into the Constitution, it intensified and, in the Dred Scott decision (which the Court has never overturned) it made it the supreme law of the land, making every state a de facto slave state.   That wasn't entirely or even effectively expunged from the foundational law of the United States.  The Courts and many states continued de facto slavery in the Jim Crow period until the 1960s.  What wasn't done by law and court ruling was done through white supremacist terrorism and violence enforced discrimination.  As I mentioned yesterday there were many slavery promoting and protecting features of the Constitution which were not, in fact, abolished in the vitally important amendments drafted in the wake of the Civil War.  Such things as mentioned yesterday.  And those Civil War Amendments have been twisted and distorted by the corrupt Supreme Court through thier usurped, extra-Constitutional powers to, by a simple majority of fewer than ten "justices" nullify laws duly adopted by the representatives of The People and the president  and to lie about the obvious meaning of the Constitution when it suits them.  The Supreme Court, not voted into office by the voters, the most remote part of the government from The People, stupidly given tenure for life by laws that should have been changed centuries ago, is, in fact, the most corrupt part of the government.  Until the Congress and President nullify the extra-Constitutional powers that the "justices" have granted themselves and placed the "justices" under an effective code of ethical conduct - for the first time in that Court's existence - it will be the dead hand of the slave power, white supremacy and oligarchy exerting itself as it did in the post Civil War period and, in the Rehnquist and courts, now, in their nullification of just the latest attempts to shake off the power of white supremacy, copying the late 19th century, Jim Crow Courts.  We are at high risk from our indigenous form of fascism, under which Black People and other People of Color and, yes, WOMEN have lived for most of the period in which the slave owners and financiers have had their Constitution in effect.  Not to mention workers in general.

But the misconception of "freedom" that I'm talking about above is older and more fundamentally depraved than the U.S. Constitution.   

To put it plainly, there is something obviously wrong with a conception of freedom that permits People to do what's wrong.*  I mentioned the Supreme Court ruling that said that the suppression of the trade in snuff porn was a terrible violation of that most idolized section of the Constitution, the idolized First Amendment.   That was a ruling joined in by every member on the court at that time except, oddly enough, one of the worst and most corrupt members of the court, Alito.  It was supported by the idolized Ruth Bader Ginsburg and all but one of the "original intent" "textualist" liars.   I'm always suspicious when they agree on something.   Now, I would bet you my last dollar that if we could revive the First Congress which drafted the First Amendment and every last member of every legislature that adopted the thing and asked them if contemporary snuff porn in which small animals are tortured and killed for the sexual pleasure of sadists and other degenerates was what they intended to protect, they would think you were insane to ask the question.  I think the American right went from their opposition to pornography to understanding the profit they got from allowing it in that the "freedom of speech" that line of civil libertarianism adopted by the Court was an opening for all kinds of peddling of lies profitable for the oligarchs and their fellow fascists.   On the other hand, I don't know if the legendary RGB had read the stupid and famous essay by Simone de Beauvoir, Must We Burn Sade, and if that figured into her vote on that issue of inverse morality, to allow snuff porn, to allow American sadists to have pay-per-view access to monkeys and other small animals being tortured to death for profit, but I wonder if it or its equivalent in literary essays did.  

I've written extensively about Sade and the assertion that his immoral and evil literature and the assertion that it comprises an act of libertarian virtue.  Of
Freedom, if you will.  A "freedom" which infamously includes the enslavement of Women and Children and men of the underclass so that libertines can practice their "liberties" upon them, their torture and rape and destruction, acts which the "enlightenment" conception of libertarian "freedom" valued so much that he was sprung from incarceration and put into the governing assembly during that other iconographic height of "enlightenment" "freedom," the reign of terror.  That the aristocratic de Sade  survived it while so many other aristocrats of his class - and myriads of common people - were tortured and viciously murdered in the name of "liberty, equality and fraternity" is certainly a sign of what such an "enlightened" conception of "freedom" leads to.   And if one thing's clear, it isn't equality that it leads to.  It's frequently not anything good.  As can be seen in the United States Supreme Court rulings which have made sadism into a "right" and the degenerate legal culture which has made that permission into some inverted conception of a virtue, Sade isn't in any danger of being burned today.  I mentioned the freedoms of presses and speech which gave rise to the commercial printing of and dissemination of penny postcard snuff porn of pictures of Black People lynched, of notices being posted that a lynching was going to happen at a specified time and date - something which no Supreme Court to my knowledge ever suppressed.  Not to mention the literature of white supremacy, the even more effective and corrupting cinematic promotion of white supremacy in its most violent manifestations at least since the time of Birth of a Nation which I've written about here before.  All of that was a promotion of violence and oppression of Black People, none of it was ever legally suppressed under the First Amendment or other laws upheld by the Supreme Court which I've been able to find.  It is what is allowed in under the gaping hole that that most lauded of all parts of the Constitution, that and the actual violence and oppression which inevitably comes with it.   To assert that we must allow that promotion is to assert that the next time those who want that have a right to do it under the First Amendment.   Forgive me if I suspect the "civil libertarians" of the legal profession and, um, "journalism" will be too busy worrying about some liberal, somewhere being mean to a Nazi to bother in fighting against it.  They are deadly parasites on the real left of equality and democracy.  

I can hear the scrupulous adherents to that libertarian conception of "liberty" now,  "But if we suppress lies, why, why,  we may be suppressed from telling the truth,"   or some such line as if the two things had to be considered as equivalent under the law.  That judges pretend that while they selectively make judgements on lies and truth (especially when the wealth of the wealthy needs to be protected) is one of the most amoral games of our legal system.

There is something not only wrong but brain-dead stupid with a conception of freedom that asserts to treat others as equals and well and to tell the truth and to live a normal, decent, not depraved life, "we must" permit others to treat others worse than shit.  Not only that but to allow them to to lie, to harm, to steal, to destroy.  Yet that is the very conception of freedom as is elevated by our depraved current Constitutional, legal, political and cultural presentations of it.  Not only is there no reason to conceive of the freedom to do what is good and right that way, it's clear, now, after that libertarian conception of freedom for some at the expense of others has been given a long test of time and political supremacy, it destroys the right to live decently.  Hearing a long time civil-rights lawyer I respect, a Woman of Color repeat the mantra of mendacity "there is a right to lie" made that reality click for me.  So deeply is that depraved conception of "freedom" embedded into all of those where it really does endanger us all.

I wonder if that Christianity was unfashionable among the 18th century "enlightened" founders of the United States that they clearly rejected the idea contained in Scripture that it's the truth that will set you free, otherwise they'd have written the First Amendment to distinguish between the truth and the lies that will enslave.   Perhaps they realized the truth that slavery was wrong would diminish their personal fortunes unacceptably.  

Again, there is something deeply wrong with the conception of freedom when it is divorced from the moral absolutes of equality and truth and the moral commandments to treat others as you would want to be treated.  To not harm or exploit or use or enslave other People and to treat other living beings with as much kindness as possible.  Such a misconception of freedom was certainly not what any of those who made the several attempts at a revolution in the late 18th century intended.  Certainly not the revolutionaries in France who immediately fell into murdering each other, as they were murdering so many others in their attempt to gain and consolidate their own power.  The modern secular-lefty adoration of the French Revolution and the similar and worse Russian and Chinese Revolutions leading to some of the most brutal dictatorships in human history are a continuation of the most extreme insanity in that regard.  It is part of the "Must We Must Not Burn Sade" pseudo-left.   

Monarchy, what the "enlightenment" revolutions were supposedly against, was an expression of freedom in a hierarchy of ever decreasing freedom from the monarch and the thugs who kept one in power, down to those who were enslaved ending in the destitute who weren't even kept as slaves who might, at least, be valued as property.  Modern dictatorship as Trump wants to install here is merely a less decorous form of that gangster governance.  And the "enlightenment" for all its claims, never delivered on that.  In part getting caught up in a conception of freedom divorced from egalitarian morality has played a big part in that.  I might agree that the American Revolution may be considered to be the best they did.

But the American Revolution, the elite part of it, the part which didn't do much fighting (largely done by the underclass, recently enslaved, indentured, propertyless) but which controlled politics and the judiciary and wrote the Constitution, clearly weren't far different in kind.  The embedding of slavery, of genocide and imperialism, into the Constitution,  the subjugation of Women, etc. in the Constitution and law, by them, proves that.  It's no great wonder that the January 6th insurrectionists used the flags and symbols of the American Revolution AS WELL AS THE SLAVE POWER CONFEDERACY in their attack on a Democratic Presidents election and installation.  Those symbols and that lore - the Black Revolutionary common soldiers being bleached out of the "history" they learned from TV and movies and novels and perhaps even "history books" - are useful to modern American fascism, the continuation of our long lasting and greatly empowered indigenous form of it, white supremacy because of the real nature of America's history.  

The real and only worthwhile story of American history is the long and continually thwarted struggle against the slave-power features of the American Constitution and the dead hand of inequality.  The latest lesson in that history is the actual nature of the supposed freedoms and liberties contained in the Bill of Rights as those really are in real life.  Rights for mass murderers and the criminally insane to obtain automatic military rifles with which they mow down young children and anyone else, rights for the promotion of that in the mass media and others in the pay of the corporations that make those military rifles and sell them to the mass murderers.  Rights for those who promote sadism and torture and murder to encourage those in the population who want to do that for profit.  Rights for those who want to violently attack and kill People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, etc.   Our history is the struggle against the Constitution and that libertarian distortion of freedom in all its form.   In the 21st century it is the struggle against the depraved conception of "freedom of the press" which permits lies to triumph over the truth, racism and sexism over equality, the "freedom" which created and installed Donald Trump in the presidency, the American judicial and legal and Constitutional system stupidly and impotently leaving it as an open question whether or not he can, not only do the damage he did before, but assume the insanely structured and empowered American presidency to destroy even the self-doomed liberal democracy that was wrested out of the original Constitution.  That something like that very likely would have quickly happened if Madison had not been forced to promise a Bill of Rights in the First Congress and if the improvised and dangerous one that was adopted was in place, far earlier is no excuse to ignore that Trumpism is a product of that very Bill of Rights as interpreted by 20th century courts in the age of mass media.  Hamilton certainly wanted that and he was far from the only one of the "founders" who wanted to thwart anything like egalitarian democracy.  

The "free speech" rulings of the Court, with the support of the ACLU and other "civil liberties" frauds are certainly a part of that, in that they have protected the big money corruption of our politics and the lies in the media on which the big money depends.   I think we must scrap the ACLU and its conception of "civil liberties" if we're going to have any chance of getting and keeping egalitarian democracy.  

We need to take a hard, critical look at all of this and much more if we're going to survive, not only as any kind of democracy but as a species.**  I think anything like egalitarian democracy requires that.   In thinking about this I thought of the often made atheist critique of Jesus that he didn't condemn slavery, which I would hold is not true.  You can't keep someone in slavery if you do to others what you would have done to you.  Jesus often spoke in parables, some of which are more confusing than others.  I think he told his listeners rather explicitly what he was doing in those which he compared the Kingdom of Heaven to the sewing of seeds and putting yeast in bread dough.  He was planting seeds and leavening dough with his elevation of the commandments of equality, the Golden Rule, his commands to love.  Those have certainly not yet taken though, perhaps, they are still embedded in the culture that was forming.  They had, in fact, been part of the Law of Moses, already.  They are certainly negated and destroyed by a conception of morality and rights divorced from equality and the practice of love, concepts that slave holders and genocidalists and sharp businessmen have no use for, especially on an equal basis.  

I don't remember, perhaps it was the moral brute Churchill,  who noted that Americans will always do the right thing but only when they have no other choice.  I think the conditions we live under right now leave us with no other choice, though getting past the mythical status of the Constitution and our legal and political traditions will have to be overcome just as the slave provisions in those had to be overcome to come to even the point of progress we are at now.  Slavery and lynch law endured with the insouciant acceptance of and tacit understanding of the majority of those with power for a long, long time.  The same powers which profited from those are trying to bring them back, the Republican-fascist party, the party of Trump and the backlash against the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, the other laws which were adopted in the 1960s and 70s and a few after, are still powerful and using the Constitution and the mythical conception of our history and traditions to reimpose them.  The Roberts Court, the Republican-fascists in Congress, the American mass media are all part of that.  I don't think the American left really needs to help them by holding that it would be a terrible affront to "ethics" to suppress snuff porn and S&M, B&D promotion and the promotion of racism and fascism.   That anyone could hold that Nazism or Stalinism should have another chance at power, that our indigenous form of that as embodied in the KKK should have a chance to redo it here AS A VALUE OF THE AMERICAN LEFT HAS NO CREDIBILITY, AT ALL..  

We certainly have to get past the ACLU conception of freedom, they're some of the worst enablers of America's indigenous form of fascism which has taken hold of the country, a large number of states, as the slave states were always under their control from the start.   We need to scrap them for a real civil liberties entity, not like that thing.  I don't trust them at all.  One which does not hold that the KKK and Nazis are to always have a chance to do it again as they preen in their First Amendmenty purity.   I've long thought of Alan Dershowitz as an advocate of torture who plays a civil libertarian on TV since about the turn of the century.  I wasn't at all surprised when he turned out as he has.  Now I understand that even better than I did twenty years ago.  Such a conception of freedom will always trend that way.

* Since I'm sure some will take advantage of the difficulty of scientifically or mathematically determining what is wrong, I'd base a political and legal definition of that on the basis of every person's right to bodily autonomy, the right to live in a viable environment and the moral obligation to treat others as they would want to be treated.  Taking into account that mental illness can twist those desires in a small number of People BUT that such Peoples' desires are not useful for making a rule of general governance instead of turning that insanity into a rule under which all are supposed to live, as the stupid "enlightenment" comes down to when that question is pressed.  That's why an educated idiot like de Beauvior could ask if we must burn de Sade instead of living under a regime of "freedom" in which his psychotic fantasies re held up as a beacon of liberty.  I will point out that she and her boy friend Sartre, were supporters of Maoism as Mao and his inner circle was competing with Hitler and Stalin for whose mountain of corpses would be highest.  Such was her erudition on the topic of "liberty" and "equality."   Don't get me started on Pollitt's nostaliga for the Maoist "Progressive Labor Party."  They are in every way the exact moral equivalent of the German American Bund and the French collaboration.  

** The "liberty" of the oil, coal and other extraction industries to peddle lies through American TV and radio about global warming should stand as the absolute proof that such a conception of "civil liberties" is prepared to get us all killed in the name of "liberty."   That is a more subtle lesson of experience than them turning America into a shooting gallery through the same promotion of lies in the mass media but it's more deadly in the end.  Civil libertarianism and Constitutionalism is a demand that we don't even learn from even the hardest lessons of experience.

People Get The Vapors When You Make A Realistic Criticism of the Sacred Constitution - A Few Friggin' Obvious Defects In The United States Constitution

HOW ABOUT the constantly repeated statement that Trump could run for president while he's in prison after being convicted of felonies?   

How about the fact that the claims of his sleazy Saur lawyer to the appeals court that the president can commit the most serious felonies in office and unless convicted in that fictitious means of removing presidents, the never has happened and never will happen conviction by 2/3rds of the Senate, he can get away with it entirely?   The "impeachment power" of Congress is one of the worst jokes contained in it, it is a total fiction.   There is no actual means of removing the most depraved and criminal of presidents, we, in fact, live in an electoral monarchy. 

That either of those are glaring defects in any constitution and that those could even be argued as being Constitutional under the US Constitution, in any court shows just how deficient the document is.  Let me go on.

That the Electoral College is still in existence,  that the electoral vote of a state is based even partly on the anti-democratic number of Senators.*    I suspect that will never be abolished because of  the absurdly unrealistic means of amending the damned thing.   The near impossibility of doing that to get rid of some of its worst and most anti-democratic features certainly counts as another of its greatest defects. 

I'd like to go into a lot more, such as the slave-power implanted ban on the federal government taxing exports - something which has been an economic disadvantage which every American has had to pay for, from the beginning, which shows that the friggin' Constitution was, as Wendell Phillips called it, a pro-slavery compact.  Lincoln and the Civil War Amendments didn't get rid of some of the worst of those which the Republican-facists and white supremacists still use and which still puts money in their pockets.  

The pardon power, that anything like the fascistic "unitary executive" theory is not obviously unconstitutional.  Elite law school faculties are always trying to come up with that kind of anti-democatic, anti-egalitarian crap and the judges and "justices" as well.   That anyone could hold such a position while promoting fascism is certainly an indictment of the legal profession and judicial system under the Constitution.   You can be a fascist AND a Constitutional scholar in the United States, a real egalitarian democratic Constitution and legal system would never produce that result.

The Second Amendment is a mass murder permitting catastrophe, born in the desire to protect slave owners against those they kept in bondage.

And, since this has to be a short post, today,  don't get me started on the permission to lie in the mass media and for the media to sell the most evil and depraved crap (as FOX Lies, does)  in the First Amendment, and numerous other clear defects in it.**


* That's something that matters disproportionately when you consider the number of states with lowest number of electoral votes but whose combined numbers, both in the Senate and the Electoral College, makes their votes count many times more than those who vote in the largest states.

Anyone who has a 6th graders knowledge of American history knows that the white supremacists in the slave states and beyond made themselves even more politically powerful by denying the vote to Black People, under slavery and under the de facto continuation of it in Jim Crow, the Jim Crow that the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts are bringing back.  

Any honest electoral system would elect a president based on the national majority vote, getting rid of the corrupt electoral college.   Its congressional representation would, as well, be based on the potential size of the electorate in the state.  But, given the white supremacist use of voter suppression, in the past and, under the Roberts Court and its destruction of the Voting Rights Act, today,  both Congressional representation and any disgustingly retained Electoral College should be enumerated on the basis of the percentage of ELIGIBLE VOTERS AS DEFINED BY A NATIONAL STANDARD AND ON THE BASIS OF THE NATIONAL CENSUS which votes in any decade.  You'll have to incentivize the permission of voter participation, state by state, if you want to overcome the practices of America's indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy.  Imagine if Texas's or South Dakota's or Wisconsin's delegation to the Congress were dependent on allowing all People of Color to vote how that would change things and fuck the white supremacists shit.  They'd probably repeal the lifetime ban on voting by those convicted of crimes, one of the ways that they have used the injustice system to suppress minority votes.  

**  The definition of "free speech" that is capacious enough that it permits the production and dissemination of snuff porn with the Supreme Court's approval is certainly something that could have been better drafted by those amateurs in the Constitutional Convention and the First Congress.   It's legal for companies to pay people in Indonesia to torture monkeys to death while it's live streamed or on video for the depraved pleasure of American sadists.   It's legal for those videos you may have read about that showed up on Twitter after Elon opened it up to Nazis and fascists where kittens are killed in blenders to be shown.  And we haven't gotten to what is done to human beings under the First Amendment as stupidly written and as amended by Supreme Courts in the 20th century.   Of course, it was legal to do things like make picture postcards of Black People lynched and send them through the mail under it during the 19th and 20th centuries, so you see the hole in it is bigger than the biggest door in an aircraft hanger in the world.  In fact, they used their "free speech" to announce impending lynchings, even through the mail, to get a bigger crowd.  I don't recall reading of that ever being stopped by law. 

And the one that allows con men and hucksters and, yes, Neo-Nazis, to use the freedom of "religion" to operate freely is another.  That the thing doesn't explicitly ban anything promoting inequality and destructive of democracy is another of its most dangerous short-comings.   

I've asked every member of my family

who voted in the 1990s, all of whom voted for Bill Clinton if they would have any problem with him spending the rest of his life in jail IF he were guilty of having sex with minors in the continuing Jeffrey Epstein scandal and every one of us said we would have no problem with him going to prison for the rest of his life if he did.   I am certain that by a large majority Democrats would take that position.   Look at how they dumped Al Franken on the trumped up accusations made against him by a Republican operative.  

You can compare that to the reaction of Republican-fascists to the at least as probable if not far more probable possibility that Trump committed that crime and the excuses already being made for him by them.   

There is no Democratic equivalent to the Trump cult which rules Republican-fascist politics and politicians. 

Hate Mail - I Meant Every Word I Said About Pollitt's Ideological Position And A Lot More Words I Could Have Said

PERHAPS I SHOULD explain how I came to go from resolutely avoiding the topic of religion in my political blogging to coming to see it as, perhaps, the most important issue there is in understanding politics.

It was in the early months of my political blogging, when I had been invited to be the weekend blogger on a far more popular blog.   It was 2006 as the obnoxious, ballot box poison of the "new atheism" was everywhere on the online comment threads of us lefties.  I knew that it was ballot box poison so I posted a piece that said it was and that it was counter-productive and the religious left and the atheist left had to work in common.   My post was attacked and misrepresented by some of those who were riding the "new atheist" fad hard, it was, probably, the most attention that one of my posts had gotten at that time.  I pointed out the misrepresentations and asked, then demanded that they retract the lies they had told about it to uniform refusal.   Even by those who were representing themselves as "journalists." 

The theme I'd chosen for my blog was to investigate why the side which had many more of the facts on their side could so consistently, over the previous fifty or so years, fail politically in the United States and elsewhere.  I knew a few, though not most of the answers to that, the not infrequent snobbishness of so many of the college-credentialed lefty crowd being among the most friggin' obvious of those.  Their obsessions with stupid issues, some of them more in the area of lifestyle than of anything important, high among those.   Among the other things I'd already annoyed some on comment threads with was saying that while I didn't especially care for prayers in the public schools (though, I've come to understand, not for the reasons the ACLU opposed it) and totally unimportant things like the erection of manger scenes and crosses on public property as something worth costing the left among voters.  Disestablishment on such issues as prayer in schools or manger scence may be a mildly good thing in itself but it was hardly a life or death issue or likely to become one.  It was no hill worth enough for the left do die politically on.  So I was already pointed in the direction I've taken.  I hadn't noted that their presence before the Warren Court banned them had been a major contributing factor in preventing what is, in fact, the highest point of the American left, the period in 1964 and 1965 when the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid and a whole host of other legislation had been passed, things that did more for more People than the entire program of the secular left had managed to achieve in their entire existence.  

In the brawls I got in over such things I started to sense that the middle class and affluent college-credentialed lefties who had little to nothing to lose if Republicans won elections were quite willing to see all of the progress made die so their mere preferences could be asserted and, at times, win in courts from the leftover judges and "justices" who were willing to give them wins.  In the meantime, the perpetual American underclass, especially People of Color, didn't really count as much to them.  It was more a lifestyle and club membership than a matter of real importance to them.  

I was still naive enough to think such people were more reasonable than the, then, Bush II cultists.  But that naivety didn't last long.  I try not to hold on to illusions for any longer than there's evidence to support them.  I started looking more into the "new atheism" and quickly found out that it was hardly new, they were merely reiterating the tired, old, threadbare slogans and claims that the old atheists had always made.  I'd read much of that from the likes of, from the somewhat higher end, Voltaire, Bertrand Russell, down through the mid-brows such as Clarence Darrow and Mark Twain, to the decidedly low-brow crap such as made its way into articles in the lefty media and organized atheism.  

But I'd also read much of the religious left's literature, Dorothy Day, liberation theologians, . . . and, increasingly in those days, Protestant liberals and radicals.  And I have to say that in virtually every case, I had a lot more faith in their practicality and devotion to the basic program of the left than that of those whose primary devotion wasn't doing better for the least among us but to the promotion of atheism.   That is, I think, the real primary goal of the alleged atheist left, that and the promotion of their materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology.  Something which, as I investigated that, convinced me that it was not only ballot box poison but, in fact, is inevitably destructive of the very basis of any real left which has an aim of equality and democracy and the preservation of life and the biosphere on which we all depend.

Among the milestones at about the same time pushing my own liberation from the mindset of the conventional American secular, college-credentialed left was noticing, by chance, one of the barroom style atheists on the conventional lefty blog I frequented making the claim that "science" had debunked the idea of free will" and that there was no opposition to the idea.   I suddenly realized that believing that nonsense was fatal to any real left based on equality, on any idea of people being free to make a free and informed choice on who will hold political power and govern.  It was, in fact, something that would not bring egalitarian democracy but the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche realized was an inevitable result of his materialist-atheist-scientism.   That led me to read more of the thinking of such materialist-atheitst-true believes in scientism and, to a person, they were either entirely pudding headed on the matter of governance or they were devoted to some ideological position which was, in fact, opposed to egatltarian democracy, Marxism, of course, some non-Marxist though atheist articulations of what they called "socialism" but which inevitably looked more like state capitalism to me, or, perhaps stupidest of all anarchism.   I found that having access online to very large if not all inclusive samples of the old-line left going back for centuries was a real eye-opener to the actual thinking of such people mistaken as heroes of the contemporary secular left.  I've presented such thinking a lot on this blog and at the previous blogs I wrote on.  Darwin is certainly one, Voltaire,  Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, Emma Goldman, etc.  I also had much more access to the ability to fact check the historical and biographical claims that are and have long been current in the lore of materialist-atheist-scientism and very often found that, if anything, that lore is constructed of lies.  Lies which are never fact-checked by the journalists and other materialist-atheist-even scientistic scribblers who will rely on the secondary, tertiary claims and junk and even more remote from the actual primary documentation to repeat that common received lore.  Many of those I respected highly on the contemporary left did that, though there were some few who were far more scrupulous scholars and writers.  There are still a few of those I respect for their unusual honesty.  

One of the things I have become absolutely convinced of it is that the materialist-atheist-scientistic holding the People and other living beings are mere objects, of no more transcendent character than the kinds of objects physicists and chemists study,  is not and cannot be made consistent with egalitarian democracy and any such basis for any politics or legal system will, inevitably and eventually, result in everything from injustice to genocide, to the destruction of the biosphere and life on Earth.   No materialistic ideology is compatible with any left which has any right to the label.

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Why am I bringing that up now?   Because of a complaint about what I said in my critique of Katha Pollitt the other day on the matter of moral absolutes.

One of the arguments I early got into was on the whining in 2006 that opinion polls said that a majority of Americans said they would not vote for an atheist as president or, as I recall, for lower offices.   It figured in that first most controversial of my posts I mention above.  I pointed out that if that was something atheists didn't like the only People who could change that opinion among American People were atheists who could make themselves more appealing and trusted by voters.  I pointed out that the anti-religious snark which blanketed the lefty blogs and in magazine and other articles by atheists was that ballot-box poison which it was and if they wanted voters to vote for them, and this was news to them, THEY HAD TO BE LIKABLE.  No one is likely to vote for someone who they believe doesn't respect them or disrespect them.  THEY SEEMED TO BELIEVE THAT THEY HAD SOME KIND OF RIGHT TO HAVE THE VOTES OF PEOPLE THEY DERIDED AND MOCKED AND WHO THEY CLEARLY NOT ONLY DIDN'T RESPECT BUT DESPISED.

I asked how many of them would vote for a Southern Baptist or what the shorthand was already calling "evangelicals."  I don't recall any of them taking the point that that question made.  

As you no doubt will understand, these guys who figured they were the smartest people there were, were entirely clueless about how real People think and react to that kind of thing.  In the back and forth that came as a result from that post I realized that their ideology, apart from any issue they claimed to support, was inevitably worse than counter productive, it was self-destructive.

In further arguments along those lines, the claim that morality was nothing but a product of common consensus of a majority opinion of any society at any given time.  I asked how they could complain if a society came to a consensus or majority opinion that you shouldn't trust atheists with political power, then.   Or how anyone could hold that within a society in which Black chattel slavery or the subjugation of Women or the brutal inequality of LGBTetc. People was believed to be right doing those things was, in fact, wrong.

Of course I said that such a basis of morality or "ethics" could ever call any society in which a majority believed it was the right thing to do to kill all Jews, wrong if they did that.   I may have already pointed out that such a secular-legal position was taken by Senator Robert Taft in his opposition to the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis on the basis that what they had done in the Shoah was legal under the laws the Nazis had adopted and, therefore, the legal process against them was illegitimate.   A position so depraved that it took that Harvard trained lawyer, JFK, to identify Taft's moral depravity as "A Profile in Courage."  As I indicated above,  I'm not so warm on  Constitutional secularism and, especially, as that has developed in the lore and "ethics" of the American legal profession.  I'm impressed with how frequently a training in the secular law will make the most obviously morally depraved position acceptable as the "right" position and course of action, or inaction.   Especially at the Ivy-League level of respectability.  

The fact is Katha Pollitt AND VIRTUALLY EVERY OTHER MATERILAIST-ATHEIST-SECULAR lefty scribbler does what the great musician Eduard Stuerrmann called "Vienese double-counterpoint"* on "ethics" or what is really morality.  They hold all kinds of "ethical" positions that are impeached by their underlying materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology.   And their instance on their "secularist" (really M-A-S) ideology creates all kinds of intellectual problems but, in reality and far more importantly, undermines real morality.  I have come to see that as one of the most important reasons that the American left and so many other secular would-be lefts have failed so catastrophically.   I think it is one of the reasons that liberal democracy was doomed by coming out of that same ideological stream and why any liberalism that has a chance has to be based on the kind of moral absolutes that are found in Scripture.  I believe those can come from other traditions than the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, any religious holding that holds that People are equally endowed by their Creator with rights that are absolute an inalienable, and that there are absolute moral obligations of the right kind could provide a support for egalitarian democracy and real equal justice but the fact is, in the United States, other aspiring democracies, for the most part it is, as the atheist-materialist philosopher Jurgen Habermass DID ACTUALLY SAY, that has no other source or source of nourishment than than the Jewish "ethic" of justice or the Christian one of universal love.   Something which, when the Christian apologist John Lennox (unlike his critics, a fluent German speaker) quoted Habermass as saying, atheists online blatantly lied about what he said.  When I pointed that out, repeatedly and exhaustively using the exact words of Habermass in the original, they still claimed Lennox was lying.

I think the current failure of liberal democracies is a strong indication that the very bases on which those are founded, especially such things as the failure of the acknolegement that there is a right to tell the truth but no right to lie, a right to promote equality but no right to promote privilege and discrimation against groups, THE MEAT-HEADED IDEA THAT MEDIA COMPANIES OR CORPORATIONS HAVE A RIGHT TO LIE AND SPREAD HATE WHEN CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE AND HAVE NO RIGHTS, is fatal to them,  And I think those were all adopted out of that self-destorying scientistic ideology taken from the frequently dangerous exemption that science was given from the consideration of morality in the thinking of the 17th and 18th century "enlightenment."   I'm not sure that was ever a wise decision to make in the scientific pursuit of the knowledge of and manipulation of the physical universe, I KNOW IT IS A DISASTER WHEN IT IS APPLIED TO THE REAL LIFE POLITICAL AND LEGAL REALMS REGULATING THE BEHAVIOR OF PEOPLE.   I don't see that there is any difference between the death lists of the Nazis or those that current "ethicists" are always drawing up on the basis of the economic valuation of human beings.  I think you really have to be educated and acculturated into true depravity to do such things with the human population's experience of the scientific genocides of the 20th century.  And such a depravity is promoted and made mandatory by our secularized Constitution and legal rulings and legal lore and in the most insane, brain and soul-dead culture which is the norm in our journalism, academic writing and popular culture.  A lot of that is imprecise and inexact adoption of the original ideas but even watered down and alterered slightly, they have become quite poisionous to egalitarian democracy.  

I've come a long way since 2006.  A long way much farther to a real left to egalitarian democracy and the presevation and improvement of life.  I don't think I hold much of anything else strongly enough for it to be called an ideology.   As FDR said,  I'm a democrat and a Christian, nothing else.  I'm not stupid enough to think any of this is discernible with the methods of science, not as asserted by the ideology of those I'm criticizing.   I think rigorous and honest consideration of history is a superior method of finding out about that.  Their scientism certainly hasn't worked out as prediction after prediction fails in the test of time, which is what is supposed to be the source of the credibility of science.  The failure of the secular left is what got me going on this to start with.

*  As I recall, he mentioned someone who was a member of the Nazi party but who, nevertheless, asked someone for an introduction to Alban Berg because he wanted composition lessons with him.  

John Harbison - The Flight Into Egypt

 

Los Angeles Philharmonic, Andre Previn,  David Hoose, Cantata Singers and Ensemble, Sanford Sylvan,  Roberta Anderson

I can't find my copy of this recording so I can't be sure of who is performing here.  

The flight into Egypt,  Jesus and his parents as aliens,  if they'd fled to the United States or most other modern countries, they'd be illegal aliens.   God as an illegal alien is certainly something People today should be led to consider, one the king was after so he could kill him.   That's one of the things I most like about Christianity, one of the most believable things about its narratives, that God truly chose to become one of the lowest of the low.   I don't have any faith in princely or elite saviors.

It's a mistake to think stupidity is the main issue

 in the Trump cult because the main defect in them isn't intellectual, it's moral.   They are an expression of vulgar materialist immorality and amorality, which end up being the same thing.   Their inventiveness in coming up with excuses for Trump and his failure to deliver what he promised them - most of which they shouldn't have wanted if they were motivated by morality - proves that they have an intelligence detached from any sense that it's wrong to lie.  

It's one of the stupidest ideas that "if only they knew" they'd abandon the Trump cult.   It's not like they haven't seen the truth, it's that they have no sense of a moral obligation to reality or the truth.   And they're hardly alone in that.  

Hate Mail - Put Up Or Admit You Can't - This Is A Good Model For How The Trump Cult Operates

I HAVE BEEN issuing the challenge since about 2008 to anyone who wants to refute what I wrote from the words in the primary scientific record of Darwinism to demonstrate that Darwin rejected eugenics and didn't do what he did in his letter to Francis Galton praising his first book of eugenic theory,  Hereditary Genius, and the two articles which Galton, himself said were his first publications of eugenics.    That Darwin not only praised those to Galton and others privately BUT CITED THEM AND THE EVEN MORE EXTREME EUGENICS OF ERNST HAECKEL IN HIS SECOND MAJOR BOOK ON NATURAL SELECTION, THE DESCENT OF MAN.   That he supported his son George's article which may be the first time that anyone proposed a law instituting eugenics, the involuntary dissolution of a marriage if either partner was judged to be mentally ill, attacking those who pointed out what an outrageous intrusion of the legal system and government into the private choices of married couples that was.   Those are rather conclusive proof that Charles Darwin was not merely accepting of eugenics, he asserted it as a holding of science and of legal and social policy. 

No one has ever shown that the acknowledged inventor of eugenics,  Darwin's cousin and an eminent scientist in his own right, Francis Galton, who explicitly said the entire thing was based on Charles Darwin's articulation of natural selection in On the Origin of Species, ever renounced that claim before his death.   That claim is certainly not made in his authorized biography by his eminent student and figure in science, Karl Pearson, who asserted the basis of eugenics in natural selection, himself.  Even if Charles Darwin had rejected eugenics,  Galton proclaiming On The Origin of Species as the thing that inspired him to invent eugenics would absolutely settle that case.   

Without the theory of natural selection being claimed by Darwin, eugenics would likely never have been invented or put into practice in the Americas, in Europe, in Nazi Germany.  

As I pointed out yesterday,  Leonard Darwin, who certainly knew his father's thinking better than any post-WWII liar who distanced him from eugenics and who has absolutely more credibility to make that claim than anyone who never once laid eyes on the man or talked to him, or who knew him as intimately as a son knows his own father,  said his own eugenics activism was him carrying on his father's work, he said so over at least a period of three decades, as I documented from his own words.   He, as well, in 1939, five months before the Nazi government started WWII and, with that the active genocidal phase of their eugenics program,  credited On the Origin of Species as the spark for Wilhelm Schallmeyer, independently inventing German eugenics - though I'd say Ernst Haeckel and others had come to the same conclusions well before Schallmeyer did.   He explicitly endorsed Nazi eugenics, though it had not yet come to the logical conclusion of eugenics and natural selection, of actively killing people,  though such talk had been rampant in English language eugenics for about four to five decades.   

The talk of one ethnic group wiping out other ethnic groups on the basis of their respective economic value (though seldom admitted to be what was under discussion) on the basis of natural selection started almost immediately, as can be seen by Haeckel's publications and those of Darwin's protective "bull dog" Thomas Huxley who breezily announced the impending obliteration of American Black People in his infamous 1865 essay Emancipation: Black and White.  The scenario he gave of such a genocidal race war was entirely based in his own scientific racism and the theory of his master, natural selection.    Darwin, in The Descent of Man, repeatedly made assertions of the beneficial effects of murder, individual to genocidal, constantly presenting the deaths of those he deemed inferior as a means of the improvement of the (murdering) survivors.   

Given the availability and ubiquity of such claims AS SCIENCE in the primary record of Darwinism, of the theory of natural selection, it astounds me how long the scientific, academic, journalistic, etc. establishment got away with peddling the lie that Darwin and his theory of natural selection had nothing to do with eugenics.  It could only be done either through a. reading those scientific publications on which so much subsequent science is alleged to be based and lying to themselves and everyone else what they said or, b. pretending to have read them and merely repeating the tertiary or even more remote claims made about it, especially on the popular level of "the public understanding of science."   As I said, though always on the look out for that denial of a connection in the pre-WWII period, I never found anyone actually claiming that natural selection had nothing to do with eugenics - especially not as claimed by the eugenicists.   The closest thing I found to that was in such clearly embarrassed implications of Vernon Kellogg in his Headquarters Nights, that the German military officers he encountered, some of whom he had known from the time they were students together,  had an understanding of Darwin that was, in some unspecified way, illegitimate.   Kellogg, himself, had supported eugenics and was a through Darwinist and I'm certain he must have read The Descent of Man and probably the things Darwin endorsed as science in it, from such scientists as Galton and Haeckel which couldn't be more clear of the connection between exactly the ideas of the German officers Kellogg talked to.   

It was one of the unintended results of the more than fifteen years I've put into studying this issue that I was stunned by how easily that lie was inserted into the common received wisdom of the college-credentialed class in the post-WWII period and how resistant those who bought into that are to a presentation of the actual primary record contradicting that lie - in my experience among the most absolute proofs of any such thing as could be found.   The reliance on the very lies in the popular post-WWII presentation of it insisted on being more reliable than the very words of Darwin and those he presented as supporting scientists and the plain meaning of what they said.   I think if you want to see how the Trump cult thinks or, rather, doesn't think but lies on his behalf,  the conventional post-WWII line on Darwin and natural selection is a good model to consider. 

Simps Said:

 

Dec 16, 2023

Even shorter Sparky: If it hadn't been for Charles Darwin, nobody's Jewish relatives would have been killed by the Nazis.

 

That's quite plausible because Nazism's eugenics which included its genocidal programs are a direct result of the belief in natural selection.  As I've noted here in the past, in direct response to such derisive snark we know that the German officer class and others who started the Nazi party were thinking in Darwinian terms during the First World War, as documented by the American biologist and quite conventional Darwinist, Vernon Kellogg.  We know that as Hitler was dictating Mein Kampf that he had been provided with the thoroughly Darwinist and eugenics textbook by Baur, Fischer and Lenz - not improbably the only biology book he ever may have read - that Nazi literature noted the influence of American eugenics - which was, by its own proclamation an outgrowth of Darwinism, that is, the theory of natural selection.   We furthermore have the definition of Nazism, "National Socialism" as being nothing but applied biology from Rudolf Hess.  To top that off we have the discussion at the infamous Wannsee Conference in which the theory of natural selection was given by at least one of the participants as the reason to murder all of the Jews because any that survived the brutal culling they were planning were believed by the Nazi participants in that incomparably brutal intellectual-technocratic meeting to be biologically superior and so would generate a population of Jews who would be an even greater "threat" to the imaginary Aryan German "master race," they fully believed, on the basis off Darwinism, to be creating.  In that they were merely the logical conclusion of things said by Darwin in On the Origin of Species and, especially, in the Descent of Man.  

 

If they would have come up with other excuses in the absence of Darwinism can't, of course, be known but how they thought of what they planned and did can be known and it is fully documented in, not only the secret literature that became apparent after WWII but in their public pronouncements and their propaganda.   There is absolutely no possible contradiction of that short of lying, as the conventional college-credentialed mainstream has been lying about it since the exposure of the atrocities of the Nazis.

 

And, as I have documented through his own words at the beginning of WWII, by that time probably the greatest living authority on the thinking of Charles Darwin to survive into the years of WWII, Leonard Darwin, repeatedly, over decades said that his own eugenics work was carrying on his father's work.  In April of 1939 he published an article in which he said German eugenics, that would be NAZI EUGENICS, had moved German legal and social policy in the right direction.  The article also noted that German Eugenics, begun by men like Wilhelm Schallmayer, was a direct result of their reading of On the Origin of Species.  No doubt they also read the far worse, Descent of Man in which, among other claims of beneficial murder,  Darwin repeatedly asserts that the deaths of those who he considered inferior were a boon to their survivors, even in cases such as the Tasmanian genocide, when it was done through such evil acts. 

 

If natural selection had never been invented by Darwin and Wallace, it's quite probable that there would have been no Nazi party.   

Update:  I don't care what the eejits of E-ton believe they know about something they don't know anything about.

I Should Have Written This Post About Four And A Half Years Ago - Thoughts On The Epstein Document Dump And The Names Not Listed

OF COURSE among those named in the Jeffery Epstein papers released yesterday was William Jefferson Clinton who, of course, denied he had anything to do with the sexual abuse of young women and girls and, of course, that denial is widely disbelieved.  While there may sometimes be reason to not disbelieve such a denial, in the case of Bill Clinton the only one he has to blame for the extent of that disbelief is him and his known behavior with a young woman, though legally an adult, less than half his age while he was president.  If his denial is true it may be too bad that he will be disbelieved but he's got no one to blame but himself.

I glanced through the list of names I saw in the news this morning and most of them I wouldn't know from Adam or Eve (I was expecting fewer Women's' names, I suspect they listed victims as well as possible victimizers) and was surprised by there being so few names I recognized of those in the sciences.  We know that Epstein cultivated some of the big names and many of the not so big names in science and is known to have flown them around on his boy-joy jet and entertained them at his notorious properties.  I wonder if there is another batch of names coming out that will have more of them on it.

My surprise at that can be contrasted with that which the Nation columnist Katha Pollitt expressed a few years back about the connection between scientists (and so science) and the notorious human trafficker and sex criminal.   I used to always read Pollitt's column when I was a subscriber and generally liked her take on things.  But I've increasingly come to see there are problems in the foundations on which those ideas are laid.  They need far firmer foundations than she would accept for them.  I hope others give them those.   

 

In 2019 she said, quite naively:

Epstein’s stay at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center and his death on Saturday will breed multiple versions of the truth, and conflicting interpretations of scientific evidence. That, too, is fitting: Epstein, as it turned out, had been cultivating conflicting understandings of science for a long time through his donations to research institutions and the lasting friendships he formed with legitimate, renowned scientists.

And that’s what gets to me: the scientists. I can live with the idea that the 1 percenters who hung out with the financier Jeffrey Epstein are frivolous, heartless people who either don’t care if he sexually abused underage and barely of-age girls or spent decades living in a cave. I can be bewildered by Ghislaine Maxwell, who apparently had nothing better to do with her money and her fancy Oxford degree than to act as Epstein’s majordomo, social secretary, and procuress. I’ve read my Evelyn Waugh and my Edward St. Aubyn, and I get it: The British upper crust is famously depraved. As for the politicians, it’s no surprise that Donald Trump and Epstein went way back. Two masters of the universe with mansions in Palm Beach and a taste for very young women—why wouldn’t they like each other?

She also said:

What I can’t get over is how Epstein successfully weaseled his way into science at the highest level by cultivating major figures in the field socially and spreading his wealth around. Science! The very temple of the pursuit of truth. Call me insufficiently jaded, but am I wrong to expect more of those we rely on to combat all of the nonsense swirling around us?

The list of scientists whom Epstein wined and dined is like a Nobel Prize dinner table in Stockholm. Besides Stephen Hawking, there was Murray Gell-Mann, who proposed the existence of quarks; the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky; the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss; and many more (Virginia Guiffre, one of Epstein’s teenage victims, alleges that he forced her to have sex with Minsky, among other well-known people including Dershowitz.) “As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds,” cooed a 2002 profile of Epstein by Landon Thomas Jr. in New York magazine. Beautiful young women were said to always be in attendance—but, as Daniel Engber observed in Slate, almost all the beautiful minds were male.

And what did the beautiful minds think of Epstein’s conviction? “I never actually believed this underage thing,” computer scientist Roger Schank told Slate. “They might have been in their early 20s or late teens, but when I talked to them…they were always in college or had just graduated college or something like that. They were not high school girls.” And Schank was not the only Epstein science crony to pooh-pooh the idea that Epstein’s girls were underage. “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people,” said Krauss—who, for his part, chose to retire from Arizona State University in 2018 after accusations of sexual harassment spanning a decade and a university investigation that found he had grabbed a woman’s breast.

The Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker has vociferously denied having been part of the Epstein circle. “I could never stand the guy and always tried to keep my distance,” he told BuzzFeed News. As far as I know, as of this writing, the only scientist to apologize for his closeness to Epstein is the biologist George Church, who also teaches at Harvard. “There should have been more conversations about, should we be doing this, should we be helping this guy?” he told the health news website Stat. “There was just a lot of nerd tunnel vision.”

The most grotesque aspect of this high-IQ sausagefest, of course, was Epstein’s fantasy of transhumanism: improving the human race scientifically, in his case by inseminating women—perhaps 20 at a time—with his own sperm on his ranch in New Mexico. This sounds about as smart as his other idea, which was to have his head and penis cryogenically stored after his death for resuscitation in the future. This was the guy some of the most brilliant (male) minds of our era took seriously?

Well, maybe they just took the Dom Pérignon and lavish conferences on his private island seriously, to say nothing of the $6.5 million grant to help found Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (which the university has no intention of giving back). Maybe they tolerated him only in the hope of obtaining funding for their own projects. Or maybe they just worship the rich on general principles, as so many people do.

As sad as that is, I hope that’s the case. Because it’s even more painful to think they privately sympathize with eugenics and couldn’t even see what a crackpot idea this particular version of it was.

To which I can honestly be astounded that someone who went to college and grad school like Pollitt did could have maintained such a wacky rose-colored glasses view of scientists and, so, the science in whose minds is found the only place in the universe in which science is known to exist!  They are the gate keepers of what is officially to be considered and called "science" they are the ones who are the gatekeepers of who is let into that fraternity (science still largely being one) and whose ideas are allowed to be published as science and which ideas are forbidden to be science.  

Pollitt as a humanities grad (Philosophy and Writing) may had avoided knowing as many majors and instructors and professors in the sciences as I have but my education was in the humanities too.  I knew Women who went into science and heard more than one of them talk about having to put up with the boys club that science is, being the target of puerile, often sexual hazing and harassment, the casual sexism of male faculty on who their future in their chosen field depends.  When I first heard about the connection between Epstein and Maxwell to prominent departments of science at big name universities and celebrity scientists I don't think it gave me a 64th note length worth of pause.  I've known more than one ex-wife of a scientist who thought her ex was a total pig, including wives who were scientists, too.  

More unsurprising in Pollitt's surprise was her cultivated stupidity about the not uncommon acceptance and assumption of and the thoroughly scientific nature of eugenics.   But that's unsurprising only because the actual history of the fact that eugenics began with some of the most lauded and praised scientists of the 19th century,  Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, Karl Pearson, etc.  and had an uninterrupted history as university department level science among the most eminent scientists of the early 20th century - having only a short underground period after the liberation of the German eugenics centers, the death camps and the horror of what such science had wrought - to reemerge among many of the most eminent scientists (such as Watson and Crick) beginning in the 1960s and establishing essentially neo-eugenics within the wildly popular scientific schools of neo-Darwinism, Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology.   Only someone as willfully stupid as a conventional secular-liberal college grad of my generation could have missed that happening, even as there were minority viewpoints in science that called it what it was beginning in the mid-1970s.   Only someone as dishonest and willfully blind about the actual substance of the biological, social-pseudo (psychology, sociology, etc)  and trash sciences (such as "Darwinian economics") could have been surprised at the kind of scientists who Epstein would have been attracted to and cultivated not being much bothered by eugenics.  Not to mention some non-scientist sci-groupies like the ultra-Darwinist fundamentalist, the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

The fact is that as long as Darwinism, natural selection, is an established part of what is accepted as biology, eugenics, mild to genocidal, will arise within scientists and within the common holdings of science.  Within the framing of materialist, atheist, scientism, there is no countering moral absolute to prevent that happening and the naive conception of science give it enough force to even overcome the countering moral absolutes of revealed religion in far too many naive and gullible semi-believers.  As Pollitt is a feminist scholar, of sorts, I'd recommend the relevant writings of the great and undervalued 19th century radical feminist Frances Cobbe in that regard.  She was truly one of the more clear-eyed critics of natural selection in its long and not infrequently rotten history.

Which brings me to another thing about Pollitt in regard to this, her even more naive conception of morals and morality, though I'd guess she'd turn up her nose at anything in that line other than "ethics."   Pollitt was a signatory of the third iteration of the Humanist Manifesto - what I think of as the slacker-edition of it.  

In its version of the origin of morals or "ethics" it holds, as all secular, materialist, atheist, scientistic views of those must, that they are merely the product of some kind of social consensus,* there being no other source for those available.  As such there is no such a thing as a hard and fast morality that is not dependent on that consesus.  Which is rather a hard thing to find Katha Pollitt's (and my) holding that grooming, exploiting, seducing and raping teenage girls to be the sex toys of men with celebrity or power, money, in short, within the secularist, materialist, atheist, scientistic conception of "ethics".  Or, for that matter, coming to a "final solution" to eliminate any ethnic or other group which a majority in any society would want to eliminate.  Just as eugenics will always follow wherever natural selection is taken as a force of nature, so will such ideas follow when morality is considered to be merely the product of social convention or that mythological "consensus" that that idea is usually peddled in.

While there is a rather fluid and hardly universal social consensus among some at the moment that such a thing as sexually using children for sex is wrong - at least in the milieu in which Pollitt practices her profession, it's clear that there is a parallel social consensus that holds that if you can do it and get away with it, it's OK.  And, as Trump himself believes, if you're a celebrity, you can get away with a lot.  Look at the results of the 2008 judicial process against Epstein and how he was allowed to walk away with little to no cost.   The sexualization of young children in the media is not only permitted, it can make you billions on streaming services, other online and off-line venues for selling that.  If you want an example of what happens when you slam that, look up the word "Tumblr" in my archive.   Such is the milieu in which Jeffrey Epstein and his pimpess Ghislaine Maxwell and the many men who availed themselves of the girls and young women they groomed, seduced, isolated, threatened and coerced into being, in effect, raped by celebrities, millionaires, maybe billionaires, and, yes, scientists, is just as much a social consensus as the one that Pollitt and Me-Too hold as a social consensus.  While I'm sure there are many who participated and supported #Me-Too who have a more stable and less fluid structuring of morals or "ethics" if you reject that there is such a thing as a moral absolute you're up "Skepticism" creek without a paddle just wen you need it most.

I looked into that Humanist Manifesto that Pollitt signed and, just as I expected to see, I saw the name of the late Paul Kurtz circle sexologist Vern Bullough's name.  Vern Bullough was an atheist, social (arguably) scientist, who, I expect, held a similar view of the origin and conditions under which morality or "ethics" exists.  He clearly comes from approximately the same milieu in which Pollitt navigates and, before it became inconvenient to be open about such things, he was a supporter and editor of Paidika, a child sex abuse promoting and practicing entity which called for the elimination of laws setting a minum age of consent for a child to agree to have sex with an adult.  Such ideas were not uncommonly found among those circles in the 1970s and even into the 80s and participating in that or merely holding that as a desirable thing wouldn't get you black-balled from within those circles."   If anything, being a vigorous critic of that, such as Andrea Dworkin was, would be more likely to get you black balled.   And, as I've noted, it's long been a part of mainstream commercial culture, pop culture, movies, pop music, even those old relics, books.

Among the things I've learned since starting to address the culture of atheism, especially the "new atheists" how little room there is between such "ethics" as they might advocate and those of the vulgar materialists of the facist-Nazi-white supremacists.   I'd hold up someone she slammed in that article, Dershowitz, as a typical specimen of what that leads to.   I'd also remind her that that now moribund then hot-bed of the new atheism, the Science Blogs, were funded by Epstein and Maxwell.  

If nothing else there is something about science that has been obvious from the time that its founders started working for princes and kings and governments, scientists are always on the make for money.  Always.  I once was told by a particularly successful biologist that she felt like a shill because of the time she spent writing grants instead of doing her work.   That thirst for funding doesn't go down as the size of the science goes up.   That scientists are susceptible to the deep pockets of a morally corrupt pieces of scum like Epstein and Maxwell is about as unsurprising as them taking money from big business and the military.   

I'm frankly shocked that someone could reach Pollitt's age and not understand that much about one of the foremost forces in contemporary human culture.   Or notice the connection between that and such holdings that there is no such thing as any moral absolute.  And the convenience of having no such a thing as a moral absolute not interfering with it.  I'm kind of surprised that there aren't a lot more compromised sci-guys than there are on that list.  

*  Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience. Humanists ground values in human welfare shaped by human circumstances, interests, and concerns and extended to the global ecosystem and beyond. We are committed to treating each person as having inherent worth and dignity, and to making informed choices in a context of freedom consonant with responsibility.    

There is certainly enough of a gaping chasm of a loophole in that pablum which, clearly, could contain advocacy for the legalization of adults raping children or, I also assert,  eugenics, everything from passively discouraging groups from having children up to and including active programs of genocide.   Eugenicists, almost to a person, saw what they did as being "consonant with responsibility" including their ranking of human beings on scales of economic (though not called that) value. 

"man transforms himself by conquering his liberty"

 More from the introduction to A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez


A reflection on the theological meaning of the process of the liberation of man throughout history demands methodologically that we define our terms.  The first part of this book is devoted to  purpose.  This will enable us to indicate why we pay special attention in this work to the critical function of theology with respect to the presence and activity of man in history.  The most important instance of this presence in our times, especially in underdeveloped and oppressed countries, is the struggle to construct a just and fraternal society, where people can live with dignity and be the agents of their own destiny.  It is our opinion that the term "development" does not well express these profound aspirations.  "Liberation," on the other hand, seems to express them better. Moreover, in another way the notion of liberation is more exact and all-embracing;  it emphasizes that man transforms himself by conquering his liberty throughout his existence and his history...

This is a fascinating concept so totally at odds with the "enlightenment" conception of humanity and which demonstrates how radically different liberation theologies view of human beings is from that of the inadequate and failed 18th century conception of "liberty."  That People would need not only to obtain liberty but to "CONQUER HIS LIBERTY THROUGHOUT HIS EXISTENCE AND IN HIS HISTORY" is the definition of a fully adult conception of freedom, not only from unjust external opposition but in opposition to the self-enslaving and blighting aspects of our own desires and personalities.  That is an entirely different view of "liberty" of freedom which is exactly NOT in line with the pop-culture or even the elite culture's view of human existence but which, in addition to "be agents of their own destiny," makes them responsible within such freedom to reject choices that would thwart or hamper or attack "a just and fraternal society," indeed, even those choices that would prevent or deconstruct such a society.  That is not only in line with the New Testament and the testimony about the teachings of Jesus, Paul, etc. but the description of the earliest Jewish Christian communities.  It is certainly informed by the long prophetic testimonies and declarations about the corruption of the Davidic-Solomonic regime as it forgot the Sinai-Deuteronomic elucidation of reality.

The modern concept of "development" takes as a given that "a rising tide raises all boats" as JFK put it, it doesn't notice that it's the pirate boats that prosper in such a tide of history.  It doesn't really care about that.  I mentioned a while back being dismayed when I heard the retired Representative Barney Frank speaking in favor of economic inequality as an engine of progress, clearly he was someone who bought into that conception of "development."  One which results in a world in which billionaires are a ruling class unto themselves, eating entire countries, even those which are supposed to have the strongest democratic institutions.  Some of those billionaires leading some of the strongest gangster-capitalist countries in the world, such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, using the American First Amendment as interpreted by Supreme Courts starting in the 1960s to attack and destroy America's merely liberal democracy.  Liberal democracy in this period exposed as doomed by such assumptions as that there is a right for the media to lie and that money is speech, thus giving billionaires billions of times more of that than those with nothing possess.  The very bases of 18th-19th and 20th century liberal democracy carries the poisons fatal to it.  We are not that far removed from Latin American in the 1970s under the yoke of American and European capitalism, we are all colonial subjects of the world-wide billionaire class and their owned and controlled media.

As pointed out in many posts here, Scripture presents a different and radically more effective idea of how to change things.

. . . The Bible presents liberation - salvation - in Christ as the total gift, which, by taking on the levels we indicate, gives the whole process of liberation its deepest meaning and its complete and unforeseeable fulfillment.  Liberation can thus be approached as a single salvific process.  This viewpoint, therefore, premits us to consider the unity, without confusion, of man's various dimensions, that is, his relationship with other men and with the Lord,  which theology has been attempting to establish for some time;  this approach will provide the framework for our reflection.

It is fitting, secondly, to show that the problem which the theology of liberation poses is simultaneously traditional and new.  This twofold characteristic will be more evident if we analyze the different ways in which theology has historically responded to this problem.  This will lead us to conclude that because the traditional approaches have been exhausted, new areas of theological reflection are being sought.  Our exclamation should help us remove the obstacles from our path and move ahead more quickly.  The second part of this work deals with that matter.  

The preceding analysis leads us to consider the "practice" of the Church in today's world.  The situation in Latin America, the only continent among the exploited and oppressed peoples where Christians are in the majority, is especially interesting.  An attempt to describe and interpret the forms under which the Latin American Church is present in the process of liberation - especially among the most committed Christian groups- will allow us to establish the questions for an authentic theological reflection.  These will be the first effots along these lines, the third part of this treatise is devoted to this atempt.

The previous remarks make it clear that the question regarding the theological meaning of liberation is, in truth, a question about the very meaning of Christianity and about the mission of the Church.  There was a time when the church responded to any problem by calmly appealing to is doctrinal and vital resources.  Today the seriousness and scope of the process which we call liberation is such that Christian faith and the Church are radically challenged.  They are being asked to show what significance they have for a human task which has reached adulthood.  The greater part of our study is concerned with this aspect.  We approach the subject within the framework of the unity and, at the same time, the complexity of the process of liberation centered in the salvific work of Christ.  We are aware, however, that we can only sketch these considerations, or more precisely, outline the new questions - without claiming to give conclusive answers.  

So much that could be commented on.

Last year I read an article about the billionaire financed "traditional-Catholic" fashion which, among other things, wanted to go back to using the old and awful Baltimore Catechism for instructing Catholics, both children and adults.  The article noted how such a notion was a call for the infantilization of Catholics.  I'm old enough to remember when the Baltimore Catechism was in use, how insulting and degrading it was due exactly to that infantlizing approach to catechesis.  The entire program of such "traditional-Catholicism" is  to move away from any intellectual engagement with the important questions of life into a "pray-pay-obey" regime favored by the right-wing Catholic hierarchy, so many of whom had little to no direct pastoral relationship to Catholics who lived lives under various yokes of oppression.  I remember some of my mother's cousins who watched the most effective conjurer of that stuff, the late Mother Angelica and her EWTN cultic TV network.  They longed for a return to the Church they knew from their time in Catholic schools in the 1930s, with masses in a language they didn't know, sermons about nothing much and the rote praying of the rosary.  They were old and childless and lived a life pretty much within the confines of other such people, resenting the influx of Latino people into their city, even though they were as Catholic as they were.  

I think in many ways the same problems that face the Catholic Church, a question of mature and active adult thinking and adult taking of moral responsibility is the same problem that is destroying American democracy.  Infantilization, whether through the old and lifeless forms of pre-Vatican II Catholicism or through the never really reformed aspects of our corrupt Constitution and the white supremacy that it was structured to protect and promote, it is an encouragement towards puerility and infantilizaiton, a seduction into that and the discouragement of adult facing of reality and moral responsibility.  I think the reality that that has been primarily discouraged through the libertarian wet-dream of the "free press" as defined by the American Supreme Court, the corrupt and morally depraved popular media whether in English, Italian, Spanish, etc. as it peddles fantasy and unreality and, yes, resentment, envy, hate, packaged for the easiest and most seductive sale is among those things which we will face and end as adults or watch the aspiration of egalitarian democracy melt and run through our hands no matter how hard we try to grasp it.  

Broadway Stevey Simps Says

 "The American media is in the business of peddling lies, for the most part. Especially in their entertainment divisions which is what most people consume in their corrupted and seduced minds."

You're so right, Sparky. The fact that "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" were the two biggest movies of 2023 proves how evil movies are, and why people should boycott them as a protest against facism.

First, since you are always getting into your meter maid of orthography costume and commenting on my copy,  that's "f-a-S-c-i-s-m. 

If you think that the majority of Americans who imbibe entertainment for many more hours a day than they do imbibing accurate information aren't affected negatively by it you must be at a total loss for how Trump ever rose so improbably from being a fascistic fictional character in a "reality" TV show to becoming the greatest single danger that America's liberal democracy has faced since the Confederacy.   He rose on the power of entertainment TV, Andrew Dice Clay style shock jock style radio and the demotion of TV and radio "news" to a high end of Joe and Mika (he was a regular call-in feature on their "morning news" show) and the feuilleton sections of print rags like the New York Post and New York Times.  

And I could make similar points about the political career of the previous record-holder for criminality in a modern American presidential administration, Ronald Reagan.  

There are only so many hours in a life, hours spent on entertainment are not hours spent on the serious and more difficult pursuit of learning about what is really happening in the world. While a daily diet of fiction, taken as fiction, isn't exactly a diet of lies, if it is mistaken as reality or a close approximation of that - as I learned even PhD holders in disturbingly large numbers do from the years I spent reading the comment threads at the baby blue blog - it may as well be a diet of lies.  The "noble cause of the Confederacy" as pushed by Hollywood from the 1910s and in pop culture from well back into the 19th century is an enduring lie that blights the lives of People of Color as the lies of "the old way-est" has so much to do along the same line in the Republican-fascist promotion of arming their suckered white supremacist invisible army that any thinking person realizes is a real threat to us all.  

You spent your life with your head stuck up the ass end of American commercial culture and look how you turned out.  It's not any great stretch to imagine the same thing among someone who wasn't acculturated into the ambient mid-brow, college-credentialed milieu in which you've lived your life.  Considering the fact of New York City politics and the politics of New York during your lifetime, figures like Giuliani, Pataki, D'amato and the other Republicans and, then, Republican fascists who regularly gain office WITHOUT THE VOTES OF PEOPLE IN YOUR MILIEU, I'd have thought you'd have learned something over the decades that's been going on.   But people who spend their lives in entertainment and fiction don't learn much and don't think much.  

 Update:  Simps says further: 

"You spent your life with your head stuck up the ass end of American commercial culture and look how you turned out. "

You mean successful, loved and capable of joy? Yeah, I turned out awful. Get back to me when you can make a similar claim, you pathetic prig.

When I am as delusional about my life as you are, in other words?   I don't know which comparison to your claim is more apt, Trump or Hyacinth Bucket.  

Update 2:  As The Days Grow Longer The Simps Grows Wronger

 "When I am as delusional about my life as you are,"

Gee, I don't know Sparky -- after all, you're the one who claimed Guy Lombardo's band was better and more important than the Beatles.

Looking in my archive, I find that I've corrected him on this point before:

Moron says what?

I think the only things I ever said about Guy Lumbardo was that he was one of Louis Armstrong's favorite musicians and that he had more musical competence than a lot of rock musicians.  Or rock critics, though I don't think I said that.  You can tell when Dopey is lying because his lips or fingers are moving.   Louis Armstrong, by the way, is one of the greatest geniuses in musical history, Dopey isn't.   Who would you suspect is more credible? 

He got pissed off when I said that  hearing some talent deficient adenoidal post-teen intone "Imagine" did what I thought was impossible, making me yearn for yet another of Guy Lumbardo's gooey renditions of Auld Lang Syne, though not so much as going to bed early and missing the new years ball drop entirely.  He's never gotten over it and, like everything processed in the TV trained mind of Simpy Sales, it's become self-serving fiction.  Like I said, Trump or Hyacinth, take your pic. 

I'll end by saying it, mop heads.  

Update 3:  Longer And Wronger

:"I don't know which comparison to your claim is more apt, Trump or Hyacinth Bucket.:

DEFINITION OF IRONY: A provincial hick nitwit snob criticizing me for having watched too much TV and television by comparing me to an obscure character from a crappy British TV show.

I haven't had a TV since HD was made mandatory and I know who who that is.  I'll bet easily 90% of casual PBS viewers would know who that was, not to mention anyone else.  Hell, Simps, even you know who she is.  You pretending not to realize that seems so very Hyacinth to me.  

Orrin Evans Quartet featuring Ralph Bowen

 

 

Orrin Evans - Piano
Ralph Bowen- tenor
Ugonna Okwego - bass
Donald Edwards- drums

"Why didn't you post about Simps during the week between Chrismas and New Years like you said you would."

As the late Alfred Lunt is reputed to say when complimented on he and his partner, Lynn Fontanne,  sticking to the stage instead of going on the movies, "Oh, we can be bought but we can't be bored."

It's essentially making bricks with the straw that comes out of his head,  I can do it but the results aren't generally worth it.   Maybe I should go back to answering him in limericks again.   My rule was that I wouldn't post it if it took me more than five minutes to come up with one.  Usually it took a lot less than that. 

Or in the form of Burma Shave signs.  I remember the tail end of the advertising campaign, there used to be a set on the highway into a town two towns away from here that stayed up a long, long time after they stopped producing them.  Shows you how old I am.  

A Post For The New Year

Our purpose is not to elaborate an ideology to justify postures already taken, nor to undertake a feverish search for security in the face of the radical challenges which confront the faith, nor to fashion a theology from which political action is "deduced."  It is rather to let ourselves be judged by the Word of the Lord, to think through our faith, to strengthen our love, and to give reason for our hope from within a commitment which seeks to become more radical, total, and efficacious.  It is to reconsider the great themes of the Christian life within this radically changed perspective and with regard to the new question posed by this commitment.  This is the goal of the so-called theology of liberation.

Many significant efforts along these lines are being made in Latin America.  Insofar as we know about them, they have been kept in mind and have contributed to this study.  We wish to avoid, however, the kind of reflection which - legitimately concerned with the prevention of the mechanical transfer of an approach foreign to our historical and social coordinates- neglects the contribution of the universal Christian community.  It seems better, moreover, to acknowledge explicitly this contribution than to introduce surreptitiously and uncritically certain ideas elaborated in another context which can only be fruitful among us if they undergo a healthy and frank scrutiny.  

From the introduction of A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez  

I can't but think that most people on reading that would think "Marxism" though I think in the context of Latin American in 1971 capitalism was as much on the mind of Gustavo Gutierrez.  It was a period marked by the double-speaking, two-edged sword of the Kennedy-Johnson administration Alliance for Progress and the even more soured handling of American policy towards Latin America by the Nixon administration.  I think too many Americans who read the Latin American literature would have done well to read, re-read and really think about these two paragraphs.  It would also have been best if they really considered the warning against introducing "uncritically certain ideas elaborated in another context," whatever good to be had from those available only through "a healthy and frank scrutiny."

Since the publication of this book, probably the most influential work in theology of the past half century, numerous other schools of "so-called theologies of liberation" have risen up and, in many cases, flourished, if nowhere else than among those living in the contexts which those theologies address.  By this time James Cone, the pioneer of Black Liberation Theology was already writing out of the context of Black People living under white supremacy.  Women were writing a related but different and distinct kind of theology based on their living with male supremacy.  At times they addressed and criticized even liberation theologies being written my male writers and, in many cases, the male theologians heard them and took them seriously, consequently taking those voices into account.  Certainly LGBTQ+ People have been writing a different theology that addressed their own lives and experiences of oppression in light of the experience of God as addressed in Scripture.  That's no surprise, the past month's short peek into Walter Brueggemann's take on the Hebrew Scriptures prove that that began in the expression of those experiences in the particular context of The Children of Israel, their experiences of life and their experience of a need of liberation.  If any Christian wants to slam "liberation theology" they'd better think twice because if that were to be eliminated from Christianity, pretty much all of Scripture would have to go because the very heart of it is a repeated sounding of theologies of liberation, starting with Exodus, certainly, and very arguably even before that in the book.  

I think among the most needed theologies of liberation are those who address the American and other "white evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics" in the bondage the sin of white supremacy and the cargo cultism of Republican-fascism.   Today, in the United States, the large majority of time you hear the word "Christian" that's the heresy that is meant by it.   

Anywhere there has been a rise of racist, bigoted excluding nationalism, there is a need of a countering theology of liberation.  I think there is a need of liberation from TV and other hegemonic, life eating media.  In a Latin American context, from the likes of Univision which regurgitates the seduction catering to our weakness and is in the process of harnessing People to their own oppression.  The same can be said of English language TV and media, up to and including such supposedly respectable venues as PBS, NPR and the deeply corrupt BBC.  Wherever there is inequality, wherever there is bigotry or gender based oppression there is a need of a theology of liberation, wherever there is privilege and the an elite, wherever there are those seduced by materialism and acquisitive mental illness there is a need of a theology of liberation to overcome those.  That was what was needed on the American left for the past century and a quarter or more, not Marxism or anarchism or some pseudo-scientific, bound to be rejected, bound to fail secular program.  In the past month I have become convinced that that nonsense, indeed, started with the generations of Descartes and Spinoza and the early period of scientism and its increasing adoption as the house ideology of Western and now world academia.  Brueggemann repeatedly notes that the Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures were uncredentialed poets who spoke out of their artistic inspiration and out of the Sinai tradition of Hebrew prophecy.  Jesus was certainly uncredentialed, in a commonly held modern fable of him, he, as Paul and others are presumed to be illiterate.  In the anachronistic slogan of the recent and fading new-atheism, they were "illiterate bronze-age goat-herders."  

Even as I have rejected the prescriptive aspects of Marxism, which has had among the most disastrous and evil series of trials in real life of any ideology ever developed by human beings except monarchy, I have acknowledged that his critique of capitalism has a lot in it to learn from.  Capitalism is another system which has had a disastrous and evil trial in human history, the example of the large majority of People living under it, especially in such places as Latin America, Asia, Africa, etc. proves that it is sheer evil.  The worst thing that Marxism produced was the stupid and facile mounting of a dualism in which we were required to choose "which side are you on."  That there were other alternatives which rejected both is one of the most stupidly unconsidered aspects of modern culture.  That one of the aspects of that alternative existed in the Hebrew scriptural tradition in the rejection of lending money at ruinous rates without having state ownership of everything only goes to show how corrupted religion has been in the modern period, as corrupted as it was under feudalism in the middle-ages.  I don't think there is such a thing as a durable Marxist regime, they seem to always go into a post-Marxism that is not only indistinguishable from capitalism, they are among the most brutal expressions of capitalism.  

I think in the theologies of liberation may be producing practical and concrete, instead of merely theoretical ways around all of that through their addressing the lives of those who are afflicted by capitalism and in their experience of Marxism.  Nicaragua under the Ortega gang is just another example of how Marxism eventually gives way to gangster capitalist rule, as are Russia and the post-Soviet states as well as Communist China which is the preeminent state-capitalism under Communist rule.  That the present junta in Nicaragua is in the process of suppressing the Catholic church if, for now, somewhat less violently than the junta that they overthrew about four decades ago only shows that Christianity which addresses liberation, justice, equality, environmental justice, etc. will be as opposed by Marxism and post-Marxism as it is, in fact, by capitalism.  The American experience of billionaire and millionaire financed opposition to Pope Francis and the practice of Christianity is pretty much the same thing.  I have ever confidence that the coming years will see a billionaire-millionaire financed American schism, probably led by Raymond Burke or another of the reactionary bishops or cardinals.   If the next Pope is even close in their intentions to Francis and his attempt to make the Catholic church Christian, that's going to come.  In the mean time such movements as the Roman Catholic Women Priests and the Intentional Eucharistic Community movement will probably slowly grow, identifying as Catholic even as they are officially rejected by the hierarchy.   I wouldn't be surprised if it started while Francis is still alive or soon after the next Pope is elected.   And, as always with American media, they will be presented as the face of "real Catholicism" just as the cargo-cultist, white supremacists are presented as "Christianity."   The American media is in the business of peddling lies, for the most part.  Especially in their entertainment divisions which is what most people consume in their corrupted and seduced minds.

What About My Secretary of State! - The Pride And The Shame

I'M SELDOM PROUD of being from the state that I am but I'm so proud of Shenna Bellows for taking the honest and courageous measure to bar the criminal insurrectionist Trump from the Maine ballot in line with the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.   We're not big on vainglory and overweening pride in Maine but there are times you just don't want to avoid it.

On the other hand, Susan Collins has already called for that decision to be overturned, that would be Susan the cowardly hypocrite and liar Susan Collins who has the support of the Republican, now Republican-fascist electronic media in Maine and, because of that,  has a majority of Maine voters duped.   If there's something about my state to be proud of, it ain't our media.   She is the shame of my state, one who knows no shame and who knows she'll never be shamed by the media here no matter how beneath contempt she gets.

Vox in Rama - Mikołaj Zieleński - Chór Insieme

 

Chór Insieme
Monika Bachowska - director

Hate Mail - Boredom Is The Curse Of The Shirking Class And Its Habit

OK, I did what you dared and looked at the baby blue blog again and saw it's pretty much the same names saying the same things they have been saying over and over and over again since the very early 2000s and not much else.   I didn't see anyone I recall as being an interesting comment writer or much of anyone I thought was likeable.  As to it being a "brain trust" (they really believe it is one of those) they seem to believe Simps without verifying what he says so they're pretty gullible though lazy is probably more apt.  Though inept is spot on.  It's Harry Hope's Bar without even that much ambition or range of difference.   They couldn't have written a play about it because its pathos is mired in laziness and conventional expressions rotely recited instead of thought.   I  can't care enough about it to care about it more than that.   I doubt I'll look at it in 2024. 

In The Great Tide Of Human Sin Plagiarism Just Don't Much Impress Me As Evil - Hate Mail

and I'm not convinced what she did amounts to much of it.   If you want a good example of the twisted notions of morality that rule in academia and the goddamned media, the reaction to an accusation of stealing words as opposed to, oh, mass killing, waging unprovoked invasions and wars, economic policy that knowingly causes death and maiming, etc.  AND BALD FACED LYING IN THE MASS MEDIA TO DAMAGE PEOPLES' LIVES AND DEMOCRACY is the shame of the free press, the flower of a twisted interpretation of the First Amendment.  

I wrote about that in one of the early pieces I wrote for my first blog.

Monday, May 15, 2006
 
Feet of Clay Words of Steel

You could be forgiven for getting it wrong. I certainly did. Some of us thought that the self evident crisis in journalism today were the cumulative repeated, uncorrected errors in fact, the inventions of quotations, the verbatim stenography and similar violations of the ever adjustable Code of Journalistic Ethics -- "Gore claims to invent internet, " being the poster example. We assumed that the overarching crisis was that the corporate consolidation of the media had rendered our journalism a tawdry pose fit only to fill up spaces on the cable band so the best in rerun sit-coms could go premium. But we were wrong.

The great crisis facing this foundation of democracy, itself, is that someone has been at the cooky jar, someone's been stealing their snickerdoodles. The great flood of plagiarism is the real danger that faces the nation, with front page stories and network news segments presenting in indepth report on the rolling crime wave. A rather flashy and enterprising Harvard co-ed (having read some of 'her' words I think she has earned the title) has borrowed from an even more eminent auteur of her genre. An executive at Raytheon has taken time off from producing engines of mass death to pilfer the wisdom of one of the ancients of his tribe. And now, we are told that a nameless intra-network jegg has broken into the word hoard of the fictitious President Bartlett of "The West Wing" applying the stolen phrases to the real life news story of an heroic horse trainer. This may be the first instance in history of words written for a fictitious president to say, we assume written by fictitious ghost writers, being applied to what passes as news on our major networks. Though that might be too much to hope at this stage of our politics.
Given that the typical West Wing script is full of references to numerous works other than the script writers' the big deal on this one escapes some of us. A point made online before it was also made on a certain Boston TV program the other night.

Um, hum.

Understand this, though. The press has seen enough. It will act.

So while the Cheney and Bush crime syndicates steal everything in sight, waging wars of conquest abroad, stealing elections and the U.S. Treasury here. As they hand out patronage money and the public schools to any hallelujah peddler with an R after their name. As they dismantle the national parks and turn them into franchise operations for extraction industries we can rest easy. Even as the free press watches the Republican Party donate the internet to the telecom industry, the media can be counted on to provide protection. For their words. Their intellectual property at so-many-cents apiece, down to the most putrid swill issuing from the conservative nepotism newslets, will be made safe from those who would borrow them without attribution and compensation.

Note: Officially, Al Gore pointing out, correctly, that he had a hand in founding the internet is over the top, the Republicans stealing it for their campaign contributors is just swell. Just for those who like to keep track of current ethics. Also note: Since on one gets killed, no one loses their pension and no wildlife habitat is destroyed in the act, plagiarism is a moderately naughty thing to do and at times actionable. This piece is not an invitation to commit crimes or violate the rights of authors to just compensation for their work. Since a "journalist" may read this I should point out that it is an invitation to the press to do their jobs.