"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
Positive: Hallmark Channel Stupid
Comparative: Spike Channel Stupid
Superlative: Play-lefty-Green Party Stupid
Note: This is based on a conversation I had with my brother when I was still exposed to cable TV. I dropped it ages ago so I'm not sure if there are more apt current adjectives.
I'VE gotten some flack for using the word "legillimency" in a title a few days ago, I make no apologies for using it, I do it boldly because the word conveyed both by denotation and connotation exactly what I meant to use it to convey. The book, if I recall correctly, in which J. K. Rowling introduced the word for the first time was "Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix", the fifth of the books, I believe it was used in the next two books.
HP&TOOTP sold five million copies on the first day of publication and, Harry Potter fans of the day being what they were, I would guarantee you that it entered into the recognition if not use vocabulary of at least five million English speaking readers hours after the book was released - Harry potter fans didn't buy the books to leave them unread for a day - probably many times that within the first month after publication. I don't know what the sales figures of the book have been in the last seventeen years but I'm sure many more millions of copies of the book have sold since then in English alone. I never read that one of the series in any other language but I'd guess that as soon as it was translated into most if not all the languages it was translated into, that word entered into the recognition vocabulary of many millions of more people in other language communities around the world not long after that. I would doubt that many neologisms in most "high literature" or scholarly works or essays could match that word for number of literate people who could tell you a precise definition of it is.
A word becomes a "real word" through its use by people, that use is later recognized in reference works but it is the use of it that confers its status as a real word, I am not a Harry Potter fanatic, I know there are many of them, I'm sure that a large, though smaller group of the human population have used the word "legillimency" many times, on online and other forums, probably in scholarly works, even, use of a word also confers the status of it being a "real word" on a word. I would bet you that that particular word is used far more often by far more people who understand it to have the same meaning than most of the more and less obscure words in a collegiate or unabridged English dictionary.
The Merriam-Webster website (I love the Merriam-Webster website) has an article about "real words" that are used in the Harry Potter series, in the listing of "Arithmancy" it says,
The most important feature of the wizarding world is not it flora or fauna, but magic itself. Divination, charms, potions, alchemy: all of these are words that we’re familiar with, and words that we already associate with magic. But there are other magical words Rowling uses that may pass you by.
Arithmancy is one such word. It is, as any fan of the books will tell you, Hermione’s favorite subject: it is divination using numbers and numerology. The word dates back to the 1500s and is a combination of arithmetic and the suffix -mancy, which means “divination.” Arithmancy wasn’t just fictional: there are numerous 17th-century records stating that arithmancy was not just magical, but also religious and philosophical. In fact, arithmancy was common enough that the word arithmancy has an entry in a very early English dictionary:
Arithmancy (Gr.) divination made by number, which hath consideration and contemplation of Angelical vertues; of names, signacles, natures, and conditions, both of Devils and other Creatures. —Thomas Blount, Glossographia: Or A Dictionarie Interpreting Hard Words, 1661
Blount also mentions arithmancy in his entry for cabala, which he defines as “a hidden Science of Divine Mysteries”:
Arithmancy, Theomancy and Cosmology, are said to depend on the aforesaid Cabala, which (to give you also Reuclins definition of it) is nothing else but a kind of unwritten Theology.
You’ve probably already figured out that Rowling also used the suffix -mancy in naming two other types of magic that are important to the series: occlumency, or the magical art of shielding one’s thoughts (a likely blend of the word occlude, or “to hide,” with a slightly altered -mancy); and its comparative term, legilimency, or the magical art of reading one’s mind (heavily influenced by the word legible, or “capable an article about "real words" of being read,” with the altered -mancy).
If Rowling had not included the word "arithmancy" in the series, I bet not a fraction of one percent of those who would have known exactly what I meant by using the word in the title as I did would know the "real word." Though, due to her use of the suffix in question, they may well have figured out what it meant. I make no apologies for using a word that probably tens if not hundreds of millions of people around the world know and know the meaning of to communicate the idea it was invented to mean, taking advantage of the fact that if there is such a thing, it's nothing that the law of the United States should insist can and must be done in the application of the law.
You may notice I have concentrated only on the use of the word in the books, not in the movies made on the books. I only saw part of the first and all of the third of the movies, I didn't much like either - hated the music. I would imagine they use the word in the movies so perhaps many times more people than I imagine learned the word from the books learned it from the movie, but I don't know much about that.
I would bet you that many, perhaps most of the many neologisms contained in the "Shakespeare" canon don't have the current frequency in either the recognition or use vocabulary of educated or uneducated English speakers that the word in question does. A few of them are of disputed use by even the author, at least one I'm aware of very likely being a spurious introduction by likely Dutch typesetters who didn't speak much English. It didn't enter the language on any other basis. Is it a real word?
Still with the internet problems but that's nothing compared to the problems in Texas and other places where Republicans have destroyed the power grid, so I shouldn't even be complaining about it. I will be trying some work-arounds so I can post something every day again. I think it's just that and not burn-out to go with the brown-out.
As for Texas and the Governors, since George W. Bush and various other gangsters who have run that state, anyone who thinks that lies are a necessary evil, claiming they MUST be allowed free reign else our "liberties" be lost, while sitting at their writing desks in New York or DC or Boston where the full impact of Republican-fascist lies are either mitigated or minimized, it's easy for them to say. As easy as it is for straight, white, affluent males generally have it as opposed to People of Color, etc.
There is no reason for anyone to be stupid and irresponsible enough to claim there is a right for a common citizen to lie. While some lies may be too slight in their effect to bother with something as unwieldy and cumbersome as even the civil law to be used to fight, there are many lies that are so serious in their outcome that they should be suppressed with all of the weight of the appropriate legal and judicial apparatus, from small-claims to civil courts right up to courts where the most serious of lies can get people imprisoned must be brought to bear in fighting them and their effects.
People are dying in Texas, right now, due to lying, lies told in the mass media for the benefit of Republican-fascist politicians right up to the ones the Republican-fascists have told while they hold public office. Those media lies should be subject to serious civil consequences and regulatory consequences, there should be a death penalty either by suing them into hell or pulling their broadcast licenses, cabloid and internet media of consequences should be held to similar possible corporate death penalties. The ones told by elected, sworn office holders and those who are sworn employees of governments should also be liable to criminal penalties for serious lies, ANY LIE TOLD BY AN EXECUTIVE, A LEGISLATOR OR A JUDGE SHOULD RESULT IN PERMANENT LOSS OF OFFICE.
A lot of the foundational lies that have come to their putrid and poisonous fruit in this latest Texas mass murder by Republican-fascist deregulation lies in lies told by those at elite universities and stink-tanks. The University of Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, etc. and the push for "classical" economics in the 1970s and on is directly responsible for this. But I don't expect academia to hold its plutocratic prostitutes accountable, getting the courts to do it is hard enough, academia is harder to get held accountable than any part of the government.
THE journalist Michael Sean Winters who writes regularly for the National Catholic Reporter is one of the most underestimated writers who are currently working. Many times I've found things that I go over and over in my mind are apparently going on to more productive ends in his, sometimes it's things that he has thought of which I and those I've read haven't thought of.
His excellent analysis and excoriation of the Republicans' acquittal of Trump for fomenting and encouraging the seditious insurrection against the Capitol and the democratic form of government, Trump's impeachment: 'The cowards stand aside,' has many points I could write full posts on, I'll concentrate on one of those, the dodge of questioning whether or not Trump believed the lies he told to incite and encourage the insurrection, the assertion that if he did believe them, whatever that means, that means he's not guilty. It's a quasi-judicial form of the ridiculous claim that if a liar doesn't believe his lies are lies that means they aren't lies. Something which is impossible to prove and, so, is a permission given to those who you choose to pretend to believe that about.
Let us return to election night. In the early hours of the morning, he addressed a group of supporters in the White House. He listed some states he had indeed won, such as Florida and Texas. He prematurely claimed he had won Georgia and began casting aspersions on the decision by Fox News to call Arizona for Biden. He correctly said he was winning Pennsylvania, but failed to note that very few of the mail-in ballots had been counted. "We were getting ready to win this election," Trump said. "Frankly, we did win this election."
It was hard to know that night if he believed what he was saying. It is often difficult to know if Trump and his followers really believe the demonstrably false things that come from their mouths. One of the most dangerous qualities about a narcissist is their penchant for believing their own propaganda, which creates a variety of sincerity. As the ballots were counted and it became clear Trump had lost, his speech became more fantastical. After the votes in the states were certified and the electoral votes counted in the state capitals, he supported a bizarre legal challenge from the attorney general in Texas, which the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed without even granting it a hearing. By the fateful day in January when Congress was to ratify the votes from the states, his legal challenges had been tossed out in almost 60 cases. His last-minute effort to get the secretary of state in Georgia to "find" 11,780 votes, in a Jan. 2 phone call, showed how desperate and disconnected from reality Trump had become.
Intent is a key element in a crime but it is often difficult to nail it down when the accused is not really tethered to reality. Further, to sustain a charge of inciting an insurrection, you would think the former president's intent would need to be made crystal clear, that he wanted those people in that crowd to storm the capitol building and do … what? It is not at all clear how he thought this would play out. His defense lawyers and political allies argued that his repeated calls to fight were metaphoric, that his speech was no more an incitement than the speeches of many Democrats who sometimes use combative language.
It is a nice question: How did Trump expect the mob was going to "stop the steal"? Republicans say that the difficulty in answering that question required an acquittal because the connection between his fiery language and the actual misdeeds of the mob was necessarily too diffuse. Weeks later, we still are not sure what he or they intended. How could that be deemed a high crime?
Trump's defense, then, was that his language about fighting and stopping the steal was metaphoric. But what was the metaphor? Did he expect the mob to enter into the Senate or House chamber and put forward some amazingly persuasive argument that would convince enough of the legislators to toss out the certified Electoral College votes of the several states? Was he hoping they would make an appeal to the United Nations? Was he expecting divine intervention?
That lays it out as clearly and well as I've ever seen it laid out.
Of course, if Trump did believe his lies that would have meant he was dangerously delusional and should not have been allowed to remain in the presidency due to that self-serving, or rather Trump-serving claim made by the media and by Republicans.
And that is true of the whole list of delusions that Trump would have had to be dangerously mentally impaired to have believed, including the effect that his words would have on his cult of fanatical followers. Clearly, as the House Managers pointed out, Trump had every reason to know what his words would incite in Washington, DC on January 6th because he knowingly and demonstrably incited some of the same Trumpzis to plot the attack on the Michigan Capital, the abduction of the Governor and her assassination, he clearly knew about that and other incidents which his words had incited, would be and attempted practice runs for what his cult did in Washington DC.
I don't buy for a second that that alleged judicial standard, that you have to demonstrate the state of mind of a liar to show that they knew they were lying, that their words would have the clearly intended effect that they would have, that you would have had to pretend that a result other than what had resulted from such language in the immediate weeks before something like the January 6th insurrection happened is a standard that is consistently applied in anything like a pose of objective equality.
I wonder why, for this, the old slogan "ignorance of the law is no excuse" is suspended so regularly for the likes of Trump, fo people in the government (though only some of them) and others who hold white-collar jobs of responsibility unwisely given to those prone to such delusion. Because that's what this standard is, it depends on something far more common and far less credibly believed than mere ignorance of statutes, though that as well. Allowing some of the most dangerous of crimes against domestic tranquility, the rule of law, the very basis of legitimate government off because of the allegedly less than lucid state of mind of the criminal. I am absolutely certain that it isn't a standard that would be applied to a poor criminal accused of far less consequential and dangerous crimes unrelated to their job and their position in society. I'm sure judges would have no problem ignoring their probable genuine ignorance of the law or their ignorance that what they did was wrong, mistaking the sometimes less obviously untrue lies they told for a sometimes less obvious truth. I have absolutely every confidence that if it were possible to tally cases in which this alleged standard of telepathic conviction or acquittal were appplied that People of Color, the poor, the disfavored, probably even white women would not be granted the lenient standard of phony-psychological dismissal of guilt that rich, well-educated, white men, especially those who are Republican office holders, are given by tradition, by habit and by the choice of those who are lying that they believe they didn't know exactly what they are doing.
It is one of the worse effects of the selling of the powerful elite on the lore and nonsense of psychology, that such uses of it as benefit the elite are allowed when it sets up an impossible burden of evidence demanded before the simple act of calling a liar a liar and stopping and punishing the most dangerous liars is permitted by the legal system or, as the abysmal impeachment and removal provisions of the Constitution puts in their power, by the Senate. That kind of an out will never be applied evenly, it will always be a permission to get away with murder given to those favored by the established power, that's literally what the Republicans under the Constitution did for Trump, he got away with murder.
I don't remember the name of the, I believe it was Washington Post writer who mocked a 1970s era Supreme Court ruling that dealt with the issue of the mind-set of journalists on some free-press issue. He said when he started there were two states of mind among journalists, drunk and unconscious. Dark humor over an issue of journalistic license to slander and libel, as I recall. But it wasn't that much different from the absurd notion that the law, what lawyers claim in courts, what judges instruct juries as to what they should and shouldn't consider, what Supreme Court "justices" use to give out privileges to lie and to defame or to hold others accountable for telling the truth, to claim that that can hinge on the unknowable mental state of a president who lies repeatedly, flagrantly obviously knowing what they are doing by lying is as dangerous as it is an invitation for the kind of use of it we saw in Saturday's infamous acquittal.
I don't have anything to say about sea shanties and Americans or Brits or, for that matter Canadians, Australians or New Zealanders singing them that's going to make you happy. Why do you want me to upset you?
"I thought the impeachment trial was not only unconstitutional, I condemn what happened on Jan. 6, but the process they used to impeach this president was an affront to rule of law," Graham opined. "We've opened Pandora's Box to future presidents."
Lindsay "Faghorn Laghorn" Graham
Sea shanties should be sung only by real sailors, at sea, on a boat where I am not. Other than that, I'm agin' 'em.
I was curious to look up what the name "van der Veen" means and was tickled at the aptness of it meaning "from the bog" in Dutch. Apparently it's a moderately common surname in the Netherlands. It's certainly appropriate to have Trump's ambulance chaser lawyer have it.
IF ANYONE ever dares to doubt brilliant, experienced, battle hardened but still graceful and eloquent, old Nancy Pelosi's status as sharper and more focused and more rational than just about anyone should have her impromptu appearance at the press opportunity with the House Managers yesterday pushed into their idiotic faces.
She had not intended to get in the way of the House Managers, she is nothing if not graceful and would only upstage them by compulsion by events. The House Managers under Jamie Raskin had just performed a five day virtuoso performance that will stand with any other such one at the top of such endeavors. Then Mitch McConnell did his vile, hypocritical act of trying to rescue his name and his fascist party from the ignominy of OKing seditious insurrection done by a president of his Republican-fascist party.*
It's not to take anything from Jamie Raskin and his team of spectacular prosecutors to focus on Nancy Pelosi, their names deserve to go down in history in honor for what they did, far, far higher in such status than the classical speeches of the Roman Senators or any made in classical Greece BECAUSE THEY WERE ARGUING FOR EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY WHILE EMBODYING THE PRINCIPLES OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRATIC MORALITY AND INTELLECTUAL EXCELLENCE IN THEIR VERY IDENTITIES.
Anyone who worships at the altar of classical political discourse while ignoring the fact that it is the yet developing sense of egalitarian democracy in which the highest moral and rational levels achieved, perhaps achievable by human beings is happening during our lifetimes, the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents. In American terms that was something which did not start until the abolitionist movement began among those held in slavery and who had escaped slavery, aided by, first a few not at risk individuals such as John Woolman and later, when the promises of the Declaration of Independence were reneged on by the Constitution, by increasing numbers of white abolitionists.
Everything that is admirable in the American nation is a product of the struggle for equality and justice for all against the aspects of the Constitution and the law which either promoted slavery and inequality or merely chose to leave things as they were in the 1780s, after the revolution had failed to achieve the equality promised. Nothing about our history or our present which resists or impedes the progress towards equality and justice for all is admirable, no matter how often those things are covered up with slogans of 'freedom' and, usually with worse intent, 'liberty'.
No evil thing that people do can rationally or morally be considered to be done by some "right," no, the ubiqutious misuse of language that expresses the granted liberty, the PRIVILEGE of doing wrong by some always comes at the cost of equality and justice for other people. There is no right to harm other people, there is no right to lie to them, to cheat them, to gull them into doing evil, themselves, those things are only considered as "rights" or "liberties" through the corrupt stupidity and often complicity of those who make and, especially, those who administer laws. The Supreme Court has pretty much for most of its history been the place where such privileges to the rich and powerful and male and white have been given out or confirmed, cemented into place with the force of Constitutional doctrine. But if it had not been there to start with, if the promises that Jefferson et al gulled common men into fighting a revolution for them with had been kept, the Supreme Court wouldn't have found what they did so much evil with for its entire history, it would not have been essential to go beyond the words of that document and its writers to get past the intentional evils embedded in it, many of the worst of those not reformed out of it in the centuries of coping under it and the growing unwillingness of those who were subjugated by it to remain subjugated.
One of the first brawls I remember getting into online was over the issue of the impeachment of Bush II and, especially, when lefty bloggers and their communities targeted Nancy Pelosi when she refused to go through the futile and pointless exercise of trying to impeach the illegitimate and criminal Bush II and his Regent, Dick Cheney. She knew what I had come to believe was true, that impeachment as a means of removing even the most criminal president is a Constitutional fiction, it was never going to happen. I remember one of the most bitter parts of that long, ongoing brawl at the baby blue blog was when I slammed not only Edward and Caroline Kennedy for giving Gerald Ford the "Profiles In Courage" award for the purely evil act of him pardoning Nixon, but I also did the unforgivable, I slammed JFK for giving Edmund Gibson Ross as a "profile in courage" for his likely bribed vote to acquit Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial. JFK, a president who has done nothing but sink in my esteem, the more I learn about him, and, I suspect, his daughter and brother cared more about "the stature of the presidency" than they did the fact that Andrew Johnson was an eminently impeachable and terrible president. The presidency, especially through holding up presidents in the way Kennedy promoted during his administration, has not suffered from a realistic view of presidents as voluntary servants of The People, properly held as great only to the extent to which they serve ALL of The People, equally, promoting and extending democracy, the common good and general welfare of all.
The corrupt Republican-fascist presidencies of the 21st century, the current corruption by lies in the permission given to the media to lie with impunity, have brought all of the evils extant in the Constitution to their head. All of the skills for the evil to exploit those, all of the legalistic arguments allowing them to do that have been perfected and extended - the use of computers has aided in that to a degree where either egalitarian democracy addresses those EXACTLY IN TERMS THAT REMOVE PERMISSION TO DO EVIL FROM THE CATEGORY OF CONSTITUTIONALLY PROTECTED RIGHTS OR EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY WILL DIE AS A RESULT OF SUCH "RIGHTS".
That is the lesson of the failed impeachments of the most criminal president who has not brought an illegal war about have as lessons for us all. He came to power on the power of mass media told lies, lies told by him amplified by TV, cabloid TV, hate-talk radio and social-disease media. Anyone who holds on February 14th 2021 that we can allow the old ACLU- "Civil Liberties" lines on the right to lie to continue is, in fact, a tool of Repubican-fascists if not a fascist themselves. We make that stand against lies and hate talk now or we should just give up and let the fascists take over now. The sooner we do that the sooner the terrible, bloody civil war that will come from that is fought and we know if government of, by and for THE PEOPLE perishes from the Earth to be replaced by government by gangsters of the kind which the Republican-fascists of the Senate acquitted yesterday.
Little noticed while this was going on President Joe Biden asked for the resignation of almost all of the U.S. Attorneys for their resignation except two, those two were assigned by the previous corrupt "Justice" Department to investigate the Obama Administration's investigation into election rigging, and so Joe Biden when he was Vice President and the one assigned to go looking for dirt on Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden. I think Joe Biden shows every sign of being a greater president than the only previous Irish Catholic president, JFK. He already has every Republican president after Eisenhower topped in that category. Not that I trust the damned journalistic profession to come close to noticing.