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. 

I Don't Give Zionists Any Benefit Of Any Doubt After Gaza

 it is a nationalist, chauvinist, supremacist movement and a criminal one.   And I oppose all of those, including the native one in the United States and the one rising back up in places like Germany under Russian supremacists' online instigation.  There should be no freedom for any site or platform to push that,  they should be required to ban such destruction of equality and democracy and that the idiotic 18th century conception of liberal democracy refuses to be morally responsible, it has failed no less than the monarchies of Israel and Judea did in Scripture times. 

I don't give anyone license for that because it always leads to murder and oppression.   I'm not going to cut Israel any slack I'm not going to cut my own country.   No one, gentile or Jewish who pushes Zionism after Gaza and the ongoing terror campaign to force Palestinians out of every place they live has clean hands.  No more than the apologists for lynch law here had OR HAS.   It's all fascism and it should be defunded, destroyed and its future promotion forever forbidden.   I believe in learning the hardest lessons of history, unlike our idiotic mainstream legal experts who hold we are never to learn from them so "never again" really means always again.   English language media is covering up for the equivalent of Nazism today. 

This is a response. 

Abolish The ICEstapo, Expose These Nazis, Put THEM In Prison

 Democrats should pass a law making it illegal for police to mask their faces and hide their ID numbers and names.  These AmeriNazis have to be crushed out of existence.

Some Notes And Rants

JOURNALISM ISN'T THE ONLY so-called profession that shouldn't have come to rely on an aspirant having a bachelors or higher degree from a college or university of whatever purported credibility as a credentialing board.    I think that the arts are far better learned on something like an apprenticeship model.   I have told a number of very good musicians who wanted to know about majoring in music in college that the only degree program I would ever recommend anyone take a degree in is Music Education where they might get a job teaching in a school which will provide them with a salary,  insurance and enough leisure time during the summer (assuming they didn't have to take a job as a store clerk) to pursue some outside music activities.   I would hold the same about visual arts as a major.   So called "artists degrees" are worthless and a waste of money.   I can tell you that from personal experience.  

I would say the same about writing as a career, only its worse because even the lower levels of the paid writing racket have imploded with the death throes of the ink on paper journalism.  Nowadays it's primarily having your voice or face on some screen or on the radio, and the radio part of that in the US is shit.   You'd do better to learn makeup.  Knowledge doesn't seem to be much required in that profession. 

Unlike the arts, though, real journalism, the collecting and reporting of facts and, occasionally, the telling of the truth is a vital necessity for the possibility of legitimate governance in an egalitarian democracy.   You no doubt notice I stipulated FACTS, TRUTH, AND EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY.    The current professional practice of the decadence that "journalism" has become serves none of those, it reports obvious lies and did even before Bari Weiss took over and destroyed CBS "news" or what was left of it after the firing of the likes of Dan Rather.    It concentrates on "opinion" instead of reporting, it reports opinion polling instead of presenting issues, it has retreated into the cowardice of first, both-siderism" and gradually that become one-siderism as it presented what the owners, the publishers, the editors, the advertisers and the wealthy wanted it to present.   It's no accident that the whore Bari Weiss was brought into "journalism" first with the backing of millionaires and then billionaires whhen she had absolutely no journalistic abilities (as she proved at that Ivy League oligarchic whore training academy she attended) and absolutely no intention or inclination to publish facts, truth or to serve egalitarian democracy.   She intended to service the millionaires and billionaires here and the Zionist government in Israel, on behalf of whom she so notably lied from the time she was a poisonous liar in college. 

I was entirely sincere when I said the First Amendment was stupidly written in several ways, though here I'll only concentrate on "freedom of speech" and the freedom of the "press" which has taken both and used them to not only use that recent innovation invented by the Warren Court, the "right to lie" but to privilege lies over facts and truth and to the intentional determent of egalitarian democracy. 

James Madison and his colleagues who wrote the so-called Bill of Rights were a mixed bag.   As the great American historian Paul Finkelmann has noted,  Madison was forced into supporting one in the first Congress because Virginia would not have voted to adopt the Constitution if he had not made that promise.   He didn't want to have one.   I think the reluctance to do that shows up in no places so much as the badly written and considered First and Second Amendments.  The problems with the Second Amendments will certainly show up in those weekly if not daily mass shootings and I'll deal with that again another time.    

As mentioned by me many, many times over the past three or so years,  the failure to distinguish between the absolute right to tell the truth (albeit, a right that is only morally exercised with real responsibilities in regard to the consequences when telling that truth might lead to a moral atrocity) and the absolute fact that there is no such a thing as a "right to lie" is the major defect in the "freedom of speech" part of it.   I think the fact that so many of the members of the First Congress were lawyers (51% by this paper from that Ivy League training brothel, Harvard Law*) can account for why they may have wanted to give lying the benefit of Constitutional protection.   Though it could have just been the stupid urge to write bad late 18th century poetry instead of the typical and probably safer dry prose that would have made that clear.   The result has not made the United States or its law and legal practice notably more honest than that of many other countries when the sanctimony that oozed and gushed out of the founders and framers about erecting a "new order of the ages" would have led you to believe that was the intention.   It clearly was not and never was.  I will note that the very same men, in many cases, when it came to the protection of the slavery that made them wealthy, either through the holding or the importation and selling of human beings into slavery, didn't just leave it to vague poetics.** 

The same kind of defect saturates "freedom of the press" which was mistaken as the protection of a right when a "press" is an artificial entity and can have no rights.    What they did was foolishly erect a privilege for the press to lie and to spread lies more effectively than a speaker at a podium or pulpit or on a stump to a lynch mob could, to corrupt We The People with cleverly told lies, fashioned for far easier sale to the vulnerable and morally deficient than the harder to take truth is.   That failure of reasoning and writing has been one of the most dangerous defects in the Constitution from the time of its adoption.   We remember the martyrs of the "free press" such as Elijah Lovejoy  because they told the truth, the reason so many journalists are getting fired these days.   That happens while those who practice their "right" to lie and to publish lies (as the NYT was given by the Warren Court) prosper.  And, yet, the "journalists" like the lawyers wonder why they are so distrusted and despised. 

An artificial entity whether  a media corporation or the kind that the Supreme Court playing God granted "person-hood to" (by lying about the 14th Amendment) cannot have rights which are a characteristic of a naturally living being.   There is no rightful claim by an artificial entity to the kinds of rights that were dangled in front of the common American People by the Declaration of Independence to get them to fight the war for independence on behalf of the aristocrats who wrote that document.   There is no real instead of notional obligation to allow them ersatz "rights" though they can be given certain privileges, which is what the "freedom of the press" really is.   

The defect in the First Amendment is that that was not made specific WITH AN OBLIGATION THAT THAT PRIVILEGE DEPENDED ON THEM SERVING THE NEED FOR PEOPLE IN AN EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY TO HAVE THE FACTS AND THE TRUTH AND NOT TO BE PEDDLED LIES AND BIGOTRY AND HATRED THROUGH AN APPEAL TO WHAT WAS WORST IN THE AMERICAN POPULATION.   Instead Madison and his colleagues didn't mention any of that and much if not most of the "press" and now the even more degraded form of that "media" serves up lies to the People to gull them into voting the worst of the worst into office and on to courts.    And I have every confidence that there was some level of intentionality for that to happen, so many of those drafters of the Bill of Rights as it became being lawyers and "planters" (that would be big slave holders, in most cases) and others who were served by lies and who, as in so many cases among the framers and members of the First Congress, despised equality and democracy.  They were certainly experienced in the management of lies and peddling them.  Again, lawyers.   They'd have seen that possibility. 

It is one of the major defects of the teaching of American History that the major force in that history is almost never mentioned,  the agitation and struggle AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION by those who were enslaved under it, those who were subjugated under it, those who the laws that were made on the basis of it - whether by the Congress or under  the usurped powers stolen by the Supreme Court.    As I have pointed out, starting with the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800 and in many states and at times the federal government after that, the real virtue of the United States has been in the expansion of the exercise of rights and freedoms (though, alas, hardly ever with mentioning the responsibility of that freedom) AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION INCLUDING THE SO-CALLED "BILL OF RIGHTS." 

There a reason that fascists on the Supreme Court always pretend to be going back to the original intent of the framers and the text they produced IT'S BECAUSE THAT IS HOW THE COURT ROLLS BACK EVERY MEASURE OF PROGRESS MADE AGAINST THE INTENT OF THOSE SLAVEHOLDERS, INDIAN MURDERES AND LAND STEALERS AND CON ARTISTS.     When Little Ms. Amy Coney Barrett or a thug like Alito mouths such civic seeming pieties, that is what they really mean. 

And all that comes from the defects in the original Constitution made worse by the usurped Marbury and other powers stolen by the Supreme Court.  

That is what we face and until it becomes the common understanding that that is what we face,  the enemies of We The People, the despisers of egalitarian democracy and the common welfare that we were falsely promised reap the benefits of it.   And the strongest tool they have is the "right to lie" that the Courts gave them and the "press."  

* I'm not sure that the law having been one of the earliest professions to give up an apprenticeship model in favor of the erecting of law faculties at elite universities wasn't a decision to make the profession both more pretentious than it was and far more adept at lying and pretending that there was some higher virtue in that.   But it's worth thinking about.   

I'd never send a kid wanting to be a musician to an Ivy League or its equivalent.   If they wanted to be a teacher there are land-grant universities that do a much better job and if they wanted to try their luck as an artist or composer, it would probably be a huge mistake.   And an extremely expensive one.   I know a young woman who has an "artists degree" who can't get work in her field and who has large student loans to pay off.   She realizes now she was had. 

** I don't know if it's really necessary to point it out, but rereading that passage while editing this reminds me of the gangster Meyer Lansky who sardonically noted that the Mafia's "men of honor" were so honorable that they couldn't trust each other to not kill them.    It's not much different in the early history of the founders and framers.   The struggles and bile thrown in the early struggle between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian-Madisonian "Democrats" and the attempt of the Federalists to throw their fellow founders in prison for sedition is certainly relevant. 

Last Word On This For This Week

WHAT PART OF "although we seem to have very definite conceptions of objects in the external world, those conceptions do not enter into exact science and are not in any way confirmed by it;"  

and let me repeat this part of that, 

DO NOT ENTER INTO EXACT SCIENCE AND ARE NOT IN ANY WAY CONFIRMED BY IT

don't you get?

And Eddington was addressing  "very definite conceptions in the external world" as not being able to be confirmed by science.   

While those with a professional motive might want to pretend all kinds of things have a "very definite conception" you generally only have to look at their conceptions of those "things" about which their as-qualified colleagues disagree to see that those conceptions are in no way definite.   AND THOSE ARE JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT COMPRISES THE SO-CALLED SCIENCES I AM SLAMMING.   Everything from those shifting quicksands of psychology, sociology, anthropology, . . . and on to that most notable minefield of self-interest by those who practice it and those who pay them, economics.   At best such fields as are totally unsuited for the methods of science can come up with a generally enforced required agreed point of view about such things, that only lasts until the next big thing erodes that requirement in regard to  that general agreement as has happened in every one of them.  Economics is the quintessential academic whore house.  At least among those that purport to practice science, though to some extent all of them will whore out of necessity. 

And huge swaths of biology could be included within that, especially when it consists of speculation about things not visible or in any way measurable as physical phenomena, as the entire assertion of "natural selection" is not.

"Before exact science can begin to handle the problem they must be replaced by quantities representing the results of physical measurement." 

No such physical measurement of the "selective forces" that purportedly resulted in the evolution of a new species has ever been taken or could ever be taken.   As I recently repeated here, even a convinced Darwinist of the level of the geneticist Richard Lewontin admitted that.  To purport to apply that to the pseudo-science of economics "economic Darwinism" as a number of recent academic economists have is something of an ultimate absurdity.   I think natural selection is an illusion, a product of ideology, not scientific observation.   And they have led to the deaths of millions of People and the oppression of many more. 

"The essential point is that, although we seem to have very definite conceptions of objects in the external world, those conceptions do not enter into exact science and are not in any way confirmed by it. Before exact science can begin to handle the problem they must be replaced by quantities representing the results of physical measurement. " - Hate Mail

JUST BY CHANCE I have been reading a biography of the early sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and just last night read this quote by him, “Nothing in nature can escape natural law.”   

It's not for nothing, though I don't think the author of the biography meant it, that she noted in the beginning of the book that Hirschfeld was a product of the 19th century and, though unusually modern in many aspects of his thought, he was a thoroughly conventional 19th century materialist.   I don't think it would have been easy for someone to make much of a splash in the soft-sciences of his time if he hadn't been.  Especially in his line of trade.*

The confident assertion by an educated man working in what has to count as certainly the softest of sciences,  something which depended entirely on the self-reporting of human beings about not only their sexual activity but their interior sexual consciousness, that "natural law" had some independent existence apart from the PEOPLE who formulated such laws and that such "natural law" which had its basis in the observations of non-living and systems, planets, objects moving and being affected by gravity and other seemingly involuntary forces could have anything to do with his area of study has to count as a monumental leap of faith, not based on religion but based on an ideology that was intrinsically hostile to religion and in that attempt to win out over it,  clung on to entirely unfounded articles of faith such as that one. 

People like to think of "scientists" such as Hirschfeld who had some progressive ideas about forbidden sexuality in heroic terms  He is generally presented as a hero to my fellow LGBTQ+ People.**  Also for the extreme opposition to him that the Nazis had, both due to him being Jewish and due to his subject of research but also due to the fact that a number of Nazi Party members had exposed their own homosexuality to him and his colleagues.  They were especially targeted by the Nazis for that.   And there was a lot to respect in what Hirschfeld did, though certainly not everything.   I have to say that the book's reporting of his fears for the direction that Zionism was headed in during his time were prescient. 

And a lot of his "science" is as definitively rejected now as an enormous part of what was accepted as even hard science, published in books and journals, taught at universities and colleges and high schools, especially the farther you get from physics and inorganic chemistry.   Which shows you just how durable the 19th century notions of "natural law" are.   

If 21st century notions of natural law are any more durable, we don't know yet,  no more than someone who died an old man in 1935 could have - though if he'd read, for example, the eminent astro-physicist and non-materialist, A.S. Eddington on the topic he might have had a more sophisticated view of what "natural law" is.***   Though you could say the same thing about a lot of current professionals in science, even many a living physicist and, especially, cosmologist.  

The "natural law" that we can talk about is a human creation.   Just as every aspect of everything we can talk about, write about, make mathematical calculations about, teach about, etc. is a product of human consciousness.  And it is nothing like a complete picture of even simple realities.  The farther you get from those simple entities, the less scientific the science gets. 

* Like all of the social-pseudo-sciences, anything that depends entirely on reports by People of their own unobserved behavior and, ever more so, their internal experience of their own consciousness,  can never, ever have anything like the reliability of the observations of planets or molecules or subatomic particles.   People lie about their sexual activities,  they lie to their partners,  they lie to themselves about it.  Those lies are so basic to the pretense that what they are doing is science that they are reported as fact in publications held to be science, even as the resulting statistical analyses are mathematically incoherent and impossible.   Sexology might be a suitable topic for academic study and publishing but any alleged scientific handling of it is pseudo-science. 

See the reports of the numbers of sexual partners of heterosexually identifying males and the different numbers of sexual partners of heterosexually identifying females as only one glaring example.   Yet it is published as science. 

I would go into the history of political opinion polling and, especially, the notoriously partisan polling results of Republican favoring polling firms but I won't for now.   I'd ban political polling and the reporting of them before elections if it were my call. 

** I hadn't till last week come across the designation "2SLGBTQ+" and had to look it up.  the "2S" means "Two-spirit."   Since it was a Canadian source that I found it in, I gather that it's given its first place out of respect for First Nations ideas, which I have no problem with, though it's a bit cumbersome to keep adding to the inclusive term which I prefer, I might adopt it out of respect.  

But the complexity of any one of those identities included in that ever expanding acronym shows how pointless and hopeless it is to come up with a real "science" of human sexuality.    I often half-joke that I refuse to share a sexual identity with Republican-fascists who like to have sex with men, but that's only half a joke. 

***  To get some idea at the extremely tenuous relationship of exact science and the (pseudo-)would-be-sciences, especially something like sexology, take this passage from Eddington's 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World.  

As is my current MO, I have inserted breaks for the ease of modern readers who aren't accustomed to reading long paragraphs but I have not changed any words or their order. 

 Nature of Exact Science. One of the characteristics of physics is that it is an exact science, and I have generally identified the domain of physics with the domain of exact science.  Strictly speaking the two are not synonymous. We can imagine a science arising which has no contact with the usual phenomena and laws of physics, which yet admits of the same kind of exact treatment.  

It is conceivable that the Mendelian theory of heredity may grow into an independent science of this kind, for it would seem to occupy in biology the same position that the atomic theory occupied in chemistry a hundred years ago. The trend of the theory is to analyze complex individuals into “unit characters.” These are like indivisible atoms with affinities and repulsions; their matings are governed by the same laws of chance which play so large a part in chemical thermodynamics; and numerical statistics of the characters of a population are predictable in the same way as the results of a chemical reaction.

I break in to note that even with Eddington's quite unusual caution in describing the then presumed knowledge of genetic inheritance,  that view of biological inheritance AND IT IS PROBABLY STILL THE DOMINANTLY HELD VIEW OF "GENES" EVEN AMONG MANY BIOLOGISTS! it is extremely naive in light of the ever increasing complexity and non-fixity of the behaviors of genes and the general area of biological inheritance.   "Mendelian theory," that is genetics, has become ever less like that description of it with its presumed proximity to 1920s chemistry, starting with the work of geneticists even in the decade after these lectures were published.  I don't know the extent to which Eddington may have known about that cutting edge work before his death in the 1940s.  

Now the effect of such a theory on our philosophical views of the significance of life does not depend on whether the Mendelian atom admits of a strictly physical explanation or not. The unit character may be contained in some configuration of the physical molecules of the carrier, and perhaps even literally correspond to a chemical compound; or it may be something superadded which is peculiar to living matter and is not yet comprised in the schedule of physical entities. That is a side-issue. 

We are drawing near to the great question whether there is any domain of activity - of life, of consciousness, of deity - which will not be engulfed by the advances of exact science; and our apprehension is not directed against the particular entities of physics but against all entities of the category to which exact science can apply. 

For exact science invokes, or has seemed to invoke, a type of law inevitable and soulless against which the human spirit rebels. If science finally declares that man is no more than a fortuitous concourse of atoms, the blow will not be softened by the explanation that the atoms in question are the Mendelian unit characters and not the material atoms of the chemist.

Let us then examine the kind of knowledge which is handled by exact science. If we search the examination papers in physics and natural philosophy for the more intelligible questions we may come across one beginning something like this: “An elephant slides down a grassy hillside…” The experienced candidate knows that he need not pay much attention to this; it is only put in to give an impression of realism. 

He reads on: “The mass of the elephant is two tons.” Now we are getting down to business; the elephant fades out of the problem and a mass of two tons takes its place. What exactly is this two tons, the real subject matter of the problem? It refers to some property or condition which we vaguely describe as “ponderosity” occurring in a particular region of the external world.

But we shall not get much further that way; the nature of the external world is inscrutable, and we shall only plunge into a quagmire of indescribables. Never mind what the two tons refers to; what is it? How has it actually entered in so definite a way into our experience?

Two tons is the reading of a pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing-machine. 

Let us pass on. “The slope of the hill is 60˚.” Now the hillside fades out of the problem and an angle of 60˚ takes its place. What is 60˚? 

There is no need to struggle with mystical conceptions of direction; 60˚ is the reading of a plumb-line against the divisions of a protractor. Similarly for the other data of the problem. The softly yielding turf on which the elephant slides is replaced by a coefficient of friction, which though perhaps not directly a pointer reading is of kindred nature. No doubt there are more roundabout ways used in practice for determining the weights of elephants and the slopes of hills, but these are justified because it is known that they give the same results as direct pointer readings.

And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left with only pointer readings. If then only pointer readings or their equivalents are put into the machine of scientific calculation, how can we grind out anything but pointer readings? But that is just what we do grind out. The question presumably was to find the time of descent of the elephant, and the answer is a pointer reading on the seconds’ dial of our watch.

The triumph of exact science in the foregoing problem consisted in establishing a numerical connection between the pointer reading on the weighing-machine on one experiment on the elephant and the pointer reading on a watch in another experiment. And when we examine critically other problems of physics we find that this is typical. The whole subject matter of exact science consists of pointer readings and similar indications.

We cannot enter here into the definition of what are to be classed as similar indications. The observation of approximate coincidence of the pointer with a scale-division can generally be extended to include the observation of any kind of coincidence - or, as it is usually expressed in the language of the general relativity theory, an intersection of worldlines. The essential point is that, although we seem to have very definite conceptions of objects in the external world, those conceptions do not enter into exact science and are not in any way confirmed by it. Before exact science can begin to handle the problem they must be replaced by quantities representing the results of physical measurement. 

Look at the above link to the post about something as seemingly simple as the statistics of numbers of sex partners and the knowing scientific reporting of what are mathematically impossible data for reference. 

I have to confess, reading that again makes me eager to use the word "superadded" and getting some online knickers in a twist.  The ones this kind of a post gets knotted up.