The Kind Of Christmas You Need Right This Very Minute Is Probably Not What You're Getting

HALLMARK XMAS flicks wax large among the Christmas junk most devoid of Christ but I've never heard a right-winger complain about them. 

They're grotesquely materialistic,  lavishly vulgar and superficial and, as I asked a Woman I know who has been binging on them so as to take her mind off of the disaster of Trump II,  has anyone ever mentioned Jesus in any of them?   She, who has watched scores of them over the years, couldn't recall one that did.  And I'll leave out that they all have the frickin' same plot and use the most treadbare of movie and crap theater cliches over and over again.  You could probably do a drinking game at guessing which of those cliches you were about to see though I'd advise against it.  Unless you were as stupid as a . . . . um, troll, you'd probably all die of alcohol poisoning by the end of the crap.

But, then, the most pervasive and ultimate American messaging around Xmas, the commercials, never do, either.  They are dedicated to the exact opposite to the Gospel of Jesus, the Epistles, Acts and, especially Revelation.   

The best way to do Christmas would center on exactly what American Xmas doesn't, especially what gets on FOX Lies and the other imaginary command centers in the defense of "Christmas."  

It's gotten so my favorite thing about Christmas is Advent, ignoring American Christmas, entirely.   RMJ's is a good place to get a lot of that,  in fact, he's started a week early.  That's the kind of Christmas I need right this very minute and no one does Advent like him.

The Dangerous Subtlty Of Thinking Like A Fascist Or A Nazi In Everyday American Life And Its Pervasiveness In Popular Culture

 As late as 1921, the [Henry Ford owned] Dearborn Independent still proclaimed: "The motion picture influence of the United States -- and Canada -- is exclusively under the control, moral and financial, of the Jewish manipulators of the public mind." The publication asserted that "the picture business, on its commercial side, is Jewish through and through" and that "the American Public is as helpless against the films as it is against any other exaggerated expression of Jewish power." It concluded that "When the people know who and what is this intangible influence we call the 'movies,' the problem may not appear so baffling."

The Anti-Defamation League

AN APOLOGY TO THE READERS is, perhaps needed because yesterday I let Simps go on a bit because I knew from experience he'd say something stupid and I'd get a post out of it.  Really, I generally count on him saying several stupid things at any given time, all based on the current  tropes on the stupid and so most influential part of American pop culture.  I had the feeling the first times I saw him do that that I could predict where he would end up because that's what that kind of non-thinking is, IT ALWAYS ENDS UP IN THE SAME STUPID PLACE.  It was especially satisfying for me because he did one of the things I suspected he'd do, parrot one of the most enduring of modern American antisemitic tropes.  

As it developed he claimed that the author and film critic Neal Gabler wrote a book saying "Jews control Hollywood."  I, like Simps, haven't read Neal Gabler's book about the early days of Hollywood because, unlike him,  I've had more than my fill on the topic.   Hollywood loves, just loves to talk about itself and I don't especially enjoy reading about it.  Though I confess I did think Scotty Bowers'  "Full Service" was entertaining and, in its exposure of the lies the lives of the biggest stars was . . . well, satisfying.  

I have, in the past, enjoyed some of Neal Gabler's writing about more than just movies and respected his thinking so I was certain he never said such a stupid thing.  Looking around to find out if  Gabler had said that's what he said I found something much better, an article that a Hollywood film writer Malina Saval wrote in which she started this way:

Several years ago, a non-Jewish film producer turned to me and announced, casually and with an air of arrogance and ignorance reserved particularly for bigots, “Jews control Hollywood.”

He assured me this was a compliment, as many antisemites are wont, trotting out Neal Gabler’s seminal text on the subject, “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” as evidence. But it was clear that said producer had either never read Gabler’s book, or missed one of its key points entirely: the founding producers of the film biz were Jewish, most of them Eastern European immigrants, excluded and ostracized from virtually every other industry in America.

William Fox, Carle Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer — they created Hollywood out of collective necessity, a decidedly human desire to realize the American Dream. They were not wanted anywhere else. But if these pioneering studio heads were Jewish, the majority of directors, writers and actors were not. Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, John Ford, Howard Hawkes — these were the artists largely shaping early 20th century cinema in the U.S.

In short, there is a core etymological difference between invent and control.

This was not, of course, the first time I’d heard uttered the weary and delusional trope that Jews, who comprise roughly 0.2 % of the world’s total population, are somehow at the totalitarian helm of an industry that, per the U.S. Dept. of Labor, supports some 2.6 million jobs. Growing up Jewish in post-Holocaust America, I’ve experienced antisemitism in all its various nefarious forms, from violent physical assaults to passive microaggressions shrouded in the guise of woke intellectualism.

But, for whatever reason — aside from the well-documented epigenetic trauma, antisemitism can breed introspection in its objects of hatred — said producer’s assertion that Jews dominate decision-making in Hollywood prompted me to examine the years working in the film industry in which I, a Jew, had zero decision-making power. 

For the record, this was written in 2021, fresh off of Trump I.   I have a feeling that given the abuse of the term in the past four years, she wouldn't have used "woke" here in the same way.  I like to think someone who can think, as she clearly can, would have learned that, though she does use the term more subtly than it has been generally used and distorted by Trumpzi-fascism.

Risking violating fair use,  I'll let Malina Saval have the say in the rest of it, demonstrating how her and other Jewish People working in Hollywood with little power AND THE CONTENT OF HOLLYWOOD'S PRODUCTS, prove that Jews do not control Hollywood.   And supporting my contention that if they did, the content of Hollywood films would be far, far different from what that crap is now.   I will note that she touches on one of the things that I am on record as having noticed and said, How so many, especially secular Jews, seem to have internalized the perhaps not yet pervasive but all too common antisemitism that really hates Judaism and constantly reassures other People that they're not "like 'those' Jews."  

But, for whatever reason — aside from the well-documented epigenetic trauma, antisemitism can breed introspection in its objects of hatred — said producer’s assertion that Jews dominate decision-making in Hollywood prompted me to examine the years working in the film industry in which I, a Jew, had zero decision-making power.

In 1997, after graduating from USC with an MFA in screenwriting, I spent that summer penning a semi-autobiographical script that would ultimately land me a deal at a major motion picture studio. Before sending it out, however, my then-agent advised me to make the storyline “less Jewish.” Could we change the Jewish characters to Irish-Catholic ones? she asked. We could, so I did. Because I was new to the biz and assumed that is what one needed to do in order to work as a screenwriter.

In truth, it wasn’t difficult. I grew up in Boston, a city with the highest percentage of Irish ancestry in the United States. I wore green on St. Patrick’s Day and sat through annual elementary school screenings of “Darby O’Gill and the Little People.” So, I changed the bat mitzvah scene in my script to a First Communion and switched the Cohen family to the McConnells. The essence of the script felt lost, but at least I’d scored a job.

From that moment on, the message was clear: you can be Jewish in Hollywood, but not too Jewish.

For decades the watering-down of Jewish representation in TV and film, namely in terms of casting, struck me as an annoying but not necessarily harmful casualty of Jewish life in America, one in which assimilation — not just for Jews, but for every ethnic group — has always come at the expense of subverting one’s cultural identity. But amidst a surge of antisemitism in the United States — per the FBI, 63% of all reported religion-based hate crimes in 2019 were directed at Jews, making it the single-largest category — and the fact that scant few individuals are speaking out against these crimes, it bears reminding those in the industry that, as with any other ethnic minority (Asians, Blacks, Indigenous peoples), the perception of Jews onscreen does matter. In a day and age in which a focus on diversity and inclusion is front and center, it’s a hypocrisy to affirm it doesn’t.

Are there Jewish characters on screen? Of course. From Jerry Seinfeld to Fran Drescher’s nanny and Debra Messing’s “Grace,” there are Jewish protagonists that are writ large in the American pop cultural canon. But for every Larry David, there’s a Cheryl Hines, a non-Jewish spouse, friend — foil, if you will — to offset the Jewishness. To make it more “accessible” for American society at large. (Unless the storyline is about the Holocaust; then Hollywood seems to be OK with an entire family being Jewish, especially if they die at the end.) When there is a Jewish actor playing a Jew, Hollywood effectively demands said actor to express at least slight moral disdain and psychological discomfort with one’s Jewishness. The edgy, neurotic misfit Jew has become synonymous with Jews in film and TV, from Woody Allen in every movie he’s made to every actor playing Woody Allen’s surrogate to Seth Rogen’s nebbish-y pothead slacker in “Knocked Up.”

Because, God forbid, Jews like being Jewish. Far more fashionable to be a little self-hating.

Actors ignoring or nonchalantly brushing off antisemitic comments — statements further perpetuating the damaging mythical assertion that Jews imagine the hatred directed their way —can be cast as Jews. And they are. Hollywood has no issue with this at all. Take “Mank,” for example, David Fincher’s biopic about “Citizen Kane” screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. Gary Oldman, who netted an Oscar nom for his portrayal of Mank, told Playboy magazine in 2014 that people should “get over” Mel Gibson’s infamous 2006 antisemitic rant. And they did, of course. Despite Gibson’s antisemitic (and misogynistic and racist) slurs, he’s continued to work as a director and actor. His status in the biz has thrived; in 2017, Gibson earned an Oscar nom for directing “Hacksaw Ridge.”

The messaging here, too, is clear: You can say and do things that are antisemitic, and still go on to have a flourishing career.

With rare exception in the way of Barbra Streisand — perhaps the singular Jewish superstar whose cultural identity, not to mention her unrelenting support of Israel, is allowed free rein across music, television and film —Hollywood seems to find an almost obsessive, near-pathological need to dilute female Jewish characters. Or erase.

The examples are vast, and they are also maddening. In “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” Jewish heroine Midge is played by non-Jew Rachel Brosnahan. In “On the Basis of Sex,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the modern-day thinking Jewish woman’s pin-up for her groundbreaking contributions to constitutional law, is played by non-Jewish British actor Felicity Jones. And in Hulu’s “Mrs. America,” Jewish second-wave feminists Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem are played by Tracy Ullman, Margo Martindale and Rose Byrne — none of whom are Jewish. Julianne Moore (not Jewish), also played Steinem in Julie Taymor’s “The Glorias.” And in ABC’s long-running sitcom “The Goldbergs,” shopaholic balabusta Beverly Goldberg is played by non-Jewish comedian Wendi McLendon-Covey. Even Elsa, the adolescent “Jew in the Wall” in Taika Waititi’s Oscar-winning “Jojo Rabbit,” is played by non-Jewish actor Thomasin McKenzie.

It's an excellent article that tells me, someone who has more or less boycotted Hollywood since the late 1970s, that it's far, far worse and more subtle than I'd suspected.  I'm sure a very similar article could be written about People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+ (the exact same trope about queers controlling show-biz exists and is widely believed*).  You should read the rest of it, though I didn't want any of the points she made get lost to those who don't bother with links, as Simps generally doesn't.  

You should read the ADL article, too, though, being based on what can be factually stated, it doesn't have the depth and nuance that comes from the personal experience of someone who knows the situation first hand.   Simps, being a washed-up pop-music "critic" thinks about things he has no first-hand experience of working in and, like inferior critics, which is what most of them are, he thinks superficially and in stereotypes and tropes.  As I've said,  I don't do that by a reasonable and fair consideration of the complexity of reality and because my Irish Catholic parents and grandparents rejected such thinking as immoral, closely related to gossip and inevitably including the bearing of false witness.   In  short, such stereotyping, bigoted thinking and expression is a serous sin, one which violates one of the most important of the Commandments.   If such thinking is a part of modern secular culture, it wouldn't surprise me, anymore.  

*  I can't get used to using the term "queer" in that way, to start with.   And I've heard and read the parallel accusation that "queers" control show biz, not infrequently said by straight men who aren't talented and don't get work.   Sort of how a Jon Voight or a washed-up "talent" like Bo Derek claims that liberals control Hollywood and so they can't get work. 

Update:  I had a few minutes I didn't expect to have and found where I said it back in 2017. 

 What I noticed was the pains he took to describe both sets of great-grandparents as "secular," something I always feel a little uncomfortable with hearing Jewish people say, as if it is an assurance to other people that they're not all "that Jewish" or something.   

I always feel uncomfortable when people feel the need to explain away their identity or to diminish it.  When it's a Jewish person making sure that people understand they're safely secular it's worse than when an ex-Catholic (as if there's really any such thing) talks about themselves as a "recovering Catholic" because the persecution of Catholics in the United States is far more remote in time and far less likely to become as seriously bad is it has so recently in Central America and elsewhere, I guess.   
In the case of Stern doing it, it reminds me of something especially troubling, that was the talk among the Nazis of how the Einsatzgruppen, the soldier-murderers who murdered hundreds of thousands, probably well over a million Jews by shooting them, found it easier to kill religious Jews, especially those in Poland and the Soviet Union and other places who didn't look or dress so much like non-Jewish Germans or, I'd guess, others who they might think looked too much like they thought they did.   It was one of the reasons they decided to develop a "more efficient" means of committing genocide.  I'm sure that's not something Stern would think he was signaling with what he said, indicating that, somehow, "secular" Jews were .... I don't know, it comes down to superior to religious Jews in some way.   He should certainly indicate what he means by it, especially in the context of that topic. But, as I've experienced, the declaration by Jews that they are safely secular is widespread in the United States.  It's a practice which is a lot more serious and fraught with implications and danger than someone declaring themselves an ex-Catholic or ex-Protestant.  

There's only one thing to say about that - Unsolicited Information

 

MOP HEADS

DEMOCRATS! Are The Ones Guilty of A "Heresy Hunt"? Give Me A Frickin' Break

GENERALLY I LIKE Michael Sean Winters but his piece today, one of the myriads of would be autopsies of the Democrats losses in this election is about the last straw in that for me.   He starts out with the bizarre idea asked about in my title.

The Democratic Party autopsies continue. Critically, the Democrats are now tagged as the party of the nation's cultural elite, so the changes need to extend beyond the party's leaders. The soul-searching must be more widespread. It won't be easy.

Today, and over the next few Mondays, I plan to look at some of the deeper habits of thought that have come to characterize Democratic Party leaders and that need to change.

The first deadly habit the left has to forswear is its tendency to heresy-hunt. If you are hunting for converts, you are engaged in party-building. If you are hunting for heretics, you end up alienating people whose votes you need.

This heresy-hunting tendency is found to the nth degree in discussions of sex and gender. It is pretty obvious that transgender-related issues are replacing abortion as the principal totem in our culture wars. While former President Donald Trump barely mentioned abortion during the campaign, the GOP spent millions of dollars on an ad that highlighted old video of Vice President Kamala Harris indicating her support for gender-reassignment surgeries for prison inmates, paid for by the government.

Mr. Winters, did you actually follow the  campaigns of the two parties?   I mean every one of those since Truman ran in 1948?  What the fuck has the Republican Party done for the past eighty years BUT RUN ON "HERESY HUNTING?"   Here's a list of those targeted by Republican-fascists in 2024

People of Color,  Most of all Black People and Latinos but including many others.

Women except Republican Women and by that I mean those who supported Trump and Trumpism

Liberals 

Environmentalists

Teachers

Labor organizers

Muslims and members of other religions

Literally the majority of the United States and the majority who voted didn't vote for Trump who won under fifty percent of the vote. 

Imaginary Marxists and Communists - REALLY, THEY THINK THERE ARE STILL THOSE UNDER THE BED, or they pretend to for the rubes and those whose senile dementia is triggered by those buzz words.   Which is hilarious because no American politician has ever been more in bed with commies than Donald Trump,  I mean, the KGB man Putin, Xi, KIM OF NORTH KOREA!  FOR THE LOVE OF MIKE!

When have Republican-fascists ever LOST AN ELECTION through "heresy hunting?"   If you're saying that doesn't work as well for a democratic party of inclusion, the reason for that has to be far more complex than you make it to be, for example, the widely reported on phenomenon of Latinos WHO ARE OR ARE RELATED TO OR CARE ABOUT THE IMMIGRANTS TRUMP AND THE REPUBLICANS TARGETED who didn't believe "he meant People like us."  

Your focus on trans-people as one of those groups the Republican-fascists have targeted the most, TAKING ADVANTAGE OF PREJUDICE, IGNORANCE AND HATRED, blaming Democrats for speaking up for a group targeted, injured and murdered in heavily disproportionate numbers is to say that the Republican tactic of targeting them works and that Democrats shouldn't oppose it.   That might be easy for a straight, white male to say as it is, perhaps, for such straight white males to dismiss as important.   Such a SWM as Seth Moulton, running as a Democrat from a safe Democratic district in Massachusetts is hardly someone for Democrats living in the real world to follow.   His attempt to sandbag the most accomplished Speaker of the House in the history of that office, Nancy Pelosi, to replace her by someone more like him is about as much as you need to know about how that would work out for Democrats.  

I could go on and I probably will if you keep up your post-mortem in this way.  I am pretty much sick and tired of those in the media who do this without admitting the most salient fact in Democrats having trouble getting elected and winning majorities, THE FACT THAT THEIR OWN PROFESSION IS NEARLY UNIFORMLY IN THE POCKET OF REPUBLICANS AND THOSE WHO LIKE REPUBLICANS BECAUSE THEY MAKE THEM RICHER.   If one of your planned post-mortems isn't a realistic and honest look at that,  you should really stick to what your're good at, which is reporting on the internal workings of the Catholic Church.  You do that well,  I don't think the world needs another cookie-cutter slam at Democrats on the basis of equality and inclusion.  

You might as well have suggested Democrats follow the tactic that has worked the most for Republicans, no one in our history more than Donald Trump, LYING AND BEARING FALSE WITNESS.  Your profession has that as a standard operating feature, these days.    

An Excellent Image Found At RMJ's

 The Fall of the Broman Empire

Giving Up On Cosmology And Looking At The Fungi Instead

SINCE THE BEGINNING of my concluding that the then "new atheism" was an important source of danger for the possibility of gaining and keeping an egalitarian democracy,  I've looked at the dodgy-at-best practice of arguing the question of God's existence from the physical sciences, especially the dodgy science of cosmology which goes from ultimate extreme to ultimate extreme in predictions about the unseeable future hundreds of billions or, really, jillions of years into the future on the basis of what is known and, really, sorta known now by a tiny fraction of one percent of one species on one small planet in the universe.  And, if that tenuous relationship to science isn't vanishingly unlikely to yield secure knowledge, they go back on the other end to the beginning of this one and only universe way beyond where present day physics can actually observe anything much about even the relatively young universe to make sweeping declarations about the beginning and absolute nature of the universe on the same basis. 

In looking at both I was struck how a single paper of untestable theorizing could sway the professions of cosmology and physics around like seventeen year olds trying to keep up with the latest early 1960s dance crazes or even younger ones on social media going from worshipful enthusiasm about some demigod to them being universally held to be scuzzy on an even more ephemeral basis. 

In short, I did something I've been doing less often these days,  listening to Sabine Hossenfelder on the topic.   Yesterday it was on a paper debunking the "anthropic principle" on the clever basis of not declaring the conclusions of the likes of Fred Hoyle exactly wrong but in claiming that "life permitting universes" aren't nearly as rare as the antropicists (if that's the word for it) figured.  That isn't real universes,  that is theoretical life permitting universes existing only in the calculations of the cosmologists, not real ones.  One of the things Hossenfelder and I both think it is that all the multiverse nonsense of the past seventy plus years is nonsense.  There is literally nothing but that sci-fi written in equations to base a belief in "other universes" on. 

She began this way:

Today I have good news. We can finally  lay to rest the idea that our universe is somehow especially hospitable for life. It  just isn’t. I think it’s good news because this argument has sometimes been used as  support for the existence of a creator and, worse, for the idea that we live  in a multiverse. Let’s have a look. The Anthropic Principle at first sight seems to simply be a tautologically true statement. We can only observe laws of nature that allow  for the existence of observers. It sounds like a joke a 5-year-old might make, but naïve  truths can be very revealing. The Anthropic principle is not entirely useless because the  observation that the universe is hospitable to life gives us constraints on the laws of  nature: They need to be so that we can exist.

I will note that the anthropic principle being used "as support for the existence of a creator" was a response to the far longer use of cosmology by atheists to argue against the existence of The Creator, something which goes back pretty much to the beginning of the written record of atheism in India and Greece and probably in other places.  I will also note that I have always held that arguing for the "existence" of God on that basis was foolish because cosmology is such a dodgy business to start with and, at least for the Jewish God which Christianity and Islam believe is the closest human conception of The God Who Is, is removed from any such use by the first few lines of Scripture.  God created the heavens and the Earth,  God who, as the Creed says, Created all things seen and unseen.   As such, God cannot be discerned on the basis of how the universe is or isn't but is intrinsic to any way that the universe is.   

As a merely practical matter, spending a lot of time mastering current cosmology so as to make extended arguments about such matters entirely bigger and wider than cosmology is almost certainly time not very well spent because of the propensity of cosmologists, a. not agreeing with each other in the most drastic of ways, quite capable of writing papers supporting their points of view of ultimate radical disagreements, b. changing their minds as drastically, turning in another direction on a dime and, c. having their favorite ideas temporarily overturned by this or that observation which will be instantly and, almost certainly, superficially declared to show this or that or that or that or that . . .   

Some of that quickly becomes apparent as Hossenfelder accurately describes the use of mostly atheist-materialist cosmologists and others within science. 

The most famous use of the anthropic principle  was when the physicist Fred Hoyle predicted the properties of the nucleus of the carbon atom.  His argument was that life on earth needs a lot of carbon, but carbon wasn’t produced  in sufficiently high amounts in the early universe. So where does it come from? It must be  produced in stars by nuclear fusion. And this can only work if the carbon nucleus has a particular  property which he predicted. And he was right.

In all fairness, Hoyle’s argument didn't  have much to do with life in particular, but just generally with the observed abundance  of some chemical elements. But in the end, it doesn’t matter all that much just how  physicists get their ideas, so long as they work.

If anything Hoyle's calculation of the improbability of life being possible in other universes was incredibly naive because he based it on such a relatively probable thing.   Probability mathematics is a human invention to make things seem more understandable or comprehensible to us but I think sometimes, often, it is treated as if it shows us some absolute aspect of physical reality when it doesn't necessarily do that.   How can you come up with a range of probabilities of something existing on the basis of the one and only thing you can observe?  Carbon being what carbon is and having its physical and chemical characteristics and that being amenable to how Earthly life uses those features.   I don't see how that can be known to be any less than 100% since that's how it happened in the one and only instance we know of it happening, the very thing that gives rise to the ideas and concepts about any of this, from the physics and applied mathematics of reality to the grotesquely speculative probability mathematics that such cosmological speculation is made of, to the far, far more complex and ultimately greater improbabilities involved in the actual construction of living organisms from non-living material on an entirely lifeless Earth.  I doubt anyone who thinks about it even a little could conclude from that last range of improbabilities that what happened on Earth lies within the far, far more probable the range of probabilities that go from Hoyle to the ones who wrote the paper that Sabine Hossenfelder was talking about.   

I would guess that the actual range of the probability of what did happen on Earth, giving rise to and the successful sustaining of life, giving rise to intelligence (which I think we have good reason to believe exists in many bacteria) up to that which produces a Hossenfelder or a Hoyle makes the ten to the hundred thirty-eight or whatever look tiny.   And I don't think you can rely on the so-far entirely elusive finding of "other-life" to lessen those odds by much.  It seems to me that such atheists who rely on that make the same mistake that idiots who buy two or a hundred lottery tickets thinking they double or triple of centuple their chances of winning.  Two to one in ten to the hundred-thrity-eight isn't much better odds than one in ten to that enormous number.   I can understand the idiot who I see buying multiple tickets who probably couldn't add up their convenience store tab making that mistake,  I am floored by physicists and cosmologists and other professional scientists and philosophers who do.  

By the way, notice I admitted that was a guess, which it is.   Which is what all of that other calculated probability babble is based in.  

I believe in God because of other reasons, not because of what some cosmologist says in some paper.  I will say that I think the only reason anyone ever believed in the multiverse was that purely ideological reaction to the evidence showing that Lamaitre and some others who said that 20th century physics pointed to an absolute beginning of the universe.  They knew that such an idea would lead many to conclude that, at least, the first lines in Genesis got that right as opposed to the then current leading atheist-materialist model that held with a steady-state universe.  Indeed, many of the more well-known cosmologists, Hoyle to Sean Carroll are still engaged in making some kind of steady-state model seem plausible and it's no accident that all of those I've ever heard of are what Rupert Sheldrake calls "militant atheists."   I have noted many times how that one ideology is introduced directly into the literature of science to absolutely no notice even when it is the explicit motive of the scientists who do that.   And it isn't just in cosmology, it's pervasive.  Atheism is the religious ideology that is most pervasive in both the culture and literature of science, and it has an extremely distorting presence there.  

My brother has told me he read Merlin Sheldrake's book about fungi and another book he followed up with on the current science in the properties and uses of fungi to make life better, here and now.   I think I've wasted enough time on cosmology and abiogensis and "exobiology"  and such related sciency bullshitting and will concentrate on that kind of science in the future.   Sabine Hossenfelder and others rightly go on about the crisis in science, and science like politics and journalism are in a crisis, the world is in a crisis.  I think those who are engaged in studying fungi are more likely to pull us farther from the brink than the cosmologists and other ideologues are.   They're a waste of time, any money going to the Lords of Creation And Ultimate Doom should go to something like finding out how to make sustainable materials out of fungi, especially as a means of carbon sequestration and replacing oil and other extraction industry produced materials.   I can't think of anything more important for science to be doing than that, right now, and you could ignore the ideological pollution of other sciences to do it.

Here's A Better Way To Waste Time

I HAPPENED TO just find out that you can listen to many shows of My Word! at Archive.org   I used to listen to it every week and didn't realize how much I missed it when it stopped being produced.  I expect to waste a lot of winter hours on it.

The Internet Exposes The Most Bizarre Fascinations

AFTER GOING ALL SUMMER gardening while wearing Tevas or going barefoot, I've got thick calluses on my feet.   Going to using a standing desk for just about everything must be a contributing factor.   I was told that especially for a geezer like me it's a good idea to gradually get rid of them so, naturally,  I looked on Youtube to see if how it's safely done at home without paying a podiatrist to do it. 

Well, I typed in "removing calluses safely" and found the world of Youtube callus, corn and plantar wart removal videos.  There must be at least hundreds of them if not thousands.  Some Youtube channels seem to be nothing much else than these things.  While being relieved that my feet which I thought were in pretty bad condition, were as nothing compared to what is shown.  I've always kept my toe nails trimmed and, to the extent a gardener can, clean but the horrors exposed on the videos makes mine look like the model of Venus on the half-shell's may have looked like in real life.  

A lot of these channels are owned by podiatrists and they present the harrowing movies of nightmare corn removals as providing some kind of satisfaction.  I think it's like when I found that there were many videos of Indian head massages that seemed to have something of a cult following, which I found kind of weird, but corn removal?  And that led me to see in the sidebar there is apparently a related obsession with watching blackheads being removed   I mean, how many of these things can you watch?  

I wonder if there is some urge behind these odd obsessions that is related to the people who go on comment threads all day, every day, on Twitter or other social media for hours a day.  To refer to yesterday's post.  I'm going to have to limit my viewing with Youtube,  who knows what kind of obsession could be developing from watching such things.  For now, I think I've had enough of my brief and unsuspecting exposure to what I guess is a form of pedophilia   Or at least a morbid fascination with something I just don't get at all.

Something To Keep In The Front Of Your Mind

as we enter into another catastrophic Trump regime.    Everything that has happened since he gained office while losing an election in 2016 HAS BEEN ENTIRELY PERMITTED AND HARDLY HAMPERED BY THE CONSTITUTION AND THE LAW OF THE UNITED STATES.

Against my better judgement, yesterday I listened to a couple of the pundit-laywers who were reassuring us that the judicial system would save us and they were     expressing both their shock at how Trump gets away with everything even as they were still telling us we should put our hope in the law and the judicial system.   Well, I've had that faith before and it turned out to be the propitiation of a false god.   Just as I used to have faith in "journalism" and the program of liberal democracy, even as I early understood that it was hardly the same thing as egalitarian democracy.   

The Constitution of the United States INCLUDING THE BILL OF RIGHTS, AND ESPECIALLY THE FIRST AND SECOND AMENDMENTS is fundamentally and basically flawed when it isn't intentionally corrupt.  The anti-democratic features of our government, the Electoral College, the anti-democratically constituted Senate,  the unrestrained Supreme Court, etc. were put there by the dirty agreements of Northern financial interests and slave-holders, genocidalists and land stealers.   That is the real history and residual character of the United States government and, so, law.    The dictatorial features of the presidential system are coming home to roost here as they have in other countries which copied it from us.  

Remember that when the lawyer-pundits reassure us that we can depend on the courts, this time that they Supremes wouldn't enforce the ban on insurrectionists holding federal office.   The Roberts Court would have allowed Jefferson Davis to take the office.  They've allowed an insurrectionist who said he intends to wreck the Constitution and federal government even as he is a known traitor in Putin's palm.   And who is willing to sell us out to the billionaire oligarchs, foreign and domestic.   That ruling last spring legalizing post-facto bribery was custom made for the Trump clan and its associated grifters.   And every one of them who voted  for it knew what they were doing. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova -

First Metis Man of Odesa part 1

First Metis Man of Odesa part 2

Interview with Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova

A real-life love story that spans continents, a pandemic and an invasion

Matt, a Canadian Metis playwright, falls for Mariya, a Ukrainian actor, during a theatre workshop in Kyiv. They kindle a year-long romance through emails before meeting in Toronto, igniting a whirlwind love affair. But as they face the challenges of a long-distance relationship, doubts creep in for both. Just before the pandemic hits, they receive life-altering news, testing the strength of their bond and the viability of their future together.

Rod Serling always said he loved working at the end of the "golden age" or radio drama in the U.S. because it was so cheap to produce the owners of the radio station didn't care what he did so he could write pretty much what he liked.  Audio drama is, if anything, freer than that because it's even cheaper to produce and the audio equipment now is far easier to use and produces much better sound without having to have or be a really good technician or engineer.  So writers are freer to produce unusual stories and try new things.   A lot of it is pretty bad, but that's true of the most expensive medium with the most control,  the movies, TV shows, stage shows.   I'm going through the PlayMe collection of audio drama from the Canadian Broadcasting Company and may be posting more of them.   

Answer To An Unposted Comment

I DON'T care what they say about me at Duncan's, I left there a dozen years ago ashamed to realize I'd wasted way too much time there the previous eight or so years and those asses all wasted that next twelve years there.  I learned a long time ago to never mistake self-congratulation and conceit for intelligence.   Considering what a self-congratulatory circle jerk it is, for them to ridicule people anywhere as interbred is mildly amusing.   Nothing of any importance is ever said there and nothing is ever done by any of them. 

Some Footnotes

 NO ONE HAS requested that I post Simp's rote accusation of "antisemitism" against me so I can answer it for at least the fiftieth time.   Not even Simps or his sock drawer.  So I don't expect I'll be posting it and will remove it from the cue in comment moderation after a while.   I guess the People who read this blog are as tired of it as I am.

This post from six years ago is, I believe the first time I criticized the IHRA project of coming up with an "official" definition of antisemitism which is, for the most part, an attempt to shield Israel and its elected governments from legitimate criticism.   In looking over it again and in light of the recent history of Israeli elections and the governments that a majority of Israelis put in power,  I think the project is entirely discreditable and has to discredit those who were involved and, tragically, the group that generated it.   I will note that I noticed something in the definition that I haven't ever seen taken seriously by those who use it and support its adoption as a legal definition:

Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

Let me highlight that last sentence.

However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

That is certainly not a part of the IHRA definition that is much ever put into effect.  As I noted in one of my recent posts, I and many of those who have been scathing in our criticism of the Israeli government and, at least in my case, the majority of Israeli voters who repeatedly, over decades, vote those governments in HOLD THEM TO THE SAME STANDARD AS WE HOLD OTHER COUNTRIES, INCLUDING OUR OWN COUNTRIES.   I have said nothing about the Israeli government that I haven't said about other governments entirely unrelated to Israel, first and foremost, the United States.  I don't think I have made a criticism of Israel, the majority of Israeli voters and the Israeli government and military and Supreme Court that isn't matched dozens of times over with the same or its equivalent of those in my own country.  Not to mention many times more for some other countries from Britain to China to Australia and back to the USA.  I may have been less critical of Canada, though I've been plenty critical of Canada, too.  

It is one of the obvious problems of such a long, vague, convoluted "definition" as it is used is that such an internal correction will fall by the wayside.  And it's a pretty weak internal correction, I would say ass-covering.   And especially as, in the case of the IHRA definition, it mostly consists of ways of insisting that Israel and the Israeli government is not to be treated as all other nations should be treated but insists that to do that is antisemtic, it's classic doublespeak. 

And that's not the most serious way in which the entire enterprise was an exercise in doublespeak.  I will also note that first sentence which calls this a manifestation of antisemitism:

Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. 

This is supremely ironic because the very ideology of zionism AND OFFICIAL ISRAELI LAW CONCEIVES OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL AS A JEWISH COLLECTIVITY.   It is one of Rabbi Yakkov Shapiro's main points in rejecting zionism and the Israeli state that the Israeli state and Supreme Court has insisted on Israel as "a Jewish collectivity" not only for the citizens of the country BUT CLAIMS TO REPRESENT EVERY JEW IN THE WORLD, thus encouraging the antisemitic tropes of dual loyalty and collective Jewish responsibility for the actions of the government and military of Israel.   The very thing that the IHRA committee was trying to shield from criticism by labeling all such critics, Jews as well as gentiles as antisemitic IS ENGAGED IN EXACTLY WHAT THEY SAY IS A MANIFESTATION OF ANTISEMITISM.  

Every time I am forced to revisit this the more the blatant dishonesty of the use of the word becomes obvious.  And, remember, it's one thing that both the Biden administration and the Trump goons agree on, that they accept the IHRA definition AND TRUMP INTENDS TO WEAPONIZE IT in exactly the way that even Kenneth Stern, one of those who was in on its drafting, has admitted it would be used for that,  ‘The Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA) and other groups will hunt political speech with which they disagree and threaten to bring legal cases."

I don't know if Kenneth Stern has disassociated himself with the project, but if I'd been in his shoes and seen how it was used after 2019, when he said that,  I'd renounce being any part of it.  I think, given the origin and the way the term is used, a new, clean and clear word for hatred of Jews is needed a lot more than a corrupt and muddling redefinition of that word. Its use will increasingly come to mean nothing because it is used to mean anything on any different occasion. 

Send In The White Collar Clowns - Another Lightly Edited Comment Worked Into A Post

or:  They won't tell you that but I just did. 

THE QUEST TO pin down the win of Trump to any one thing or even a couple or three or four things might be a legacy of the "enlightenment's" origin in the culture of science, in its most unrealistic ideological form.  The relationship of the culture of  physics to the ideologically material-monistic quest of physicists, as manifested in today's quest for a theory of everything, is a very real thing.   

The belief against all evidence that sociology and psychology are sciences and, in large part what the motivation to consider something so clearly an attenuated manifestation of that, opinion polling, is a direct consequence of the idea that due to the monistic nature of reality, reality is vulnerable to the methods of physics and chemistry, so deeply embedded that I'd bet most of those who practice those have, at best, a vague notion that that is the foundation of their claim that what they are doing is science.

The fact is that all of those social, would-be sciences that mount such quests to come up with simple answers to extremely complex questions, are based on the practice of pretending you can even discern "data" to come up with a basis for answering those questions that way.  The fact is no one asking anyone what their motives are can come up with even one reliable datum, even someone who believes they are answering a survey question honestly and completely can't really know if their motives or ideas or opinions are so simply expressed.  And that's not to mention those who lie to pollsters BECAUSE THEY LIE TO THEMSELVES about why they vote the way they do.   I'll bet a large percentage of those who gave such answers to surveyors or pollsters wouldn't admit that that's why they voted the way they did.  

Academics and "journalists" don't admit the dodgy nature of what they base their "studies" and "analyses" on.  I'll admit the following from me is no more scientific than what they do.  They won't tell you that but I just did.

I think the strength of misogyny and racism in the culture as manifested every single day in the passive acceptance of violence and the casual acceptance of stereotypical and negative views of both Women and People of Color probably account for the first reason that both she and Hillary Clinton lost by the narrowest of margins.  Though neither of those reasons is a simple phenomenon.   Racists are often misogynists,  racists include those who have interiorized the generally racist culture (Clarence Thomas?)  and women have often interoirized misogyny (the examples of that include every Woman Trumpist you could name).  

Ignorance is another pervasive and obvious reason as can be seen in the numerous Trump voters who believed his line about how tariffs were going to be paid by foreign companies and corporations.  - something that I think Trump still believes, himself.   And that's only one instance of how the basic ignorance of a very large percentage of voters can win a presidential election for someone who the media endlessly echos in their lies as comprises the public career of Donald Trump from even before he rode down the chintzy golden escalator.  To attribute some folk wisdom as so many of these journalistic and pseudo-sociological explanations do is absurd.  Even the attributed wisdom that Trump won because of the price of eggs is, at bottom, an example of the ignorance of a large number of Americans because along with that artificial boost to the price of eggs came the undeniable  benefits to Americans in their earnings.   

Another big part of that  is the little mentioned attempt early in the Biden-Harris administration to boost the minimum wage as part of their wildly successful economic recovery program, including direct payments to Americans, WHICH WAS BLOCKED BY REPUBLICANS AND ONE SENATE ALLY, AS I RECALL WITH AN ORDER FROM TRUMP TO DO THAT.  Kirsten Sinema is a one-person reason that more Americans didn't directly experience what would have been one of the greatest boosts in personal wealth among the working poor and many in the lower middle class.   But she couldn't have done it WITHOUT UNANIMOUS REPUBLICAN HELP TO THE BENEFIT OF TRUMP.

Which brings us to a third most obvious reason that Trump won, he had the support of the mass media that makes up what most Americans seen to believe is what they know about the world and what they believe they experience.   Now, this is something that could, actually be studied accurately because you can see and analyze what the mass media did, potentially you could even come up with an accurate generalization of what the most observed online media did during the election period in the hundred or so days that comprised the campaign of Kamala Harris against Trump.   Though it would be a massive undertaking.  But if such a study of such an observable, you might say studyable phenomenon as that is impractically complex, it only proves my point made above that doing so for something you can't directly observe is impossible.   I would point out one big part of that observable, even quantifiable phenomenon is the amount of coverage to opinion  polls comprised the content of that media during those crucial days.

And there are certainly many other reasons that led the thin margin of voters AND THE NON-VOTERS who reimposed Trump on us, one of those things is what gave him his first regime,  the Electoral College.   The Israeli conduct in Gaza one which I have been dealing with in the past couple of weeks is a big one which has hardly been covered.  And it's clear that a lot of the result of that in those wanting to stop the genocide in Gaza were swayed by other factors, including ignorance of what Trump had long ago done and said he would do in giving the Israeli government a free hand WITH AMERICAN SUPPORT.   I would expect that a lot of the Jewish voters who voted for Trump did so on that basis, though that is hardly ever mentioned by anyone but Trump and he can't stop himself from lying and whining ANTISEMITICALLY on the topic. 

Update:  I noticed on coming back to the computer that after a largely sleepless night I neglected to note the original of this was posted at RMJ's.

Should I Post Simp's Rote Accusation Against Me To Answer It

 for at least the fiftieth time only to have him a. not answer any point I make, b. not say specifically what I said is "antisemitic" and, c. as he always does, change the goal posts instead?   It's pretty much what the rote accusation of antisemitism has degenerated into in increasingly frequent use of the word.  As I noted last night, Omer Bartov, said being silenced by the fear of being called that name was to commit a moral abomination.    

If anyone who is credible asks me to do it, I will post his comment, and by that I don't mean one of his sockpuppets.  If anyone thinks I should or shouldn't and gives me  legitimate reasons to do either I will post that comment if I'm convinced it isn't him hiding behind a false name.

As I said from the first time I addressed the dishonesty of the IHRA definition of "antisemitism" it was clearly intended to be used exactly the way that it has been used against me for about twelve years.  And I said that I had no intention of caving into that because, among other things, the word originally was used to label a very dangerous thing and allowing the word to be degraded for dishonest motives was a gift to the antisemites.  You can search my archives to trace that argument,  I think there are more important things to discuss, like the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinians and its theft of land.   Which is exactly what I've slammed Putin for without anyone accusing me of being antiRussian, Brit imperialists without claiming I was antiBrit, and what I've said is the crime on which the United States is founded, something which I've slammed the idols of our secular religion, the goddamned founders and framers.  I don't think I've ever been more brutally critical of any group or political entity than I have those who wrote the Constitution and have governed my own country.   I sure as hell am not going to hold Israel and the frequently racist, frequently violently imperialist AND OFTEN EXPLICITLY ANTISEMITIC zionists to a more lenient standard than I am Jefferson, Madison, Washington, etc. and literally hundreds of other American leaders after them.  Israel is just another country, one whose actions are justifiably infamous.  We're not under any obligation to treat it as a special case. 

You Don't Have To Take My Word For It Here's What Independent Jewish Voices Canada Says About The IHRA "Definition" - Yeah, Answering More Hate

 

Notice the point made in the interview with Omer Bartov posted here last night that seven out of eleven of the parts of the definition are there to shield the Israeli government from criticism.   I hadn't heard this before I first criticized the IHRA definition a long time back, as soon as I read the text of it I could see what it was really about AND THAT IT WAS DANGEROUS to equate anti-zionism or even criticism of the crimes of the Israeli government with antisemitism BECAUSE IT TURNS ALL JEWS, THOSE WITHOUT ANY RESPONSIBILITY AT ALL AND EVEN OPPONENTS OF THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT INTO TARGETS. 

Zionism has been a catastrophe propped up by this kind of dishonesty from before the self-declaration of the state of Israel.   It is rapidly becoming more of a disaster as can be seen from the role it has played in everything from the lies told about the soccer hooligan started riot in Amsterdam toe part the Israeli genocide and annexation of Gaza played in reimposing Trump on us and the world.   Anthony Blinken adopting the IHRA "definition" was only one of the disasters conducted by the State Department under his leadership.  The entire disaster of the Israel-right-or-wrong policy of the Biden administration is the biggest and worst stain on what was, otherwise, the best administration since FDR's.   Things are bound to get worse now as the Trump regime uses Blinken's adoption of that definition to suppress dissent over American support for the Nazi-equivalent policies of the Israeli government.  And as resentment over that is suppressed, the pressure on it will grow ever worse and I'm very afraid that the innocent and even some of the not so innocent will be the victims of the very thing Blinken allegedly wanted to prevent by adopting it.   I think the people who created that definition and adopted and promoted it have permanently lost credibility and respectability by doing it.  And, as I said before,  I had high regard for one of the most public of them which I can't say I do, now. 

Welcome To The 1950s, Women And Those Of Us Who Care About Women If Not The 1850s

I WAS TALKING with one of my younger relatives who has put a hold on trying to become pregnant with a child she has long wanted because she will have a high-risk pregnancy like so many Women in America have or would have and she's worried about her ability to end a dangerous pregnancy after the Roberts Republican-fascists nationalized her body. 

I can't help but wonder how many Women are going to avoid pregnancy in hopes that Republican-fascists don't do what so many of them, including the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court, clearly want to do, ban contraception.

It was decades ago, seeing the political action of right-wing Catholic bishops in returning to the pre-Roe period while opposing the promotion of educating Americans, older and young in using contraception effectively that they were, actually, one of the strongest forces behind America's extremely high abortion rate.

Anyone who favors both illegalizing the abortions that will happen no matter how illegal they make it WHILE CUTTING OF ACCESS TO CONTRACEPTION is clearly in favor of Women dying and having their health permanently damaged, not only when they feel compelled to end a pregnancy by any means BUT ALSO WOMEN WHO WANTED TO CARRY A PREGNANCY TO TERM WHO HAVE A MISCARRIAGE OR HAVE A LIFE THREATENING PREGNANCY.  Even now, the Roberts Court majority have summarily sentenced such Women to death AND THEY ARE DYING and about a month ago refused to intervene to save Women's lives.   Including the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, right-wing "Catholic" organizations even some middle-of-the-road Catholic organizations.   And what can be said of them can be said of many Protestant denominations, as well.  It's true of the Republican-fascist Party from top to bottom.   One of the two parties favors this for all Women and the "girl-dads" that were, late in the now over campaign, invented to assure us that the non-Women-killing party would win the election were a figment of their wishful thinking.   At least their numbers were clearly not a majority of "dads" overall. 

I have every expectation that the Roberts Republican-fascist Court will get to overturning the Griswold decision, now that they know that their party actually won AFTER THEY OVERTURNED ROE.  And that the governors and legislatures of Republican-fascist dominated states will go with that just as they have been killing Women in their states, now.  And I wouldn't expect those state Constitutional changes voted for by even some who opted for Trump will stand after the Republican-fascists put that nationwide abortion ban into effect.   Would you want to bet the life and safety of yourself, your daughter, your neice, your mother on the Roberts-Republican-fascist Court not upholding it and declaring it trumps state Constitutions?   If you do you are living in a fool's paradise, as so many of us are encouraged to by the TV pundit lawyers who assured us that the Courts would save us.

The media which has been burying these stories are complicit, too.  They are guilty of murder and they get away with it because our legal system and political system are what they always have been, corrupt and entirely unwilling to take such realities seriously.  

Something You Don't See Every Day - The Thought Criminal Recommends A Movie

I HAD HEARD of but had never seen the 1961 movie, The Victim, a breakthrough event in the history of LGBTQ+ liberation, probably the first mainstream (or is it "independent") movie to present us as sympathetic characters who shouldn't be illegalized and discriminated against.   I came across it online and it reminded me what life before legalization of same-sex life was like, even if it was in a British context.   

Who knows how bad it will get and if life could return to that or worse as fascism overturns liberal democracy, such as it became, remembering that for almost all of the history of liberal democracies LGBTQ+ People have been made illegal and even the most violent oppression against us and even murder against us was entirely OK with politics and the law.  

The opening part of the movie is especially compelling though it is an outstanding script, by Janet Green and John McCormick, for its time and the acting,  especially the outstanding main characters played by Dirk Bogarde and Sylvia Syms and Peter McEnery whose run from the police is what the movie forms around.  

You'll want to watch it on full screen. 

Israeli-American Holocaust and Genocide Professor At Brown Confirms That Israel Is Committing Genocide

 

America has to stop supporting Israel or it is complicit and supportive of genocide.  Americans who support Israel in the present circumstances are supporting genocide.   

The Israeli military isn't a "defense force" they are storm troopers.   Their goal is the same as the Nazis in their invasion of Poland, genocide for purposes of destroying the population of Gaza so they can steal it for Israel. 

The Quality Of An Apartheid Democracy

 

Ayman Odeh, a member of the Israeli Knesset, was removed from the podium after calling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a serial killer of peace.”

A Nuanced Analysis Of One Of Those Demographic Groups That The Pollsters And Media Stereotype In The Broadest Strokes

HERE IS AN interesting and nuanced analysis of the "Catholic vote" which comes to the conclusion that the "Catholic vote" isn't really very Catholic in its character or stated motives in supporting the embodied moral wasteland that is Trump.  

In the aftermath of Donald Trump's decisive presidential win, two sobering trends about politics and religion are becoming clear: Religion doesn't seem to motivate Catholic voters, nor do views about abortion, an issue Catholic Church leaders have made a priority for decades.

Trump's improved numbers with Catholics may put to rest the narrative of an evenly divided Catholic electorate. Yet despite movement toward Catholic majority support of the GOP, the election results paint a picture of an American church more fractured than ever, according to analysts who spoke to the National Catholic Reporter.

Exit polling confirmed a persistent shift of white Catholics toward the Republican Party, with two surveys showing 61% of white Catholic voters voting for Trump. Overall, as many as 58% of Catholic voters opted for Trump in this election, compared to the 50% of Catholics who chose him in 2020 — an eight-point swing. A pre-election poll by NCR also found Catholic voters in swing states, especially white Catholics, favoring Trump.

These numbers extend the trend of Catholics almost always supporting the presidential winner.

But Catholics have not voted as a predictable bloc since the 1960s. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne famously characterized the pattern of Catholic swing voters with his assertion that, "There is no 'Catholic vote.' And yet, it matters."

Now Dionne sees an even "less distinctly Catholic vote than there used to be," he told NCR. "In a lot of ways, white Catholic voters are behaving like other white voters are."

This next passage matches what was and is my major suspicion about both the plurality NOT THE MAJORITY of those who voted, by a very small percentage, voted for Trump, and those who, as in 2016, didn't bother to vote but who had voted for Obama and Biden.   I THINK THE PREDOMINANT ISSUE IN THE LOSS OF THE SECOND WOMAN TO HAVE RUN AS THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION IS THAT A DECISIVE PLURALITY OF VOTERS WILL NOT RUN FOR A WOMAN WHO CAN WIN.   I would not add the Harris vote to the spoiler vote for Jill Stein in that regard because no one who voted for Stein believed she would win.  It was that stupidest of stupid things, a "protest vote" in which the actual candidate didn't matter.   You'd have to be as stupid as a  Green Party member to vote for Jill Stein believing it would have any other effect other than to elect a Republican-fascist. 

Trump's gains among men of all races and ethnicities also tracks with the growing gender gap in Christianity, which reverses a decades-long trend of women being more involved with faith and religion than men. Burge believes that men who are uncomfortable with progressive social issues might find it more acceptable to attribute their beliefs to religion than to racism, xenophobia or homophobia.

But note, their religion didn't come into play when a straight, rich, white man was exposed, in court cases AND BY HIS OWN WORDS as a sexual abuser., a rapist, a crook and all round scoundrel.   Such is the quality of such "religion" that ends up doing that. 

I have to wonder how much of that can be said of the white evangelicals who also and even more notoriously support the most blatantly and aggressively anti-Christian  and clearly culturally and creedally non-Christian president in our history.*   One who attacks, brutalizes, calls for violence and discrimination and oppression against the least among us, including widows, orphans and the stranger living among us.   One who encouraged hatred of our neighbors, especially if they aren't white and who has heaped false witness on so many it's impossible to come up with even a representative list. 

Pope Francis may have inadvertently given some Catholics permission to vote for Trump by equating the two candidates as both "against life" — Harris for her stance on abortion and Trump for his on immigration. The pope urged U.S. Catholics to use their consciences to determine the "lesser of two evils."
 

Yet neither issue was named as the primary issue of Catholic voters. Instead, like voters as a whole, Catholics put economic concerns at the top of their list.

The article continues on what the media presents as the quintessential "Catholic" issue:

Yet neither issue was named as the primary issue of Catholic voters. Instead, like voters as a whole, Catholics put economic concerns at the top of their list.
 

Abortion not galvanizing voters

Voters sent a contradictory message on the issue of abortion. In the 10 states where abortion was literally on the ballot in the form of state constitutional amendments, measures that protected or expanded abortion access won in seven states. It would also have prevailed in an eighth, Florida — where the amendment won support from 57% of voters, but Florida requires a 60% threshold, rather than a simple majority, to amend its constitution.

In the states where abortion expansion initiatives failed, Catholic dioceses and other organizations had poured millions of dollars into opposition groups. Yet in four of the seven states where voters expanded abortion access, majorities also voted for Trump.

"A lot of people went to the ballot box and voted for Trump and to increase abortion access," said Burge.

And at least some of these pro-choice Trump voters were Catholic. Polls consistently show, as did NCR's, that a majority of Catholics support legal abortion in all or most cases.

"Despite everything the bishops have tried to do to make abortion the Catholic issue, the public opinion polls show Catholics are pretty much the same as everybody else on abortion," Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese observed in a post-election event sponsored by Georgetown University.

I am ever more skeptical that a population that lives in a media saturated, post-literate, post rational, post-truth state can maintain a democracy and our country and, increasingly,  tottering democracies around the world seem to be experiencing the same thing.   I would add the poisonous extreme notion of libertarian liberty mixed in with that as a powerful help for those already with power, through wealth, through race, through gender, to lord it over everyone else.   Such a "democracy" may have elections, even elections that accurately measure the vote of those who are permitted and encouraged to vote and be an oppressive, subjugating oligarchy, as the antebellum South was and so many other states were, in reality.   That should certainly not be a surprise, just about every one of the most oppressive dictatorships and oligarchies in the modern world go through an exercise of voting and they never change their character.   As I've pointed out, that's what the United States was, by law, by court decision, before the Voting Rights Act was passed and implemented, only to have the Constitutional order destroy that one thing that, along with the 19th Amendment, made the country, for the first time, something approaching a real democracy.  

It certainly doesn't surprise me that Catholics don't vote and act on the basis of Catholic social teaching and the Gospels, following those costs those who follow them.   I am not surprised that as white Catholics become more affluent and mainstream that they fall for the same corruptions as have characterized American politics, law and society for most of our history.   If the bishops, cardinals, even Pope Francis had those foremost in mind they would be shocked at the morals of most Catholics, those making the most gaudy display of their Catholicism among the most immoral of their "faith."  

I have less and less faith in the official Catholic Church as I have more confidence in the dissidents, those who belong to Catholic radical and progressive groups, those who hold unofficial, vernacular masses and Eucharists, the Roman Catholic Women Priests movement.  I have a lot more faith in the missionary Church in the third world than I do the Church anywhere in the affluent world.   That is not the majority of the Catholic Church in America who I don't have any more hope or faith in than I do the Southern Baptists, the Mormons or those who go to variety-show, night-club "churches."  

Another thing is that the "Roevember" that some Democrats pinned their hopes on with all their hearts was largely an illusion, when it came to rationally voting for the candidate who would codify Women's ownership of their bodies and appoint Supreme Court "justices" who would not strip half the country of their bodily autonomy.  They cared more about the price of eggs, or some other vague ambiguity, over restoring Women's most basic right.   And it wasn't because that was not an issue that the Harris campaign side-tracked or deemphisized.  The "girl-dad vote" that imagined large numbers of men with daughters would vote for the safety and even lives of their daughters doesn't seem to have counted for much.   That shouldn't be a surprise,  men with daughters allowed the homicidal status-quo on birth control and abortion to stand for far more than a century, even after Women could vote but didn't comprise the majority of voters.

American's by a reliable plurality, are a nation of egoists and narcissists, something that comes with the post-Christianity that pervades American culture, INCLUDING INSIDE THE "FAITH COMMUNITY".    I read Jeremiah and, as I've said, it seems all too true of America in this century.  I think we are about to find out if we are going to suffer the kinds of consequences that Jeremiah predicted his People were about to experience and which did happen.   I'll be reading the Lamentations on Thanksgiving and the following days till Advent starts.