Even Those Too Stupid And Self-Centered To Value It Have A Right To Egalitarian-Democratic-LEGITIMATE Government

And Even If They Didn't The Rest Of Us DO

WHEN HITLER REPEATED the insult that that previous murderous military despot, Napoleon made against the English, calling them a "nation of shop keepers" he minimized their willingness to overlook their own, immediate material comfort and financial sense of security for something larger.   His something larger was his psychotic biological-murderous Aryanism and his wars of conquest and supremacy.   

He figured the Brits were sitting ducks because of their decadent materialism, though his own was OK, he thought.   The irony was that Napoleon was likely influenced by what Adam Smith said about the English as a nation of shop keepers and their complete willingness to send soldiers and sailors (mostly of the underclass but with aristocratic officers) to do something like Hitler had plans of doing.*  Like what America's ruling class has done. 

But there are other larger things than that, far larger than Hitler could hold with.   The common welfare, is one of those.   Of course you know that I would hold that equality and democracy are high on that list, as well as the legitimate government that is a product of democracy based on equality.   

That was what I though of when I caught this passage in Reese Water's post yesterday

Yes, of all voters. Now, mind you, we have had conversations here where we've addressed farmers, we've addressed truckers, we've addressed soldiers, we've addressed a great number of constituencies, and their opposition to this administration specifically along economic grounds.   And the subtext of that being the rest of it was fine though. You know the the rest of it was fine.   They even had threats to democracy and corruption on the list.

I have no doubt that a very large percentage of Americans, certainly  those who vote Republican, who have no problem with the destruction of democracy and  its replacement with corruption as long as they have that material comfort and financial sense of security.   The kind who got suckered into voting for Trump using the price of eggs in 2024 as an excuse.   I would say that that is endemic in at least the percentage of the American voters who vote Republican or may vote Republican depending on which way their sense of financial security is.  

Reese Waters, of course, has made the obvious point for Republican voters that it's only when Republican-fascist violence, murder, oppression and terror touches theirs and in the hardest cases waiting till that touches THEM, that they have second thoughts about it.   Much of his and many others' content focuses on those who were downright enthusiastic cheerleaders for that being meted out to Black People, other People of Color, Latinos, Haitians, etc.  who have that FAFO only when it touches their lives.   But that often leaves out white people whose lives are never touched in that way but who whine like a rusty hinge when their money is put at risk by the billionaire-millionaire servicing party THEY VOTED TO PUT IN OFFICE.  

Yesterday I had a discussion with a member of my family about the very real and dangerous problem of our permanent stupid class - it started by my bringing up what John Cleese said about a Trumpzi woman who, when confronted with what Trump said to Billy Bush about grabbing women by their genitals said,  "Well, he'd never have said it if he knew he was being recorded," as if that made it better.  Cleese is the one who pointed out how truly stupid the core of Trump's voters are AND THAT IS TRUE FOR THE CORE OF THE REPUBLICAN VOTING AMERICAN PEOPLE.   

And make no mistake about it there are several huge problems for democracy, the perennially stupid (many of whom are stupid voluntarily),  Trumps' "low information voters,   those led to that by media.   To cast a beneficial vote, you have to know enough of reality to make the right choice.   

And then the real hard cases,  those who are selfish, mean, hateful and bigoted.  THOSE ARE THE REAL AND MORE DANGEROUS PROBLEM FOR AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.  

I don't think that is something that we will find American democracy can continue to leave unaddressed,  to find ways to prevent them from destroying the democracy the rest of those who are People of good will have a right to.    

I said that one way to address it would be to allow those libeled and slandered by lies and hate talk media to sue their slanderers and the platforms they are carried by UNTIL THE COST MAKES THEM STOP CORRUPTING THE VULNERABLE OR RUINS THEIR ABILITY TO KEEP ON DOING IT.   Overturning the large swaths of such corrupting "First Amendment" Supreme Court rulings that have so empowered lies and the corruption of the susceptible and vulnerable is not going to prove to be optional.    

I don't think on the basis of the history of electoral governance in the United States, especially the white supremacy strongholds, that that matter can be allowed to continue as it has.   Not unless you want to see the thing break up and/or civil wars, insurrections and terrorism all into the future. 

The libertarian notions of "free press" and free speech absolutism have definitively failed the test of time, that is unless oligarchic fascism is the goal of it.  Because such has been the result of that notion of "civil liberties."  And I do think that for a large number of the "civil libertarians" they're at least OK with oligarchic fascism because they are oligarchic snobs to their most central core. 

I don't favor an intelligence test to vote, a literacy test (I doubt most Americans much younger than 50 would pass a real one) or any kind of automatic restriction on voting - though if it proves impossible to protect egalitarian democracy any other way, I wouldn't automatically reject that idea, it's just that it's so prone to abuse by the fascists as they have used such tests in the past.   I do agree with Benjamin Franklin that a government of the wisest would be a very foolish thing because it's impossible to determine who is wisest and even more problematic for democracy is selfishness, snobbery, the existence of grotesque wealth inequality .  A lot of the best and brightest have proven to be idiots and thugs.   Especially the lawyers and media whores. 

I think its a certainty that the egalitarian democracy can be destroyed and thwarted by an appeal to the worst in human nature.  In fact I think that is, basically, what is destroying ours.  What do you think the monarchies, dictators, oligarchies, etc. that democracy rose in opposition to were founded on?   But our idiotic Constitution and, especially "Bill of Rights" does nothing to address those facts.  You could expect nothing more from the lawyers, slavers, merchants, bankers and shop keepers who framed it,  their fortunes, like all great fortunes, are founded on doing evil.   Those are founded on the inequality which is inimical to real democracy and legitimate governance.  

Our media, especially our entertainment, panders to the worst in us.  It does nothing to shame us out of the worst in us, it doesn't do anything to support the moral basis of democracy.  It is far more likely to take a cynical pose in opposition to that.   

It's not only the stupidest among us whose attitudes and ideas are molded by entertainment media, it was one of the greatest shocks of my first years online to find that many a real, science PhD's notions of history, biography, etc. were formed by movies and TV shows which they believed were true to life.   Hollywood and Broadway and popular lit are as much a problem for American democracy as being shopkeepers may have been for the English.   And those are a bigger problem for the English now, as well.   With movies, radio, TV and the internet, those have changed human culture so basically that any 18th century notions of how we can have democracy are not only useless but they are an inhibition to even noticing the problem.    

They've made us fatally stupid as a People.   And fixing that that isn't something you can just leave to lassiez-faire - the idea that laws of nature were going to ensure the right result is about the stupidest idea still current among us, one of the central superstitions of modernism and the "enlightenment."  

* I don't know if Napoleon was making a reference to Adam Smith who used the phrase, but my guess was he knew this passage: 

“To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first sight, appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers. ”

Being opposed to the founding of empires, period, I don't think Adam Smith's use of the term makes it any better than Hitler's repeating of it.   I would like to know the death toll that the British Empire took in comparison to that of Napoleon or Hitler or the US, for that matter.  

Here's Reese Waters complete post:

All Souls Day

The passage posted here yesterday continues:

From the beginning, Christians have shared the conviction that they were "called to be saints" (Rom. 1:7; 1 Cor. 1"2), to move through this transformation into the image of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit that came from Jesus himself as risen Lord.  Furthermore, they have believed that this transformation means enacting, in the circumstances specific to their own lives, the same pattern of obediential faith in God and self-giving service to others that was demonstrated by Jesus, so that as he moved through suffering to glory, so also -- through participation in his Spirit - would they progress.

From the beginning, Christians have shared the conviction that "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ" by which they are saved (Acts 15:11; Rom. 5:15; Eph. 2:5) is more than simply a "favor" don them by God; rather, it is in some real sense a "gift" that enables them to share the very life of God through the Spirit that comes to them from Jesus.  This gift, furthermore, is not simply potential but actual:  "Hope is not shamed, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us" (Rom. 5:5).  The process of transformation in holiness therefore is taking place within human freedom as it opens itself to the freedom by the Spirit of the Lord (2 Cor. 3:17-18).  

The understanding within the tradition that there are "saints" in whom the pattern of Jesus the Messiah and Lord can be discerned with particular clarity is an acknowledgment of the reality of grace and willingness to give glory to God - that is, to recognize the presence and power of God at work in the world.  That understanding was an early element in Christian consciousness  Already in Ignatius of Antioch we find a disciple who faced martyrdom with the clear understanding that this path of witnessing to God unto death was a literal following in the way of Jesus.  And those friends of Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, who reported his death at the hands of the authorities also showed that their rendering of his martyrdom that they understood it to be an imitation of Jesus' loving sacrifice for others in obedience to God. 

The heart of the Christian tradition is in fact the living succession of holy persons who have been transformed by the Holy Spirit of Jesus.  Tradition is not simply the transmission of facts and norms; it is above all the communication of life and identity.  And it is through the saints 0 those who have been transformed by the power of the resurrected Jesus - that the tradition has been enlivened. Some saints have been public figures within the church and within society;  their example has been seen by all, their influence obvious.  Other saints have been virtually anonymous, known only to a few  (and some perhaps only to God); their example and  influence are more subtle, though no less real.

"Perhaps only to God,"  perhaps not even to themselves.  I think there are lots of saints who never heard of Jesus or the Holy Spirit or the Bible or if they had, don't think about those much.   The Jewish New Testament Scholar Amy Levine, when asked about whether or not she is afraid of being damned for not believing in the status of Jesus as the Risen Lord or he Messiah she pointed to the end of Mark 25,  a great and famous  passage which, through an ancient mistranslation, has caused no end of evil, especially in the Western Church, especially in the modern period starting with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.  I'll give it to you in the second edition of David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament. 

And when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the [holy] angles with him, then he will sit on his throne of glory; and all the nations will be assembled before him, and he will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the kid goats, and will set the sheep to his right, and the kid goats to his left. 

I have to break into this to point out something which so many who have read this passage miss,  Jesus was using a simile from the everyday life of some in the lowest economic stratum of his milieu, "as the shepherd separates the sheep from the kid goats."  So much of the misunderstanding of Scripture comes through a too close to literal misunderstanding of rhetorical language.   Jesus was communicating things that can't really be told directly in human language to human understanding so metaphors and similes and symbols have to suffice.  

And that is even more of a problem in much of Paul's writing where he uses far more complicated rhetorical language to make his arguments.   Paul's rhetorical method is ill served by the modern punctuation of chapter and verse.  

But that's only the first problem which has come to us.   For me, the idea that goat kids are somehow more wicked than sheep is a problem,  they're more rambunctious, but they're some of the most charming animals of my experience.   

Then the King will say to those to his right, 'Come, you blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the cosmos  For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you gave me hospitality, naked and you clothed me, I was ill and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to me.'  

Then the just will answer him, saying, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?  And when did we see you a stranger and give you hospitality, or naked and clothe you?   

And in reply the King will say to them, 'Amen, I tell you inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.'   

Then he will say to those to the left, 'Go from me, you execrable ones, into the fire of the Age prepared for the Slanderer and his angels.   For I was hungry and you did not give me anything to eat, I was thirsty and you did not give me drink, naked and you did not clothe me, ill and in prison and you did not look after me.'  

Then they too will answer, saying,  'Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked or ill or in prison, and did not attend you?'  

Then he will answer them, saying, "Amen, I tell you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least among these my brothers, neither did you do it to me.'  And these will go into the chastening* of that Age, but the just to the life of that Age.

You may not notice, as so many don't, that that passage makes no reference to faith in Jesus as the Messiah as sufficient for salvation (no matter what Luther, Calvin and others claimed) or even as a requirement for salvation.   It refers to salvation through doing good to the least among us, the alien, the hungry, thirsty, sick, imprisoned,  something which I dare say large numbers of those who profess a belief in Jesus Christ entirely ignore and in so many cases, deplore.  That is a characteristic of the most public of those in America who proclaim their Christianity while being ICE supporting, racist, political, billionaire serving financial ideological christianists.   I have no doubt that they put themselves into the category Jesus called "execrable."  By their own claims, they are with those to the left of the throne and are on their way to correction.  

Amy Levine notes her long service in working with and for prisoners as qualifying her as a "lamb" and, as I mentioned yesterday,  I know of infidels who reject Christianity who fulfill at least part if not all of those qualifications listed in this key passage.   It is remarkable, since those who are of that tendency put this passage to so much use to promote the idea of eternal damnation, in many cases, the eternal damnation of  the large majority of humanity, including infants who died unbaptized and, in the worst of Calvinists, for example, even many babies who are baptized, it would seem, they so notably reject that which would get them a place to the right. 

In DBH's postscript to his translation in which he writes about his translation of certain controversial or difficult words, in regard to this passage and a few others,  he says 

The first word is aionios, which in most traditional translations is rendered as "eternal" or "everlasting," [as in eternal damnation or everlasting fire] except in the many instances where such a reading would be nonsensical.  And I have discovered that there are many Christians whose sometimes furious objection to any other rendering revolves around a single verse, Matthew 25:46 [ The last sentence talking about "the chastening of that Age.]  After all, in the original Greek of the New Testament, there really are only three verses that seem to threaten "eternal punishment" for the wicked (though, in fact, none of them actually does),  and many who are doctrinally or emotionally committed to the idea of eternal torment for the unelect would feel gravely bereaved if the delicious clarity of the seemingly most explicit of those verses were allowed to be obscured behind a haze of lexical indeterminacy.  To these I can say only that, if they really wish to believe in everlasting torment of the reprobate, they are perfectly free to do so, whether there is any absolutely unquestionable scriptural warrant for doing so or not;  but, then again, even the Greek word rendered as "punishment" in that verse arises problems of translation . . . he then refers to the footnote I typed out blow.  

He goes on for a number of pages making a very convincing argument for his universalist interpretation of that which, if had been done right by Jerome and the other early translators into Latin, might have saved Christianity, especially western Christianity, from more than fifteen hundred years of enthrallment to what in the Baptism rite is called the "glamour of evil."  Because it is clear that much of even the churches are enthralled by their meditations on hell, damnation, various species of devils and those they love to imagine as damned.  It doesn't get more evil or glamour stricken than those images which saturate European and American culture.  The evil which flows from that is seen in the current christianist plague that, well, plagues us now.  Especially among the "evangelicals and reformed" though not all of them. 

I believe all souls will be united with God, there are scores of Scripture passage that have been cited to support that belief while the eternal damnation preference really comes up entirely short in that tally.  And, as DBH says, it is based on faulty translations and understandings of the original language of the New Testament.  And when I say all souls, I mean all creatures which possess souls, which I am certain includes the animals and, in ways I can't claim to understand, trees, plants, etc.   The more complex science reveals the "simplest" organisms to be, the more obvious it is that there is cognition happening in the simplest one-cell organisms, the more universal salvation makes sense to me. 

* The mistranslation on which a huge amount of the eternal-damnation dogma and doctrine and bloodthirsty assertion hangs comes from the description of the assignment of the "goats" to in the Latin translation as "eternal" when the word in Greek meant of an indistinct but eventually ending term.  In his footnote on that point  the fluent Greek scholar and classicist, as well as theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart says:

The word kolasis, originally meant "pruning" or "docking" or "obviating the grown" of trees or other plants, and then came to mean "confinement," "being held in check," "punishment," or "chastisement,' chiefly with the connotation of "correction."   Classically, the word was distinguished (by Aristotle, for instance) from timoria, which means a retributive punishment only.  Whether such a distinction holds here is difficult to say, since by late antiquity kolasis seems to have been used by many to describe punishment of any kind;  but the only other use of the noun in the New Testament is in 1 John 4:18, when it refers not to retributive punishment, but to the suffering experienced by someone who is subject to fear because not yet perfected in charity.  The word form kolazo appears twice; in Acts 4:21, where it clearly refers only to disciplinary punishment and in 2 Peter 2:9 in reference to fallen angels and unrighteous men, where it probably means "being held in check" or "penned in" [until the day of judgement]. 

Relativizing our rights out of concern for others lest out freedom cause them to stumble demands that we have consideration for “the brother for whom Christ died"

It being All Saints Day and tomorrow being All Souls Day, I've decided over the next two days to post from the third chapter of Luke Timothy Johnson's book Learning Jesus, the section he titles, 

Learning Jesus In  The Saints. 

I agree with the first sentence which strikes me as a very Catholic idea and a very human one.   Short of a Pauline experience, where else are we to find the confirmation of the testimony found in ink on paper?   The greatest evidence I've seen for the truth of the resurrection and continuing life of Jesus is in those who truly follow Jesus.   In my experience, those are much more likely to be Women even though many more men are canonized as saints I read 80% online.   Which also, unfortunately, strikes me as a too Catholic idea.  Though hardly only Catholic.   Maybe All Saints Day should be considered a feminist holy day, the one where all those Women who aren't the focus of an official feast day or inclusion in the canon are remembered - at least until Rome sees fit to or is forced to correct the sexist sins of the hierarchy's past - including ordaining Women. 

The most compelling and convincing evidence of the resurrection is the existence of Christian saints.  The Spirit poured out on believers by the resurrected Jesus is not only a spirit of prophecy directing their speech (Acts 2:14-21);  it is also a spirit of holiness (Rom. 1:4) directing and transforming their livers according to the image of Jesus (Rom. 8:29).  Paul’s language is most dramatic: 

"Now the Lord is the Spirit.  And where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom.  And we all, gazing on the glory of the Lord with unveiled face, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as the Lord who is spirit (2 Cor. 3:17-18."

If Christians “live by the Spirit” that comes from Jesus, then they are also to “walk by the Spirit” (Gal. 5:25), which Paul explicates as “fulfilling the law of Christ” by bearing one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2).  The pattern of Jesus’ character – the way he “loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20b) – is now to be the pattern of the Christian’s life, for like Paul we “have been crucified with Christ;  it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God” (Gal 2:20a).  Paul speaks of “putting on the Lord Jesus” (Rom. 13:14) and of “putting on the new person which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator . . . Christ [who] is all in all” (Col 3:10-11).

The idea of imitating moral exemplars is as old as human wisdom.  What is distinctive to Christian conviction is that both the pattern and the power to follow it are given to humans by the living Lord Jesus through the Holy Spirit.  The process of sanctification to which Christians are called (1 Thess. 4:3; 1 Cor. 1:2) is a process of growing in conformity to the “mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16) – a process that results in a life that is, in reality a continuing embodiment of Jeusus’ own: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.  Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of yoru mind, that you may test what is the will of god, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:1-2, RSV). 

The path of holiness doesn’t not consist in an imitation of the historical incidentals of Jesus’ human lie; these remain in the past and are irrecoverable.  Jesus’ specific time and place in the world, his maleness and Jewishness his speech patterns and his deeds, his mode of ministry and his manner at meals, even his enemies and his way of fighting them, all these help define the Jesus of the past but no longer define the Jesus of the present, who finds specific bodily expression in the lives of others through the power of the resurrection. 

Paul and Peter and the anonymous author of Hebrews all grasped that it was the pattern of the Messiah’s humanity – his character, as it were – that Christians were called to imitate and were empowered to imitate through the Holy Spirit.  The mystery of “incorporation” into Christ meant that one was a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17) in which the Spirit of Jesus could direct one’s life – in circumstances utterly different from those of Jesus in the past – through the same process of self-giving service, radical obedience, suffering, and new life exemplified by Jesus, himself. 

“I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord  For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and consider them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ, and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own based on law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness from God that is based on faith, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead . . . . We await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body by the power that enables him to subject all things to himself. (Phil. 3:8-11, 21). [Note that I’ve underlined what Luke Timothy Johnson put in italics in his text.]

To be transformed according to the image of Christ means, therefore, to live by the “mind of Christ” and the “pattern of the Messiah.”

It is precisely in this connection that the humanity of Jesus appears as most important in our earliest Christian texts.  The transformation work of the Spirit is to replicate in human freedom the character of Jesus.  Witness to the reality of God in the face of idolatrous pretense continues the witness borne by Jesus (Rev. 19:10; Tim. 6:11-16).  Bearing persecution and social ostracism with faith means that we “go outside the camp bearing the abuse he endured” (Heb. 13:15). Suffering without reviling or complaint requires that we “follow in his steps: (1 Pet. 2:21).  Forgiveness of others is to be done “as the Lord has forgiven you (Col 3:13; Eph 4:32)).  Walking in love is to act “as Christ loved us and handed himself over or us” (Eph. 5:2). Avoiding every kind of vice follows from “learning Christ . . . if indeed you he heard about him and were taught him just as the truth is in Jesus” (Eph. 4:20-21).  Relativizing our rights out of concern for others lest out freedom cause them to stumble demands that we have consideration for “the brother for whom Christ died" (1 Cor. 8:11). 

I'd forgotten that LTJ made that statement about "relativizing our rights" out of consideration for others till I typed it out just now.  It could not be more relevant to the posts I've been posting and working on and it is heretical in secular, "rights" proclaiming America as the Roman and Greek despisers of early Christianity found the Gospel of Jesus.  I dare say that huge numbers of bible thumpers and trad-caths would despise that idea.  But I wouldn't accuse them of being Christians, being political-economic ideologues,  christianists. 

I don't think that saints are necessarily professed Christians.  A member of my family who is anything but one constantly shows me what it means to do to the least among us what we would do for God and he's a right old infidel.  And I know a number of others like that.  But in the end I'm a sort of Catholic Christian universalist who believes in the eventual reconciliation of all in all.  Which will bring us to my favorite of the two days,  All Souls, tomorrow.  I don't believe in either the Augustinian heresy of eternal damnation nor in the other heresy of the obliteration of those found insufficiently good at a last judgement.   Though I do rather like the idea of purgatory as taught by Paul and Macrina and, actually, Jesus, himself. 

More Halloween Fun

 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - James W. Nichol - Midnight Cab: The Mystery of the Silver Rings

 The Mystery of the Silver Rings

Walker is driving back to Ontario from Vancouver where his girlfriend and he were living together before she decided to return to Toronto.   Broken down in the middle of nowhere, after he gave a rather spooky hitch hiker a ride, he's abducted by a farmer and his son and only when they clear up that he's not some satanic fiend terrorizing their farm, he's forced to spend the night there.  Only things start getting really scary from there. 

I had wanted to post something appropriately spooky for the evening and remembered this play, one from a series of the CBC Mystery Project, one of James W. Nichol's Midnight Cab series.  

Most of the transcriptions I found posted online were from the very bad ones  found on the Archive.org posting of this series and the only one that at least starts out clearly is on this large Youtube file holding a large number of plays in that series (if they're clear, it's worth listening to more of them.  I enjoyed the series quite a lot in the 1990s.   I haven't listened to all of it but what I did hear is quite listenable.   

Footnote On The Sheer Lunacy Of "The Most Leftist In The Room"

I CAN'T RESIST the temptation to recommend a book that is invaluable to anyone who hopes to have an effective, really egalitarian and democratic American left, The Socialist Party of America: A History by David A. Shannon.

Especially instructive is chapter six, Socialist Verses Communist, 1919 in which the fatal attack on the Socialist Party was made by the self-designated "Left Wing." 

After discussing the fact that after the Russian Revolution that many Slavic language speaking immigrants joined Eugene Debs' Socialist Party swelling its "Left Wing" and the consequences of that, Shannon said this:

The leadership of the Left Wing, however, was not very different from the Old Guard as to national origin and social position.  Indeed, the charges of the Left Wing, that the Old Guard was bourgeois, were ridiculous when it is recalled that it had leaders such as the well-to-do John Reed, a former Harvard cheerleader, and the millionaire William Bross Lloyd. . .  

Although the Old Guard had a full quota of colorful personalities, there was not as much romanticism in it as there was in the Left Wing.  In the list of twentieth century American romantics, John Reed could not be denied a place near the top.  His impulsive, wild, undisciplined spirit at times made him an absurd figure.  Once in a committee meeting of the Left Wingers he presented a wild plan for storming the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary to free Debs, and he put his case with such vigor and sincerity that for an hour the committee listened to every detail.   The story reveals as much about the committee as it does about Reed. . . 

Soaring spirits such as these could never be happy in an organization dominated by such steady, stodgy, stuffy leaders as Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit.  

"The story reveals as much about the committee as it does about Reed."  Indeed it does and it is characteristic of all such self-proclaimed "most leftist in the room" entities in the history of every left from the French Revolution to today.  And those have uniformly been destructive of the efforts to get equality, democracy, economic and other justice. 

I will point out again that Berger was one of only two Socialist Party members to have ever been elected to Congress, largely on the power of his having been a very successful elected mayor of Milwaukee where he was derided by the "real left" as a "sewer socialist" because he pushed through providing sanitary sewage and clean drinking water.   The "Left Wing" never produced anything except babble and providing a weapon to the American fascists to defeat those on the real left. 
It's also important to note a few other points that Shannon made in regard to the differences between the "Left Wing" and the "Old Guard" which had actually had some success in electoral politics. 

There is a very long, very detailed description of tactics and actions of the various factions in the Socialist party which carries this description of actions the socialists as opposed to the communists took to prevent the party's takover by them which notes:

Paradoxically, throughout 1919 the Old Guard, which extolled political democracy, resorted to monolithic tactics, and the Left Wing, which scorned political democracy as "bourgeois," condemned the Old Guard for being undemocratic.

The fact is that any "leftist" entity that would hold that democracy is "bourgeois" can be counted on to damage and destroy democracy, no doubt that was part of why the "Old Guard" which had produced some actual electoral success fought so hard and, arguably, dirty to prevent the takeover of the one and only successful socialist party in the history of the United States. 

That a rich Harvard cheerleader would be the head of a faction that scorned democracy with an idiotic fever dream of, instead of winning power through a fair vote opt for a "revolution" that would sweep him and his colleagues into power is not anything to wonder at.   I have no doubt that it accounts for why, as I noted this morning, Harvard's law school has been a central locus in the development of the fascist unitary executive theory of the presidency as well as much of the stupidest and most democracy destroying "leftism" in our history.   And don't get me started on the Kennedy School of [oligarchic] Government there. 

That hostility to democracy on the part of that Harvard cheerleader is seen later in the description of what led Louis Boudin to leaving the "Left Wing" faction that created the Communist Labor Party:

The chief controversy in this convention was a plank in the platform committee report that urged the workers to join with the Communist Labor Party "in the political field."  John Reed argued against this recognition of political action, as did most of the leaders who had been in the Left Wing since its organization.  Joseph Coldwell, however, said that if he were against political action "he would do the sensible thing - resign from a political organization and join the I.W.W."*

Some of the delegates had never been in the Left Wing and had left the Socialist convention only because they thought the Socialist Party's conduct had been too arbitrary and drastic.  These delegates agreed with Coldwell, and when the revolutionists defeated the political action plank 41 to 28, [such was the size of the mighty "Left Wing"] many of them bolted for the second time within a week.

When Louis B. Boudin bolted the convention he fired a parting shot with which many a bewildered Socialist might have agreed,  "I did not leave a party of crooks to join a party of lunatics."  

The whole chapter and, in fact, the whole book carries so many a cautionary tale for any egalitarian democratic left and flashing warning signs of how dangerous it is for any left to allow romanticism and razzle-dazzle (especially from the affluent collegate types) to gain a foothold.  

In James Weinstein's book The Long Detour, he notes that in a massive irony the role of Louis Boudin's grand niece, the infamous criminal Kathy Boudin in the Weather Underground which played a similar role in the implosion of the Students for a Democratic Society.  Apparently she had not heard what her far more admirable and rational great uncle had said on that occasion.   I will point out that as she was born a year after Louis Boudin died, they never met. 

* Despite the romantic lore of the Wobblies, the I.W.W. produced little to nothing of value in its entire history.   And much of its claimed accomplishment is highly open to challenge on the basis of fact instead of folklore. 

Who Do I Propose A House Committee To Defend Democracy Investigate?

ANY AND ALL GROUPS AND MILLIONAIRES AND BILLIONAIRES who fund those that had a role in the Trump and Republican attack on equality and democracy, including those who installed the current Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court.  

- The Heritage Foundation which created the Project 2025 blueprint for the Trump dismantling of America's democracy is proven to be far more dangerous to us than all of the entities that the old Congressional committees,  the Hoover era FBI and many state and other entities investigated.   It is still not known whether or not their attack on American democracy has succeeded and I wouldn't be any too certain that it has failed until it has been obliterated and prevented through Supreme Court and Constitutional reform and revision.  

And that is only one of many of the stink-tanks who participated in it.  Many of them staffed by cronies and buddies of big law and media firms, many of them frat bros and members of the same Ivy League classes. 

- The Federalist Society and its satellites which installed the fascist majority on the Supreme Court which has done such damage that it may have, in that one unelected branch, have done the job for the oligarchic fascists and their herd of lawyers and media liars.   As Senator Whitehouse has detailed, there are numerous auxiliary entities that are part of that which have been constructed to have a false, separate identity from the Federalist Society.

I will add that any and all lawyers, judges and "justices" who are or were members of the Federalist Society or its associate subversive entities should be part of that investigation.   It is one of the most dangerous of organizations that have actually subverted American democracy.  

- All of those entities which caved to the pressure of Trump II are highly eligible for investigation both as to the degree of their unwillingness to oppose the fascist putsch against democracy and why those which actually did resist stopped resisting, often very quickly.   And in few cases was there much actual resistance.   Not a few of those were law firms, corporations, universities, especially elite universities, and private so-called non-profits.   

- Everything to do with Elon Musk.  Surely I don't have to list why.   Every contract he has with the American and state governments must be voided and all national security related entities in his control should be confiscated.  

- You will know if you have read me much that the role that the Ivy League and Ivy Equivalent law schools have played in this is a largely uninvestigated and exposed thing.   The role that Harvard's Law School played in the creation of the fascist unitary executive myth is central to discovering how it happened here.  And it is hardly alone in that.   The fact that all of the fascists on the present Supreme Court are products of such schools is certainly relevant to investigating the central role that the Supreme Court has played in destroying the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and much of the other law that has attempted to make the United States a real democracy makes that inquiry into what produced them essential. 

The Republican inquisition of a few Ivy League presidents should have been an investigation of the law schools and other schools at those which have participated in the undermining and destruction of egalitarian democracy.  

- There is an extremely important investigation of the supposed "civil liberties" outfits that aided in the attack on democracy that must be made.   The ACLU has played one of the most important low-overhead roles in that going back more than sixty years through their championing of rulings from Sullivan v New York Times to Buckley v Valeo and onward.   Its reputation as a champion of equality and democracy while playing such a big role in supporting Court rulings and an ideology which has plunged us into fascism, starting in the 1960s when they got their "right to lie" ruling from the Court (which resulted directly in the election of Nixon and the cascade of our politics into what produced fascism sixty years later) is especially pernicious.   And you can say the same about much of the media and Hollywood "left." 

- The large media organizations "news" divisions almost uniformly went along with it, though most of those have a long history of participation in the effort to destroy equality and promote inequality and the profiting of the billionaires and millionaires.   The New York Times is both the flagship example of that and the rightful emblem of fascist enabling media.  Though, from what they were saying in the 1920s and 30s, that's kind of a tradition at that rag. 

- Entertainment media has long played a role in that, especially when you include the shock-jock form of entertainment.   That used to be mostly hate-talk radio and cabloid TV but it now includes much of online promotion of fascism especially in the form of video games.   The role that corporate entertainment has played in the errosion of equality, the promotion of racism, ssexism,  religious hatred, etc. and the fact that all destruction of the ethic of equality is in fact an attack on democracy cannot be any less important than all of the above.   That much of the destruction of democracy came about in the two administrations led by Hollywood and TV entertainers,  Reagan and Trump is certainly indicative of the fact that subversion through entertainment - WHICH THE LARGE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS CONSUME AND ARE, SO, INFORMED BY - is really and truly of vital importance for promoting and obtaining egalitarian democracy.     

As I said yesterday, that investigation will meet immediate and loud condemnation as "McCarthyism of the left" through the media training of the minds of Americans through its many melodramtic presentations of the victims of McCarthyism.    But there is a complete difference. 

The actions of the old-line commie hunters in the federal and state governments AND THE MEDIA were going after those who would never, ever have any success in gaining power in government, on the courts or in corporate media in the United States.    A number of years ago in my criticism of the old-left I reviewed the record of electoral success of all of the myriad communist, Marxist, and associated socialist parties and it was a pathetic record of near total electoral failure.   As I recall (without bothering to look up the relevant posts here) their entire record of electoral success was two city council positions in New York City.   

In fact central to that critique was pointing out that the communists had had the major role in destroying the old Eugene Debs Socialist Party which was about the only socialist party with any record of electoral success,  most of that on the local and state level,  mostly in the mid-west (ironically, most of the socialist success happened in places now associated with Republican-fascism).   It is also a fact that the only two members of any socialist declared party to have ever been elected to Congress were members of that old-line Eugene Debs Socialist Party.    But it was effectively destroyed from within by the Communist faction led by John Reed.   When he saw what happened at the emergency convention of the Socialist Party in 1919,  Louis Boudin was first disgusted by the tactics of the Socialists to protect the party from the Reed faction which broke off and met in another room in the same building.   But Boudin, seeing what they were up to left that meeting saying he had "not quit a band of crooks to join a band of lunatics."   That band of lunatics is what promoted itself as THE American left and the enemies of equality and democracy and economic justice were only too happy to let those lunatics become the face of and burden to the real American left.    That campaign is on full display in Republicans' commie labeling of Democratic candidates,  which the mainstream and cabloid media is carrying and echoing as they always will until sued out of that habit. 

What if the old red-hunters had actually had a real danger to American democracy as their focus instead of using fear of the reds to promote their elections, something which not only the Republicans waged against the memory of FDR's and Harry Truman's administrations but which the cold-warriors like the Kennedy brothers did as well?  What if those commies had actually been the danger to equality and democracy that they were held out as being?   What if they had been capable of installing a president - more than one, actually, and Congresses and Supreme Court majorities?    What the Republican-fascists have succeeded in doing NOW just as the slave-power did before the election of Lincoln?  

If the House Unamerican Activities Committee had been going after a real instead of phantasmal danger to American democracy it would have been doing good instead of earning the condemnation of history.   As it happens in real American history instead of the fake American history which is what we get, they would have had to go against the white supremacy that ruled and has ruled many of the American states since the founding of the country THAT IS OUR VERY REAL, VERY DANGEROUS, VERY POWERFUL AND INDIGENOUS FORM OF FASCISM, WHAT TRUMP AND THE REPUBLICANS AND THEIR LEGAL AND MEDIA SUPPORTERS HAVE HARNESSED TO IMPOSE OLIGARCHIC FASCISM ON THE ENTIRE COUNTRY.    So that would not have happened in the years going from Truman to Kennedy.   But it might be done now and if it is not done now,  American democracy is finished.    

I don't underestimate the size and difficulty of the war we will have to fight against American fascism and its alliance with the billionaires and millionaires and the corporate media.   It makes the make-believe war against Voldemort in Harry Potter look like what it was, a fairy tale.  And unless we junk all of that ACLU,  anti-anti-communist lore and its slogans which will be used to defeat that investigation, we have lost before we started to fight it.  

If we don't fight it and win, the alternatives are a continuing reign of terror and oppression and death or a real, guns and bombs civil war or a series of them.  And the outcome of that is not guaranteed to end like the last one did.   As I have been pointing out, as soon as the law was amended and changed to try to produce equality through the voting rights and civil rights acts and the Civil War Amendments, the Supreme Court mowed down and mendaciously amended those out of existence creating "corporate person-hood" and a host of other innovative lies in the process.   That is the real history of the United States.  That is what we are up against.  Letting Hollywood and Broadway lie us out of it will be one of the greatest dangers to that effort. 

Our Absurd Legal And Media Ideology And Its Promotion Of Triviality Over Life's Necessities

THE INFLUENCE OF MODERN SHOW-BIZ on the thinking of the English Speaking Peoples and, unfortunately, humanity in general, has some terribly disastrous consequences.   I got into a little tussle online this week because I left some comments in places saying that while I hope Hasan Piker wins a lot of money from Scott Jennings and, I hope in time, from the media corporations that sponsor Jennings lying, including CNN, I was critical of Piker for his shock jockery.   And shock jockery is an important issue in this as well as the general level of superficiality and promotion of sensation to get eyeballs in the media.   

I doubt that if Hasan Piker spoke in reasonable, measured terms about important issues he'd get the following he does but the use that the Republican-fascists have made of his language and rhetoric (calling it that elevates it above where that kind of commercial babblage really exists) shows that as lucrative as it is for the shock jock, it is damaging to the politics he attaches it to.   

While the fascist media, and these days I would pretty much include all of the corporate media as either inarguably in that category or arguably adjacent to it,  can be depended on to lie and invent in the financial interest of its owners, highly paid staff and their major financial backers,  there's no advantage for those on the left, real or show-biz left, in helping that effort along.   

My criticism of Hasan Piker has been that he has made himself the news, something which is no help to defeating the fascists.   He isn't the only one that does that and if his name was Harry instead of Hasan,  it's quite possible that the racist Republicans wouldn't have made as much out of him as they have. 

We have no idea today if their use of Piker to defeat Democrats in some key races will override the advantage that the Trump era Republicans have given Democrats with the pain and hardship they have given to poor and middle class Americans but we've seen the Republican-enabling media turn less than him  into the margin of victory in delivering low-information voters' votes to the candidates who will continue to damage them. 

Piker has a right to tell the truth about that, he may even have a right to say it in stupid ways that give Republicans and their "free press" ammunition to do what I just described in the last paragraph, WHAT GAVE US TRUMP TO START WITH.    But we have the right to judge that right for its usefulness, helpfulness, and wisdom AND RESULTS and with that the character of the person who exercises that right.    

I say the idea that the extent to which rights are responsibly exercised in an informed way, benefiting the common good or at least not harming it,  is a key to determining their legitimacy as rights or, phrasing it another way, the validity of defending the "right" of the person exercising it.   Irresponsibly and harmfully exercised "rights" are no better than the wrongs they produce.   That result is the only reason that such rights talk matters at all.  If a "right" produces harm it is wrong to that extent no matter what Madison or Thomas Paine or the ACLU said.  

In the end, the political, social and legal status of "rights" depends entirely on the extent to which large numbers of us are benefitted and not harmed by the exercise of those rights.  Eventually that will even over-ride the "constitutionality" of an enumerated "right."   That is once the exercise of it has gone too far.  I would favor the reform of the status of the Supreme Court on that basis as they have sided with the mass-gun murderers and others against We The People.   That institution of government has forfeited the expectation of respect as much as the Blanche Department of "justice" has the expectation of regularity in the courts.   We have no obligation to allow that to continue. 

The idea that all rights are equal is one of the stupidest consequences of our superficial consideration of the matter of rights and one which has had real and bad results for equality and so legitimate democratic governance.  

The right of shock jocks to build a profitable media career out of offending People with sarcasm and insults is not the same thing as the right of someone to offend People by the plain telling of truths which a lot of People don't like.   The offense is secondary to telling the truth in the latter example, not the substance of a shock jock's shtick. 

Nor, despite what those in show-biz with a financial interest in pretending that the show-biz business of making a career, getting famous and an audience by appealing to a range of puerile character flaws - that is the fuel of that kind of media career - a boon for egalitarian democracy.   It is destructive to the real life consequences of having an egalitarian democracy over the worse forms of governance.  Those worse forms of governance rage from unequal liberal democracy (and liberal democracy is inherently anti-egalitarian, in the end) to oligarchy of some degree (what the American government has been in reality) and onward into the fascism which we are in danger of seeing come if Democrats don't decisively win next week and wisely use their majority to destroy Trumpian, Republican-fascism throughout the government, MOST OF ALL IN THE SUPREME COURT AND THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY.   AND IN THE MEDIA WHICH CREATED TRUMP AND THE DANGER TO EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY. 

I deny that we have any obligation to permit the media to destroy equality and democracy and the possibility of a decent life for everyone, the extent to which that is possible.  There is no moral obligation for us to permit that destruction of egalitarian democracy on the basis of assertions of rights.  Not now that we can see in real life what allowing that to flourish has cost us. 

Apart from show biz and media biz, the other area of commerce that promotes all of this is the lawyers, especially the media lawyers who pose as civil libertarians while never forgetting which side their brioche is buttered on.   But that would get me into the consequences of us allowing the legal profession to have normalized lying and the absurd idea that lies can achieve the status of an ethical professional virtue.  Which I'm sure you'll hear me saying more on very soon as I have been for years, now.   I will confess,  I have come to hate that profession. 

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

Some of the most controversial things I've said here were refutations of show-biz myth, much of that in regard to the mythical status of the victims of the 1940s-60s red scare as Hollywood - the very entity that victimized them - has profited off of that over and over again while covering up and blurring the real nature of so much of it.   

The martyrdom of the Hollywood 10 is emblematic of both the villainy of their persecutors and the fact that lots of those victims were far from heroes or deserving of admiration.   I think a lot of the anti-Ukraine lying on the English speaking left is a hangover habit from the romanticism of that now moribund communism.  There have been a few of them in the past decade who I have suspected might have been blackmailed by Putin.  Especially one late Sovietologist with ties to the lefty media.  

I will, if forced to, go into the actual facts that anyone who belonged to the Communist Part in the United States during the 1930s, 40s and 50s were actually supporting one of the worst mass murderers in human history,  Stalin, and an ideology that is as anti-democratic and, in reality, anti-egalitarian as fascism and Nazism.    The only difference between the Communists of that era and the supporters of Italian and German fascism and Nazism was that unlike fascism - which already had a considerable power base in American white supremacy and our oligarchs AND THE "FREE PRESS"  - Communism had absolutely no possibility of gaining power in the United States and ending what democracy we had.   That the anti-communists were, in their majority, part of American fascism is relevant to the entire picture but no more than both the total idiocy of the Communists in promoting an equally anti-democratic ideology which not only had absolutely no prospect of adoption by large numbers of Americans but which was, through their attachment to the democratic left of the United States, a propaganda tool for America's indigenous fascists,  doing real and consequential damage to the struggle to establish egalitarian democracy.  

I'm going into this ancient history  to raise a problem which all of that history, the anti-anti-communist lore as told in plays, movies, TV shows and pulp novels and the unconsidered, un-nuanced thinking about that for the real democratic left going forward.   

We are going to need to address the part played by the Republican-fascist, oligarchic, billionaire financed war against equality and democracy WHICH HAS PROVEN TO BE THE REAL DANGER TO US THAT THE OLD-LINE COMMIES NEVER WERE.    And that is going to have to be done in the Congress.   And as soon as that effort is undertaken the fascists AND THEIR "FREE PRESS" ARE GOING TO HOLLAR "MCCARTHYISM!  HUAC! and every other thing that was rightly condemned about the red scare even though in this case, it will be an investigation of real and potent and powerful anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, BILLIONAIRE FUNDED AND FINANCED ATTACKS ON AMERICAN DEMOCRACY WHICH HAVE PROVEN THEY CAN ACTUALLY DO WHAT THE IDIOT DUPES OF STALIN NEVER COULD HAVE DONE.  

And I have every confidence that the media and the "civil liberties" industry will join in the kneecapping of that effort to expose and destroy the real and potent enemies of equality and, so, democracy.    Americans have been trained to have that knee jerk reaction by show-biz, by the media, by the superficial and unnuanced consideration of that history and by the lawyer babble of the "civil libertarians" who have been, for the most part, the whores of Hollywood and the media and the oligarchs.  

We are going to have to crush those who gave Trump II its blueprint for destroying democracy here,  an effort which the big law firms, the universities, show-biz and the "free press" have been everything from actively involved with to complicit in to an impotent and ineffective counter to.   There are, of course, exceptions to that but I have no doubt that once the slogans of anti-anti-communism are voiced,  they will largely chicken out of doing what will be needed to establish egalitarian democracy.   

I would bet you that you can name those who will piously and self-righteously proclaim that the emergency effort to rescue democracy is guilty of "McCarthyism" and will cite the litany of Hollywood-Broadway red-scare slogans.   George Clooney, for one, the guy who bugged out to France comes to mind for me.  That was after he sandbagged Joe Biden in the New York Times.  And, I will add, before he hypocritically recycled his semi-red-scare show on Broadway.  He deserves to be the example of such official show-biz duplicity in such matters.  Or stupidity.  It could have been that like most actors, he's just not that bright or able to deal with complex realities that don't fit into the narrative of a show.  Having to wrap it up the show in about two hours leads to that kind of superficiality. 

Enabling the second empowerment of Trump determines the morality of whatever someone in the media did to bring that about.   To hell with whether or not they had a right to do it,  It's my right to point out the consequences of it. 

Update:  George Clooney and the New York Times did more to harm American democracy than the entire structure of that old red scare ever did.  Especially the NYT with its initial publishing of lies about Hillary Clinton right before the 2016 election and its sandbagging of Joe Biden in 2024.   The consequences of the red-scare were a side show compared to the attack on democracy by Trump and the Republican-fascists.   Anyone who did that can go to hell as far as I'm concerned.   If I hate the legal profession,  I hate the corporate media even more and ever more.   Including "entertainment" which has more influence because more low-info voters watch shows.  

Israel Is Headed For Catastrophe - Brave Israeli Journalist Gideon Levy

Israel has devolved into the ethno-fascism I warned it was going to twenty years ago.   There is no denying that after this election and the racist reaction of those who actually won, allowing the fascist war-criminal Netanyahu a chance to retain power.   

No one who supports equality or even a democracy based on the majoritarian principle of government can ignore this.   At this rate anyone who is not an apartheid-fascist is going to stay and the genocide will accelerate.   The big question for us is if it will happen with the support of the United States and other deputed democracies.   And the answer to that question will tell you as much about the status of democracy here as it does there. 

Note On Trump's Revoting "Ass"Talk

It's senile dementia, that's obvious

Treatment of Inappropriate Sexual Behavior in Dementia

Inappropriate sexual behavior (ISB) is a relatively common and potentially disruptive form of behavior in people with dementia. It can cause considerable distress and put placements and people at risk. Yet it is poorly researched and understood. In addition to non-pharmacological approaches to management, a wide range of classes of medication has been used in ISB, and the results have been reported as single cases or short series, though none has been the subject of a randomized clinical trial, in part because of the lack of a well-defined method of observing and measuring ISB, as well as the significant ethical considerations. Pharmacological treatments for which there is low-level evidence of efficacy in the literature include antidepressants, antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, cholinesterase inhibitors, hormonal agents, and beta-blockers. None of the drugs discussed here is licensed for use in ISB, and elderly people, particularly those with dementia, are at high risk of adverse effects. Caution is advised before using medication in this group of people. It is important to consider alternative non-pharmacological treatments, as well as discussing issues of ethics and consent with those involved, before initiating treatment. It is helpful to identify and monitor target symptoms. Pharmacological treatments should be started at low dose and titrated up slowly and carefully. Nevertheless, in some situations, medication may provide a useful part of a management plan for ISB.

Also:

In elderly patients with dementia, a combination of cognitive deterioration, worsening judgment, and personality changes probably contributes to changes in sexual attitude and behavior. The most common alteration reported in people with dementia is apathy and indifference to sex [3]. Nevertheless, inappropriate sexual behavior (ISB, also known as sexually disinhibited behavior, or hypersexuality) has been consistently described in most dementia syndromes 

Call me old fashioned but I never believed I'd live to see a day when an American president would talk like he does in public and have the support of three out of ten Americans and most of the corporate media and all of the Republican-fascists in Congress and on the Supreme Court.    The unitary executive presidency is a sewer brought to us by the perfumed, Ivy League credentialed whores of the Roberts Court. 

I'm sure they were all aghast when Obama wore a tan suit while Black and about as dignified a president as we've had since Carter left office. 

The Ill Considered Subject of "Rights" And How Their Common Assertion Trivializes Rights

EVERY ONCE IN A VERY GREAT WHILE, especially if I'm sick and don't feel like thinking or reading , I might watch one of those videos of a "sovereign citizen" getting pulled over for a minor or major traffic infraction by the police.   The ones in which if they'd just hand over their registration and license and didn't mouth off to the cop they might have gotten a ticket or being let off with a caution but due to their insistence on their "rights" and their "rights under the CON-STI-TU-TION!" they end up in cuffs and on their way to jail.    

The ones where the wife in the passenger seat keeps telling her husband to shut up and ends up driving herself home as hubby goes to jail are kind of satisfying, though you have to wonder why she stays married to the libertarian jerk. 

But usually I am not in the frame of mind to listen to the twenty or thirty minutes of libertarian bull shit.  

Considering how much stock modern People put into the idea of "rights" and "liberty" and "freedom" and "democracy" (that is liberal democracy, not egalitarian democracy) we spend remarkably little time or care in determining what those mean and the conditions under which they not only exist but are practiced in real life and the real world apart from theories about them.   

One thing that we need to get clear about is that all of them are not abstract entities but are series of acts done by People, in terms of human law and life. 

And with that comes the as necessary but seldom considered matter of rights, liberty, freedom and democracy and their impact on the rights liberty, freedom and life under democracy of other People, whether as individuals and groups.   And the total folly of believing any of them can be in some imaginary way an absolute value and practice.   

That in regard to those "rights" both enumerated and misidentified as such in the First and Second Amendments of the US Constitution it is the lawyerly and judicial fantasy that any such "rights" can be exercised responsibly and as an absolute thing is one of the greatest engines destroying equality and so real democracy and in the process destroying far more important rights than the right to lie and to con and cheat and pretend that people getting conned and cheated are entering into contracts,  and other lawerly bullshit into infinity. 

Witnessing the combination of laziness, cowardice, and complicity in the American judiciary in regard to the criminal career of Donald Trump, his family, their allies and other Republican-fascists - often the matter of class, party and financial interest of the judges and most of all "justices" facilitating that decades long crime spree,  I have come to the conclusion that without a total reappraisal and change of all of the things that contributed to that - NONE SO MUCH AS THE ABSURDITIES PRESENTED AS MATTERS OF "RIGHTS" UNDER "LAW" -  we are idiots if we don't expect the crime spree to continue and expand to the total destruction of whatever is held to be good about the United States.   

All of that has certainly contributed mightily to the serial overturning of any and, eventually, all measures of progress towards equality and democracy and the securing of a better life for all.  As I said recently that is the history of the United States as it really is, not as it is taught or presented in the load of lies and bullshit that the popular presentation of that history is. 

I am thinking of writing a few posts on that this week, it's looking like it's going to be a hard week for me so it might not be every day.  I will certainly go into the absurd "rights absolutism that refuses to acknowledge that all "rights" are not created or practiced equally.   That absurdist AND REALLY, LET'S CALL IT WHAT IT IS, SELFISH ASSERTION OF "RIGHTS" is supremely destructive and in a very real and consequential way it has become the lawyerly and judicial and Supreme Court articulation of "rights."    The idea that the right of a topless dancer to dance without pasties having the same status as an MLK jr. agitating for voting rights, civil rights and economic justice or students at Columbia University protesting against their University investing in the genocide of the Palestinians is destructive of real rights while promoting things that are rather stupidly considered to be matters of "rights" has essentially trivialized and bastardized the concept. 

You can say everything that Lenny Bruce got arrested for saying on stage and which George Carlin's rather stupid and derivative night club act said you'd never be able to say on TV but you can't effectively advocate for economic justice,  oppose genocide, oppose Trumpian fascism.   As I said the Warren Court, with the ACLU advocating for it, creating the "right to lie" for the NYT and the Burger court making millionaire money and now billionaire money equal "speech" was imagined by them to be a way of ushering in ever increasing democracy and liberty but which has brought us closer to fascism than we have been at any time since the Civil War ended.  That is how stupid the Best and Brightest minds of the American judiciary really are and have been all along.  

I will also go into the folly of the secular assertion that morality has nothing to do with it when morality is either the basis of all of it or equality and democracy are of no surpassing value.   At least that's my plan this morning. 

This IS How It Probably How It Went Down At Vivek Ramaswamy's Campaign

 

 One of the better shorts I've watched.  He got the profession of campaign consultant down pretty well. 

Now I'd like to see him do one about James Carville and his recent perfidy.   

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Forty Three, Fifty Nine Wake

 Forty Three, Fifty Nine Wake 

Jess is travelling with her mother, Avril, to see Danny one last time. She's not been back for 24 years; she and Danny were childhood sweethearts and were going to get married, but Danny's dead and he was only 39.

She wants to say goodbye to him one last time, which doesn't seem too much to ask - except Jess's father killed Danny's sister in a hit and run.

On Jess and Avril's day trip, one lie leads to another and soon they find themselves embroiled in a rare old pickle.

Katie Hims comes up with the most unusual plots.   Who needs Halloween with plots like this? 

Forgot I'd Done That

SOMETIME IN THE new atheist fad of the 00's I felt moved to type out the entirety of A. S. Eddington's Swathmore Lecture, Science And The Unseen World and post it online.  I don't remember where I first posted it but I posted it later  on my now largely unremembered utility blog.   I haven't gone through it in the next fourteen or so years to check for typos and other problems and like all major efforts, its importance to me has faded since then.  If I'd known about it, I could have saved myself the bother of typing it out because Archive dot org had posted it the year before that.   Though I think I first typed it out earlier than that posting, I don't remember when that was. 

Some of the descriptions of science are quite vintage, now.  Though looking at it, it had some good things in it.  Here's how he ended.   I think I kept Eddington's Brit spelling though probably not consistently. 

Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require. I recognise that the practice of a religious community cannot be regulated solely in the interests of its scientifically-minded members and therefore I would not go so far as to urge that no kind of defence of creeds is possible. 

But I think it may be said that Quakerism in dispensing with creeds holds out a hand to the scientist. The scientific objection is not merely to particular creed which assert in outworn phraseology beliefs which are either no longer held or no longer convey inspiration to life. 

The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university where it was the practice of the students to recite adherence to Newton’s laws of motion, to Maxwell’s equations and to the electromagnetic theory of light. We should not deplore it the less if our own pet theory happened to be included, of if the list were brought up to date every few years. We should say that the students cannot possibly realise the intention of scientific training if they are taught to look on these results as things to be recited and transcribed to. Science may fall short of its ideal, and although the peril scarcely takes this extreme form, it is not always easy, particularly in popular science to maintain our stand against creed and dogma. I would not be sorry to borrow for our scientific pronouncements the passage prefixed to the Advices of the Society of Friends in 1656 and repeated in the current General Advices:

“These things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by; but that all with a measure of the light, which is pure and holy, may be guided; and so in the light walking and abiding, these things may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not in the letter; for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.”

Rejection of creed is not inconsistent with being possessed by a living belief. We have no creed in science, but we are not lukewarm in our beliefs. The belief is not that all the knowledge of the universe that we hold so enthusiastically will survive in the letter; but a sureness that we are on the road. If our so-called facts are changing shadows, there are shadows cast by the light of constant truth. So too in religion we are repelled by that confident theological doctrine which has settled for all generations just how the spiritual world is worked; but we need not turn aside from the measure of light that comes from our experience showing us a Way through the unseen world.

Religion for the conscientious seeker is not all a matter of doubt and self-questionings. There is a kind of sureness which is very different from cocksureness.

I'll add that I doubt anyone, no priest, bishop, pope, patriarch, reverend, etc. has ever been as rigidly attached to and observant of creeds as is imagined even by them.   I think for just about everyone who is sincerely religious, all such things are held as the late Walter Brueggemann once put it,  held onto but loosely, in regard to the reading of Scripture. 

And I think Eddington viewed the actual culture of science in regard to rigid creedal adherence with unrealistic idealism.  It may not be formally required that an affirmation of belief in creeds be made in science but in most science departments in most universities there will be one or two different denominations of whichever science holds sway there through the ideological and professional interests of the faculty members (often chosen by which ever faction dominates) and in places where two competing creeds are represented on a faculty,  students will be under pressure to choose one or the other.   Eddington certainly experienced that, himself, in the earliest years of his adoption of the new physics starting with his acceptance of Einstein's theories.   

While the evidence in physics may have been sufficiently compelling to force the reluctant to adopt those theories as the evidence grows vaguer along with the complexity of the subjects of science lends itself to less and less exactness,  those denominational struggles and wars can get pretty bad.  The slapping fights in the soft sciences can get really vicious.   

At times during Eddington's lifetime, such as in biology in the Soviet Union, the state supported ideology oppressed and even executed many scientists in ways that the supposed martyrs of science, such as Galileo never was subjected to by the Catholic Church.   Copernicus, by the way, had the full support of bishops and even popes for his science during his lifetime, as he noted in his book dedicated to Pius III AND AS GALILEO POINTED OUT IN HIS OWN DEFENSE.   And that was hardly the only place where science with support of the state and ideological and financial institutions enforced creedal discipline.   That can be everything from such drama instigating incidents as Edward Teller getting Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance revoked to scientists making sure that those who are not strictly adherent to their preferred creed don't get grants and funding.   That is a weekly if not daily occurrence in science. 

But I especially liked how Eddington ended in advocating the opposite of arrogant certainty in our conceptions, that the sureness we have is a matter more of experience than of articulating stands and dogmas.   Sincere religion isn't what the new atheist faddists of that time claimed it was but it also wasn't what the rigid creedalists and other religious types hold it to be, either. 

Polling In Regard To Elections Are Election Fraud - Just Posted Video About How The Media From Elite To Sub-Gutter Fell For A Fake Polling Firm

 

It is sheer lunacy that in a deputed democracy that ANYTHING INTENDED TO SUBVERT, DISCOURAGE OR MISINFORM THE BASIS OF THAT DEMOCRACY, THE VOTE IS PERMITTED WHETHER BY LAW OR BY THE FRICKIN' BILL OF "RIGHTS."

And America's democracy is that loony.   The result is corrupt, illegitimate governance under corrupt, illegitimate law or, rather, the corrupt thugs who get elected. 

Debussy - Ballade

 

Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano

A lot of musicians play Debussy (and most other things) as if they're pieces, objects like furniture.  This performance strikes me as the opposite, playing it like it's a life experience, living in time and in the time it takes to play and hear it.   You really can't put it into words, those are too tied to thinking of things as objects.   Music doesn't work when you do it like that.   

Three Cheers For Cultural Wokeness -

There have been several principle musicians of the Boston Symphony over the years for whom I hold special affection.   

There's their former Concert Master, the late, great violinist and conductor Joseph Silverstein, whose performance of the Schoenberg Concerto with the BSO is one of the finest concerto performances of any style I've ever heard*.  

There is the great tympanist Vic Firth whose performances, for example,  in the Michael Tilson Thomas's recording of Carl Ruggles Suntreader never fails to chill me to the bone as soon as the first note of the piece sounds.   The one he recorded with the Buffalo Philharmonic is pretty good too but there's something about that earlier recording and Firth's playing that is singular in my experience.

But the former principle BSO trombonist Douglas Yeo has a special place in my heart for many reasons, first his playing of his instrument.   Longtime readers may know I have a thing for the trombone as an instrument.  I love the deep brass and it is the most musically flexible and often best played of them.  Yeo also is an adept player of the serpent and other related instruments. 

Though, if I had not gone the route in music that I did, the thing I'd have wanted to be more than anything else is a choral conductor, high on the list of other alternatives would have been to play trombone.   I don't know if one of the reasons for that is because my closest music friends have happened to be trombonists or that I had an intense crush on a particularly nice one who happened to also be very handsome when I was a teenager.    Alas, he was straight and were were just friends.  Though that would probably have been for the best.   I met someone else in an area of music entirely removed from what I did and had a long, faithful relationship with him. 

But that's enough of me and my senior reminiscences.   This comes because I clicked on a video that came up with the unlikely title, "Why Everyone Stopped Playing Lassus Trombone."   

I won't go into why I clicked on it, something to do with curiosity about what a trombone had to do with Orlando di Lasso, aka "Orlande de Lassus". 

But it had nothing to do with that 16th century composer, it was the name of a band piece featuring the trombone from the early 20th century and the grotesquely racist associations given to it by the man who composed it.   It's a piece I'd heard and which was familiar to me but I didn't know what it was called, who wrote it (Henry Fillmore) or those racist associations it and a host of other trombone pieces witten by Fillmore had.   It's a really insightful and interesting short video that goes into a lot of background and why Douglass Yeo called for not playing those pieces, part of the central repertoire of his instrument, due to those associations.   It comes about from a piece that Yeo wrote that went viral (among Trombone players, I'm guessing).  I have to say it did everything to make me respect and value the musical judgement of Mr. Yeo even more than I had.   I also didn't know he wrote a blog which I will be reading all of when I get the chance.  

From a quick glance, his pieces going into the history of "Gospel Trombone" look fascinating,  I'll be looking for recordings from some of the figures he mentions in those.   Mr. Yeo is also a rather fine researcher and historian of music. 

* Like the person who commented on this excerpt which he performed previous to that, I've long wished that they would issue a recording of that BSO performance.

Note:  I have not really been keeping up with the current crisis that the Boston Symphony is going through, a mix of idiots on their board acting like idiots,  firing the conductor without any consultation of the orchestra's musicians,  the shrinking of their audience, probably due to ticket prices and bad promotion as much as the stupidification of the American culture.  Just as an aside, if I could get to Boston I'd be interested in hearing them but I couldn't afford those prices. 

If that kind of symphonic institution is still viable is open to question, or maybe it's just that such an institution in a city like Boston which is incredibly expensive to live in - and musicians except at the top tend to be anything but affluent  - I don't know.  

I'd be very sad if the Boston Symphony went under but I don't doubt that music will continue on.  Though such large ensembles may not be nearly as common as they once were. 

They should stop filling their board with lawyers and corporate gangsters.   If they aren't supporting the orchestra, they're going to gut it.   They should watch Slings and Arrows to see where that kind of thing leads an arts institution.