When Thiel's Bitch Vance Is President He'll Be A Less Druggy Musk - Things We Need To Know

 

Tabloid Culture That Produced Trump As A New York City Phenomenon Was More Than Matched By What The Cabloids Did To The US

But Hollywood is what sold us America's Hitler. 

STILL ILL so here is another video I watched which was enlightening in a totally different way from the last one posted.  Of all the Youtube Legal AF programs, I prefer the one with Sean Wilentz and Sidney Blumenthal.  It didn't occur to me till this morning that that could be because of all of them, they're not lawyers.  

This discussion with Jonathan Mahler about how New York City in the 70s to today produced Donald Trump is full of reminders and the kind of insights that come from the honest study of history.   It was, in fact, the tabloid culture of New York, which I would say has to include the New York Times as well as the little papers, is what taught the crafty but vapid, sly but stupid and, most of all privileged straight, white, affluent Trump how to turn his criminal sleaze,  his real-estate wealth, into the kind of celebrity and power that became the stock in trade of not only that city but the national media which followed it into the cesspool that America has become largely due to the mass media.  

I do think that concentrating on the moribund ink on cheap paper media -which was admittedly important in the period and was the spear point in dragging us into the sewer - is a mistake because if that was important electronic media, hate-talk radio and cabloid news - which were also getting going in the biggest way at the same time - has been far far more important.   

The time period that they concentrate on, from about 1980 on, is notably the exact same period that produced several phenomena, most notably the Hollywood B list actor Ronald Reagan's presidency.   It should not be forgotten that his presidency, following on the Nixon-Ford presidency with the relatively clean Jimmy Carter presidency as a brief intermission produced what was, till Bush II and Trump the most criminal administration in American history with the most members of it convicted of felonies while in office.    Like Trump as a politician,  Trump is a product of the American free press,  certainly the entertainment division of it but also the "news" division of it.   Trump is a media phenomenon far more so than he is a product of the organized-crime saturated NYC real estate world.   And as such he is a direct product of the libertarian Supreme Court rulings flowing from the Warren Court's disastrous interpretation of the First Amendment.  

I think the location of the media that produced Trump as a political figure being located in New York City is largely incidental to his national presence,  though it's certain that a figure like Trump in most other cities would never have gotten the attention from that media as he got as a product of that stupendously corrupt, celebrity and pop-kulcha infested city.   Trump as a national figure is far, far more due to Hollywood than he is New York.   And most of all he is a product of the fact that our indigenous form of fascism,  white supremacy, was also ascendant at the same time.   

Stacey Abrams, in that last video I posted,  mentioned the role that "white evangelicals" played in the destruction of Jimmy Carter's administration,  certainly meaning the Arlington Virginia based Jerry Falwell and the other racially motivated TV hallelujah peddlers who the media also started promoting as "Christianity" largely through cable TV in the same period.  And,  I will say as a positive fact, for largely the same reason,  that they were a useful weapon to destroy a Democratic president and attack any Democrats who endangered their owners wealth.    That was certainly something taken up by the NYC based media but it didn't start there.   They used "reborn Christians" to bring down probably the most Christian president in American history in favor of the adulterous, divorced, remarried, and corrupt Reagan.   The combination has given us today what would once have been considered a bizarre phenomenon of "white evangelicals" supporting the very thing that they were alleged to oppose the most,  a sex criminal,  Antichrist,  given to serial blasphemy and self-worship, a crook and cheat, someone who has repeatedly and publicly broken every single commandment,  including murder, now.   And someone who has done in the most extreme possible way what the very same white-supremacist "evangelicals" railed about for generations,  sending federal troops in to take over against the objections of state and local governments.  In every way Trump exposes both the "trad-Catholics" (I won't go into that here) and the Protestant "white-evangelicals" as pseudo-Christianity,  but what the media has promoted as being "Christianity" for the past half century - I say due largely to the real thing being no more congenial to their wealth than the presidency of the moderate Democrat Jimmy Carter was. 

I think the areligious media culture of the US, many of its major figures certainly hostile to Christianity has made common cause with "evangelical" Antichristianity and it was certainly helped along in the effects that has had in American life and politics by those on the alleged left who shared the media figures' disdain for religion with an overt hatred of Christianity.  The role that the American "left" has played in the rise of Republican-fascists - never forget the role the Green Party and Ralph Nader played in the election of Bush II and Trump I and others in the sandbagging of Biden - is a minor but important part in this.  The American left - largely college credentialed in its most public face - has been incredibly stupid, that is if what they claim to want in government is what they actually find most important.  And I doubt that they do, certainly not as compared to their self-satisfying conceit    They've got more in common with Trump than they'd ever want to contemplate of have a thought criminal bring up. 

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

Someone asked what I was sick with.  It's allergy season, goldenrod and ragweed, etc. I always get a bad cold during allergy season and I don't work as well through it as I used to.   So, sorry, nothing fatal except being over 70.  Which is fatal enough to be getting on with. 

Keep Getting Sick This Year - This Made Me Feel Better This Morning

Hadn't known that Stacey Abrams has a podcast.   I listened to the one posted three days ago and it faces the hard issues we're facing but her conversation with Bishop William Barber and Fr Greg Boyle feels like a health tonic.  I'm a subscriber now. 

Christian nationalism is an extremist, anti-democratic ideology rooted in the belief that the United States should be a nation for Christians to the exclusion of all others. In modern times, the Trump administration and its Republican allies have wielded this ideology as a weapon to divide Americans and implement an agenda via plans like the infamous Project 2025 that eviscerates the rights of immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community, questions the rights of women to vote, restores a freedom to discriminate against others and targets reproductive rights. This week, in response to a listener question asking what Christian nationalism has to do with the central tenets of Christianity, Stacey shares her own experience as a progressive, democratic Christian, pulling back the curtain on a core truth: the malice and hatred preached by right-wing religious leaders who shape our politics has nothing to do with Jesus’s actual teachings. She’s joined by Bishop William Barber, president of Repairers of the Breach, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, and professor at Yale Divinity School and Father Greg Boyle, Jesuit priest, founder of Homeboy Industries, and author. Together, they break down the threat Christian nationalism poses to democracy and show how faith, at its best, can be a powerful force for justice and progress. This inspiring conversation has so much to offer all our listeners, whether they come from a Christian background, some other faith background, or no faith at all.

Never Thought I'd Say Something Like This

but I'd give twenty dollars to a go-fund-me for Hunter Biden to force Melania and Trump to be deposed in her threatened lawsuit against him.   I can't say I have had an extremely high opinion of Hunter in the past but if he carries through on this suit and forces them to tell about their past in regard to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell he'd be a hero to me in that regard. 

Do it, Hunter. 

I've Got To Make It A Rule

to turn off Toby Laboutillier before he gets to the pop hits of 1965.   It seems to be the year that pop music in the US took a real nosedive.   I mean, "Hang on Sloopy?"   "We Got To Ge Out Of This Place?"  "Summer Nights?"  "Where The Action Is?"  "Who'll Be The Next In Line?"  

Geesh!  It's almost enough to make me want to hear The Association.  

Save me

Big Mama Thornton - Hound Dog and Down Home Shakedown

It's time to rip up the Code of Liberal Ethics - Hurray For Gavin Newsom

THE FIRST THING in the first blog post I ever posted at 9:45 AM EDT on May 13th, 2006 * started this way:

To start with, there are two things about the Code of Liberal Ethics that bother me. One, that we are supposed to be entirely fair to everyone and especially in instances when that would put us at a disadvantage, will be dealt with later. The one I will deal with first is the assumption that liberals must get it right every time, not only right but correct. That liberals and leftists, such as myself, must be purer than pure or relegated to the tip, is something I'd better address right now in this first post.

Yesterday a Democratic Politician, for the first time of any significance, took a step out of the worse than futile, prissy,  sanctimonious, liberalishy-laywerly scrupulosity that sacrifices everything,  democracy and millions of lives to, as I heard one of the MSNBC type lawyers piously say it "the rules, the norms and the manuals."   I'm talking, of course, of Gavin Newsom's plan to put it to the highest authority in any government,  The Voters, to override the liberally-lawyerly reform to prevent that ubiquitous anti-democracy practice under our corrupt system, partisan gerrymandering which Republican-fascists never put into effect in the states they control, so as to rig the Republican minority into a majority in the House of Representatives.    In doing so he not only FACES REALITY INSTEAD OF THE PIOUS CORRUPTION OF HEAD-IN-THE-SANDS THEORETICAL IDEALISM,  HE DID SO IN A WAY THAT MAKES IT WHAT REPUBLICANS NEVER WILL MAKE IT WHEN IT'S NOT A SURE THING FOR THEM,  A CHOICE OF THE VOTERS.

The corruption of the Federal system,  dreamed up largely by John Adams, even more so than that baked-in corruption I noted in a post the other day,  by rigging House districts began as soon as elections under the Constitution were held.  The "Gerry" in gerrymander is Elbrige Gerry, one of the founders,  VP under Madison and one of the drafters of the so-called Bill of Rights who rigged the Massachusetts Senate districts to keep his party in control of the Massachusetts Senate.   A practice that has proved popular with incumbents bent on holding on to their seats but has been extremely popular with America's indigenous fascists, the white supremacists, both as the slave-power and today as Republican-fascists as a way to thwart equality and, so, any legitimate government in the United States.  When I read that on Gerry's death John Adams praised him as an unusually moral politician it did a lot to open up my eyes, not about Gerry, but the real character of John Adams.   And it wasn't in his favor. 

I remember when the idea of "making things fair" through taking redistricting out of the hands of the so obviously interested politicians in state legislatures took hold in response to the scandal of ubiquitous gerrymandering to give more power to a party whose policies and actions in government were unpopular.    As I recall it, it was one of those schemes dreamed up by politician-lawyers and the lawyerly types who tend to get control of so-called civil society non-profits.   And it would have been a nice idea if it wasn't an idea guaranteed to never be put into effect by Republican-fascists in enough places to ensure that the anti-People, pro-billionaire-millionaire-white supremacist party would control things.   Democrats in reliably Democratic majority places should always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS BE SUSPICIOUS OF "REFORMS" THAT THEY KNOW WILL NEVER BE PUT INTO EFFECT IN PLACES LIKE TEXAS or other white-supremacist majority states.   Facing reality even when that means you don't adopt the piously advocated, purity asserted plans of the scrupulous and, especially, lawyerly should be the universal rule, the norm and even written in the manuals of Democratic Party politics.  

Maine has suffered enormously through the idiotic scrupulosity of such "liberals" of the past and today., most of those I know of by name,  yes, lawyers.   But the United States as a whole has been put in danger by them.   It's time to rip up the Code of Liberal Ethics and fight fascism without two hands tied behind our backs.   I say any "reform" commission that ends up with the House in the hands of the Republican-fascists is no reform, it's sheer idiocy.   I wonder if the reason Newsome is willing to do that is that he isn't a lawyer,  a profession that, despite what you see in TV and movie fiction,  makes big money through cowardice and surrender to evil    I wonder if the reason that the governor of the third largest state,  Kathy Hochul hasn't proposed that is because she's a lawyer. 

I will pray every day that if Democrats win back control of the government that they don't let the lawyers talk them out of really, really taking power and doing what's necessary to defeat Republican-fascism, that they do what the lawyer and law school teacher Obama never would have done and which Joe Biden should have certainly known he had to do - BREAK THE RULES, THE NORMS AND WHAT IT SAID IN THE MANUALS BECAUSE EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY ARE THE ONLY LEGITIMATE THINGS IN GOVERNING.   As I've mentioned, my nightmare is that the next Democratic president will appoint another Merrick Garland who cares more about keeping his own lily white hands clean and not the breath of scandal away from his name,  a goddamned "institutionalist" who cares more about the "DoJ" than he does democracy as Attorney General.  And if that's not enough to keep me awake at night, the lawyers in the Senate and House will be there to surrender egalitarian democracy to the jaws of Republican-fascism.   And then there's the Republican-fascist stacked judiciary.   We need a rule-breaker, even more so a norms-breaker and someone who will order the manuals be rewritten to take reality and hard experience into account.   If Gavin Newsom is that person,  I now have fewer doubts than I did the day before yesterday.   He did so as Mayor of San Francisco when he started issuing same-sex marriage licenses before the country, temporarily, caught up to him.   I have some deep disagreements with him, none more so than over the homeless but I think he'd try to do something more effective to house them than the alternatives would.    If he became the nominee, his first wife, the psycho-fascist Kimberly Gilfoyle would be a problem.   But so far he's looking like our best chance to save democracy.  

*   I remember what motivated me to finally post something on that blog I'd set up but hadn't posted to was hearing the smarmy Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition scolding about some Democrat not rolling over backward to be fair to some Republican-fascist, otherwise I'd have dealt with the first one first.   I loathe Scott Simon.  

Are RFK jr. And His Sleazy Colleagues Chasing Another Ambulance?

AS SOON AS I HEARD LITTLE BOBBY say:

Nobody blamed The New York Times for spreading that disinformation that football can cause injuries.

to deflect his role in motivating the guy who murdered a cop as he shot hundreds of rounds at the CDC campus the other day, the first thing I thought is what a massive fucking liar that scumbag lawyer was.  Have I mentioned that Little Bobby Kennedy is one of the things that definitively put me off of that scumbag profession?   I mean in the last several days?   

If there's one thing that is known about football without any possible question of it being a fact IT IS THAT IT CAUSES INJURIES.   The first recorded deaths FROM INJURIES WHILE PLAYING THE GAME date from the earliest years of the game in the late 19th century.   Teddy Roosevelt named a commission during his administration to address the massive number of deaths from the game.  Though I am within my rights, due to what the lying scumbag said to include that,  I assume the scumbag lying lawyer was denying the clear fact that among those injuries are long term and often fatal brain injuries - another fact as clear as any about the favorite sport of his family.  It was one of the things that drove poor Ted's first wife to drugs and mental illness that the assholes in that family made fun of her during their famous touch football games.   

But, of course, that fucking liar of a lawyer, with all of the arrogance of the worst of his kind lies about vaccines and, as we found during the questioning of him during his confirmation hearing  the scumbag lawyer liar intends to keep on profiting perhaps in the tens of millions of dollars off of his anti-vaxx ambulance chasing which he is currently providing with lies for the courtroom about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.  

So,  I have to wonder if he and his fellow scumbag liar lawyer colleagues are hoping to cash in on defending football whether professionally or at the college or high-school or even pee-wee levels as they are sued by those that industry feeds off of.  

The Trump regime is full to the top of scumbags but Kennedy is in a class of his own both trading off of his family name but far worse than that in what he's doing which has the potential to, over time, get millions killed.   And I have ever confidence that he's planning in his worm rotted brain, to profit off of it. 

I hate that guy and I'm not ashamed to admit it. 

Update:  The college-credentialed "r" word journalist and resident wit at Duncan's idea of an athenaeum and Little Bobby level liar wants to post a comment that's especially stupid even for him.   If someone other than him begs me to post it,  I will and I will answer it.   He's at the Pee Wee Herman level of stupidity without the late Paul Ruben's talent or intelligence.   Writing pop reviews for an ad flyer must have been close to the minimal requirements to be an American journalist in the age of the Sullivan decision.   I haven't considered that decision as the reason that American journalism, briefly and in part once somewhat better than the Hearst-Pulitzer period has gone even stupider than it traditionally had been but it may not be just a coincidence that it happened in the same timeline as that decision brought us to fascism. 

Israel Is a Genocidal Apartheid State - Hate Mail

Katie Halper,  Dr. Feroze Sidwha and Dr. Mark Perlmutter talk about just a few of the atrocities the so-called "IDF" have committed in Gaza and the Israeli government supports in the West Bank, including the IDF burying Palestinian children alive.   

Katie Halper says that opposing Zionism is a mitzvah.   I don't have the right to say that but I would say it's a mortal sin for a Christian to not oppose "Christian" Zionism.   

Back in 2006 when I first wrote about the disaster that Israel is, in reality,  I made a prediction that I think is coming true:

Their alliance with fundamentalist “christians” should be all the evidence you need of their stupidity if not duplicity. End timers have only two uses for Jews, especially Israelis. Jews are either to be converted to “christianity”, perhaps by force eventually, or they are extras waiting to die in their pre-enactment battle fantasies based on the Book of Revelations. As the events around Lebanon this month show, the fundamentalist ghouls can hardly wait for the real slaughter to begin. Their script calls for Israelis to die in the millions.

Failing the fundamentalists’ favorite wish, Americans of future times will grow weary of supporting Israel if it is engaged in endless wars, endless conflicts and, especially, if idiocy on the level of this war in Lebanon continues. A constantly attacked Israel will become increasingly militarized and isolated and paranoid. With that will come the destruction of democracy. A nationalistic, perhaps theocratic and despotic Israel is certainly nothing that the vast, vast majority of Israelis or Americans want to see. If someone can convince me that isn’t where it is headed I’d really really like to believe otherwise.

I have every confidence that these ideas have been thought about in Israel. I can’t believe anything I’m writing here hasn’t been more fully considered there where investigating every contingency is a matter of life and death.

I was clearly wrong about a majority of Israelis not wanting that because it was in their hands and no one elses to keep that from happening and they haven't. 

Elsewhere at that time I said in all sincerity that I would be in favor of admitting Israelis who hadn't committed war crimes into the US as full citizens.   At the time I believed I was talking about the large majority of Israelis who were innocent of the crimes of the Israeli government.   Now I'm pretty certain that it would be a minority of Israelis who didn't have blood on their hands.   Which is sad but, especially if the poll are right, is true.   I would not want any former members of the IDF here, we've got more than enough home grown fascists already.  I'm less willing to pretend that Israel deserves the benefit of any doubt,  they'd already lost the right to that by 1980. 

Summer Rerun Brokeback Mountain, Good Story, Meh! Movie, Great Opera Has It Really Been 20 Years Since The Movie?

Note:   Hearing it was the 20th anniversary of the release of that horse opera I went back to see what I'd written about it.  Here's something I think is worth going over again.   You might want to read the brawl at the original posting which featured mostly the superior observations of RMJ and the opposite from you know who and one of his side-kicks and with minimal content from me.   I found it interesting  

Friday, November 18, 2016

I've Never Heard Liberals Say "Mansion Trash" or "Penthouse Trash" The People Who Really Gave Us Trump

I suspect that, unlike most of the people who throw around the term "trailer trash" and who use that form of housing as a term of disparagement, I've known a lot of people who lived in trailers.  Most of them are quite decent people who have that most unforgivable of conditions even among the allegedly liberal, being poor*.

Having gone to college, knowing lots of college faculty, having spent time among the Ivy League class of people, I also have had a chance to see the clean, well coiffed and manicured wealthy up close and in their element and. as well, the academic and intellectual class.   I will say that they've got nothing on the people who live in trailers by way of trashy behavior.  If anything, more of the people I've known who live in trailers have higher morals than the wealthy and well-educated, a number of them have more sense, as well.

I can't talk about this without again bringing up the main character in Brokeback Mountain, Ennis Del Mar and that Annie Proulx not only put him, that most sympathetic of tragic figures among the liberal elite, in a trailer,   And the admirable Ms. Proulx, not only put him in a dilapidated trailer, she made him what would be considered "trailer trash" from the start, having him urinate in the sink.   I doubt anyone I know who lives in a trailer does that, though almost every man I've known who lives in a trailer has a wife who wouldn't put up with that.

But urinating in a sink, if it's your sink and no one else uses it, is a crime against your own sanitation, it isn't rank amorality and moral depravity of the kind our elites envelop the world in.   Reading about how Charles Kushner, Ivanka Trumps father in law father got back at his own sister and brother-in-law for turning states witness against him.

Now he has stepped down as chairman of his company. His days as a political force both nationally and in New Jersey are over. Saddest of all, he has shattered his once close-knit family. The days when the Kushner clan—Charles and his three siblings and all their spouses and kids and grandkids—would travel to Miami together for Passover are long gone. He and his older brother, Murray, have not spoken in more than two years as a result of a bitter lawsuit over money Murray believed Charles owed him from deals they had done together—a lawsuit that Charles Kushner’s supporters claim opened the door for the U.S. Attorney’s investigation into his campaign-finance activities.

And, of course, to add to the horror, the federal witnesses he had attempted to retaliate against were his sister and brother-in-law, who were cooperating with that same investigation. Kushner paid a prostitute $10,000 to lure his brother-in-law to a motel room at the Red Bull Inn in Bridgewater to have sex with him. A hidden camera recorded the activity, and Kushner sent the lurid tape to his sister, making sure the tape arrived on the day of a family party.

As he sat in his office less than 24 hours after his guilty plea, the phone rang. The caller couldn’t have been more unexpected—it was Governor Jim McGreevey. Though Kushner had given the governor more than $1.5 million for his two races and was instrumental in his rise to power, the two had barely spoken in months.

I don't know anyone who lives in a trailer who has ever done anything worse than these guys and their tale of trashiness could be met with equally trashy stories from the millionaire and billionaire class thousands of times.  You wonder why liberals don't put the blame for the creation and election of Trump where it really belongs, with this class of trash.  Could it be because their alleged liberalism is a manifestation of upper class snobbery far more than any real devotion to economic justice?  Could it be because it's far less risky to kick down than up?   Or could it be that they're really just not liberal?

The rich class, beyond any doubt, contains a far, far higher percentage of people who engage in the trashiest of behavior than the poorer class, yet it's poor people who are blanketed with the behavior of the worst of them.  Rich people hire lawyers and lobbyists and buy politicians and judges to make their trashiest behavior legal and allowed, they get praise for it in the well paid media, staffed by rich people - look at Trump.   A real difference in what gets called "liberal" and what gets called "conservative" in the United States, Britain and elsewhere is in which poor people are the objects of their scorn and hatred.   Conservatives in the United States focus theirs on Black People, Latinos, and others while treating poor whites as stupid people who can be manipulated into a resource, acting as their tools.  Alleged liberals, those people who are always congratulating themselves on their brilliance,  aid them by heaping scorn and derision on poor white people while sentimentalizing the poverty of Black People and Latinos.    The liberal supported American media has been part of the right-wing's gaming of the stupidity and hypocrisy of alleged liberals to their political and, so, financial advantage.  In this, the biggest dopes of all have been liberals of the type who have not learned a single thing in the past half-century of what happens when they play along with this.

As I said, to the fury of several people, after watching them for more than half a century, secular liberals are about the stupidest political identity, the kind who can go on with a rotten and stupidly self-defeating habit as it fails and fails again and again. They really are stupider than the Sneetches in Dr. Suess's story.  They learned from getting cheated through their own stupidity.  I see little sign that many liberals have or will.

I put any hope for liberalism learning and not acting so stupidly on those who put egalitarian democracy and justice before their own preening self-congratulation.  The kind of people who wouldn't think in terms like "trailer trash" or find it fun to say it because they know it is wrong and the don't want to hurt people.

*  I used to wonder what the difference between living in a trailer was and living in one of the "tiny houses" that may still be a fad among such wealthy people.   I suspect the difference is in the price per square foot.  When I first started reading about the "tiny house movement" my first thought was of small houses that would be good for poor people to live in, then I saw the bijoux boxes that, somehow, seem to get bigger and bigger in the "tiny house movement" little custom made mansions that have more to do with Thomas Jefferson's useless garden folly than with Thoreau's cabin or the Mad Houser's outlaw huts for the destitute.   I can't think of anything more trashy than some of the Faberge class tiny houses I've seen.  They turn my stomach in a way that reading about Ennis Del Mar pissing in his sink doesn't.

Update:  An example is demanded.  Well, here's what the oh, so amusing Rude Pundit had to say recently.

My friend Duke from West Virginia said something that had crossed my mind but had shoved aside as bitterness: "Fuck the white working class. Obama gave them health insurance and a chance to get new jobs and they hated him. Fuck them." 

Without thinking, I immediately agreed, and as soon as I did, it made total sense. "You're right. Democrats need to abandon the white working class." By "abandon," I mean not trying to desperately court the votes of people who always vote against their best interests and against those who are trying to help them. See, Democrats don't have a working class white people problem. Working class white people have the problem. When you vote against those who are trying to help you for the very people who have harmed you, then you are not dealing with rational thought.

Yeah, that's patronizing and elitist. But nearly half of the voters in a presidential election chose the man who regularly lied to them. So you'll have to forget it if you want me to romanticize and normalize their ignorance.

By the way, that ignorance is a product of years of Republican fuckery at the local level to assure them that they do not get educated. That long game has finally paid off big time.

Just who does he think has benefited from large numbers of the white underclass believing this is how liberals think about them for most of the past fifty years?   And why does a smart guy like him figure that pattern won't continue?

Poor white people will make common cause with poor Black People and poor Latinos before such liberals give up their preening conceit.

Update 2:  I've pointed out who voted for Trump, white people in our age group whose median income is about $72,000 a year.  Higher in income and older and whiter than those who voted for Hillary Clinton.   If you want to blame anyone for electing Trump, Simps, it's more likely to be people who were grooving with you in college than not.

Update 2025:  You don't have to take my word for it,  you can hear and watch the opera.   Annie Proulx did a really, surprisingly good job with the libretto, which is a far different thing from writing a prose story.   I have no doubt at all that of all his many works this is the one work of Charles Wuorinen that will enter into the repertoire.   If he has "a" masterpiece  this is it. 

I Can't Imagine The Roberts Court

will not be actively participating in the Republican-fascist campaign of 2026,  which is why it will blow up marriage equality ten years after the Court declared its banning to be a violation of the Constitution. 

I don't for a single second believe any of the Republican-fascists on the court care deeply about the sanctity of hetero-sexual marriage,  considering how they are facilitating the biggest, most publicly known serial adulterer,  serially married (and ACCORDING TO SCRIPTURE IN AN ADULTEROUS MARRIAGE TO THE MOST SUCCESSFUL NEO-SOVIET HONEYPOT , RIGHT NOW) and, lest anyone forget for a second, CREDIBLY ACCUSED CHILD RAPIST in his quest to become an even more absolute despot in the US than the Roberts Court has already made him,  those whited sepulchers in black robes don't care about that at all.  

Nor do I believe a majority of them really care if same-sex marriages are legal or not.   I mean, maybe Thomas does but only because he can use it as a chance to practice his sadistic cruelty against LGBTQ+ People,  maybe Alito does because he's such a prissy little and totatally corrupt goody-two-shoes.  Maybe Coney-Barrett due to her membership in a deeply twisted "trad-catholic" cult  But Goresuch, Kavanugh (speaking of credibly accused sexual criminals) the so deep in the closet Roberts that he believes no one remembers he's there? 

But them taking up the case or it making it this far has nothing to do with the issue of same-sex marriage.  

NO.  What they are dedicated to is being part of yet one more of the every-two-year whipping up of hate that is the perennial theme of Republican-fascist election campaigns, hoping to get the idiot seniors and low-info voters to forget that Trump and the Republican-fascists in the Congress have just robbed them of an average of $1,200 dollars as they give it to billionaires and millionaires and have promised to rob them of even more if they continue in office in any security by appealing that the drug that Republican-fascist voters are addicted to,  hate.   THAT IS WHY THIS ISSUE HAS BEEN BAKING IN THE REPUBLICAN-FASCIST SUPREME COURT TEST CASE KITCHEN SET UP BY THE BILLIONAIRES AND MILLIONAIRES.   They want to ride it to success in yet another election in which, along with People of Color,  LGBTQ+ People are the boogyman used to scare their low-info-high-on-hate voters to the polls to vote against their own welfare,  yet again.   They've been doing it every election cycle of my lifetime, even those I don't remember but have looked back on.   

On Trump Bragging About His Gold Gilding The White House

Can't say it better than someone in a comment online did: 

I thought he'd put a tariff on all that Temu junk.  

Update:   It occurs to me he's got a 6-year-old girl's sense of beauty.   And I mean one who's watched way, way too many Disney princess movies. 

If Truth Telling Reigned They Wouldn't - Hate Mail

THE SENSIBLE CANADIAN OBSERVATION that speech was a right but it isn't the only right has it right, as far as I'm concerned.   The Canadian anti-hate speech law is far better than free speech absolutism which gives words more rights than the objects of lies and hate speech are given.*   The victims of lies and hate speech might have that "more speech" which the preening idiots of the American civil liberties industry give as the universal antidote for the most deadly of hate speech though those idiots - Ivy League JD'd or LLD'd or credentialed in some just as bogus degree in journalism or whatever - don't seem to be able to notice that if their victims have "more speech" the hate speakers have their "more speech" on top of their hate speech ("more-more")A ND GIVEN THE FINANCIAL INTEREST THAT MANY OF THE RICHEST AMONG US HAVE IN LIES AND HATE SPEECH AND THE GIANT MEGAPHONE OF THE COMMERCIAL MEDIA that hate-more-speech is louder than the speech of their victims ever is.    If "more speech" was the antidote for hate speech and lies that the idiots of the ACLU pretend it is then slavery, women's' subjugation, wage-slavery, etc. would have ended quite abruptly centuries ago instead of not only persisting but flourishing sixty one years after the Sullivan Decision made lies told in the mass media theoretical equal of truth being told.  Only the golden age of liberty that was the promise of the free speech theorists of that age up till today has not worked out that way, at all.   "Civil liberties" as it has come to be in reality means that millions can die after living lives of slavery and subjugation and it's no concern of the "free speech-press" crowd if all the blather in the world doesn't change that.   The most rational view of this by the victims of lies and hate speech is that the "civil libertarians" can FOAD.  

It is the most telling thing about the wrongness of the ACLU types,  that Strossen idiot,  the pantomime Fredrick Douglass,  Cornel West (he has every right to dress up like him and I have every right to point out he ain't no Fredrick Douglass) is that today the biggest, fattest proponents of "free speech" "free press" are not only the liars and haters but also THOSE WHO IN POWER ARE ATTACKING THE FREE SPEECH AND PRESS RIGHT TO TELL THE TRUTH THEY HATE SO MUCH and that the "more speech" of the civil liberties industry is failing so abjectly in defeating them.  American Nazis and fascists (white supremacists) and Republican-fascists are the biggest fattest "free speechers" there are.   Look at how some of the biggest fattest "civil liberties" lawyers like Dershowitz **is thick as a thief with them these days!   

The idea that since the courts are unreliable in the even-handed, non-interested administrations of the law that we are to always give up to the hate talkers and liars is absurd.   They have shown themselves to be just as capable of being biased and entirely interested under "free speech-press absolutism" as they have been under any other aspect of legal action.   They may feel the need, on occasion, to make some phony, bogus rationalization of their suppression of speech and truth telling ESPECIALLY WHEN THOSE PROVE TO BE A REAL DANGER TO THEIR PREFERRED PARTY AND IDEOLOGY but they'll lie through their teeth to back the suppression of it.   Watch the Roberts Court in regard to any university that really challenges the Trump regime's suppression and wholesale control - control which so many of the most elite educational institutions HAVE ALREADY SURRENDERED TO, SOMETIMES IN ADVANCE, as well as the big networks and the few big rags on paper.   

The question as to who will decide what is a lie and what is hate speech,  well, the answer to that is we will.  With all of the risks and dangers of that,  we will because no one else can do it.   The risk of letting lies and hate speech reign are far more certain than the theoretical risks of making that a matter of the law,  risks that we take in so many other instances.

What we can be certain of is that the likes of the Roberts Court, the lower Trump-McConnell-Grassley packed courts will do whatever they have to to suppress the truth being told whenever that endangers the Republican-fascism that they favor.   That is on those occasions when truth telling isn't already effectively banned by the corporate media, the networks, the big online operations and, when that doesn't work,  their goons with their very real as well as threatened violence and endangerment of the truth tellers.    And make no mistake about that, IF TRUTH TELLING REIGNED, THEY WOULDN'T.  

Scratch a professional civil libertarian and you'll find someone who's really  OK with oppression and even murder.   Especially the lawyers but even many of the academics. 

* I suspect one of the reasons for that perverted inversion of values is that words can be a property of some monetary value whereas People are not.   The perversion of the Anglo-American legal tradition cares far, far more about objects of monetary value than it does human lives.   I dream of a time when Americans and others are so fed up with the perverted values of our legal tradition and systems that they scrap it for something that puts life above property.   It is one of the most effective refutations of the widespread superstition that the American legal system is based on Scripture that the Mosaic Law and the even more radical economics of Jesus are far from the Anglo-American system that turns property and money into the all-powerful idol of the civil law.   I'd trade the entire legal code for the teachings of Jesus and I'd fully expect that the entire society would be better off,  though the rich would be leveled out of their wealth.    We should be so lucky as to have an egalitarian update of the Mosaic Law as the basis of it instead of the perverted neo-feudal English common law tradition.   

** Speaking of the Dersh.  I used to say "he's an advocate of torture who used to play a civil liberties lawyer on TV."  Look at how  his relationship with the truth and hate speech developed and how these days he's supporting not only torture but also genocide.  

Archaic, Cumbrous, and Ineffective

Simps has his pinafore all in a twist because in that short post I knocked off the other day expecting my internet to go out again at any second,  I spelled the word "poll" instead of "pole."   He loves to put on his tireless meter maid of orthography uniform and get out his ticket book as much as he likes to put on his Poldark breeches when PBS is running that bodice ripper again.   He's got an uninteresting fantasy life.  

I'll use the occasion to repost, again, one of the best passages from Thorstein Veblen, from the last pages of his Theory of The Leisure Class:

As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found, outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of the English language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.

Thorstein Veblen 

I just love the language Veblen used when he was being as sarcastic a writer as there has ever been in the history of the English language, even more subtle and sarcastic than Ben Jonson.   I'm tempted to go into Jonson's spelling, not only of his last name which he changed TO NOT CONFORM TO THE COMMON SPELLING OF IT mid-career but spelling by one of the most learned and erudite writers in the history of the language.  But this is a knock-off piece, too.  

I'm a thought criminal.  I have no desire for reputability.  What's reputable in 21st century America and English language kulcha is most likely stupid and sloppy.  I decided to embrace disrepute after years of being told that I can't say the things I say.   You think that's going to make me feel shame?   As opposed to what?   Supporting the most publicly conducted genocide in history?    You've been trying to make me feel ashamed for years and it hasn't worked yet,  it's never going to.   It only risks making me feel smug.   Though I don't even care that much about it. 

It's A Mistake To Let Them Keep Calling It "AI"

something more like "cheap imitation of intelligence" would be more honest.   It's not even the margarine of intelligence it's more like replacing butter with used motor oil.  Intelligence has nothing to do with it.   I think if we survive and recover from "AI" it will serve mostly as a cautionary tale as to how gullible human beings can willfully be out of bad habit.   Turing may have been an incredible genius with numbers but he knew shit all about how complex real intelligence in real, living beings is.   I mean, the genius went to the cops to complain about his boyfriend robbing him in 1950s Britland.   How stupid can someone get?  

So You Figure All We Have To Do Is Go BACK To The Constitutional Order. How Stupid Can You Get? - Hate mail

IT IS ONE OF THE UNDENIABLY CORRUPT aspects of the United States Constitution as drafted by the idiotically idolized framers that the slave-power, the Southern states and their Northern Allies - who were not an inconsiderable part of the slave-power - that the slave-power insisted on counting slaves in apportioning representatives to the House of Representatives even as those slaves would never be represented by the House members elected from those states.   The white-supremacists, the slave-power insisted that, in truth THEY, THE ENSLAVERS, THE WHITE SUPREMACISTS, be given additional representation through that mechanism.  Which is exactly the same thing that the Republican-fascists in Texas and other states trying to gerrymander their Congressional districts before next years mid-terms are trying to do.   Though as I and others have pointed out,  it was one of the consequences of de jure emancipation of slaves that the 3/5ths of stolen representation apportioned on their behalf would be enhanced to a full 5/5ths representation under de facto slavery,  the Jim Crow that reigned for the majority of time after the Civil war.  That corruption was baked into the Senate - apportioning far more representation to low population states to start with and giving all of the Senate representation in the many more states where Black People, Women, etc. were not allowed to vote to the minority of white men.   Even if there was universal suffrage the Senate would carry the taint of inequality through its very definition under the corrupt Constitutional system.   I believe Franklin was the only one of the framers who favored a unicameral legislature,  I wouldn't be surprised if that anti-democratic structuring of the Senate had a lot to do with that.  

Some of the worst of that might have been different in American history if Reconstruction had continued to completion.  Reconstruction was supposed to do for the United States what the more, at least temporarily successful, de-Nazification did in West Germany though far less effective in the Stalinist East Germany and not much in Austria which was idiotically deemed to not need it since they'd been overrun by Germany in the Anschluss    Reconstruction's failure was also a product of the slave-power and their Northern allies in the original Constitutional Convention through the adoption of the totally corrupt Electoral College which led to one of the several corrupt deals under it which had Rutherford Hayes sell out emancipated slaves to get the support of white-supremacist Southerners in Congress by promising to end Reconstruction.   

Among other things relevant to my criticism of the First Amendment and its idiotic, perhaps unintended creation of the notion that there is such a thing as a "right to lie" is the fact that such provisions prevented the United States government from outlawing lynching.   The first federal anti-lynching law was prevented - especially in the slave-empowered Senate - from being adopted until March 7th,  2022 when Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law.    

let me repeat that 

THE FIRST FEDERAL ANTI-LYNCHING LAW WAS PREVENTED FROM BEING ADOPTED UNTIL MARCH 7TH OF 2022! 

I have absolutely no confidence that the Roberts Court or an even more Republican-fascist (you can read "white supremacist" with complete accuracy) packed Supreme Court will knock it down,  either by direct action or through its increasing and cowardly shadow docket practice as one of the Trump-McConnell-Grassley atrocities on the federal bench knocks it down which you know many of them would like to do.  

So, you can see my criticism of the Constitution as the "pro-slavery compact" that the Abolitionist Wendell Phillps truthfully described it has had the most serious of consequences for Black People, other People of Color and the prevention of legitimate government,  egalitarian democracy in the United States.   If he had lived about twelve more years he could have seen the Supreme Court, using the Constitution as an excuse,  enhance the de facto slave-power even more through the Plessey decision.  And that Court was modest in its outrageous white supremacist (you can read that "Republican-fascist" with total accuracy)  partisan,  corruption.  The Roberts Court is now polling as the least trusted Court in the history of polling on that question.   Not that it bothers them,  in their billionaire-millionaire padded and, self-exempted corruption.    It's yet another idiotic aspect of the Constitution that they failed to find any provisions to keep that Court honest - which it hasn't been since 1803 and the Marbury power grab.  

I used to share the fear of a new Constitutional Convention being corrupted by the billionaires and millionaires and their kept media and politicians and lawyers and judges and "justices" making things worse but that fear disappeared with the rise of the Rehnquist (Bush v Gore among others) and the Roberts Court which is imposing those corruptions without any consultation of the Voters being involved.   Charles Pierce isn't wrong in his fear but he's naive if he thinks that's not exactly what we are seeing happening right now,  every week, every day of the week,  hourly, right now.  

On Again Off Again Life

WELL,  I THOUGHT that yesterday they'd replace the telephone poll down the road,  the one which has to be replaced before, MAYBE,  my internet will be reliable to any extent.   A car with a little yellow light was parked there with a big guy with a big beard sitting in it for a quarter of an hour and I thought,  Oh, the poll must be coming.   Well, other than getting all the dogs within earshot of the one that was barking at him going nothing happened.   I needed to get down the road to do a chore so I was going down and the guy was getting out with something in his hand.   

I said, "Are they finally replacing the poll?'

He said,  "I don't know.   Could be today, could be in thirty days.  I'm just here to put these on door knobs."

They were notices saying that the poll had to be replaced and that they'd be doing some excavation to put it in.   I guess they figure we were as unclued into that as the power company apparently has been.   Thing is still held in place by a 4x4 bolted into the two ends, still looking like a stiff wind could blow the whole thing and all the wires down.   The cable guy who came out to look at it told me that it was really dangerous to have it propped up like that.   Like that wasn't obvious, too.   He said he couldn't fix the wires till they replaced the poll.   

And Maine is supposed to have one of the better public utility commissions, or so they tell us.  They're probably going to give the power company that big increase they're asking for to deal with the damage to the system two winters ago.  Ain't capitalism wunnerful!  

You'd think they'd at least send some skinny kid working for them over the summer out to put those knob hangers out instead of some guy who looks like a lineworker.    

Hate Mail 2

I dealt with that a long time ago, too. 

No two groups are discriminated against in exactly the same way, each struggle for equality will have its own aspects peculiar to that group as well as features which are common to all.

Yrs, truely

Note the long exchange I had with Simps back then.  Maybe I should do summer re-runs of some of the more entertaining of those.  

That's A Question So Transparently Dishonest That I Dealt With It Two Decades Ago

THE AFFLUENT WHITE no doubt mostly straight-male answer to the arguments I made on Monday,  "If you don't like what they're saying you don't have to listen to them, "  shows nothing except how safe and secure the affluent-white-straight-males who invented that feel.   They may feel so secure and are rendered so stupid in their leisure that they can't imagine this as anything more than a matter of preference and offense of sensibilities.   They know they have little to nothing to fear from the kind of hate talk I say should be suppressed,  that would be because the ones who have the most to fear would probably be attacked or killed by other straight-white-males who are too cowardly to attack those with more money than they have.   And they know they have little to fear from those who are the focus of those lies.  

I am far more surprised when it is members of groups who are the main focus of lies and hate speech and receive the full measure of violence that comes with those who are as willfully deaf to the insanity of what they're saying.  

Look at that quote from Cornel West, "They have a right to spread their lies."  

TO SPREAD THEIR LIES.   

Even someone as degenerated as the once better West understands that the hate speech is spoken, it doesn't just dissipate in the air to no effect at all but the ideas it transmits take hold and spread,  no doubt being repeated by those it has spread to and spread to even more People.   Next thing you know you've got a lynch mob or a fascist party or a fascist government - which we have had in large numbers in the United States.   I doubt Mississippi, Alabama or any number of states in the USA have ever not had one governing it and many states have seldom had anything but a fascist government - white supremacy having been our indigenous form of fascism before fascism had a name.  The United States was under overt white supremacy up until 1865 and under de facto white supremacy for much of the rest of its history.  The white supremacist faction has always had more than its share of representation in the Congress and has been able to control the presidency through the Electoral College for much of our history.  That is historical fact made legal fact through the majority of the laws passed and enforced.  That the Supreme Court has been even more securely in the hands of white supremacy, AND NEVER MORE SO THAN IN THE ROBERTS COURT is even more evident in the history of its rulings.  They are about to reimpose Jim Crow.   All of that is supported by an ocean of lies and hate talk, all of it spread by the freest of free presses in human history.   The internet which some of us naively believed would be a force for breaking through the lies of corporate media has become a tsunami of lies and hate speech, now automated by "AI."   Still the civil liberties asses bleat their slogans of "free speech" absolutism as it is the vehicle driving us to fascist empowerment. 

It was easy for the affluent, white, straight or passing as it men of the Constitutional Convention and the First Congress to pretend that their second-rate late 18th century poetry of the First Amendment  was sufficient without excluding lying and hate speech under its absurd general protection.   I've said that many times,  that it is as plain as the distinction between good and evil that there can be no such a thing as a right to do what is evil and lying is except in the most exceptional circumstances,  evil to some degree or other.*   These days, as off on the legal professions as I am,  I wouldn't be surprised if those lawyers who drafted both documents understood how professionally and financially profitable their lying had been and they didn't want to include any possibility that their lies might someday be even mildly taken to account.   Though in my experience lawyers are such habitual liars - far more so than cops in my experience - that might not even cross their minds.   I'd always attributed it to Madison's distaste for having to keep that one promise, to push through a Bill of Rights and, so, just coming up with something that sounded good on its surface in the past.   

I have noticed one thing, the last time I slammed an individual for saying that there was a "right to lie" it was the noted civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley.   I attributed her myopic view of the real life consequences of such a dishonest framing of the right to free speech - which should have noted the right to tell the truth but stated there is no right to lie - to her law school training (she's a Dartmouth and Columbia product,  the goddamned Ivys).   Cornel West is an Ivy product too (Harvard Princeton) but not the law schools.  Come to think of it, most of the most influential framers with a university education probably were too.   Members of the groups most impacted by the violence and oppression and murder that comes from the spreading of lies must have to eat a special brand of lotus to blind them to what that should have taught them.   It comes naturally to the affluent, straight, white males who have created the culture of such institutions and professions.   Most such lying is done by them on their own behalf.  

It is less surprising to hear it from an affluent white woman like Nadine Strossen whose identity includes the greatest number of victims of such violence, WOMEN, even white Women, primarily because she's a lawyer and one who has gained her professional and public status through that most morally compromised of idols of liberalism, the ACLU.   And - surprise, surprise,  she's an Ivy product too,  Harvard and among the worst of it,  Harvard Law.  

*  I've dealt with the evasion that claims that then it's evil to lie to the Nazis about where the Jewish children are.   The greater evil of the Nazis - who believed in all kinds of lies of the kind I hold should be totally suppressed, those lies being the basis of their evil - is what makes lying to them a moral imperative, preventing a greater evil.   I would hold that as an emergency exception to the evil of lying in general.  Such as you and the ACLU would use it as an excuse to permit the Nazis to lie themselves back into power wherever they can dupe themselves back into power through their lies.    

The Amorality Of Modernism Eats Everything And Discredits Everything It Touches

I HAVE NOT listened to the three hours plus that this twelve minutes plus have been taken from.  I will say of the three in the discussion,  the former ACLU executive director,  Nadine Strossen,  the former scholar,  Cornel West and Norman Finkelstein I have the most respect for Finkelstein.    I have long disdained Strossen and almost as long had disdain for the parody radicalism of West.   Take these examples:

They have a right to spread their lies.  Cornel West

She [Nadine Strossen] said you have the right to advocate anti-semitism and you have the right to advocate genocide.   Norman Finkelstein summarizing what Strossen said, a summary she doesn't object to.   

ANY ALLEGED SCHOLAR such as Cornel West has been, in academia and in the public sphere, saying that there is such a thing as a "right to lie" THE VERY THING WHICH VIOLATES EVERYTHING THAT THE PROFESSION OF SCHOLARSHIP IS ALLEGED TO EXIST TO UPHOLD, THE DISCERNMENT AND THE PROLIFERATION OF KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUTH should have their credentials as a scholar pulled.    No one who has made their living as a scholar who can hold that there is any such a thing as "a right to lie" deserves to continue being paid as a scholar, should be employed to be a scholar, should be published as a scholar.*   Cornel West's claim discredits him as any kind of scholar, or it would if the world of scholarship - that would be academia and the academic publishing industry - had any intellectual or moral integrity.   I could go on to ask what it says about his other professional gig as an ordained minister but will leave that to you to fill in.   That a Christian minister could hold that there is such a thing as a "right to lie" is even more outrageous. 

It is one of the more grotesque pretenses of this whole thing,  "the law" but, also,  the modern scholars racket, that we can't discern the difference between lies and the truth,  the advocacy of equality and inequality, the difference between equality based democracy and the most extreme kinds of the opposite of that.  And that, given that pretense of intellectual and moral incapability, that we can't make those distinctions performative in even the most careful of decisions and actions.   That scholars who supposedly spend their professional lives in discerning the most minute of differences and making categorical assignments on that basis get away with pretending the most glaring of real life differences can't only be discerned but held to be definitive in choosing the good over the most evil are some of the biggest fattest liars there are and I would put someone like West in that category, now. 

I am far less shocked that a lawyer like Strossen would claim that there was a "right to advocate genocide" or "anti-semitism" or any other kind of bigotry because of all the allegedly scholarly pursuits,  the study of, theorizing about and profession of practicing "the law" is a profession of practicing and excusing and holding up lying as a professional responsibility like no other.   I have, over the last quarter of a century, ever more been impressed at how much of the legal, the lawyering racket is based in such pretense and willful nonfeasance, not only on the part of lawyers but even more so in the senior branches of the lawyering racket,  the judges and most of all the "justices."   I think the "civil liberties" lawyers are especially dishonest and disgusting, given their claims to moral stature.   I could go into the Premiership of Keir Starmer at this point but I'll try to keep it on this side of the Atlantic. 

I will say that only someone who believes, whether rationally or stupidly that they, their friends their families, their loved ones, those they might have the least comma of any care about has NO CHANCE OF BEING THE FOCUS OF MURDEROUS VIOLENCE AGAINST THEM AS INDIVIDUALS OR AS A GROUP could possibly advocate that there is such a thing as a "right to advocate genocide" or any other kind of racist violence which is guaranteed, once it is believed, once it falls on the ears of someone who is both disposed to take it as encouragement and act on it,  that someone is going to be attacked and likely someone will be killed.   Clearly, Strossen as well as the long line of lawyer-liars of the "civil liberties" industry don't really believe that they and theirs are going to be the recipients of the logical outcome of their pious (in a purely secular sense) professional pose or they would not claim that any such a thing as advocating genocide or forms of bigotry that have and still do lead to violence FOR OTHERS attains the status as "a right."   Though I am fully prepared to believe that the professional (and you can certainly include monetary) interests of such lawyers will blind them to the possibility that they are calling down everything from individual violence to genocide against those they may care about and they'll still do it.    I  don't believe for a second that they really care about the lives and rights of the victims of those whose "rights" to advocate their oppression, violence against them and,  in Strossen's chosen examples, their mass murder at the hands of the state all of which - as in Finkelstein's very real life historical example of an infamous spectacle lynching - proves to be a very, entirely probable possibility of the kind of lying that West and Strossen are advocating.   

I clearly take Finkelstein's reasoning that it is a desecration of the memory of the victims of those who commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc.  very seriously.  But it is ever more important than that because such talk has the not only possibility but guarantee that eventually someone, some group, some conspiracy, some region or state or country is going to act out of such lies to repeat that violence, that discrimination, that genocide again and again.   The desecration of the dead takes its most severe form in permitting, encouraging what was done to them to be done to others who are still living,  now and into the future.   Strossen's babble about them being honored by the protection of their killers and those who are inspired by their killers is among the most disgusting things that are current in the blathering, blithering "civic piety" that we are all spoon fed by the perverted notion of civics and, especially by the "civil liberties" industry and the mass media, news but most effectively entertainment which makes billions off of lies and next to nothing off of the rigorous telling of the truth.   

About the only encouraging thing I have read about the "civil liberties" groups is that younger, Women and People of Color, for the most part, are fed up with the old lines that "we must protect Nazis, white supremacists, male supremacists, pornographers, etc. "   

Despite all of the "never again" talk when it comes to the Nazi holocaust the official, required POV in these matters is that "never again" really means ALWAYS AGAIN.   If I'd been on that stage with them,  I'd have said that about both Strossen and West   West's claim that he had an uncle who was lynched in this context - which I am prepared to believe him on - makes his stand especially putrid and discrediting.   If I had had an uncle I had never known who was lynched I certainly would have had the moral integrity to question the received conventional POV on the falsely claimed "right" of those who incited and led the lynch mob to say what they did  to encourage his terror-murder,  every syllable of their lies and accusations and mere racist incitements,  everywhere up to and including, perhaps, them actually putting hands on my uncle to kill him.   It might do to claim that while sitting on your ass at your writing table or computer station as you coolly are in absolutely no danger yourself,  anticipating how you will gain esteem by your postmortem burning of your uncle on the secular altar of the First Amendment,  to me it just makes me think you are detestable.    Though no less detestable than a "civil liberties" lawyer who doesn't even have that much ancestral skin in the game. 

*  Reading this through again, it occurs to me that if Cornel West thinks there's a right to lie in regard to inciting genocide and anti-semitism and, indeed, in the example he claims, inciting a lynching,  I wonder if he holds there is a right to lie in the impotent, dusty, generally useless and irrelevant to anyone outside their often very obscure specialties, ream of scholarship.   How can a right that he holds so dear when it gets People killed disappear when it's something as trivial as most "scholarship" is?   Though I'll bet he'd never admit that such a "right to lie" in that one context, exists. 

The Best And Brightest Of The Ivy Law Schools Gave Us The Stupidest, Most Criminal, Most Vulgar, Most Clearly Demented Despot And Are Enabling Him Right Now

IN READING THE SEVERAL posts RMJ posted about just this weekends' manifestations of Trump's floridly senile and demented statements about him achieving percentages in the thousands of reductions in the price of drugs - an achievement which not only never happened but would mean that the drug companies would have to be paying patients back handsomely for buying their drugs - it makes me ask a question I have not heard asked at all.

ARE JOHN ROBERTS AND THE OTHER SUPREME COURT 'justices' WHO HAVE MADE THE UNITARY EXECUTIVE, FASCIST INTERPRETATION OF THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY "LAW" PROUD OF WHAT THEY HAVE, BY A VOTE OF SIX SINGLE PEOPLE TO THREE BROUGHT THE UNITED STATES TO?

This,  this very real, very actual, entirely non-Ivy League Law faculty theoretical TRUMP is the embodiment of what they think is desirable for the United States of America to be governed by.  THIS follows on to the Bush II,  not even smart, though criminal, daddy Bush,  "H.W." BUT  the idiot son "W" Bush who was a cautionary example of what the unitary executive theory could bring in the very lifetimes of those six "justices" ALL OF THEM PRODUCTS OF ELITE LAW SCHOOL EDUCATIONS, ALL OF THEM MEMBERS OF THE LAWERLY (liarly) ELITES,  his diasterous presidency - I WILL REMIND YOU BROUGHT TO US BY REHNQUIST COURT FIAT -  to have cautioned them as to the very real life consequences of their elite-entirely anti-democratic, entirely financially self-interested legal, constitutional theory for those in real life who don't get to live "safe in their alabaster chambers, untouched by morning and untouched by noon."   

Though I doubt ol' Emily Dickinson realized she was describing late 20th century, early 21st century Ivy League law faculty and their spawn who would be put into that ultimate alabaster chamber,  the goddamned supreme Court.   Though, considering her lawyer politician-father's relationship with those who took a dim view of how Harvard (see the intentions of those who founded Amherst College)  was developing, even then, maybe she did have some such idea.   

Only Roberts' clique has no intention of their Doge surrendering, they really believe he is going to do everything from making their familiy's extraction industry fortune safe from environmental action (Coney-Barrett, among others)* to keeping "People Unlike Us" (People of Color, etc.) out of their alma maters and professions and clubs and out of the voting booth and out of Congress (all of them clearly have that goal.  John Roberts can stand as the Taney of this racist court, and I include that poison well of pathology,  Thomas in that).   They are well on their way to reinstituting de facto Jim Crow with all of its necessary violence of enforcement. 

They really have been prepared to not only intentionally pave the way for the stupidest, most criminal, most vulgar, most corrupt man to have ever held the presidency (even more so than the one who appointed Alito and Roberts) to rule as an absolute dictator,  they are doing their best to try to enable his idiocracy, his gangster governance even as they try, in the most modest of ways, to cover their own judicial asses as they do it. 

John Roberts et al are the most corrupt of the already very corrupt Courts since the one chiefed by John Marshall - a man who never found a slave to side for in the many cases that massive slave holder ruled in and who grabbed the unconstitutional Marbury power for the court.   John Roberts has gone farther than Taney or those who started destroying and distorting the 14th and other Civil War Amendments to work for the newly empowered successor of the slave-power allegedly defeated in the Civil War and against which those Amendments were adopted.  He is the most corrupt, most criminally intending Chief Justice in the history of the country and his fellow five are as worthy of removal and prosecution for their crimes against equality and democracy and even the inadequate and fatally flawed liberal democracy that was set up by the Constitution and the early revolutions of Jefferson and Jackson.   I have a theory of the history of my country that literally everything good about us has been in opposition to the Constitutional order as originally set up and as it has been distorted by the Supreme Court and the corrupt powers in the other branches.  The abolition movement, the Women's rights movement, the struggle for equality, the struggle against wage-slavery and oligarchy, etc. have all been struggles against the Constitution and the law as it was set up and as it developed in each and every case.    The Supreme Court, presented in amber-tinted, soft-focused sentimentality in the American media and academia is and always has been the primary engine of anti-equality, anti-democracy, pro-oligarcy in our country and our history.   It has been the forces of "Constitutionalism" which constitute the worst of our history.   Though they won't tell you that in your education as a "Constitutional scholar."  

Either the United States will adopt a different Constitution, one which will, among other things, strip the usurped Marbury power and the even more appalling add-ons made by academic law school fascists** or the United States will possibly devolve into one of three things.  The oligarchic fascism they clearly favor (no doubt with "the vote" of white racists propagandized by our "free speech absolutist" lying media), an even worse fascism which those soft-handed, soft-brained "justices" believe couldn't happen here, or the United States will split into two or more entities,  I think there are regions and states which will eventually conclude that they can't tolerate the Constitutional order as it has become in reality.  If there will be a civil war, this time waged by the slave-power states (which now include many even in the upper-mid-west and Rocky Mountain states) against those who favor equality and democracy, God only knows.   

I used to fantasize about the possibility of Canada taking Maine, my state,  in though I would caution Canada against doing that without the strongest of grantees that U.S. habits of thinking wouldn't prevail in any part of the old US that wanted in on a more modern Constitution in a country which still aspires to egalitarian democracy.   The greatest disincentive of that on the part of Mainers,  that it would probably forfeit the Social Security of those in the state who paid into it, the Republican-fascists seem to be about to remove as they destroy Social Security - another thing the Roberts six are perfectly OK with.   If Mainers didn't have that keeping them from it,  I think only the really hard cases would oppose that.  But, of course, all that is only a fantasy.   I can tell the difference, Roberts,  Coney-Barrett et al seem to have been educated out of being able to discern that kind of thing.   The Ivys and their equivalent can do that to you.  

*  Though I have absolutely no doubt that the racism, sexism, dislike of freedom of choice in abortion and contraception,  class hatred of the six fascist "justices" are a strong motivation YOU CAN BE CERTAIN THAT THEIR PRIMARY MOTIVATION IS THE PROTECTION OF THEIR PERSONAL AND FAMILY MONEY AND THAT OF THEIR UPPER CLASS.   That, alone, explains pretty much about 19 twentieths of the history of the Supreme Court in action.  

Though, thinking this out and writing it makes me realize that we need a word to describe Clarence Thomas's clear and serially demonstrated hatred of Black People, "racist" doesn't cover it.   I don't think there has been a "justice" since the 19th century who has more clearly demonstrated his hatred of Black People than that ocean of pathology.  

**  Those currently at Harvard, alone, are a ship of lunatics who are often fools of the worst kind, and that's ONLY HARVARD!  Many of them are the most lunatic are "trad-catholic" theocrats of the most insane variety.   I was working on a post about that, too, but the iffy internet here is delaying that post.