Saturday, October 2, 2021

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Annabell Wilson - No Science To Goodbye

 

No Science To Goodbye 

 

It's been a long time since I posted something from Radio New Zealand, I figured I'd sample their archive again.   This verse drama inevitably reminds me of Under Milk Wood, though less nostalgic and edgier. (I wonder if the links from the time I posted that still work).  

Here's what the website says:

Elsie is a tempestuous young expat who returns to Wanaka from Berlin to look after her terminally ill brother, Sam. She runs into her former lover Frank who is now a glaciologist – a coolly logical and rational scientist. The ensuing complications push them to the torn edges of love, loss, risk.

The Southern Alps are as rugged and complex and as painfully beautiful as the relationships that form and melt under their gaze.

Written by Annabel Wilson

Directed by KJ Smith

Soundscape by Cory Champion

For RNZ -  Recording director    Adam Macaulay           Sound engineer    Darryl Stack

One Of The Things I Love Most About Jen Psaki Is How Her Sense Of Journalistic Responsibility Is So Much Higher Than The Vaunted DC Press Corps

 

 

DIRECT LINK TO THE YOUTUBE 

(Let me know how it works.) 

These asses are a really good example of what I mocked earlier as the "it's being said" standard of journalists being lazy, sloppy, irresponsible, dishonest and, when it's  Ms. Psaki they try it with, incredibly and repeatedly stupid.  All she had to do to make this guy demonstrate he's incompetent and blitheringly so is to ask him to identify who he alleged to be paraphrasing.

The First Amendment rulings of the past sixty years have not only made the press more dishonest, it's made them stupider and lazier.  Though TV was bound to have that effect without requirements to prevent that.

Will Bunch On The Source Of The Sewage Blocking Democracy From Happening

WILL BUNCH, in his September 28th column says everything I did except he doesn't trace the corruption back to its source in the line of First Amendment decisions that start with the Sullivan Decision in 1964, through Buckley v Valeo of 1976, through the other decisions gutting and destroying the campaign finance reform and other clean government laws passed in witness of the criminality of Nixon and others and on to the even worse decisions, the Supreme Court enabling the corruption of our politics and handing over power to billionaires domestic, certainly as they always seem to end up doing, but also foreign as they were warned would be one of the consequences of Citizens United, a consequence which became reality in the 2016 election that gave us Trump.  Here's how he starts: 

It sounds bizarre, but a $1,117.40 summer internship at a vineyard in the heart of California wine country may prove the ultimate saga in how Big Money has permanently broken American politics. It was as seen on TV this past week in Washington, where squabbling Democrats and an obstructionist GOP is showing the middle class why we can’t have nice things.

The eager worker who showed up during the coronavirus summer of 2020 was no ordinary summer intern, but a then-44-year-old United States senator: Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. That Sinema (who makes $174,000 a year at her day job) would spend a week picking and maybe stomping on grapes in Napa Valley for some pocket change actually isn’t totally shocking for the Senate’s most iconoclastic member — atheist and bisexual with a defiant openness, and a marathoner with a Ph.D. in justice.

What’s more noteworthy is who was hosting Sinema and paying her four-figure intern salary during that wine-soaked summer: Billionaire Bill Price, who not only owns the Three Sticks winery in Sonoma but also co-founded one of America’s most lucrative private-equity funds, TPG Capital. At the end of her internship, Price did something worth more than his intern’s modest paycheck: He hosted a $5,000-a-ticket fundraiser that benefited both the Arizona senator’s campaign but also a PAC that supports a gaggle of centrist — i.e., anti-progressive — Democrats on Capitol Hill. The Intercept reported that the vineyard fundraiser was a key stop on a Sinema summer 2020 tour that netted campaign cash from Price, his TPG Capital associates, and Silicon Valley legends like billionaire Bill Gates.

You should read the rest of it because he is one of the stronger journalistic takes on this and he almost gets to the root of the matter of not only Sinema's but the other "centrist Democrats" doing Republican's bidding.   But don't expect a journalist is going to get you to the real source of it.

Will Bunch is a professional journalist, if a real one and a good one, but professional journalists and the corporate entities and individuals who hire them have an interest in what Sullivan allowed the press, impunity from having to be careful not to lie in a way so as to defame politicians.  The First Amendment rulings of the court gave them other things which are profitable to the media and privileges which people who work for the media find both profitable and pleasurable.  It's a pain in the neck to have to fact check and verify and do the hard work of being a reporter who has to sift falsehood from truth, planted lies from hidden truths, etc.  It is so much easier to go with the NPR-NYT style "it's being said" approach to creating ersatz reporting in which they can report lies and not bother with verification.  I think Bunch is more careful than that but he certainly knows that if he did what I've done here, slam the corruption of our politics at its real source, the real corruption of our politics from the creation of the Constitution by slave-owners and financiers in ways that would benefit them and, especially in this, the corrupt pseudo-scientific 18th century "enlightenment" refusal of the First Amendment to make a distinction between the absolute right and moral obligation to tell the truth and that there is absolutely no right to tell a lie for an individual, one who has natural God-given rights and corporate entities like the media which are human creations without real rights but which were given privileges by the very un-godlike First Congress.  I fully believe that it was that declaring that there was a moral obligation to tell the truth and one to not lie that was at the heart of the reluctance of the "framers" to include that obvious truth.  It wasn't fashionable in the world of the 18th century "enlightened" to admit that there were such things and, beside that, as today, if "the law" can put aside questions of moral obligation it's so much easier to turn it into the tool of self-interest that the present Court is making it and people of their class. 

I will say that in regard to Kyrsten Sinema Bunch implies something that I have thought about and that's the relationship between her CFI honored atheism and her seeming to believe that there is no such thing as a real and durable moral obligation, not even one that would have formerly fallen under the debased imitation of that as a "gentleman's agreement."   I do have to wonder if she isn't an embodiment of what I have so controversially said here before, playing off of Dostoevsky's observation that if there is no God then nothing is impermissible.  There is no logical, mathematical or scientific assertion that would give morality any durable or enduring status as reality, it has to have the conviction of belief to become real in almost anyone's life.  I am and have always been open to a rational or scientific argument that would prove that assertion wrong though I have never had one made to me which I couldn't demolish, and I'm no pro at doing that, atheists do it all the time.

However,  that assertion within this would easily be countered by pointing to the other "centrist Democrats" and ALL OF THE REPUBLICANS who do the kind of evil that Sinema is now engaged in, ALMOST ALL OF THEM PROFESSED CHRISTIANS perhaps with a few professed Jews thrown in.  I can say that I don't buy their profession of belief in the Gospel or The Law anymore than I do a prosperity gospel hallelujah peddler or any other pseudo-Christian fraud or corrupt cult leader rabbis who prosper under the idiotic inspecificity and so pretended judicial stupidity of the First Amendment.

But her atheism isn't the entire explanation of her corruption.

There are three or four officially non-affiliated Democrats and one Buddhist in the Senate (at least two of whom I would vote for president at the drop of a hat) who not only seem to find but also demonstrate their belief in durable moral obligations of the kind that Sinema certainly doesn't believe in anymore than she believed in her former political stands as a Green, an independent and, as opportunity made it convenient to her, an ersatz Democrat.  I don't question the demonstrated fidelity of those unaffiliated Democrats or the great Mazie Hirono BECAUSE THEIR ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN ANY WORDS COULD.   Sinema could demonstrate the same thing if she chose to but, obviously, she doesn't care about that. 

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

While I have every confidence that saving Democracy, even it it passed and was signed into law by President Biden, would be destroyed by the goddamned Supreme Court as it has destroyed everything from clean elections legislation to the greatest law passed in the United States in the 20th century, the Voting Rights Act, we can't test that because a reputed atheist and a reputed Catholic (yeah, I was surprised to find out Manchin is officially one of those) are blocking it in the face of the worst anti-voter crime wave in the history of the country

In fact, if the two intertwined infrastructure bills implode this autumn, or if the pro-middle-class measure shrinks to the level of triviality, the failure won’t really be on the legislation itself, but rather the failure of Congress to enact a different measure: The For the People Act that aimed to take a whack at money in politics. Although it wouldn’t have eliminated the power of campaign cash altogether, the bill — which narrowly passed the House with only Democratic votes in March — includes several giant steps to clean up our campaign-finance mess, including a ban on untraceable, massive “dark money” donations.

The For the People Act — at least its most progressive, un-neutered version — is going nowhere in the Senate, blocked by a Republican-led filibuster. As a result of this, as well as stalled voting-rights legislation, a growing number of Democrats are willing to break with 200 years of warped precedent and either fully or at least partially kill the filibuster. Again, all 50 Democrats would need to be on board. Again, two of them are rigidly opposed to progress.

The goddamned Senate, the most anti-democratic entity in the government other than the goddamned Supreme Court are the roadblock to egalitarian democracy and for corrupt oligarchy that Madison, Hamilton, Jay, etc. intended it to be.  That's something I doubt you'll ever hear from a professional journalist but I'm going to keep saying it as long as it's true and it always will be.  Democracy shouldn't be so hard to save as the Senate, the Supreme Court and, ultimately the friggin' slave-owner-financier "founders" intentionally made it to be.

Friday, October 1, 2021

Careful, Simps

THE PROTECTION that the idiot Supreme Court gave bloggers such as Duncan Black from being answerable when they carry the libelous comments of others such as you may not  extend to the owner of a blog libeling someone on their own blog.   You might want to keep that in mind though I doubt your pockets are deep enough to go after.   If I suddenly were to be in funds, though. 

What's the matter, you not getting enough attention at Duncan's idea of an Athenæum of the arthritic, frenetic, and neurotic?   Actually, that's your ideas for yourselves, to Duncan, I suspect, you're a bit of spare change.

Hate Mail - I Have No Interest In Returning To A Past, Especially Not That Of Secular Liberalism Of The 1950s Till Today. We Move Forward Based On Experience Or Democracy Is Dead

BEEN A LITTLE BIT SICK this week, it's been pretty stressful with a significant family crisis.  But that's done.  

I don't feel in the least bit inhibited from my criticism of secularism, especially in the typical materialistic forms of it, the allegedly intellectual and the obviously vulgar forms which I ceased mistaking for two separate entities quite a while back.

I think the arguments I made for the disaster that "enlightenment" 18th century scientistic materialism being embedded in such abominations as the slave-power enhancing aspects of the Constitution, those which were partially, merely legally overturned in the Civil War Amendments and those which are retained, the anti-democratically constituted Senate, the abominable Electoral College and some other terrible things such as the life-time appointments to the Supreme Court, appointed by the President and confirmed, not by the most democratically constituted House of Representatives by by the anti-democratically constituted Senate, the various inadequacies of the so-called Bill of Rights, reluctantly taken up because Madison was forced into that in order to talk the Virginia legislature into adopting his Constitution, all of those are products of the materialism and naive scientism of the mythic and fabled "founders" and, as can be seen in the Senate this week, the goddamned Supreme Court in its shadow docket overturning of Roe a few weeks back, those are still very, very much with us.  I think in its real life as opposed to merely quasi-fictitious legalistic form, we're not entirely shut of chattel slavery anywhere near as much as we are coerced to pretend we are. 

I didn't make any secret of what I am, I am a thought criminal, I think forbidden things and I say forbidden things.  I don't do that out of desire to shock or to be naughty, I do it because the thoughts of the past have proven to be a disaster, especially those of the secular "elightenment" lefties.   I have a few absolute, basic stands that all others must rest on, absolute equality under the law, economic justice, social justice, that no one should be allowed by the merely civil law to do unto others that which they would not have done unto them - the basis of the real LAW and the Prophets.  If I ever violate those I want it pointed out to me because I really believe those things are real, I will not entertain any political, social, legal or scientific violation of them because observation and analysis of real life have convinced me those are true and that nothing good comes out of denying them or failing to put them into practice. 

I would note that while I am fully prepared to accept anything that mathematical logic or carefully done, validly conducted science tells us about the material universe and carefully done life sciences, I have never met even the mildest mannered, most reasonable-seeming materialist who will ever really respect anything which challenges their ideology which, at its basis, cannot seem to have the same kind of foundation in observation.  That is especially true of those of us who make rigorous and careful criticism of the ubiquitous ideological and preferential pollution of what is held up as pure science.    I have pointed out before that the philosopher of science and one of its more exigent critics of the last century, Paul Feyerabend, noted that in many ways even medieval scholastics were more open to no-holds-barred discussion of things than much of modern scientism and materialism.  I have found few main-stream theologians of today who are more close-minded than so many of the self-declared "free thinkers" who won't entertain the concept that our minds can be free of material causation so their self-declared "free-thought" must be delusional and their claim to it discrediting.   

I find it is one of the more constant experiences I've had in the years I've been doing this that whenever I give a charitably extended benefit of the doubt to a materialist that that they will prove that benefit so extended was futile.  There is no more rigid and unyielding ideology except, perhaps, the related ones of vulgar materialism founded in secular, civil law, here in "Constitution" talk.

That's enough "I's."  

Wednesday, September 29, 2021

Hate Mail From Over The Past Two Days

NO, NO, NOT AT ALL.  What I posted this morning is the opposite of a "conservative" view, it's the opposite of a libertarian-"liberal" bullshit "classical liberal" view of things, it is as radical as the economic justice of Moses and aspires to the even more radical commonwealth of Jesus which is more radical than any Marxism or secular socialism ever was and ever has been.  It is more radical than the Constitution, though I will admit is is as radical as the declaration of the Declaration that "all men (PEOPLE) are created equal" and endowed with permanent, durable and real rights by God.  

This is far to the left of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, it might even be to the left of AOC, though she, and I share the same ultimate source of this thinking. It's far to the left of the ACLU who can't admit to the origins of the corruption that their old-guard helped to create through their libertarian-"liberal" positions adopted by the Warren Court and quickly adopted by Republican-fascists as they realized that the quaint anti-porn blue stockings who voted Republican wouldn't get them nearly the same bang for the buck as going for the big money and the media that could get them.  I think that Rupert Murdoch became rich off of porn, titty photos on page 3 being his leading edge proves what a retrogression that that "free speech-press" obsession of libertarian-"liberalism" always was.   You'd think treating women like objects for use might have clued them in on that one, but, then, they always cared more for words and pictures than they ever did the actual lives of people who could be ground up by the industries and the "rights" of corporate entities and thugs they championed.   

Seeing anyone treating People as objects, like commodities as "freedom" is and always has been utterly depraved and leads to depravity.  ANYTHING THAT REFUSES TO DO THAT ON AN EQUAL BASIS IS AS RADICAL AS THE ECONOMIC JUSTICE OF MOSES AND THE COMMONWEALTH OF JESUS, whether it is done by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. or even atheists is absolutely radical, refusing to see animals that way is even more radical than that.  And the equality of that is as necessary to the result as the good will in it.  The worst of dictators have no problem with asserting THEIR rights, the worst white supremacists have no problem with asserting theirs, even the imaginary rights of them to use those rights to destroy the rights and lives of People of Color, male supremacists to destroy the rights and lives of Women, etc.

Secular "Virtue" As The Source Of Corruption

ALL OF THE CORRUPTION in Washington today, the fact that it is two ersatz Democrats who are holding up a bill which polls as being hugely popular with the American People, virtually all of their own party, even within their two conservative states, hugely popular at least in part with virtually all non-Republican-fascists is due to the interpretation of the Free Speech-Press provisions of the First Amendment that I spent the end of last week and the beginning of this week slamming.

If the campaign finance reform laws overturned by the unelected, appointed, Supreme Court  and passed by those mythically virtuous bi-partisan majorities in Congress and signed by even Republican presidents, Gerald Ford being forced by the corruption already endemic in the Republican Party and his predecessors outrageous corruption into signing, none of this would have happened as it did.  That was the bill that the Supreme Court overturned two years later in 1976 in Buckley v Valeo.  A case brought by the crypto-fascist brother of William F. Buckley who, in the 1950s and perhaps beyond, supported the suppression of Black Voters in the South because they would elect people to represent them and they wouldn't be conservative Republicans.  

Sinema, Manchin and all of the Republicans rely on the corrupt money they can raise in the wake of the slew of "First Amendment" cases in which the Supreme Court created a right to lie about politicians, made money the same thing as speech (giving a billionaire billions of times more speech than someone with nothing) and otherwise overturned laws the better for them to allow unbridled corruption in our politics in the name of ersatz, secular, "virtue".  If they couldn't reliably rely on TV, radio, internet and, even the quaint form of print lies and propaganda to sucker enough voters to vote for them, they would never feel so comfortable in hindering what the voters in their own states want and would find they wanted if they experienced it.  As they did in the American Care Act, which the Supreme Court nearly destroyed in full even as Roberts forced its crippling in that goddamned Court. 

All of the corruption in Washington has become worse since the First Amendment became the tool of the fools on the Warren Court to unleash the money fed lie machine of the media and the fools and thugs on the Berger Court, the mostly thugs on the Rehnquist and Roberts Court to produce the level of corruption that gave us Trump and is giving cover for two Conservative Democrats who are doing what the Senate has been so good for, thwarting the will of the American People on behalf of wealthy funders of THEM. 

All of that flows directly out of the huge holes and gaps in the inspecific language of the First Amendment, which makes no distinction between the absolute right to tell the truth and that there is no right to lie and there never has been.   

The notion of there being a "right to lie" is so daft that its creation must have come from the fallibility and corruption of fallen humans because God certainly didn't endow us with a right to lie.  It is so stupid that I doubt it could pass a serious and honest analysis as a rational proposition and the experience of real life as opposed to law-scholar manipulation of words to achieve a corrupt end proves what terrible results come from it.  

The Covid denialism which is killing tens and scores and thousands and, if science had been unable to find even the viral fixes they have so far managed, could very well be killing millions soon is a product of the First Amendment and the Supreme Court creation of a right to lie within it.  That is a product of the modernism of figures such as Holmes and the members of the ACLU who would probably scoff at my point that, as the Declaration of Independence says, people are endowed with rights by God.  

 I can well imagine lots of them, secularists, post-religion types, perhaps even Bert Neuborne would believe that all of this is a manifestation of physical processes and any imposition of values on the truth as opposed to lies is merely an expression of societal consensus - you wonder why the desire of a large majority to have clean elections and honest government and things like universal healthcare, universal vaccination and the Build Back Better bill don't figure in those things are allowed to be made real without the opposition of these true believers in the banal power of social consensus.   Of course any notion of God should be kept out of it, though the friggin' founders in the contract with the world and the people they wanted to fight their revolution, the Declaration of Independence, correctly noted that rights in any durable conception cannot be anything but an endowment from God.  Even a "social consensus" on that count would depend on the society believing that.

I don't think that the sciency desire to keep questions of morality out of it, as someone like the patron saint of free speech-press absolutism, Holmes did, is ever going to produce anything but the kind of clash of sides he loved to think the Law should produce, the strongest winning out against the weaker ones.  He was truly a depraved human being because he believed in nothing but the late Victorian science he read.  Amorality in a Supreme Court justice will turn into them doing whatever they want to do, which is another of the enormous problems with the self-created power of Supreme Court review of laws adopted by Congress and signed by an elected Executive.  I think we have a depravity majority court and the real history of that unelected branch seldom has anything but that on it.   As they take their excuses for maintaining the privilege of the privileged, protecting their wealth and power and power to destroy from the Constitution, its language and, sometimes, even its meaning a no-holds-barred critique of that document, its language INCLUDING THE IDOLIZED BILL OF RIGHTS is not only permissible but essential.  Changing it is, I assert, necessary if we are ever to have egalitarian democracy and all of the good things that a majority wants but a minority of scumbags can thwart through the slave-owner protection features intentionally embedded by them in the structures and words elevated by the Constitution.

 


Monday, September 27, 2021

Tadd Dameron Sextet with Fats Navarro - Lady Bird

 

 

Tadd Dameron Sextet (New York: September 13, 1948) Fats Navarro (tp); Wardell Gray, Allen Eager (ts); Tadd Dameron (p); Curly Russell (b); Kenny Clarke (d)

Someone asked me the "who's your favorite" question about music the other day.  I told them whoever I'm hearing that I like at the time.   Though I think Fats Navarro might be a good candidate to be my favorite trumpet player.  At least he is when I'm listening to him.

Orrin Evans - Wheel Within A Wheel

 

 

Beattitudes 


Orrin Evans - piano
Luques Curtis - bass
Nasheet Waits - drums
Rocky Bryant - drums
Gene Jackson - drums

Had A Few Minutes So I Typed Out Fr. Jack Lynch's Short Sermon

HAD A FEW MINUTES so I transcribed this, Fr. Jack Lynch's excellent sermon from yesterday's Daily TV Mass from outside of Toronto.

I would say this text from the Gospel of Mark* is most enlightening. The disciples report something which bothered them very much. An  unknown person was expelling demons and this behavior is an intrusion into their work and mission because he wasn't one of them.  And Jesus reproaches them and shows how radically different his thinking is to theirs. The first and most important thing is not the growth in the prestige of this small group but rather that God's grace should reach every human being even through people who don't belong to the group. Jesus rejects the sectarian and exclusive policy of his disciples and adopts an open and inclusive attitude in which the important thing is to free people.  Free people from what dehumanizes them and makes them feel unhappy. That is the Spirit that must always animate us and the disciples.  The doors of this new Temple, which is Jesus, are open to all. No one is excluded. Sinners, the unclean, even non-believers.  The God who lives in Jesus belongs to all and is for all.  

Paul's description of the Church as the one body of Christ in which there is no longer distinction between Jews and Christians, Jews and gentiles, slave or free, should continue to inspire our work for all-inclusiveness within the church and in the world. I like to recall the words of Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury who said, "Mission is finding out where the Spirit is at work and then joining in." 

The Spirit is present in our world in other Peoples' cultures and religions and other efforts for Justice.  Where the Spirit of God is at work, we are to join in. And as Pope Francis reminds us, we do so with the joy of the Gospel.  In his encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis expressed a concern and a hope that remains uppermost in his thoughts. 

And he writes, "Once this health crisis passes, our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation. God willing, after all this we will no longer think in terms of "them and those" but only "us". "For this reason," - these are Francis's words, "I wish to devote the message for tomorrow's celebration of the World Day of Migrants and Refugees to the theme Toward an Ever Wider We. In order to indicate a clearer horizon for our journey in this world.  That horizon is already present. God created us male and female, different but complementary in order to form a We destined to become even more numerous in the succession of generations. God created us in his image, in the image of his own triune being, a communion in diversity."  

And Pope Francis offers this prayer in his reflection, "Holy beloved Father Your Son Jesus taught us that there's great rejoicing in heaven when someone lost is found, when someone excluded or rejected or discarded is gathered into our We, which thus becomes ever wider. We ask you to grant the followers of Jesus and all People of good will the grace to do Your will on Earth, bless each act of welcome and outreach that draws those in exile into the We of community and of the Church so our Earth may truly become what You, Yourself created it to be, the common home of all our Brothers and Sisters, Amen." 

I can say from my experience as an LGBTQ man that hearing that use made of that line from Genesis so often thrown up by those who want to oppress and discriminate against us used by Pope Francis and Fr. Lynch for the very opposite purpose of inclusion in diversity was enormously appreciated.  I'd thought of typing out this sermon before I heard that passage and that is what made me take the time to do it today, for today's celebration of "them and those" who they insist it is our obligation to include as We instead of waiting till time wasn't so pressing.   I can't help but point out that Pope Francis, so devoted to Franciscan thinking must have included the animals, the Earth and Creation, itself as "our Brothers and Sisters."  I will note that the capitalization is mine, I don't know if they wrote it out the same way. 

*  From Mark: 9:38-43, 45, 47-48

At that time, John said to Jesus,
"Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name,
and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us."
Jesus replied, "Do not prevent him.
There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name
who can at the same time speak ill of me.
For whoever is not against us is for us.
Anyone who gives you a cup of water to drink
because you belong to Christ, 
amen, I say to you, will surely not lose his reward.

"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,
it would be better for him if a great millstone
were put around his neck
and he were thrown into the sea.
If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off.
It is better for you to enter into life maimed
than with two hands to go into Gehenna,
into the unquenchable fire.
And if your foot causes you to sin, cut if off.
It is better for you to enter into life crippled
than with two feet to be thrown into Gehenna.
And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.
Better for you to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye
than with two eyes to be thrown into Gehenna,
where 'their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.'"

I'd point out that the first reading from yesterday's liturgy was from Numbers 11:25-29 which attributed the same kind of universalist thinking to Moses.

 25 Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him. He took some of the spirit he had given to Moses and gave it to the seventy leaders. When the spirit came on them, they began to shout like prophets, but not for long.

26 Two of the seventy leaders, Eldad and Medad, had stayed in the camp and had not gone out to the Tent. There in the camp the spirit came on them, and they too began to shout like prophets. 27 A young man ran out to tell Moses what Eldad and Medad were doing.

28 Then Joshua son of Nun, who had been Moses' helper since he was a young man, spoke up and said to Moses, “Stop them, sir!”

29 Moses answered, “Are you concerned about my interests? I wish that the Lord would give his spirit to all his people and make all of them shout like prophets!” 

Good News Version  

 

Sunday, September 26, 2021

Bud Powell Trio - Off Minor


  

Piano: Bud Powell,

Bass: Curly Russell, 

Drums: Max Roach

Somebody Loves Me  

 


 

 

A Short Index Of These Posts Dissecting Stephen Rohde's Take-down of Bert Neuborne

SOMEONE WHO READ  my morning posts is confused as to why I refer to the late "justice" William Brennan in it "out of nowhere".  If I'd posted the entire four posts as one they would have seen he is important as the author of the Sullivan decision, quoted by Stephen Rohde earlier in his piece.  But, if I'd posted the whole thing as one post it would be so long no one would have read it to the end.   Here are the links to the various parts of it.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4 

And here is the requested general explanation of what I was getting at.

How Much Do You Want To Wager That It Can't Happen Here When It's Already Happening Here?

THIS IS THE LAST PART of my examination of two ACLU's lawyers' dishonest and hypocritical assertions about the First Amendment deals with some of the most serious dangers of their free-speech-press absolute absolutism and revised absolutism on the topic.

Elsewhere in his book, Neuborne contradicts himself. He applauds Madison for understanding that

the habits of thought that enable free people to govern themselves justly and well — respect for individual dignity, a healthy sense of self-worth, curiosity about and respect for others, skepticism about absolutes, toleration of disagreement, and openness to change — cannot thrive without a steady flow of unfiltered information, ideas, and opinions about art, philosophy, literature, science, technology, history, ethics, economics, psychology, sociology, sex, leisure, and business.


But then he argues that “unwilling hearers” should be shielded from “false, offensive, denigrating, or even frightening speech.” He seems oblivious to the fact that one person’s “ideas and opinions” on that list of everything from art to business might be thought to be “false, offensive, denigrating, or even frightening” to someone, somewhere, thereby allowing the government Neuborne is so willing to trust to impose restrictions and limitations.


How dishonestly these "civil libertarians" frame the problem.

THE PROBLEM OF MALIGNANT SPEECH ISN'T THE "UNWILLING HEARERS" OF IT FINDING IT OFFENSIVE IT IS THE ENTIRELY WILLING AND SUSCEPTIBLE HEARERS OF IT FINDING IT WELCOMED AND AN ENCOURAGMENT TO ACT ACCORDINGLY.  For Neuborne and Rohde and others to not understand that is the central idiocy of their position, which Neuborne, even in the face of the dangers his former orthodoxy brought, can't really bring himself to abandon.  

 The problem of lynching was not a problem of those being unwilling to hear the lies and racism and whipping up of the lynch mob, it was the problem of those who wanted to believe it hearing it.  The problem of a man who encouraged by pornography feels entitled to rape, torture, murder or merely intimidate women is not a problem of those who find what they do repugnant and offensive.  It is the central idiocy of the orthodoxy of "free speech-press" that answers it "if you don't like it you can turn it off" which does nothing to stop the acts of those who do like it and who seek out what instructs and encourages and "justifies" what they want to do, anyway.  It is not those who accept the scientific validity of virology and vaccine production turning off the anti-vaxxers and Republican-fascist liars that has produced the catastrophe of the pandemic of the unvaccinated.  This line of ACLU-"civil libertarian" lies follows on the Sullivan Decision practice of putting the responsibility for things in the wrong place, identifying the problem as merely one of taste and preference instead of as lies and truth, lies that kill and the truth that saves life.

As just one example, Neuborne complains that “Holocaust survivors living in Skokie, a largely Jewish suburb of Chicago, had no right to be shielded from Nazi marchers who chose to display swastikas and other Nazi regalia in the Jewish suburb precisely because the symbols would upset the elderly Jewish victims.” The most compelling refutation to Neuborne’s position on Skokie and indeed to his entire project of limiting free expression in the name of protecting “unwilling hearers” was made by Aryeh Neier, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, who was born in Nazi Germany and became a refugee when his family fled in 1939 when he was two years old. He was national director of the ACLU at the time of the Skokie controversy. What he wrote on this question in his book Defending My Enemy: American Nazis, the Skokie Case, and the Risks of Freedom (1979) is worth quoting in full:

Because we Jews are uniquely vulnerable, I believe we can win only brief respite from persecution in a society in which encounters are settled by power. As a Jew, therefore, concerned with my own survival and the survival of the Jews — the two being inextricably linked — I want restraints placed on power. The restraints that matter most to me are those which ensure that I cannot be squashed by power, unnoticed by the rest of the world. If I am in danger, I want to cry out to my fellow Jews and to all those I may be able to enlist as my allies. I want to appeal to the world’s sense of justice. I want restraints which prohibit those in power from interfering with my right to speak, my right to publish, or my right to gather with others who also feel threatened. Those in power must not be allowed to prevent us from assembling and joining our voices together so we can speak louder and make sure that we are heard. To defend myself, I must restrain power with freedom, even if the temporary beneficiaries are the enemies of freedom.

Neier’s powerful and compassionate comments reflect the words of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in its decision in Collin v. Smith, upholding the right of the Nazis to march in Skokie:


Our task here is to decide whether the First Amendment protects the activity in which appellees wish to engage, not to render moral judgment on their views or tactics. No authorities need be cited to establish the proposition, which the Village does not dispute, that First Amendment rights are truly precious and fundamental to our national life. Nor is this truth without relevance to the saddening historical images this case inevitably arouses. It is, after all, in part the fact that our constitutional system protects minorities unpopular at a particular time or place from governmental harassment and intimidation, that distinguishes life in this country from life under the Third Reich.


Neier's and Rohde's position only makes sense if they believe to an unavailable and unattainable level of certainty that it can't happen here.  It is a gamble that Nazis, under that name or any other, could not do a re-run of the Shoah, murdering millions, if they did not pretend that it is impossible here, their position would not only be transparently dishonest it would obviously be insanely pathological.  It has been my experience in arguing this that American civil libertarian ideologues insist that the German prohibition of Holocaust denial and Nazi propaganda is a terrible wrong and, in fact, even as the bodies in Rwanda were being counted that William Jefferson Clinton's administration were right to not bomb the radio tower that the genocidalists used to instruct the killers on where their victims were to be found.  It is a supreme example of amorality in principle turning into the most obvious immorality in practice.  

And I do mean that. And I do think it is held, by them, because they have every belief that, for them, it can't happen here.  At least for them and their loved ones.  They, highly college-credentialed members of the allegedly thinking class certainly can't be unaware that it does happen here for other people.

For anyone even in 2015 to hold the position that we were secure in knowing it could not happen here is to ignore reality on and surpassing the refusal of reality of today's anti-vaxxer-so-pro-Covid virus crack pots.  And doing so while practicing lawyers.

We know it can happen here because it has happened here, for Native Americans, for Black People, for Women who have been under a reign of lynching terror (an average of four women a day, so lynched) so long that it just seems like part of natural gender roles. Any lawyer who is Native American, Black, Brown, Asian a Woman who has adopted this insane notion that it can't happen here even as that is the actual history of the United States AND ITS LIVED REALITY NOW has habituated themselves to the orthodoxy of the legal profession and the culture of Constitutional lore of their profession. 

And it has happened for briefer periods for other groups throughout our history. If things were now as they were in the 19th century, I'd have included Irish Catholics in that list above, but I doubt it is ever going to be the kind of danger that it, indeed, may be for Jews here, though it has not been in our history.  

One of the effects of Nazism being expressed freely is that it has inserted the insane pathology of biological hatred of Jews into the imagination of the susceptible population where it will likely remain as long as there are those susceptible to it in the population.  I would bet that danger has grown since the Nazi period, here as well as elsewhere where it was previously rare due to the speech of Nazis introducing it into the cultural history of fascism.  They found fertile ground among the indigenous American fascists such as those who the ACLU have championed, the KKK, in particular.  A terrorist group which was revived through the speech of the movie The Birth of a Nation, a terrorist group whose primary target was Black People but, also, Catholics and Jews, though ALMOST never with the same violence and to same extent.

If William Brennan were not confident that the levels of discrimination and violence against Irish and other Catholics had not permanently subsided from that of the 18th and 19th century, if Irish Americans faced an increase instead of a decrease of violence due to the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic rhetoric that led to that violence during his time, I doubt he would have said what he did.*  If he believed what he said in the face of that reality it would be almost as stupid as a Jewish lawyer asserting the Nazis right of free speech in 1935 Germany.  Though, since some American lawyers were opposed to holding them responsible at Nuremberg after the war,** never suspect there is a limit to lawyers, judges and "justices" and so the law's stupidity.  We face that stupidity all the time, now, we should not tolerate this as an unchallenged orthodoxy in this case.

If judges and "justices" are as incompetent as those like Brennan assert to judge between clear lies and truths, speech which advocates everything from discrimination against People of Color, Women, LGBTQ people, etc. to mass murder as opposed to equal justice under the law then they are too stupid to be judges and "justices" and have no business ruling on such matters.

Now, with the ascendancy of neo-Nazism which, along with its associated fascist ideologies, dominates one of our two real political parties, one which could take control of the government in less than five years, ONE WHICH RULES THE SUPREME COURT, NOW, anyone who figures it can't happen here and now FOR THEM AND THEIR LOVED ONES is worse than an idiot, they are a willing and entirely informed  idiot. I think if any of them hold that allowing Nazis, white supremacists, etc. the freedom to lie us into fascism it is done so only on the basis of an idiotic belief that they and theirs are not the ones put at risk in their gamble done on behalf of media corporations, pornographers, etc. who have lots of money and pay them for their willful and dishonest assertions.

Given Neuborne’s illustrious career as a civil liberties lawyer and all the battles he has fought to protect the First Amendment, it is distressing that he has turned his back on these fundamental principles and instead has devoted his considerable skills and rhetorical gifts to writing a book undermining what Justice Brennan called a “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” Inevitably, enemies of the First Amendment will relish citing Neuborne’s book in future cases to convince courts to limit or restrict freedom of expression.

Something tells me that if any of these ACLU figures were aware of the arguments I have made her they would not like it being said at all. Never mind it being expressed with the list of manly sounding virtues previously noted. Especially my criticism of the ACLU and its sordid history of enabling some of our most violent racists, pornographers, etc.  I don't think they'd welcome the "robust, wide-open, etc." aspect of it, it has certainly been my experience in making these arguments that one of the things I will be told by the biggest, fattest, most free-speechy-free-pressy types will be to shut up.  

It's been my experience of the culture of "free speech-press" that the last thing they want to face is a wide open brawl over their assertions which are today's orthodoxy, the one which is so established in Supreme Court law making and the culture of the college-credentialed.  They don't want those things being said, at all. Which is why Rohde wrote and the LA Times printed his take down of Bert Neuborne's pathetically weak, merely partial criticism of that orthodoxy.

* It is worth pointing out that when Eisenhower nominated him to the Supreme Court, Brennan was the target of anti-Catholic hate mounted by "The National Liberal League," an atheist organization which was, at that time, under the control of the ultra-racist, near-Nazi, James Hervey Johnson. They pretty much repeated the popular 18th-19th century nativist accusation that a Catholic on the Supreme Court would rule on behalf of the Pope and not the Constitution. Ironic considering his career on the Court.  That was a position held by John Jay, among the "founders" who had wanted to exclude Catholics from having the vote.  It's clear Brennan never really felt endangered by that remnant of 18th and 19th century bigotry or it would have been something he took into account. There were those who got killed by it, within his own lifetime one of his fellow associate justices, Hugo Black, a KKK member, was put on the court despite using the same line of prejudice to get the killer of a Catholic priest off. But it was never as bad as the racism that was thrown at Native Americans, Black People, People of Color and Women. The Irish definitively became white in the 20th century. White people have never really experienced the same levels of danger that People of Color have, men have never experienced the same levels of danger as women have.

** John F. Kennedy considered Robert Taft's daft opposition to the Nuremberg trials a "profile in courage," on the principle that the Nazis had legalized what they did so they shouldn't be held criminally responsible for their genocides and war crimes.  If you want another extreme example of what a huge ass the law can make of itself as a stand of "principle." 

Note: I will probably be out for Monday and perhaps Tuesday due to a family matter that I just heard about, so I am posting this last part of this series today.   I may be able to post comments so make those if you want to.

The Utter Hypocrisy Of The ACLU's Position On Press Freedom And The Supreme Court's Own Hypocrisy In Giving Them What They Wanted

THIS IS THE THIRD part of my critique of the "free speech-press" orthodoxy as promoted by the ACLU and the Supreme Court, in which several central hypocrisies of that orthodoxy are pointed out, in refuting Stephen Rohde and his target, Bert Neuborne

But Neuborne would change all that. He would replace the Sullivan “actual malice” standard with a much higher duty, requiring that writers, speakers, and the media meet a “reasonable standard of care” in determining whether to utter “harmful speech.” He claims that’s what “good” journalists do. He ignores the devastating impact this would have on journalism and freedom of expression — judges and juries would be empowered to decide whether a speaker had acted “reasonably,” like “good” journalists do, even if there was no proof that the speaker actually knew his or her statement was false. And judges and juries could decide that controversial or unorthodox speech was “harmful.”

Notice what the lawyer Rohde does here, he defines the practice of responsible journalism, being careful NOT TO PUBLISH LIES as some outrageous requirement for the mass media, as being an outrageous burden on "the press."  Including mass media which makes enormous profits and has enormous budgets. This inflation of a basic responsibility into a crushing burden seems to me to be quite a typical lawyerly dishonest exaggeration, not that unrelated to the outrages that courts regularly entertain to the discredit of the legal industry and, I hope, the judiciary that collaborates in such dishonesty. It does nothing for the reliability and so repute of the alleged profession of journalism.   And in making the assertion that what should be defined as the first responsibility of credible journalism as an outrageous burden, the Court, at the "civil libertarian's" bidding created a truly impossible to meet burden on those it victimizes with intentional lies.  In doing so the Warren Court does what that Court so often does, it privileges powerful, wealthy corporations and their owners and robs those wronged by the wealthy and powerful of their rights.

It was the post-freudian demand by the Warren Court that people lied about by the media do what is virtually impossible in almost all cases, establish the mental state of those who lied about them before they can be provided with justice by the court that is an outrageous burden, not the one which, before the trade mark Warren Court bombshell of that decision dropped on American democracy was a possible means of both giving relief to those lied about and to punish the liars so that, perhaps, they wouldn't do it again.  Considering the lies the "press" engaged in and got away with back then, often with the help of their lawyers, it was hardly much of a burden to their ability to get away with intentional lying.

In doing so he also does what virtually the entire history of First Amendment babble does, it ignores that "the press" is a human, not divine creation, an invention, invented to magnify the power of what is said in it.  The media having the power to magnify the malignity of lies far beyond what any one person exercising a "right" to lie would have should, if anything, force their obligation to not lie to be considered as the prerequisite for them to be given an artificial "right" to publish. There is an important though ignored distinction between the natural rights of individual people and the "rights" granted in the First Amendment to human made entities and institutions, including religions. To pretend that any corporate entity has "rights" which are the same as the natural rights of individuals, endowed with those by God, their "Creator" has proven to be extremely dangerous. It is how judges and "justices" can get away with pretending not to see that crooks and hucksters taking advantage of the gullible is the same thing as one of our local UCC churches that is dedicated to service to the poor, the sick and the addicted and otherwise vulnerable, that the gangster members of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops do the same thing as the Nuns On The Bus or the Medical Missionaries of Mary.  But that's a different problem from the one I'm doing this for. "The press" is an artificial entity, it does not have the same kind or level of genuine rights as human beings or, I'd assert in other arguments, animals.

If his assertions that judges and juries are incompetent to judge things such as the difference between lies and the truth, harmful and innocuous behavior THINGS WHICH THEY DO IN OTHER CONTEXTS EVERY DAY AND WHICH DEFINES BOTH THE RESPONSIBILITY OF JUDGES AND MEMBERS OF JURIES, what he's said is that the very courts doing what they do, certainly at the ACLU's and his own insistence, is impossible.  I would love to see the cases Rohde has been involved in, that the ACLU has brought to wonder if these things that he asserts are not possible have not, in fact, been things requested or even demanded by them that judges and juries do. If the standard of doing that is the impossible to meet one of perfect fidelity to discerning the truth, of assessing harm which he asserts it is, then he is part of one of the biggest frauds ever perpetrated on the human population.  I doubt he or the ACLU would ever hold that in other matters in which its clients and, so, its lawyers interests contradict his assertion.  

But as Justice Robert Jackson wisely wrote in 1943, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” Without referring to Justice Jackson by name, Neuborne complains that the “modern First Amendment is shaped by an almost pathological mistrust of government’s ability to regulate speech fairly.”


To start with Robert Jackson's statement is clearly a self-contradiction, his statement is to establish a position of orthodoxy.  What he describes has certainly become the orthodoxy of the legal profession, issued by a member of the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court probably the source of more statements to be taken as orthodox with the legal and, ultimately, police power to do far more than "confess by word" but to force compliance with their acts by people whether or not they have any faith, therein.  What the hell did he think his job on that court was?  Supreme Court rulings are exactly the things that he claims to disdain in his statement.  

The Sullivan and post-Sullivan rulings are such orthodoxy that when I started my critique of them online in 2006, people were furious that I even raised the issues of what they were leading us to.  That the experience of and witness to the anti-truth, post-truth Trump regime and its continuation in the Republican-fascist attempt to destroy equality and democracy, THROUGH THE SUPREME COURT IF NOT THROUGH THE ELECTED BRANCHES only proves how totally wrong this whole bunch of Jackson brand baloney has been.

“Pathological”? Between Neuborne and Justice Jackson, who also served as attorney general of the United States and chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, Justice Jackson makes the far better case that the whole point of the First Amendment is not to trust the “government’s ability to regulate speech fairly.” Or better yet, as James Madison himself put it: “The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.”

It is kind of amusing how, even as he just denigrated "orthodoxy" and those with power, he cites Jackson's positions within the orthodox power structure to add weight to his use of a statement he made.  Typical of the hypocrisy of the "civil liberties" style of advocacy.   

It is especially ridiculous for Madison, a man who was in politics his entire professional life, whose power in not only the presidency BUT AS ONE OF THE MAIN AUTHORS OF THE MOST POWERFUL DOCUMENT IN AMERICAN POLITICS AND LIFE to make that statement about mistrusting "all men having power."  It is ridiculous for Rohde and others who hold up those two century old words, by rich, white men, most of whom held people in slavery and maintained laws depriving those people of all of their rights, who were engaged in a continuing campaign of genocidal theft of land from the previous inhabitants of it and who held all adult women in subjugation, as rightly determining our laws and government today, despite what the history of struggle against all of those things I just listed and more have taught us. Madison, Jefferson, Washington, etc. exercised some of the greatest ongoing power there has been in the United States and it is the demand of the ACLU and others in the "civil liberties" industry that it is the thinking of those 18th century white, male aristocrats that must limit the actions and thinking and, yes, expression which we are allowed today.

I will note in passing that the "civil libertarians" are far, far more tolerant of the expression of white supremacists, the continually indigenous form of American fascism, many of the fabled "founders" shared in than they are my reasoning on why we should prevent the fascists, the import of neo-Nazism and the domestic variety as expressed in white supremacists and segregationists from the possibility of repeating a history that they have proven themselves to be all too capable of gaining power, gaining control and doing the most terrible things, up to and including terror campaigns of lynching and murder.  I doubt the ACLU would really think I should be saying what I am saying here and would, at least privately, welcome its suppression.

It is convenient to Rohde's, the ACLU's and Jackson's claims to pretend that all power and all such danger resides in the government and that the government is not vulnerable to the manipulations of those with much money and, so, much power when such power and its use is the subtext of practically all of human history, certainly including that of the United States, the writing of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and all of the rest of the amendments and revisions to it as vulnerable to that as anything else.* And the Court, addicted and addled by such lofty free-speech-pressyness has made things infinitely worse by first making money=speech and then unleashing that money=speech to corrupt government, using the First Amendement to kill the rescue of democracy in the campaign finance reforms passed by both parties in the wake of the Nixon crime spree being exposed.  The Court, the ACLU, the "civil liberties" lawsters in the pay of the media, pornographers, etc. have done more damage to democracy than any idiot haranguing a crowd on a street corner as the Court may have imagined in 1919 or even 1951.  Pretending that the power of mass media didn't change things entirely from the day of page-at-a-time hand printing known to the First Congress is insanely delusional.   I would note the refusal of William Clinton to take out the radio tower that was broadcasting the location of potential victims to their killers during the Rwandan genocide on the principle of "freedom of the press" as an extreme but all too real result of this civil libertarian position.   The revelation of that, making my own country complicit in that atrocity by omission certainly had a profound influence on my thinking about these issues.

They also choose to ignore that when it is a person or a group who sues someone for lying about them, it is a much different thing from the government going after someone for "unorthodox" speech. Many of the worst of the lies told about individuals and groups of people are entirely "orthodox," the orthodoxies of racisim, sexism, etc. are deeply embedded in not only our society and, so, our government and within the law.  Many lies are entirely orthodox in that sense of the word and if the courts are not to refute them then they are a party to that orthodoxy of lies.

Neuborne apparently missed the poetic force of Madison’s warning. Instead, he urges that First Amendment limits imposed on governmental restrictions on speech “be loosened to give the regulators some breathing room.” Ironically, whereas Madison and modern First Amendment law seek to give free speech the “breathing room” it needs, in Neuborne’s hands it’s the government that needs “breathing room” to regulate speech.


Back to friggin' Jemmy Madison, I'd like to get shut of him, myself but I am following Rohde's quite orthodox slamming of Neuborne's orthodox claims of fidelity to that slave-owner's corpse, the better for its hands to strangle us today.

The next section of Rohde's take-down of Neuborne is especially worthy of dissection and refutation because it is one of the most malignant aspects of the Supreme Court-ACLU orthodoxy of free speech-press absolutism, one which I'm sure they were content to allow so long as it didn't endanger them, though it certainly endangered those who were the targets of white supremacy, women, etc. I think that what they were doing was playing a game of chicken with history, one in which the central assumption on their part was that it couldn't happen here when, for Black People, Native Americans, Women, etc. it has happened here more often than it hasn't. But I will take that up on its own.

* It is ironic that it is James Madison's own papers, his own extensive records of the deliberations of the Continental Congress and the machinations around the creation of the Bill of Rights that proves the extent to which the founder's own financial interests, those of their fellow aristocrats in the various states and the country as a whole figured into what they put into the thing.  I have repeatedly advocated that people read the great abolitionist Wendell Phillips' analysis of that, written soon after Madison's papers were published, after his death, which exposes the extent to which the corruption of slavery figured into what is still the way the United States government was set up to rig things for white supremacists, slave owners.  Things which have thwarted and still thwart the attempt to establish that thing which the Supreme Court has made sure is elusive and temporary, equal justice under the law.