I am not surprised to hear that all of her years at Eschaton has made "ql" as loose with the truth as the other rump regulars, I've come to think spending a lot of time on Duncan's blog makes even formely honest people prone to lying.
I HAVE NEVER SAID THAT I WAS A FEMINIST IN MY LIFE.
I did write about the reason I wouldn't say anything like that going on eleven years ago, back when I used the pseudonym "olvlzl", as a man writing for Echidne of the Snakes. It was one of the first things I posted as a regular blogger, there. Echidne could have told you that.
Friday, September 01, 2006
Unentitled
The beginning of September, the season of rag weed pollen, and pencil shavings. The beginning of school. Guest blogging weekends is a departure that comes at the same time as an involuntary cutback in my regular blogging activity. I am grateful to Echidne for this chance to keep my hand in.
In the spirit of new beginnings it might be good to spend a post on perusing the position of a man posting on a blog devoted to feminism. I had thought of writing an apologia of male feminism, which I hope exists, and to present my credentials. But, no. How presumptuous. A man define feminism and claim it for himself? How... typical.
Being a leftist my first instinct when dealing with this kind of dilemma is to ask women to define what it would be for a man to be a feminist. Or if a man can’t be one to at least tell how he can avoid being a total jerk about it. But women will certainly have different ideas on both questions. I’d be stuck with choosing among them or, maybe worse, ignoring all of them. Just as presumptuous, it’s hardly a solution to the problem.
But then another idea came. Why define it? Maybe no problem will come up. If it doesn’t why be the cause of unnecessary friction. I’ve seen arguments over definitions turn into death matches on some blogs. Maybe with enough determination to be fair and with common courtesy the problem won’t exist. Is trying to not be a jerk enough?
So, let me know if a problem does come up, please.
Posted by olvlzl at 9/01/2006 08:55:00 PM
Note: in the time since then I've stopped calling myself a "leftist" and, recently, even a "liberal" because of the ambiguity and expectations that come with those labels. I have not, in the mean time, adopted the one "ql" apparently claims I did. Or at least that her fellow jerks in Duncan's rump community say she claimed. I don't know if it's related to how Kevin Drum was led to say something uncharacteristically irrational a couple of weeks back.
If "ql" or any of the other rump regulars at Eschaton can find a place where I claimed to be a feminist with a link to it, I'll post it. I'm pretty confident I never changed my mind on that point.
Sunday, February 19, 2017
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Second Feature - James W. Nichol - Peggy Delaney - Identity Crisis
Another series written by James W. Nichol about a hard-boiled newspaper columnist. Unfortunately, this isn't nearly as dated as it's supposed to be.
John Stocker as Bernie Sniderman
J. W. Carroll as Nick Bauer
Caterina Scorsone as Amber
Lots of people played in the episodes, luckily the credits in this recording were pretty clear.
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Kevin Brew - Flight Risk
Ellie Kisyombe, Elizabeth
Dylan Tighe, Pilot
Kathy Rose O’Brien, Stewardess
other voices: Joe Duffy, the Liveline callers Felix Dzamara, Diana and Maria.
As ususal with RTE, you have to download the podcast to hear it but this is another timely piece during the Trump regime.
Hate Mail - "As if Americans are going to act like Christians are supposed to"
If the problem with America is that too many Christians are hypocrites about their Christianity and aren't being Christian enough, wouldn't it also stand to reason that it's as much a problem that atheists and others aren't being Christian enough?
I mean, your snark admits that Christians acting like Christians would be the answer. Things like doing unto others as you would have them do unto you (which as the saying continues is "the Law and the Prophets" is, actually, about as Jewish a saying as there is), doing to the least among us as we would to God, giving away money to the poor.... That would produce egalitarian democracy. And if that's the case, isn't it also the answer for anti-Christians like you, too?
Another question, if Christianity teaches the morality that's needed, isn't that an argument for the validity of Christianity? I'm far more inclusive than that, I think all of the traditions that come from the Jewish scriptures contain moral truth sufficient to produce egalitarian democracy. Others may as well. What doesn't and after my long and hard search within it can't seem to contain it is materialism.
There is a reason real democracy, the only form that has any right to the word in the modern period, egalitarian democracy, arose where it did was due to the moral prerequisites for it being present in large enough numbers of people. Where the people have lost that, in the West due to a replacement with market-consumer and materialist-scientistic ideology, democracy becomes impossible to maintain.
Update: Oh, no, I doubt I'm in much danger of having Simels' buddies at Eschaton read what I say, they're not great readers and don't seem to be able to comprehend what they don't already believe to start with. I wonder if there's a name for that. Confirmation-bias-dyslexia? I'd say it's Simels' mother tongue if he didn't share Mendacity with Kellyanne, Sean, Donald, et al.
I mean, your snark admits that Christians acting like Christians would be the answer. Things like doing unto others as you would have them do unto you (which as the saying continues is "the Law and the Prophets" is, actually, about as Jewish a saying as there is), doing to the least among us as we would to God, giving away money to the poor.... That would produce egalitarian democracy. And if that's the case, isn't it also the answer for anti-Christians like you, too?
Another question, if Christianity teaches the morality that's needed, isn't that an argument for the validity of Christianity? I'm far more inclusive than that, I think all of the traditions that come from the Jewish scriptures contain moral truth sufficient to produce egalitarian democracy. Others may as well. What doesn't and after my long and hard search within it can't seem to contain it is materialism.
There is a reason real democracy, the only form that has any right to the word in the modern period, egalitarian democracy, arose where it did was due to the moral prerequisites for it being present in large enough numbers of people. Where the people have lost that, in the West due to a replacement with market-consumer and materialist-scientistic ideology, democracy becomes impossible to maintain.
Update: Oh, no, I doubt I'm in much danger of having Simels' buddies at Eschaton read what I say, they're not great readers and don't seem to be able to comprehend what they don't already believe to start with. I wonder if there's a name for that. Confirmation-bias-dyslexia? I'd say it's Simels' mother tongue if he didn't share Mendacity with Kellyanne, Sean, Donald, et al.
Kellyanne Conway's interview tricks, explained
This is hard to watch but it's important to see how these Republican-fascists sell their lies.
The industry in selling lies is one of the most important creations of the media in the Age of Lies which has produced Trump just as it produced Putin in Russia. As it points out in the end of the video, it is the media that keeps having her on, just as it has had on her boss, the guy who lied himself into the Oval Office on cabloid TV.
Secularism That Denies The Moral Absolutes Necessary To Create Democracy Will Kill It
Democracy depends on a number of things, absolutely. It can't exist where its necessary precursors aren't present. Without those things democracy cannot exist. In one of his lectures going on three years ago, Walter Brueggemann pointed out two things he considered absolutely vital to a democracy, an independent judiciary and an independent press. He pointed out, three years before Trump! that under the Obama administration the Justice Department was headed by Eric Holder who, a fully invested member of the corporate establishment had failed to bring a single prosecution of the people who caused the financial meltdown of 2008 and he noted that the media that matters is almost completely in the hands of the billionaires, the corporate elite. That is why, the other night, Rachel Maddow could discuss the dark and dire implications of the meeting of the fascist Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner with the head of Time Warner to complain about CNN's coverage of the Trump regime.
For about the fortieth time, I'll point out that, for all the horrific results for the American media in the Trump regime, he is their creation through such as the parent company of Rachel Maddow's show and the "reality" show he was on and through her own network's free time given to him on Morning Joe. And, you can add such things as the quarter of a century of lies told about Hillary Clinton by just about the entire media up to and including the New York Times. While I certainly see Maddow's point, I'm having a really hard time summoning a lot of sympathy for the media, even as I see that they are in danger of being crushed by the jack oxfords of a piece of shit like Jared Kushner on behalf of his fake-fur-fuhrer father-in-law. Donald Trump is a product of the media regime that the secularists of such groups as the ACLU and the Supreme Court gave us. He is a product of their secular assertion of free-speech-free-press absolutism, an absolutism which included a permission to lie. That such people as Peter Thiel and his scummy lawyer-strategist have turned the tables on such media advocates of their right to lie, is an irony, it isn't shockingly unjust, it is an unsurprising result of the damage such "free speech" absolutism did to democracy, insuring fascism through their short-sighted regime of lying about people like Hillary Clinton with impunity. And now Thiel's lawyer is working for the Trump crime family.
But, as you know, I have gone farther than that first floor level of what a democracy needs to exist and why if it is not based on a bedrock of moral absolutes being held with sufficient firmness by a large number, an effective majority of people in a population, democracy will probably never really happen and it will never be secure. I've been through that a number of times and why the very assumptions of secular, modernist, materialist society cannot provide that moral foundation of democracy.
In order for democracy to exist, people who can or who merely believe they can rig things to get gain by violating rights and the good of other people, the environment, the economy, etc. must be in the minority. An effectively and continually defeated minority. Those who believe they must not do those things with sufficient strength to keep them from doing or trying to do those things to rig things in their favor must be an effective majority, under our insane federalist system, they have to be an effective majority in enough states to prevent people from electing exactly the kinds of presidents our country has been electing for the past fifty years and Congresses such as we've been getting consistently and in ever worsening strength since the Reagan era.
I have challenged atheists, materialists, etc. to say where those moral bases of democracy can come from with sufficient strength to be politically efficacious without belief in a God who gives commandments and have never gotten a real answer to that question. I understand their position, or, rather, their superstitious assumption that that was possible, with my witness to the United States in the past sixty years, I used to believe it myself. I no longer believe it, at all.
I don't think that even a purported belief in such a God is sufficient. People have to believe in the right kind of God with the right kind of moral commandments to produce democracy. Unless someone believes that there will be consequences for himself or herself in not treating people as we would want to be treated, that that commandment comes from a God who will punish such injustice, their inhibition out of mere social expectation or habit or disinclination will not be effective enough to have that effect.
Magnified through a population trained in market-corporate-consumerist ideology and depravity over an entire country, magnified through a country trained by "reality" TV and cabloid "news" I think it is impossible for such a population to generate the continual political effect that democracy must be to exist. I think we are on the verge of finding out that even that idol of secular superstition The Constitution with its Bill of Rights cannot produce or protect democracy without a population which is convinced that doing injustice will have the most horrific results, immediately or eventually.
I think that, when you read the Prophets, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, etc. you will see that the warnings about that are contained all through them, it is why they spoke prophetically. Only, now, we will find that secular prophesy won't do the same thing because it doesn't start with the only thing that will work, it doesn't contain the moral and, yes, religious basis that is essential for democracy. I don't think the quasi-deist-quasi-agnostic-quasi-atheist, 18th century materialists built anything into the Bill of Rights or the Constitution that will do it. There is a reason that virtually all of the great 19th century movements to remake the United States into a real, egalitarian democracy began as religious movements and why, as they turned secular that they lost steam and petered out into the ineffective form it took at the end of the 20th century and on to today.
I have come to the conclusion that unless the religious traditions, the Hebrew-Christian-Islamic tradition that contains those commandments for justice are revived, democracy will disappear. To not say that, having looked at how we lost democracy, would be as bad as anything Trump is doing to this country and the world. I think the only hope is for the people who really believe that to convince an effective electoral majority to be part of a secure foundation for egalitarian democracy. Any secularism which doesn't include that bedrock of moral absolutism has failed, secularism that is anything other than an administration of egalitarian justice in light of diversity of belief but which admits to that bedrock of egalitarian faith as an absolute will impede democracy.
For about the fortieth time, I'll point out that, for all the horrific results for the American media in the Trump regime, he is their creation through such as the parent company of Rachel Maddow's show and the "reality" show he was on and through her own network's free time given to him on Morning Joe. And, you can add such things as the quarter of a century of lies told about Hillary Clinton by just about the entire media up to and including the New York Times. While I certainly see Maddow's point, I'm having a really hard time summoning a lot of sympathy for the media, even as I see that they are in danger of being crushed by the jack oxfords of a piece of shit like Jared Kushner on behalf of his fake-fur-fuhrer father-in-law. Donald Trump is a product of the media regime that the secularists of such groups as the ACLU and the Supreme Court gave us. He is a product of their secular assertion of free-speech-free-press absolutism, an absolutism which included a permission to lie. That such people as Peter Thiel and his scummy lawyer-strategist have turned the tables on such media advocates of their right to lie, is an irony, it isn't shockingly unjust, it is an unsurprising result of the damage such "free speech" absolutism did to democracy, insuring fascism through their short-sighted regime of lying about people like Hillary Clinton with impunity. And now Thiel's lawyer is working for the Trump crime family.
But, as you know, I have gone farther than that first floor level of what a democracy needs to exist and why if it is not based on a bedrock of moral absolutes being held with sufficient firmness by a large number, an effective majority of people in a population, democracy will probably never really happen and it will never be secure. I've been through that a number of times and why the very assumptions of secular, modernist, materialist society cannot provide that moral foundation of democracy.
In order for democracy to exist, people who can or who merely believe they can rig things to get gain by violating rights and the good of other people, the environment, the economy, etc. must be in the minority. An effectively and continually defeated minority. Those who believe they must not do those things with sufficient strength to keep them from doing or trying to do those things to rig things in their favor must be an effective majority, under our insane federalist system, they have to be an effective majority in enough states to prevent people from electing exactly the kinds of presidents our country has been electing for the past fifty years and Congresses such as we've been getting consistently and in ever worsening strength since the Reagan era.
I have challenged atheists, materialists, etc. to say where those moral bases of democracy can come from with sufficient strength to be politically efficacious without belief in a God who gives commandments and have never gotten a real answer to that question. I understand their position, or, rather, their superstitious assumption that that was possible, with my witness to the United States in the past sixty years, I used to believe it myself. I no longer believe it, at all.
I don't think that even a purported belief in such a God is sufficient. People have to believe in the right kind of God with the right kind of moral commandments to produce democracy. Unless someone believes that there will be consequences for himself or herself in not treating people as we would want to be treated, that that commandment comes from a God who will punish such injustice, their inhibition out of mere social expectation or habit or disinclination will not be effective enough to have that effect.
Magnified through a population trained in market-corporate-consumerist ideology and depravity over an entire country, magnified through a country trained by "reality" TV and cabloid "news" I think it is impossible for such a population to generate the continual political effect that democracy must be to exist. I think we are on the verge of finding out that even that idol of secular superstition The Constitution with its Bill of Rights cannot produce or protect democracy without a population which is convinced that doing injustice will have the most horrific results, immediately or eventually.
I think that, when you read the Prophets, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, etc. you will see that the warnings about that are contained all through them, it is why they spoke prophetically. Only, now, we will find that secular prophesy won't do the same thing because it doesn't start with the only thing that will work, it doesn't contain the moral and, yes, religious basis that is essential for democracy. I don't think the quasi-deist-quasi-agnostic-quasi-atheist, 18th century materialists built anything into the Bill of Rights or the Constitution that will do it. There is a reason that virtually all of the great 19th century movements to remake the United States into a real, egalitarian democracy began as religious movements and why, as they turned secular that they lost steam and petered out into the ineffective form it took at the end of the 20th century and on to today.
I have come to the conclusion that unless the religious traditions, the Hebrew-Christian-Islamic tradition that contains those commandments for justice are revived, democracy will disappear. To not say that, having looked at how we lost democracy, would be as bad as anything Trump is doing to this country and the world. I think the only hope is for the people who really believe that to convince an effective electoral majority to be part of a secure foundation for egalitarian democracy. Any secularism which doesn't include that bedrock of moral absolutism has failed, secularism that is anything other than an administration of egalitarian justice in light of diversity of belief but which admits to that bedrock of egalitarian faith as an absolute will impede democracy.
Friday, February 17, 2017
I Didn't Know About the Desus & Mero Talk Show But Their Interview With Rachel Maddow Is Really Great
This famous picture of the disgraced National Security Advisor Michael Flynn with Vladimir Putin has a another person at the table I hadn't heard anyone else but Rachel Maddow point out, in the lower right of the photo is no one else but the Green Party's Putin, Republican-fascist spoiler, Dr. Jill Stein.
I don't know if I'll be listening to Desus & Mero but I certainly am grateful for them and Rachel Maddow to have pointed this out.
The Green Party is just another phony lefty party that a Russian dictator is using to screw American liberalism. Democrats need to destroy the Green Party.
Profiles In Courage Aren't What Will Get Trump Removed Profiles In Self-Interest On A Critical Margin of Republicans Might
The Republican Party is in total control of the executive and the Congress. Now, after the press disaster Trump insisted on holding yesterday, it's clear he is literally and dangerously insane. Every hour he is in the White House he is doing immense damage to the country and the world. The biggest question looming over us like impending disaster is how Republicans are going to remove him from office and how long that will take.
Susan Collins, other allegedly responsible Republicans are where the pressure has to be put because the only thing that would get Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to show the responsibility to do that is a loss of their own power. I'm not expecting any profiles in courage from the people who supported some of the worst appointments to government positions in history but that's where we come in. We've got to put maximum pressure on Susan Collins and her like.
Susan Collins, other allegedly responsible Republicans are where the pressure has to be put because the only thing that would get Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to show the responsibility to do that is a loss of their own power. I'm not expecting any profiles in courage from the people who supported some of the worst appointments to government positions in history but that's where we come in. We've got to put maximum pressure on Susan Collins and her like.
Hate Mail - It's The Victims Of Marxists, Nazis, Fascists, the KKK Who Deserve My Concern Not Those Who Favor Dictators and Their Oppressive Ideiologies
One of the worst parts of the Communist suckering of liberals was liberals falling for their sob stories when their close ideological allies in the worship of dictatorship and despots on the right did mean things to them.
I recognize absolutely no right to my support or concern of any Nazi, fascist, communist, Marxist, or anyone who advocates the theoretical denial of rights, oppression or murder of any people.
I don't agree that anyone who supports a dictator of their ideological side who is actually denying people of rights has the right to my support of them having exactly the same rights their guy obliterates along with the people who own those rights.
The fans of "the right kind" of oppression, denial of rights and murder don't own a right to my support.
THE VICTIMS OF THE OPPRESSION, DENIAL OF RIGHTS AND MURDERS THEY FAVOR UNDER THEIR PREFERRED IDEOLOGICAL DICTATOR HAVE A RIGHT TO MY SUPPORT AND A RIGHT TO EXPECT ME TO OPPOSE THOSE WHO WOULD OPPRESS AND MURDER THEM. It is a moral travesty for liberals to give the advocates of oppression a second or cent of support that rightly belongs to those they advocate oppressing.
I recognize absolutely no right to my support or concern of any Nazi, fascist, communist, Marxist, or anyone who advocates the theoretical denial of rights, oppression or murder of any people.
I don't agree that anyone who supports a dictator of their ideological side who is actually denying people of rights has the right to my support of them having exactly the same rights their guy obliterates along with the people who own those rights.
The fans of "the right kind" of oppression, denial of rights and murder don't own a right to my support.
THE VICTIMS OF THE OPPRESSION, DENIAL OF RIGHTS AND MURDERS THEY FAVOR UNDER THEIR PREFERRED IDEOLOGICAL DICTATOR HAVE A RIGHT TO MY SUPPORT AND A RIGHT TO EXPECT ME TO OPPOSE THOSE WHO WOULD OPPRESS AND MURDER THEM. It is a moral travesty for liberals to give the advocates of oppression a second or cent of support that rightly belongs to those they advocate oppressing.
The greatest act of both disastrously misplaced concern for liberals in the 20th century and of moral cowardice and betrayal was liberals spending a single second of concern, a single penny of support for the Communists who supported exactly the same kind of oppressors and murderers that Nazis and fascists did. In fact the idiocy that "we must support the rights of Nazis and fascists to advocate mass murder and oppression and destruction of every part of the First amendment or those rights could be taken from "us" could well be taken for that "us" to mean "those poor, dear, suppressed Marxists". The part that that idiocy of the half-brain dead ACLU* had in creating and imposing Trump on us through such advocacy is something I'd study if I had the time.
It would have been ever so much more convincing if they'd advocated that the people in the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, China, North Korea, etc be given the same rights there which they claimed a right to, here.
It would have been ever so much more convincing if they'd advocated that the people in the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, China, North Korea, etc be given the same rights there which they claimed a right to, here.
I think it is sheer idiocy for liberals to worry about the rights of Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, .... or communists to advocate the possibility that egalitarian democracy be replaced with those ideologies with a proven record of murdering and oppressing. They got their test of time as, with the rise of Trump, has the idiotic idea that fascist ideologies should get a "fair hearing" to try to impose fascism here. I'm far more interested in the truly superior and truly endangered right that the victims of fascism, Nazis, white supremacists, ..... communists and the potential victims of those systems have TO NOT BE PUT IN DANGER BY IDIOT UPPER CLASS, MOSTLY WHITE, MOSTLY IVY-LEAGUE AFFLUENT, MOSTLY NOT ENDANGERED LEGAL HACKS AND MEDIA SCRIBBLERS.
Communists have no more of a right to me worrying about their present or past ability to impose their ideology on us than Nazis or the Klan do. There is no such right, it is abolished by their advocacy of the abolition and abridgment of rights for everyone, especially the rights of other people who are in present danger.
Oh, and one of the big lessons of the Trump disaster is this:
No liars of any kind have a right to lie, the idea that there is a right to lie is one of the stupidest things anyone of any ideological stripe has ever asserted. Lies enable dictators, lies kill democracy. And communists have been some of our bigger liars.
* With the advocacy of the ACLU of allowing the most severely paranoid, schizophrenic and other insane people to buy guns, automatic weapons right now, after the wave of mass killings in the United States, I declare them entirely brain-dead. The ACLU has always had a double-act in which they mixed some advocacy of rights of innocent people with the far more dangerous allege right of some of the most dangerous people in our country to lie themselves into power, many of them who are now inside the White House.
If the big-brains of the ACLU can't discern the difference between people who favor equal rights and democracy from Nazis, Communists and violent white-supremacists they're too stupid to put our faith in. We need a responsible, smart alternative to the damned ACLU.
Communists have no more of a right to me worrying about their present or past ability to impose their ideology on us than Nazis or the Klan do. There is no such right, it is abolished by their advocacy of the abolition and abridgment of rights for everyone, especially the rights of other people who are in present danger.
Oh, and one of the big lessons of the Trump disaster is this:
No liars of any kind have a right to lie, the idea that there is a right to lie is one of the stupidest things anyone of any ideological stripe has ever asserted. Lies enable dictators, lies kill democracy. And communists have been some of our bigger liars.
* With the advocacy of the ACLU of allowing the most severely paranoid, schizophrenic and other insane people to buy guns, automatic weapons right now, after the wave of mass killings in the United States, I declare them entirely brain-dead. The ACLU has always had a double-act in which they mixed some advocacy of rights of innocent people with the far more dangerous allege right of some of the most dangerous people in our country to lie themselves into power, many of them who are now inside the White House.
If the big-brains of the ACLU can't discern the difference between people who favor equal rights and democracy from Nazis, Communists and violent white-supremacists they're too stupid to put our faith in. We need a responsible, smart alternative to the damned ACLU.
Thursday, February 16, 2017
Sonny Boy Williamson - Nine Below Zero 1951
I'd started listening to the radio dramas Midnight Cab again and, since Sonny Boy Williamson is Walker Devereaux's favorite artist - mentioned all through the series - I've been listening to him too. This will be going through my head the next time I wake up with cold feet, alone in my cold bed.
Keep it to Yourself
Simps is such an expert in Motown that he doesn't know the difference between the Supremes who I've never exactly been a big fan of and the great Martha and the Vandellas who I loved. I guess to him they all look alike.
Update: And, look, I had to point that out to him a year and four months ago when the idiot made the same mistake.
Update: How odd, Simels, I didn't recall and can't see in my archive that I've ever written about The Supremes, the girl group, not the criminals of the Supreme Court, I've written lots about them. I don't recall writing anything about Diana Ross and the others. I think you mean the several things I've written about Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. I loved Martha and the Vandellas. Was never big on the Supremes, neither the girl-group nor the old crooks in robes. Apparently they're all the same to you. Needless to say, as usual, you're wrong.
Update 2: I'm not wasting my time reminding you of anything Simps, you just lie no matter how many times someone points the truth out to you. You and the guy who provides you a message board for your lies have so much more in common with Trump than you'd ever want anyone to notice. Lying, mostly, stupidity, too.
Update: And, look, I had to point that out to him a year and four months ago when the idiot made the same mistake.
Update: How odd, Simels, I didn't recall and can't see in my archive that I've ever written about The Supremes, the girl group, not the criminals of the Supreme Court, I've written lots about them. I don't recall writing anything about Diana Ross and the others. I think you mean the several things I've written about Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. I loved Martha and the Vandellas. Was never big on the Supremes, neither the girl-group nor the old crooks in robes. Apparently they're all the same to you. Needless to say, as usual, you're wrong.
Update 2: I'm not wasting my time reminding you of anything Simps, you just lie no matter how many times someone points the truth out to you. You and the guy who provides you a message board for your lies have so much more in common with Trump than you'd ever want anyone to notice. Lying, mostly, stupidity, too.
It's Just A Matter Of Time Till The Buggy Whip Market Takes Off!* - Hate Mail
That, in 2017, the very centennial year of the disastrous Russian Revolution that ushered in the great and horrific experiment in dialectical-materialist, atheist MARXIST governments with the results which were anything but a workers paradise, a great and new period of light and good and freedom or even logic, a period when we, in the West got to witness that experience with its slave labor plantations, concentration camps, mass murders that match and surpass those of the past ...
WHAT DOES IT TAKE FOR THE PUBLISHERS, EDITORS AND SCRIBBLERS FOR A MAGAZINE LIKE THE NATION TO UNDERSTAND NO ONE HERE IS EVER GOING TO BUY IT?
The goddamned Marxists have been THE millstone around the neck of American liberals since the first attention-seeking "I'm the most leftist in the room" assholes that started pushing it inflicted themselves and their red-fascist ideology on us, dragging us down, discrediting us, splitting us, deceiving us, AND LET ME POINT THAT OUT AGAIN, DISCREDITING US FOR A CENTURY AND LONGER - the last thing any American who favors egalitarian democracy, civil liberties, economic justice (yeah, they got lots of that under communism, didn't they) needs is for asshole quasi-academic scribblers to push Marxism in major venues of the American would-be left. Any magazine that is still pushing that is what should be considered discredited. NO ONE WANTS MARXISM. NOT EVEN MARXISTS, ESPECIALLY NOT MARXISTS WHO HAVE CONTROL OF GOVERNMENTS. Their only big accomplishment in American politics was destroying the Socialist Party in 1919 which, considering how many of them had fallen for Marxism by that time, it was probably inevitable.
Socialism has suffered what is probably a fatal discrediting due to the Marxist appropriation and distortion if not actual destruction of the original idea. Economic justice, egalitarian democracy, civil rights, workers ownership of the means of production, Marxists gluing themselves to those ideas like diseased and poisonous limpets and hagfish has not done the left any favor.
Marxism is an attempt to construct the least bad materialist political regime, which WILL NOT BE DEMOCRATIC. The experience of history shows that whenever you begin without egalitarian democracy as the foundation that what you'll get is an oppressive dictator, how badly the dictator will oppress being merely a variable, not a difference in quality. Marx, being a 19th century materialist-atheist with massive pretensions to a scientific method that was endemic among such folk, couldn't imagine human beings having the capacity to govern themselves. Apparently neither can the people who, after a century of seeing what Marxism really is in real life, are still pushing it on an American public who aren't stupid enough to want it. They should be shoved out of any left that hopes to produce egalitarian democracy, civil rights, economic and social justice and, if it turns out to be necessary to secure those, workers ownership of the means of production.
* or Dump the Marxists. Already.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE FOR THE PUBLISHERS, EDITORS AND SCRIBBLERS FOR A MAGAZINE LIKE THE NATION TO UNDERSTAND NO ONE HERE IS EVER GOING TO BUY IT?
The goddamned Marxists have been THE millstone around the neck of American liberals since the first attention-seeking "I'm the most leftist in the room" assholes that started pushing it inflicted themselves and their red-fascist ideology on us, dragging us down, discrediting us, splitting us, deceiving us, AND LET ME POINT THAT OUT AGAIN, DISCREDITING US FOR A CENTURY AND LONGER - the last thing any American who favors egalitarian democracy, civil liberties, economic justice (yeah, they got lots of that under communism, didn't they) needs is for asshole quasi-academic scribblers to push Marxism in major venues of the American would-be left. Any magazine that is still pushing that is what should be considered discredited. NO ONE WANTS MARXISM. NOT EVEN MARXISTS, ESPECIALLY NOT MARXISTS WHO HAVE CONTROL OF GOVERNMENTS. Their only big accomplishment in American politics was destroying the Socialist Party in 1919 which, considering how many of them had fallen for Marxism by that time, it was probably inevitable.
Socialism has suffered what is probably a fatal discrediting due to the Marxist appropriation and distortion if not actual destruction of the original idea. Economic justice, egalitarian democracy, civil rights, workers ownership of the means of production, Marxists gluing themselves to those ideas like diseased and poisonous limpets and hagfish has not done the left any favor.
Marxism is an attempt to construct the least bad materialist political regime, which WILL NOT BE DEMOCRATIC. The experience of history shows that whenever you begin without egalitarian democracy as the foundation that what you'll get is an oppressive dictator, how badly the dictator will oppress being merely a variable, not a difference in quality. Marx, being a 19th century materialist-atheist with massive pretensions to a scientific method that was endemic among such folk, couldn't imagine human beings having the capacity to govern themselves. Apparently neither can the people who, after a century of seeing what Marxism really is in real life, are still pushing it on an American public who aren't stupid enough to want it. They should be shoved out of any left that hopes to produce egalitarian democracy, civil rights, economic and social justice and, if it turns out to be necessary to secure those, workers ownership of the means of production.
* or Dump the Marxists. Already.
We Must Change The Constitution To Prevent This Ever Happening Again
Now with today's press - I can't even think of a word for it - and there is no denying that Donald Trump isn't just mildly out of it, he's floridly insane, the biggest question is how irresponsible will Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan be before they do the only responsible thing available to them, remove him from the presidency and send him PERMANENTLY into treatment.
I'm not optimistic and these days optimistic means that they'll do that eventually before the worst having a total, raving nutcase and his insane neo-Nazi staff in the White House can come to. Even if that takes time, every hour he and his lie spewing, emolument seeking admin - I can't even think of a term for it - mafia of the mentally ill forms the executive is more serious and immense and irreparable damage to the country and the world is happening.
I'm not optimistic about the results of them removing him from office and having someone as incompetent as Pence in there but at least he's not totally insane and he would not dare to keep on the likes of Bannon and Kushner and Miller. But that's the best scenario and I'm not confident that Ryan and McConnell, afraid of the neo-Nazi-totally-ignorantly-insane faction of the Republican-fascist party would remove Trump no matter what it costs the country, they would never risk their position in the House and Senate to save the country.
WHAT WE NEED MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE AFTER THIS ENDS, IF WE'RE STILL ALIVE, IS TO REFORM THE CONSTITUTION TO GET RID OF THE REGIME OF LIES THAT GOT US TRUMP. WE ALSO MUST EXPAND THE DEFINITION OF TREASON TO INCLUDE THOSE ASPECTS OF THIS TRUMP DISASTER WHICH ARE TREASON EXCEPT FOR THE CONSTITUTIONAL DEFINITION. ALLOWING THOSE ASPECTS OF THE FOUNDERS' NAIVE INEXPERIENCE TO STAND WITHOUT CHANGE IS AN INVITATION FOR THIS TO HAPPEN ALL OVER AGAIN, AND AGAIN FOR AS LONG AS THOSE AREN'T CHANGED.
I'm not optimistic and these days optimistic means that they'll do that eventually before the worst having a total, raving nutcase and his insane neo-Nazi staff in the White House can come to. Even if that takes time, every hour he and his lie spewing, emolument seeking admin - I can't even think of a term for it - mafia of the mentally ill forms the executive is more serious and immense and irreparable damage to the country and the world is happening.
I'm not optimistic about the results of them removing him from office and having someone as incompetent as Pence in there but at least he's not totally insane and he would not dare to keep on the likes of Bannon and Kushner and Miller. But that's the best scenario and I'm not confident that Ryan and McConnell, afraid of the neo-Nazi-totally-ignorantly-insane faction of the Republican-fascist party would remove Trump no matter what it costs the country, they would never risk their position in the House and Senate to save the country.
WHAT WE NEED MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE AFTER THIS ENDS, IF WE'RE STILL ALIVE, IS TO REFORM THE CONSTITUTION TO GET RID OF THE REGIME OF LIES THAT GOT US TRUMP. WE ALSO MUST EXPAND THE DEFINITION OF TREASON TO INCLUDE THOSE ASPECTS OF THIS TRUMP DISASTER WHICH ARE TREASON EXCEPT FOR THE CONSTITUTIONAL DEFINITION. ALLOWING THOSE ASPECTS OF THE FOUNDERS' NAIVE INEXPERIENCE TO STAND WITHOUT CHANGE IS AN INVITATION FOR THIS TO HAPPEN ALL OVER AGAIN, AND AGAIN FOR AS LONG AS THOSE AREN'T CHANGED.
Not If You're Waiting For The Movies To Let It be Seen
Brokhshtiker (Shards) by Peretz Markish, Voice : Shane Baker, Neon Animation : Jack Feldstein
Now, when my vision turns in on itself,
My shocked eyes open, all their members see
My heart has fallen like a mirror on
A stone and shatters, ringing, into splinters.
Piece by piece I'll try to gather them
To make them whole with stabbed and bleeding fingers.
And yet, however skillfully they're glued,
My crippled, broken image will be seen.
I took that text from this, one of the few accounts of The Murdered Poets I was able to find online. It has some other translations of other poems and more detail about the poets and the events that led to their murder. Here's now it ends, note there is a poem by Lieb Kvitko in the text. That is what led me to find it online, looking for what they got killed for saying.
Stalin's systematic postwar murder of Jews effectively took up where Hitler had left off. His ferocious assault was mounted against the whole Jewish people, and all of them suffered. In consequence, the Yiddish language and its culture in the Soviet Union sustained its most grievous blow. The trial of 1952 did more than wipe out some of the best Yiddish literary talents of the century; it completed the destruction of Yiddish in Europe. Always vulnerable to a variety of life-threatening enemies, Yiddish in the Soviet Union could not survive the betrayal of the hope the Revolution had awakened for it. Perhaps nothing is more devastatingly broken than an idealistic heart, nothing more cruelly cut off than the unfulfilled promise of youth. With terrible irony, the acrid words in which Leyb Kvitko had years before grieved over the pogroms of the Civil War years now provided an epitaph for both the poets and their language:
A Russian death
Is death of all deaths.
Russian pain,
Pain of all pains.
Does the world's wound ooze pus?
How does its heart do now?
Ask any child,
Ask any Jewish child.
If, as Stalin had decreed, it was a crime to mourn the martyrs of the Holocaust, a crime to value one's Jewish heritage, a crime to treasure the language of the Torah, a crime to be a proud and identifying Jew, to care deeply about continued Jewish identity and survival in a bloodthirsty world, then those writers condemned were all, without question, guilty. To lesser or greater degrees, their creativity, even when exercised under the severest constraints, was indelibly stamped with the stigmata of their Jewishness. Whatever disavowals may have been forced from them during the long agony of their imprisonment and trial, the work they left behind belies them. The Yiddish language in which they shaped their utterance became the small voice of a betrayed and beaten Jewishness. Its memory deserves honor; its shapers, our respect.
Geesh, you'd think this is something that would have gotten some attention from American movie makers. Though, if the truth matters, that's probably not without its good points.
Now, when my vision turns in on itself,
My shocked eyes open, all their members see
My heart has fallen like a mirror on
A stone and shatters, ringing, into splinters.
Piece by piece I'll try to gather them
To make them whole with stabbed and bleeding fingers.
And yet, however skillfully they're glued,
My crippled, broken image will be seen.
I took that text from this, one of the few accounts of The Murdered Poets I was able to find online. It has some other translations of other poems and more detail about the poets and the events that led to their murder. Here's now it ends, note there is a poem by Lieb Kvitko in the text. That is what led me to find it online, looking for what they got killed for saying.
Stalin's systematic postwar murder of Jews effectively took up where Hitler had left off. His ferocious assault was mounted against the whole Jewish people, and all of them suffered. In consequence, the Yiddish language and its culture in the Soviet Union sustained its most grievous blow. The trial of 1952 did more than wipe out some of the best Yiddish literary talents of the century; it completed the destruction of Yiddish in Europe. Always vulnerable to a variety of life-threatening enemies, Yiddish in the Soviet Union could not survive the betrayal of the hope the Revolution had awakened for it. Perhaps nothing is more devastatingly broken than an idealistic heart, nothing more cruelly cut off than the unfulfilled promise of youth. With terrible irony, the acrid words in which Leyb Kvitko had years before grieved over the pogroms of the Civil War years now provided an epitaph for both the poets and their language:
A Russian death
Is death of all deaths.
Russian pain,
Pain of all pains.
Does the world's wound ooze pus?
How does its heart do now?
Ask any child,
Ask any Jewish child.
If, as Stalin had decreed, it was a crime to mourn the martyrs of the Holocaust, a crime to value one's Jewish heritage, a crime to treasure the language of the Torah, a crime to be a proud and identifying Jew, to care deeply about continued Jewish identity and survival in a bloodthirsty world, then those writers condemned were all, without question, guilty. To lesser or greater degrees, their creativity, even when exercised under the severest constraints, was indelibly stamped with the stigmata of their Jewishness. Whatever disavowals may have been forced from them during the long agony of their imprisonment and trial, the work they left behind belies them. The Yiddish language in which they shaped their utterance became the small voice of a betrayed and beaten Jewishness. Its memory deserves honor; its shapers, our respect.
Geesh, you'd think this is something that would have gotten some attention from American movie makers. Though, if the truth matters, that's probably not without its good points.
The Day The Pony Died - Bye-bye Eschaton Jr High
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2006
When criticizing Atrios, I always feel obliged to note that he gave me my first big link, and I appreciate that. I also think he's often funny as hell. That whole pony schtick, for instance, cracks me up.
But Eschaton is not a good blog anymore. In fact, it's a pretty bad one. I breeze by every now and then because he's got his finger on the pulse of the leftosphere. But that's basically the only reason. I think Eschaton may even be worse than Instapundit now. Neither of those blogs contains much by way of analysis, of course. Both are mostly link factories. But the hints and snippets of analysis both have are, well, of rather low quality.
After a promising start with the encouragement of "The Horse" of Media Whores Online, Duncan early petered out and just kept it going to get money from it. I don't even know if he bothers with the automatic open thread posting, these days. It's a long way from when he regularly had 1,000+ or close to it comment threads, sometimes several in one day.
He does attract gossip, time wasting, people using it like a 12-year-old posting what they're eating for lunch, to talk about their uninteresting lives and people who lie and dish like the biggest assholes in your grade 7 class. Which is the only reason I'm posting this, now. I get seriously libeled there several times just about every week. If he didn't do that, I'd never bother with it. If you think I should just ignore it, you try being in my position and see if you still think you should just ignore it.
Interestingly, as I recently had reason to just a couple of weeks back, he was talking about Kevin Drum in relation to Duncan back then, which may be the reason someone called my attention to this almost eleven year old post.
So what happend to Eschaton? I'd say that Atrios used to be less partisan and foolish than Glenn Reynolds, but now I'd say he's worse. What made the difference, if there is, in fact, a difference? Could it be because Atrios included comments and Reynolds didn't? They both play to the crowd, but only Atrios has an adoring chorus hanging on his every word. Dunno. It's just a hypothesis: don't take it too seriously.
Anyway, I won't be commenting on anything at Eschton anymore, as it's just not worth my time to stop by there. Better to spend my time at, say, The Washington Monthly, where Kevin Drum keeps getting better and better, rather than worse and worse. Is Drum smarter than Atrios? Maybe, but I can't tell. Drum is more intellectually honest, and that's more important than being smarter. That's good news, though, for Atrios, actually. It means he could still turn things around if he wanted to. We can't always become smarter, but we can almost always become better. And that's the really important thing.
If Duncan could have become better he obviously didn't choose to. I wouldn't accuse him of being too partisan, though I agree with just about all of the rest of it. He's not smarter than Kevin Drum, Kevin Drum works for a real magazine, writing real posts, several times a day. Mostly the only time he gets it seriously wrong is if he parrots the neo-atheist line, other than that he's mostly spot on. Duncan is an example of wasted potential.
I Just Got A Text That Simps Is Whining About Me Dissing The Movies
I knew THAT would be the thing he waxed wroth over, not something like Stalin murdering Jews, mounting what could have turned into a full blown, Hitler sized pogrom if that great hero of dialectical materialism hadn't died in his own filth, to be mourned by many an American commie, or Darwin agreeing that democracy was scientifically invalid or that he and so many college educated functional illiterates had been sold lies as history.
How he would be able to judge, he never having read even a third rate book, is something I wouldn't waste my time asking. I was thinking of not posting the post I wrote the other day but it's going up as soon as I reedit it.
How he would be able to judge, he never having read even a third rate book, is something I wouldn't waste my time asking. I was thinking of not posting the post I wrote the other day but it's going up as soon as I reedit it.
Prophets Now! -- Nahum Ward-Lev
I wish they'd edited out the technical glitch during the lecture section and edited out the "pair and share" sections that are inaudible, the rest of it is worth listening to and comparing it with the very similar conclusions that Walter Brueggemann came to in the one I posted last week.
I've got tons of snow to move, I'm going to have to get up on the roof, if this is my last post you'll know I broke my fool neck.
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