Examples Of Depravity Posing As Liberty - This Is An Answer I gave on Febuary 25th, 2017

AN IDIOT CHALLENGES ME on the idea that it might be a good thing to burn de Sade. On which, I repeat,  if burning every last copy of every single word written by and about de Sade were possible and if by doing that all or even a good measure of the sexual abuse of people and animals in the word would be abolished, I'd strike the match to set it on fire and I would think it was probably the most worthy act I'd ever committed.  If de Sade were not a writer who had championed a particularly anti-egalitarian, elitist wet dream of domination and submission with ejaculation, no one in the world would ever read anything he wrote.  Having read some of him in the original, he was a crap writer.  You can say the same about Henry Miller, Hubert Selby jr. and a number of other writers celebrated as icons of free speechiness.  It's telling that when you reduce free speech to an automatic reflex instead of considering it within a context of its real existence in the real world, you'll use it to champion ass end, sludge dwelling expression.

The liberalish-libertarian defense of sado-masochism and such related sexual practices as bondage and discipline is the language of market economics, as a contractual agreement between an abuser and the abused.[*]  As I just stated, such an analysis is so reductively simplistic that it willfully ignores that it is essentially the pro-slavery argument that slaves were happy in their enslavement.  Such slaves as might have been reduced to such an abject state by the terror campaign of the slave power are rightly seen as having their minds and spirits damaged by it.  In the same way someone who would submit to their own degradation, abuse, torture, and injury aren't exhibiting any form of liberty or freedom, they are exhibiting mental illness.  And what you say for them goes as much for the person who is sexually stimulated by inflicting the harm on someone for their self-deification.

In all such dishonest libertarian discourse, there is a simple test that will demonstrate that the person saying it is lying about what they're claiming.  Would they be OK with being the object of sadistic sex abuse, themselves, would they be OK with their loved ones being used like that or even merely expressing the wish to be used that way?  Would their well-beloved child being conned into such a relationship be OK with them, their mother or father, their sister or brother?  That is assuming such people as who defend S&M and B&D are capable of normal human love of anyone other than themselves.   It's the same question I've asked in relationship to the prostitution and porn industries.  To date I've only had one person claim they would be OK with that and he was lying about it because he expressed outrage, elsewhere over my pointing out that he said he was OK with his own girlfriend being recruited into prostitution.  If what he claimed were true, that it was perfectly OK with him, then he wouldn't have expressed outrage at me pointing that out.

Libertarians, ESPECIALLY THE LIBERALISH TYPE, are addicted to lying, covering up the morally unacceptable with verbiage such as the translation of even the most grotesque inequality and abusive practices with market-economics blather.   That such blather arose in the very 18th-19th century atheist-materialist "enlightenment" that de Sade and those who abetted and identified him as a champion and icon of liberty constructed is certainly no accident.  That their literary hero was a man whose entire reputation in literature is based in the denial of  equality, in respecting the dignity of other people or even restraining their lust for perverted sex to the extent that they killed people to get off is, as well, a symptom of a massively present mental illness and of habitual lying.

Most of all it gives weight to my observation that people who don't believe in sin will have no qualms about lying.   There was something basically wrong with the "enlightenment" just as will, with time, become apparent with any humanly constructed ideology.   I think that the horrific flaws of that movement are based in their arrogantly naive materialism and assumptions about the total efficacy of scientific method.  They might have had ignorance of the consequences of those as a partial claim of innocence, after the discoveries of physics, mathematics, logic, the experience of the biology based genocides of the 20th century, we don't get off on a claim of ignorance.  That is especially true of people who claim to have an education, who have access to that information but who choose to ignore it.  Or who, through laziness or ideological predilection don't bother to find that out.

But you don't have to have read the formal literature of formal logic or be familiar with things such as the uncertainty principle to understand that hurting someone "to pleasure" yourself is wrong and must be prevented from happening.  They knew that back when they wrote the Mosaic books of the Bible.

*  This is from 2024.  I think the "masochism" part of that sexological-psychological theory of it is, in real life, bull shit.  I think it was inserted into the discussion of those who like to hurt others as a means of lessening the reality of sexual enslavement just as assertions of "consent" so often are in describing abusive, using forms of sexual activity.  The depictions of sadism in . . . um. . . "literature" and in pornography generally include non-consent or seduction and duping of the victim and I think that's probably far more like what the real life phenomenon of abusive sexual exploitation is.  I've read people claiming that prostitution is a voluntary act on the part of the one who is being used but I doubt many if any prostitutes would choose to do it if they had a better option.  I think all of that talk of "agency" or "consent" in such sex is an outsider, elite means of excusing what other people of their class do to those who are powerless, if not what they do.  I include most of the psychology babble about it.  I do think it turns into the worst of capitalist-market-economics in reality where there is no real consent given, certainly not by the young and exploitable or the older and mentally damaged. 

Hate Mail - About Honesty About Israel And The Reading of Scripture

"the on-going tradition, has refused all kinds of settled interpretation to which Western thought is always tempted"

AS POSTED HERE the end of last year, I needed to take a lot more time with the book I was excerpting and commenting on during Advent, Walter Brueggemann's An Unsettling God.  I have started going through it from the very beginning, looking up and reading about the things he cites in the book, that is in so far as that's possible in my situation.  One of the ways I try to study things that need that depth of study is to either write out or type out the text, I find copying and copy-editing my copy is a really good way to get farther into such a book.  Brueggemann is widly recognized as one of the finest contemporary scholars of the writings that comprise both the Jewish scriptures and the Christian Old Testament.  As such when he engages with the text, he's not shy about raising difficult questions. If you intend to read Scripture or history or anything seriously, you don't cover up the most glaring, most controversial and even dangerous issues in it.  Those are going to be the most important issues for your time and place.   I'm too old and time is too short for me to waste my or your time doing the opposite.  Whatever I say would be just more useless crap if I did run-around.   

One of those issues Brueggemann handles in the Preface to the main text is a good example to consider due to current events.

As I have thought about God and God's partners,  I have focused on four such partners that are evident in the Old Testament, partners that continue to be front and center in our contemporary world.

1.  There is no doubt that God's first partner is Israel as the chosen people of God.  Israel emerges in the text through God's call to Abraham (Genesis 12:1-2), through the emancipation of the slaves from Egypt (Exodus 15:1-18) and through the covenant made at Sinai so that this people will be a "priestly kingdom" among the nations (Exodus 19:6).

There is no doubt that Israel as God's chosen people is a complex and difficult claim on many counts.  For example, this designation of a special people introduces into the core of the tradition the "scandal of particularity,"  the conviction that God may take sides in quite concrete ways in the world, so that many peoples are "not chosen."  Second, the idea of Israel's chosenness is a complicated issue for the Christian tradition, for the claim of Christ's ultimacy lives in some tension with the claim of Israel.  Christians continue to struggle with such an issue.  Third, there is no doubt that the theological claim of Israel as God's chosen people is made more complex in the contemporary state of Israel that both makes theological claims and operates by the force of Realpolitik.  Fourth, at the very edge of the Old Testament there are hints that this same God may in the end select other chosen peoples as well (Isaiah 19:24-25; Amos 9:7).  What becomes clear is that our more-or-less settled judgments about this matter must be rethought in careful, disciplined ways.

Alongside such reality,  it is useful to recognize that Israel is peculiar in its practice of interpretation that, in the hands of the rabbis and the on-going tradition, has refused all kinds of settled interpretation to which Western thought is always tempted.  Jews historically have refused "final interpretation" (by being open to continued dialogic interaction),  and have been victims, in the twentieth century, of an attempted "Final Solution."  Thus much work remains to be done to see how the "scandal of particularity" is related to the unbearable violence against Jews in the twentieth century.  It is clear in any case that "final interpretation" is a step toward "final solution."

Talk about a bundle of difficult issues.   Calling the claim made in the text of chosenness "the scandal of particularity" is, I think, fair.  To claim "chosenness" you have to assume that others are "unchosen"  maybe all others.  But the necessary question is, chosen for what reasons and what purposes?  

I don't know the extent to which modern conceptions of that chosenness are confused by scientific racism or the Darwinian conception of "selection" which, as in his title to his book claims that some "races" are "favoured by nature," meaning that those which are not "favoured" are marked by "nature" for extinction. The history of Darwinism proves that Darwinists, from the earliest years if not months of reading On The Origin of Species, figured that human beings, especially those in elites, were a good substitute for "nature" in making such "selections" of human beings even as those engaged in animal husbandry did farm animals.   I've given the list of those in Darwin's inner circle who blatantly made such assertions, Darwin, himself, his sons George, Horace, Francis and, most of all Leonard, his cousin the inventor of eugenics, Francis Galton, his closest colleague and "bull dog" Thomas Huxley, his foremost Continental disciple and colleague, Earnst Haeckel, and so many others.  And, in fact, that's how the Nazis thought of things, to the extent that that's what Mengele called what he was doing at the train siding as he chose People to be murdered immediately and those who were to be worked to death - in case you continue to wonder what I meant when I talked about "economic utility" in those posts you're complaining about.

That's an entirely different idea from that in the Jewish Scripture.   I will resist getting into my observation that materialists and atheists are always inventing gods as part of their denial of God, "natural selection" being just one of those I've identified.  Given that it is Jews who were chosen by the Nazis as those who were to be murdered into extinction, the same People for whom the claim of "chosenness" is made, and some of the more gruesome confessions contained in Scripture about claims that killing others was commanded by God, the issue is fraught with tensions and implications and numerous subsidiary issues and, if you want, "scandals."

That is unavoidable if you are going to address the Scriptures and history and the continuation of history into the present.  I no more take the entire corpus of the Old Testament as being honest in the claims made in it, I certainly don't believe God ever commanded anyone to wipe out the population of a place, I think there are parts of it which are clearly morally depraved in making such claims and, given what is known about the compilation and revision and editing that is evident in the texts, that's not at all surprising, though, especially among many Christians, it is unrecognized or denied outright.  I think it's entirely relevant that those claims of divinely inspired slaughter and even genocide were made in legends and lore about the founding of a nation, what in the modern period would be considered a nation state.  I don't think that's at all irrelevant to such claims being made by any nation state or People.  However, there is something confessional about the way it is presented in the entirety of Scripture and certainly as the study and commenting on that has continued into the modern period.  I would think that such claims are less and less believed by believers even as their like seem to be more and more believed by secularists in the modern period.  Many of those secularists, such as so many "white evangelicals" in the United States are full blown vulgar materialist worshipers of Mammon, as well as the likes of Sam Harris and his contemplation of murdering tens of millions of people living in Muslim majority countries in a day of nuclear genocide.  

Talking about those things will be full of perils but it helps if you have a moral imperative that hold that, in the end, no one gets killed, no one gets enslaved, no one is held to be anything but a being beyond any system of valuation, singly or comparative and that everyone should have a role in bringing about the future.  Though many of their ideologies, superstitions and self-esteeming pathologies should not.  No one who refuses a moral absolute of basic equality of PEOPLE can be trusted to participate in the governance of a democracy or to have a media platform to project their moral depravity.  That's a world of difference from holding they should be obliterated as People.  

The claims of "chosenness" in the Hebrew Scriptures is certainly nothing unique in the national literature of any Peoples, many if not most groups which develop a lore or scripture type of literature feel themselves set apart from "others" and even if they haven't developed those, the tendency is always to hold a group you hold to and consider basic to your identity is some how set apart and superior.  Whether it's a small modern street gang or a population the size of Russia's or the United States or even that rump of an Empire, Britain or the similar one of France, or China, that sinful tendency seems to be at least wide spread.

What is different about the Jewish and Christian Old Testaments, is that that "chosenness" couldn't be more unlike the conception of a "favored race" which is favored by "nature" to thrive and flourish.  The chosenness in the promise to Abraham was intimately tied to acting as a moral example to the rest of the world, a light to the world, bringing about a "priestly kingdom."   That the Scriptures give a history of the perils, the problems, the disasters, the successful attacks of foreign empires, the falling short, the recovery and the rest of the confessional aspects of the Scriptures is, I think, quite unusual if not unique in such collections of lore and legend and extremely true and valuable insightful bodies of works.   I think that is why the tradition of the Old Testament persisted as active belief for this long in human history as so many other national legends and lore and ways of encountering God have not.  I think it's why the Jewish People have endured and survived as long as they have as a People and why secularization and the attractions of fashion and popular culture are probably the greatest danger to the persistence of that distinct identity, today.  And that would be a terrible thing.  

Realpolitik

In both the corrupt incompetence of the Netanyahu government in Israel and its continuing criminality in its response to the Hamas attack in its treatment of Gaza, as previously in other places, there is an enormous problem for thinking about the presence of ancient Israel in the Scriptures and talking about that, today.  For Jews, Christians, I'd expect Muslims, it is inescapable that the Scriptural tradition does, in fact, concern itself primarily with Israel as a People and, later, as a nation.  That the modern-day, largely secular-inspired Zionist movement and the state of Israel has been a rather disastrous phenomenon is certainly not allowed to be addressed nor is it ever far from the most obvious of truths about the ongoing strife in the Middle East.   A modern Israel on land from which the Palestinians were displaced by violence and coercion and in the midst of hostile nation states (whose carving out of the empires of Europe  - the Europeans favored, to their conceived advantage - were bound to generate plenty of strife and violence even if Israel was never founded there) was bound to have a history like the one it has had.  That was certainly noted from the early days of the Zionist movement, as Israel was being formed and declared and onward to today.  I think the American historian Howard Zinn said it best when he said he went from being a supporter of the founding of Israel to coming to consider it as a profound mistake.  That's, of course, not an especially helpful claim to make now, when it's there and it's not going to stop being there.   But I don't think pretending it's been what it was claimed it was going to be, a place of safety for Jews who were, at times and in some places unsafe in disapora, has been any more helpful.  

And while thinking about that it is unconscionable to not admit that the founding of Israel was an even greater disaster for the Palestinian People who have also been the victim of manipulation by various powers in the Middle East and abroad.  And as Israel continued and the fascist elements gained power, that disaster has grown ever greater with every succeeding violent decade.  That Israel was in such a danger was recognized by many prominent Jewish intellectuals and scholars, one famous declaration was made when early on Netanyahu's predecessor Menachem Begin was touring and raising money in the United States.   Their warnings then were prescient in ways that the claims of those who opposed them have not turned out to be.  If, under attack and always on a war-time footing, Israel had managed to not do what most countries do in such circumstances, go fascist-nationalist, if the leadership of Israel hadn't passed to fascists, racists, fanatics and corrupt incompetents, things may have been less bad, maybe they'd have turned out far better, but that's not the history of things.   I don't think there's much reason to hope that in the present situation that things ever will be better.  Certainly a large number of Israelis, those who are in opposition to the almost uninterrupted line of quasi-fascist governments they've had since Begin first took power, must be especially pessimistic about the future of their country.  Such Israelis are quite articulate about that in ways that People in the United States are not allowed to be lest they be tarred as "antisemites."   The accusation that I'm answering in this piece.  

I went into the recent, maybe still ongoing, project of some Jewish figures, some of them intellectuals to come up with a standard definition of "antisemitism" and it was clear from their statements and publications that what it really was was an attempt to make ANY CRITICISM OF THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT "antisemitism."   I did a dive into the etymology of the word and found, to my surprise, that it was a word that was first invented by Wilhelm Marr, a German Aryanist lunatic and Jew-hater who wanted to give his crude and dirty ideology a more sciency cachet, making a superstitious pathology into something that sounded scientific.  So the word, itself, was born in a corrupt pathology so its continued and mixed existence should be no great surprise.  I think it would be a really good thing if the word stopped being used and if it was replaced by a term meaning what it originally meant, Jew-haters.*  

No word or label should ever be bandied about to prevent the legitimate and honest criticism and condemnation of any nation state that does evil things, not even the state of Israel.  Not even the ancient kingdoms of Israel or Judea - the biblical Prophets certainly didn't hold back when it came to that.  If the whole line of them were alive today, they'd be called "antisemites"  at least in the United States.   

As Howard Zinn also pointed out in a book about the U.S. war in Vietnam, ALL COUNTRIES LIE, ALL COUNTRIES DO TERRIBLE THINGS.  No country should ever be able to depend on such a campaign of coersive intimidation to suppress the honest discussion of and criticism of the lies and crimes and follies of any country, party, national state or group.  It's not "anti-Catholic" to make the most rigorous and honest criticisms of the Catholic hierarchy or other institutions (I've certainly never held back, while being considered a member of the Catholic Church), it's not anti-American to do that about the United States, if it were anyone who engaged in American politics would have to be "anti-American" because that's what politics in a democracy consists of.  You have to go to dictatorships and monarchies and other overtly gangster-run nations to see what that kind of coercive use of such terms really is, it's a cover up scheme.  And that's what the practice of coercion to keep quiet advances, in the end.  

The fact is, that anyone, any Christian, any Muslim who takes the Jewish Scripture seriously - and for Christians that's not an optional preference -  has to acknowledge and respect the claims made in it.  Among those claims is that the Covenant, certainly as far as those who take the Scripture seriously, is an eternal one.  Though, clearly, Israel under the Judges, as a kingdom under kings, as any kind of country was not morally perfect.  Even then, as the Second Vatican Council noted, there is no where in Scripture in which that Covenant is retracted by God.  But the issues involved in that will not be any less fraught and problematic than the Scriptures themselves.  Conscientious good will, generosity and acceptance of disagreement are requisite parts of a moral engagement with the Old Testament.  If those aren't part of it, the motive is moral depravity.  

Oddly, enough, I'm not pessimistic about things as it would seem you should be.  I think that the modern period, with all of the problems listed above, is probably the most promising time in human history to come to that kind of practice.   A practice which can be teased out of the Scriptures too, if you study them with the kind of engagement that Walter Brueggemann recommends and practices.  That's the Jewish practice, as can be seen on page after page of Jewish commentaries which have competing and sometimes conflicting commentaries on the same page.  As Brueggemann says, it is a tradition that has no "final interpretation" and rejects any such "final interpretation."  That's a mind set of classical philosophy and, despite claims to the contrary, scientism.  Science is alleged to be open to further evidence and findings but for easily the large majority of modern People, it is taken as a series of closed cases.   Darwinism, natural selection, was one of the most firmly considered examples of that scientistic faith but, also, one of the worst things to ever be mistaken as a settled issue. That "final interpretation of it" first declared by Haeckel and certainly known of by Darwin and his circle, did lead to Nazism and Nazi eugenics which, at least from early in the history of Nazism if not from before the start of it, included genocidal murder.  As I pointed out, that was a feature of Darwinism from the early 1860s and was confirmed to be part of it by the attribution of melioristic power to everything from individual murders (especially infanticide) to genocide,  in The Descent of Man.  It is the quintessential example of modern, scientistic, materialistic "final interpretation" there is and it did, in fact, lead to "The Final Solution" as discussed at and reflected in the records of the Wannsee Conference which planned the most organized and deadly period of the Shoah.   If you want something that's settled "finally" that's a far better example of one.  Sometimes accurate historical records can give you such a finality on a limited issue, though they often can't.  The Nazis told themselves and to a lesser extent the world what their motives were and highest among those was the theory of natural selection, second, probably,  the daffy romantic era anthropological-linguistic classification of "races" that, as well, informed Darwinism.  Biologically, when analyzed mathematically, all of that stuff was bull shit but it is still bull shit that is current in the decaying stage of modernism.   The existence of every Nazi of European ancestry was and is directly dependent on ancestors who were Jewish, who were members of other "races" that they had on their extermination lists, eventually going back to Africa and Black human beings and their African ancestors.  The same is true for every single other person who shares, in part, in European ancestry no matter what color they are.  The whole idea of "pure" biological identity is bull shit.  That's the truth we're going to either live by or we'll all die.  I see that anticipated in Scripture, as well.  In the Christian Scriptures, certainly, but also in the Jewish Scriptures.  It's not something I have any hope of materialist, atheist, scientistic secular "enlightenment" modernism will ever really accept.  I think you have to do so out of good will and a belief in morality and justice to do that.

* A word that is used to slander Jewish critics of Israel, Holocaust survivors and children of Holocaust survivors, CITIZENS OF ISRAEL, as well as other critics of Israel who are, in no way, ill-disposed towards the Jewish religion or Jews as a People, is not a word used honestly.  It may be a word which is necessary to describe not only those who are ill-disposed towards Jews and all things Jewish, and certainly those who have genocidal intentions is a word that can't be used accurately for anything.   Those two things are nothing like each other.   The word has devolved into an all-purpose calumny by those who want to use it dishonestly, as can be seen in its widest use in the United States, today. I'm coming increasingly to consider its use as a warning that the person using it might have the most dishonest intentions, the first of those to lie to cover up the crimes of a national government.  
 

I've pointed out that to call the perhaps unwelcome desire for Jews to "be saved" by conversion [see below] to one or another sect of Christianity or Islam and the attempted persuasion for that conversion, "antisemitism" as well as the Nazi's and others' desire to murder all Jews and obliterate them from the Earth by the same word is grotesquely inaccurate and unhelpful.   I have never, though, heard the word used when it's atheism or materialism or scientism, or Buddhism, etc. which Jews are being encouraged to adopt, leaving the Jewish religion behind.   That matter became clear to me when I read someone ridiculing someone of Jewish heritage who was, nonetheless, deputed to be an Episcopalian.  The online snarkers who brought that up largely identified as atheists.  One, as I recall, had a pseudonym that consisted of two of the most obvious Jew Haters of classical and "enlightenment" periods, though I wouldn't be surprised if the idiot didn't know that, online atheist snarkers are a pretty stupid lot.

Clearly the word needs to be replaced by at least two or three different things if accuracy and justice and, you know, TRUTH are to matter in it.   I'd junk the old one, it's been stretched and dishonestly used to the point of uselessness if those are what is desired.  

[I'm of two minds about those who try to convert Jews to Christianity, more than two, actually.   I think anyone should be free to convert to anything they, personally choose to be converted to, assuming that that thing isn't something that shouldn't be allowed to propagate like Nazism or fascism or white supremacy or any other kind of inegalitarian supremacy.   I can understand why Jews, generally, might take it as insulting and annoying to have someone proselytize at them, implying that Judaism is somehow inferior to some other religion, though I have noted here that that annoyance seems to be reserved for those who try to convert Jews to Christianity.   I can understand that, by the way, I've had "evangelicals" try to convert me to their sect of Christianity and it's mighty annoying.  I have noted that there isn't the same hostility to atheists who try to convert Jews to atheism, Buddhists who try to convert them to that religion, etc.   I haven't noticed the same level of hostility to the conversion to the banality of mere assimilation to the ambient secular swill that surrounds us all.  I do that noting that there are Jews who choose to convert to Christianity and I can't see that as being anybodies business but theirs.  I've noted that there is nothing in most Christian sects from preventing Jewish converts to achieving very high positions in them, there have been and are Jewish Cardinals and bishops and priests in the Catholic Church.  In that troubling and disturbing case, the abduction of Egardo Mortara by the insane Pope, Pius IX,  the adult Mortara never expressed anything but happiness over his conversion to Catholicism and his position as a priest who tried to convert Jews to Catholicism.   I don't particularly like any of that but the man, himself, has the right to make his own decisions about his life just as others have a right to express their dislike of his conclusions.  Though, in the end, as I have to respect him as the only relevant judge of his life as it was, he got to decide for himself. ]

Thoughts About The The Hoary Old Lore Of Porn That We Are Told To Believe But That Is Never Tested

A COMMENT ASSERTS that banning de Sade would ensure that de Sade was read more widely than now.  It's an old line, that banning something makes it far more desired but I wonder if that's ever really been tested or if, as it seems to me, that's just a self-serving bit of scribbling, publishing, show-biz lore.  Something I first remember seeing on "Car 54 Where Are You" when I was still young and stupid enough to take it as true.

I have no doubt that it was true that a legal ban on something is far from a guarantee that what is banned won't be illegally or foreignly produced and won't be sold and won't be bought at an inflated price- whenever there's a possibility of making money from producing and selling the most dangerous things, you can bet there are those who will not only make it available but will whip up demand for it.  Corrupt governments will not only permit that they will participate in doing it, especially if it's for export to another country.  That's the sad story of the failure of the well-intentioned but doomed experiment with the prohibition of alcohol in the United States.   But, as can be seen in the opioid epidemic, the illegalized part of it, such a problem is bound to come with any attempt to ban even the most dangerous of drugs that can't be used "safely."   But I think that example is a good one to consider.  The psychiatric industry here, in league with their partners, the drug industry intentionally and TV and raidio set the worst of that off WITH THE AID OF THE CORRUPTED GOVERNMENT.   The opioid epidemic is a complication set off by the right-wing push to deregulate in the style of Milton Friedman.  He's and the capitalism of the Reagan period is the grandfather of that.  And of the ACLU aided permission of the Supreme Court for them to push drugs directly to the public, inventing an "epidemic of untreated pain," as seen on so many daytime talk shows of the period.  

But I wonder why no one asks what would seem to be a common sense insight, if making something legal doesn't actually have the effect of making a demand for it ever grater and a determination to get it go up.  The illegal side of the opioid epidemic was, in fact, set off by making legalized opioids more available more widely and the direct advertisement of them to patients as well as doctors was certainly the major catalyst of creating a demand.   

Maybe the reason that the common sense speculation is because those who spread that bit of common received "wisdom" don't want to give away their motives in pushing their profitable line.  I see no evidence from Russia that their various gangster-dictatorial governments making alcohol freely available to their miserable People has resulted in a lower rate of drinking, drinking to excess and alcoholism, and with that part of the control that the gangsters exercise over that tragic country.  When the Nazis invaded Poland they made alcohol far more available as a part of their campaign to destroy the Polish People.  Along with degraded entertainment and pornography, by the way.  On the other hand, making Bibles a forbidden possession and religious services illegal, killing clergy and lay members, burning and dynamiting and converting churches, etc.  had a remarkably successful result in making religious belief far less common.  Interestingly, the introduction of TV and screen based entertainment has had a remarkably similar result, especially among those "white evangelicals" who are so addicted to TV idols that they don't seem to be able to distinguish between an on-screen bible thumper and Donald Trump.  Only they find Donald Trump and his hate-spiel  far more enticing than the Gospel.  As could be seen in Iowa earlier this week.  

Making something hard to get might make SOME people want it more, though I doubt even that's ever been reliably measured.  Making something hard to get might, actually, discourage even those who think they might want it from going to the bother and, no doubt, expense of getting it.  I think if Donald Trump hadn't been so widely available on screen, on radio, etc. and had been relegated to exposure only in print, he'd never have been more than a racist, raping, real-estate gangster and would probably have been permitted to get away with it by the legal industry and the courts.  If the "Apprentice" franchise had never been made widely available, he'd have probably died the same thug he was instead of a danger to democracy and the world.  Hate porn, as popularized since the late 1970s in the media free to tell and spread any lie by the libertarian notions of "free speech-free press" are what brought us to where we are now.  Banning the worst of it under broadcasting codes and community service requirements and the Fairness Doctrine that Reagan and his ilk got rid of didn't make things better, they produced Trump.  Before then several such contenders were either prevented from achieving national power and the first most criminal president in living memory, Nixon, who benefited from the earliest years of that Supreme Court folly, was forced from office by the media under those anti-libertarian restrictions.   Availability of lies and false witness in the freest "press" in our history is what brought us Trump and will bring us as bad if not worse.  I used to think that just allowing public officials to sue when they are slandered and libeled would take care of the problem but I think there has to be a positive requirement to make the media tell the truth to prevent that.

Back to the comparison of banning substances.  While I have been in favor of the decriminalization of the least dangerous of recreational drugs pretty much my entire adult life, I was never stupid enough to believe that their decriminalization would make the use of them less common.  Since marijuana's decriminalization I've known lots of people who have tried it or use it occasionally who never used it when it was illegal.   While the decriminalization of such things as a practical matter makes sense, that it became an iconic cause of the "new left," some of whom made its use a de facto virtue was just evidence that the "new left" were a bunch of callow idiots.  Which served the Republican-right far more than it did the "new left."   

My biggest reason for favoring their decriminalization, things like marijuana and other things that are measurably less dangerous, such as psilocybin mushrooms, than even many legal substances is as an alternative to the most measurably dangerous of substances.  Alcohol, any number of the prescription pills pushed by psychiatry, etc.  An elderly  relative of mine had been prescribed benzodiazepine drugs* by her doctor and she became dangerously addicted to them.  I have had a number of alcoholics in my family and have known most of my life that alcohol, freely and widely available, was one of the most dangerous drugs there is.  You don't have to be an alcoholic for it to have dangerous, even fatal results.  Casual drinking by non-alcoholics results in deaths and disabilities and blighted lives.  I doubt anyone's an alcoholic the first drink they take, no matter what anyone says.  I think if it could be measured ot would be found that making alcohol not only more available in more abundance but, even more so, its promotion in the media and through direct advertisement has made things much worse.  The level of alcohol use among young people is certainly far higher than I remember when I was a teenager and in college when, around here, oretty much everything but beer was sold in state stores and the age to buy was 21.  Use was hardly low then but it's far worse now.  Clearly availability hasn't led to anything like a decrease it its use.  

The idea that banning a book is going to make it more read seems, first, to be rather quaint to me.  As if you can get most people my age (early senescence) or younger to read words on a page instead of looking at images or movies.  I would bet that readership of the classics of banned literature available online, for free wouldn't result in a reading rate much higher than making the classics of never banned books available in the same way.  The idea that text is going to be widely read if it is freely available is ridiculous.  Even that flagship case, the overturning of the banning of James Joyce's Ulysses, is an elite cause of a bygone age.  I doubt that other than the ending, hardly pornographic monologue of Molly Bloom, what got it banned,  I doubt most of the "readers" of it have ever actually read the rest of it through.  I doubt even those who may have read the supidly celebrated, once "banned" books such as Last Exit to Brooklyn read all of them, concentrating on the snuff-porn scene of the gang rape of Tra-la-la and ignored most of the rest of its dismal tediousness.  Its short-term suppression may have led to some people buying it who may never have read it otherwise, but that's more attributable to the publicity and advertising effect of it being discussed than the actual banning of it.  The celebrated idols of "First Amendment" envelope pushing are generally stupid and tedious.  I have read Ulysses and have come to the conclusion that it is a somewhat minor work of fiction, far more talked about than read.  I know two people in their mid-20s who made a pact to read it, more of an endurance stunt than an act of literary appreciation.  I think Joyce is one of the more overrated authors of the 20th century.  If Ulysses had remained unavailable I doubt its absence would have damaged the world in any way.  I can think of some rather bad pieces of music from the 1950s and 60s that would probably not have been composed and probably hundreds, at least, of stupid critical works.  It was otherwise innocuous.  

I can't say the same about the presence of sadistic porn, of snuff porn, of porn in general. Sadistic porn serves as a how-to manual for sadists and rapists and murderers.  Those are always a part of its audience no matter how many others never will act on what they see.  And to attract a habituated population, the porn has to always ramp up the violence and killing depicted and acted.  It's like cabloid TV and Trumpism.  Porn's popularization of promiscuous anal sex among gay men certainly had a horrific result in the AIDS pandemic.  Before it became the predominant theme of gay porn anal sex had been less common than it became.  Promiscuity, also encouraged in gay porn of the 1960s and 70s, made gay populations as susceptible to infection as prostitutes, truck drivers and airline workers.  As I'll always point out, every gay man I knew in New York City in the 1970s died of AIDs, every case I know of was attributable to anal sex practiced promiscuously.  That's something younger LGBTQ+ People don't like to hear but it is a hard fact of reality.  There's no political ideology to it, it's real life.

I don't think the legal suppression of online and recorded snuff porn should be anything like putting consumers in prison - that hyperbolic idea is what's always resorted to by the defenders of porn -  and I'd never expect such a ban to wipe it out entirely anymore than I'd think making murder illegal has ended murders.**  And, given the subject matter of snuff porn, those are not entirely or even largely unrelated.   

To claim the idea that looking at (and, no doubt masturbating to) sadistic and homicidal porn is innocuous is one of the stupidest parts of that idiotic common received "civil liberties" lore about pornography.  I would bet you that if forced to admit their true feelings, no would-be civil libertarian would be comfortable with having a son-in-law or brother-in-law who imbibed a steady diet of sadistic porn and I would bet if they had one, their daughter or sister would suffer the effects of it.  I'd ask how many of them would be comfortable with having someone who was viewer of sadistic pornography babysit their child, expecting the same answers when I make such abstractions personal to them, either a refusal to give an answer or, in very rare cases when they will give one, a lie.  If it they really believed it was innocuous they would have no such qualms, not until their kid grew up and told them what really happened while they were away.   I'm always in favor of going after the more powerful party in a crime, the buyers in prostitution, the peddlers of dangerous drugs, the suppliers in porn.  That the media claim that the consumption of porn has no effect on the behavior of those who consume it is best seen to be a lie by how the media - and the all-important ad industry - sells literally everything with sex, expecting and depending on the sexual images to influence the behavior of those who see those ads, is all the proof anyone needs to know they are lying when they push such claims.   The media is about as dishonest as the legal industry is, and watching the antics around the Trump world of legal engagement, I've become entirely distrustful of all of it.  Though I can say that looking into the real character of the ACLU and other "civil liberties" lawyering gave that distrust a head start.

I am an LGBTQ+ man, I know that when it comes to talking about bans on content and behavior, those can be be dangerous.  I'm sure any law against violent porn would be used by sleazy police and prosecutors against LGBTQ+ literature, but the abuse of a law isn't in itself a reason for there not to be a law. ****   I'm in favor of the decriminalization of sex among freely consenting adults.  But I'm also aware of the dangers that making "adult consent" the be all and end all of judging what People want to do and to photograph and record and sell. As soon as commerce comes  into it, that changes things.  That makes it a legitimate thing for the government to have an interest in it.   The law being so stupid it cannot reliably distinguish between coercion and real consent in some rare cases permits judges and "justices" to pretend they can't in other cases.  It's a lot like them pretending they can't possibly tell plain truth from bald lies, when it suits them.  It's striking, given the original topic I raised here was the Epstein scandals, that we now have at least some kind of plurality agreement that children under a certain age cannot be held to give consent to having sex, though, as I pointed out, that's not a universal consensus and, I'd argue, given the activity in question, if it's even a majority opinion.  But I don't think just that someone can get someone to consent to having something done to them is a reliable means of determining if it should be legal.  I doubt that a lot of "freely consented to" behavior is actually freely consented to, certainly not among even many who are older than the legal ages of consent.  When it's a matter of payment a lot of that is about as freely consented to as being put at risk of industrial accidents or breathing in asbestos or silica or getting addicted to tobacco or alcohol or opiates.   The dangers to those who are used and abused by the porn industry are many and life thwarting and not infrequently life ending.  I doubt there are many if any who are coerced or talked into having various forms of sex in it who don't suffer some damage from it, the number of suicides among people who worked in porn is an indictaion of that, as is the frequency of HIV, hepatitis and other diseases.   I've asked here before questions similar to the ones above about having your loved ones in close proximity to a fan of S&M, B&D and snuff porn and only had one positive resopndant who I knew was lying about it (he lies like a Trumper).  

* I occasionally used marijuana for a few years in my early adulthood,  then I realized I really didn't like it.  Last year, when a relative gave me a homemade, home grown, THC laden chocolate I tried it out of curiosity and found I still didn't like it.  I liked alcohol too much and twice, starting when I was 24, gave it up for long periods before I finally gave it up seeing what it resulted in too directly to pretend anymore.

** That was despite the clear warnings given in the drug-store handouts that they shouldn't be prescribed to elderly People because of their high potential to develop addiction to them.  The doctor angrily refused to write a prescription for medical marijuana when we convinced our loved one it would probably be less dangerous for her.  I had an argument with the doctor when she wanted to give our relative another benzodiazepine  drug for anxiety, most of the worst of which was a result of taking them and becoming addicted to them.   Clearly, their availability is related to their use by those who not only wouldn't otherwise use them but shouldn't have been prescribed them.  

*** Making the murder of People of Color by police and white supremacists legal on a de facto basis certainly hasn't reduced the number of People of Color murdered by police or white supremacists.  The tacit permission of men to murder Women is and has been at epidemic levels for the entirety of history even when it's officially illegal.  The resultant terror felt by Women is so much a part of cultures that they don't even seem to realize it.  It and its preceding terror-violence is an endemic feature of porn.  The predominant theme of porn is the use of a person identified as weaker by a dominating male.  It is all a school of the promotion and practice of inequality by the privileged.

**** If someone proposed that sadism and bondage ever be added to the LGBTQ+ coalition, I wouldn't go along with that.  I'm in favor of equal rights, not unequal use and harm and destruction.   The day they add those to the acronym, I'm as out of it as as I would be if they proposed including child rapists - another dominant theme of porn, a ubiquitous parallel stream of culture to its opposition, as I mentioned the other day.

Perfect Message For The Day - The Great Jamine Crockett Interviewed By Brian Tyler Cohen

 

AI "I," My Ass

I WAS LISTENING to a youtube about "neolithic Ireland" and started noticing something weird about it when they started talking about "ranchers," in Ireland at the period of the earliest human habitation.   They quickly started using other weird language and making some oddly agrammatical statements.  

At first I figured it was written by someone for whom English wasn't nearly even a second language but soon realized it was AI.   

You'd have to be pretty stupid to get fooled for long with most of the AI generated junk I've seen or heard.   Unfortunately, media trained minds tend to be that stupid. 

AI is going to lead to huge problems,  it's already given Roger Stone an out for his recorded phone call about murdering people. 

WATCHING PAUL GOSAR

in the sham Biden impeachment smearings leads me to ask if he isn't an example of dementia caused by mercury poisoning, a result of a dentist who refused to follow safety procedures in their practice.   That's actually more charitable than my original observation that he looks exactly like Bruno Ganz acting the final days of Hitler's drug and likely syphilis induced decay.

John Harbison - San Antonio

 

Katherine Weintraub, Saxophone
Eunmi Ko, Piano

San Antonio, Sonata for alto saxophone and piano

I. The traveler has a free afternoon in San Antonio. It is August, 105 degrees. Expecting to start with the cool promenade along the river, he is instead lured by a sound. He follows it up a long stairway and finds himself in a little fiesta: a hot square, many people, no shade, a few people dancing to a fast beat, the band playing and singing in Spanish.

II. The first dancers finish, exhausted. Then, as if on cue, the whole crowd gets into a line of people of all ages, nine to ninety. They all know the steps, which change with the phrases.

III. The music changes again becoming slower. The people continue on in couples. No one seems to feel the heat and the band hardly stops. Everyone, the traveler included, sinks into it. Towards the end, a young girl asks the traveler to dance. He declines.

But a year later, when the tourist puts down the memory of the sounds, something about a saxophone, and a few rhythms in his distorted memory, he accepts.

—John Harbison

Yes, We Must Burn Sade And Snuff Porn And, Especially, Lies - Hate Mail

And you can throw the ACLU on to that pyre, too.

THERE IS SOMETHING OBVIOUSLY wrong with a conception of "freedom" which can contain the concept that some should be free to keep others in slavery and to commit genocide.  Yet that conception of freedom is exactly what the fabled founders of the United States Constitution not only held with but rigidly fixed into the Constitution which we still live under.  The slavery part of that is indisputable, nor is the genocide part of it, both which were not only the actual history but the official as well as somewhat unofficial policy of the United States.  Overt chattel slavery was still a part of it until just after the Civil War and genocide even after that is charcteristic of America under the Bill of Rights.  The Supreme Court, repeatedly, over that period, not only retained the slavery embedded into the Constitution, it intensified and, in the Dred Scott decision (which the Court has never overturned) it made it the supreme law of the land, making every state a de facto slave state.   That wasn't entirely or even effectively expunged from the foundational law of the United States.  The Courts and many states continued de facto slavery in the Jim Crow period until the 1960s.  What wasn't done by law and court ruling was done through white supremacist terrorism and violence enforced discrimination.  As I mentioned yesterday there were many slavery promoting and protecting features of the Constitution which were not, in fact, abolished in the vitally important amendments drafted in the wake of the Civil War.  Such things as mentioned yesterday.  And those Civil War Amendments have been twisted and distorted by the corrupt Supreme Court through thier usurped, extra-Constitutional powers to, by a simple majority of fewer than ten "justices" nullify laws duly adopted by the representatives of The People and the president  and to lie about the obvious meaning of the Constitution when it suits them.  The Supreme Court, not voted into office by the voters, the most remote part of the government from The People, stupidly given tenure for life by laws that should have been changed centuries ago, is, in fact, the most corrupt part of the government.  Until the Congress and President nullify the extra-Constitutional powers that the "justices" have granted themselves and placed the "justices" under an effective code of ethical conduct - for the first time in that Court's existence - it will be the dead hand of the slave power, white supremacy and oligarchy exerting itself as it did in the post Civil War period and, in the Rehnquist and courts, now, in their nullification of just the latest attempts to shake off the power of white supremacy, copying the late 19th century, Jim Crow Courts.  We are at high risk from our indigenous form of fascism, under which Black People and other People of Color and, yes, WOMEN have lived for most of the period in which the slave owners and financiers have had their Constitution in effect.  Not to mention workers in general.

But the misconception of "freedom" that I'm talking about above is older and more fundamentally depraved than the U.S. Constitution.   

To put it plainly, there is something obviously wrong with a conception of freedom that permits People to do what's wrong.*  I mentioned the Supreme Court ruling that said that the suppression of the trade in snuff porn was a terrible violation of that most idolized section of the Constitution, the idolized First Amendment.   That was a ruling joined in by every member on the court at that time except, oddly enough, one of the worst and most corrupt members of the court, Alito.  It was supported by the idolized Ruth Bader Ginsburg and all but one of the "original intent" "textualist" liars.   I'm always suspicious when they agree on something.   Now, I would bet you my last dollar that if we could revive the First Congress which drafted the First Amendment and every last member of every legislature that adopted the thing and asked them if contemporary snuff porn in which small animals are tortured and killed for the sexual pleasure of sadists and other degenerates was what they intended to protect, they would think you were insane to ask the question.  I think the American right went from their opposition to pornography to understanding the profit they got from allowing it in that the "freedom of speech" that line of civil libertarianism adopted by the Court was an opening for all kinds of peddling of lies profitable for the oligarchs and their fellow fascists.   On the other hand, I don't know if the legendary RGB had read the stupid and famous essay by Simone de Beauvoir, Must We Burn Sade, and if that figured into her vote on that issue of inverse morality, to allow snuff porn, to allow American sadists to have pay-per-view access to monkeys and other small animals being tortured to death for profit, but I wonder if it or its equivalent in literary essays did.  

I've written extensively about Sade and the assertion that his immoral and evil literature and the assertion that it comprises an act of libertarian virtue.  Of
Freedom, if you will.  A "freedom" which infamously includes the enslavement of Women and Children and men of the underclass so that libertines can practice their "liberties" upon them, their torture and rape and destruction, acts which the "enlightenment" conception of libertarian "freedom" valued so much that he was sprung from incarceration and put into the governing assembly during that other iconographic height of "enlightenment" "freedom," the reign of terror.  That the aristocratic de Sade  survived it while so many other aristocrats of his class - and myriads of common people - were tortured and viciously murdered in the name of "liberty, equality and fraternity" is certainly a sign of what such an "enlightened" conception of "freedom" leads to.   And if one thing's clear, it isn't equality that it leads to.  It's frequently not anything good.  As can be seen in the United States Supreme Court rulings which have made sadism into a "right" and the degenerate legal culture which has made that permission into some inverted conception of a virtue, Sade isn't in any danger of being burned today.  I mentioned the freedoms of presses and speech which gave rise to the commercial printing of and dissemination of penny postcard snuff porn of pictures of Black People lynched, of notices being posted that a lynching was going to happen at a specified time and date - something which no Supreme Court to my knowledge ever suppressed.  Not to mention the literature of white supremacy, the even more effective and corrupting cinematic promotion of white supremacy in its most violent manifestations at least since the time of Birth of a Nation which I've written about here before.  All of that was a promotion of violence and oppression of Black People, none of it was ever legally suppressed under the First Amendment or other laws upheld by the Supreme Court which I've been able to find.  It is what is allowed in under the gaping hole that that most lauded of all parts of the Constitution, that and the actual violence and oppression which inevitably comes with it.   To assert that we must allow that promotion is to assert that the next time those who want that have a right to do it under the First Amendment.   Forgive me if I suspect the "civil libertarians" of the legal profession and, um, "journalism" will be too busy worrying about some liberal, somewhere being mean to a Nazi to bother in fighting against it.  They are deadly parasites on the real left of equality and democracy.  

I can hear the scrupulous adherents to that libertarian conception of "liberty" now,  "But if we suppress lies, why, why,  we may be suppressed from telling the truth,"   or some such line as if the two things had to be considered as equivalent under the law.  That judges pretend that while they selectively make judgements on lies and truth (especially when the wealth of the wealthy needs to be protected) is one of the most amoral games of our legal system.

There is something not only wrong but brain-dead stupid with a conception of freedom that asserts to treat others as equals and well and to tell the truth and to live a normal, decent, not depraved life, "we must" permit others to treat others worse than shit.  Not only that but to allow them to to lie, to harm, to steal, to destroy.  Yet that is the very conception of freedom as is elevated by our depraved current Constitutional, legal, political and cultural presentations of it.  Not only is there no reason to conceive of the freedom to do what is good and right that way, it's clear, now, after that libertarian conception of freedom for some at the expense of others has been given a long test of time and political supremacy, it destroys the right to live decently.  Hearing a long time civil-rights lawyer I respect, a Woman of Color repeat the mantra of mendacity "there is a right to lie" made that reality click for me.  So deeply is that depraved conception of "freedom" embedded into all of those where it really does endanger us all.

I wonder if that Christianity was unfashionable among the 18th century "enlightened" founders of the United States that they clearly rejected the idea contained in Scripture that it's the truth that will set you free, otherwise they'd have written the First Amendment to distinguish between the truth and the lies that will enslave.   Perhaps they realized the truth that slavery was wrong would diminish their personal fortunes unacceptably.  

Again, there is something deeply wrong with the conception of freedom when it is divorced from the moral absolutes of equality and truth and the moral commandments to treat others as you would want to be treated.  To not harm or exploit or use or enslave other People and to treat other living beings with as much kindness as possible.  Such a misconception of freedom was certainly not what any of those who made the several attempts at a revolution in the late 18th century intended.  Certainly not the revolutionaries in France who immediately fell into murdering each other, as they were murdering so many others in their attempt to gain and consolidate their own power.  The modern secular-lefty adoration of the French Revolution and the similar and worse Russian and Chinese Revolutions leading to some of the most brutal dictatorships in human history are a continuation of the most extreme insanity in that regard.  It is part of the "Must We Must Not Burn Sade" pseudo-left.   

Monarchy, what the "enlightenment" revolutions were supposedly against, was an expression of freedom in a hierarchy of ever decreasing freedom from the monarch and the thugs who kept one in power, down to those who were enslaved ending in the destitute who weren't even kept as slaves who might, at least, be valued as property.  Modern dictatorship as Trump wants to install here is merely a less decorous form of that gangster governance.  And the "enlightenment" for all its claims, never delivered on that.  In part getting caught up in a conception of freedom divorced from egalitarian morality has played a big part in that.  I might agree that the American Revolution may be considered to be the best they did.

But the American Revolution, the elite part of it, the part which didn't do much fighting (largely done by the underclass, recently enslaved, indentured, propertyless) but which controlled politics and the judiciary and wrote the Constitution, clearly weren't far different in kind.  The embedding of slavery, of genocide and imperialism, into the Constitution,  the subjugation of Women, etc. in the Constitution and law, by them, proves that.  It's no great wonder that the January 6th insurrectionists used the flags and symbols of the American Revolution AS WELL AS THE SLAVE POWER CONFEDERACY in their attack on a Democratic Presidents election and installation.  Those symbols and that lore - the Black Revolutionary common soldiers being bleached out of the "history" they learned from TV and movies and novels and perhaps even "history books" - are useful to modern American fascism, the continuation of our long lasting and greatly empowered indigenous form of it, white supremacy because of the real nature of America's history.  

The real and only worthwhile story of American history is the long and continually thwarted struggle against the slave-power features of the American Constitution and the dead hand of inequality.  The latest lesson in that history is the actual nature of the supposed freedoms and liberties contained in the Bill of Rights as those really are in real life.  Rights for mass murderers and the criminally insane to obtain automatic military rifles with which they mow down young children and anyone else, rights for the promotion of that in the mass media and others in the pay of the corporations that make those military rifles and sell them to the mass murderers.  Rights for those who promote sadism and torture and murder to encourage those in the population who want to do that for profit.  Rights for those who want to violently attack and kill People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, etc.   Our history is the struggle against the Constitution and that libertarian distortion of freedom in all its form.   In the 21st century it is the struggle against the depraved conception of "freedom of the press" which permits lies to triumph over the truth, racism and sexism over equality, the "freedom" which created and installed Donald Trump in the presidency, the American judicial and legal and Constitutional system stupidly and impotently leaving it as an open question whether or not he can, not only do the damage he did before, but assume the insanely structured and empowered American presidency to destroy even the self-doomed liberal democracy that was wrested out of the original Constitution.  That something like that very likely would have quickly happened if Madison had not been forced to promise a Bill of Rights in the First Congress and if the improvised and dangerous one that was adopted was in place, far earlier is no excuse to ignore that Trumpism is a product of that very Bill of Rights as interpreted by 20th century courts in the age of mass media.  Hamilton certainly wanted that and he was far from the only one of the "founders" who wanted to thwart anything like egalitarian democracy.  

The "free speech" rulings of the Court, with the support of the ACLU and other "civil liberties" frauds are certainly a part of that, in that they have protected the big money corruption of our politics and the lies in the media on which the big money depends.   I think we must scrap the ACLU and its conception of "civil liberties" if we're going to have any chance of getting and keeping egalitarian democracy.  

We need to take a hard, critical look at all of this and much more if we're going to survive, not only as any kind of democracy but as a species.**  I think anything like egalitarian democracy requires that.   In thinking about this I thought of the often made atheist critique of Jesus that he didn't condemn slavery, which I would hold is not true.  You can't keep someone in slavery if you do to others what you would have done to you.  Jesus often spoke in parables, some of which are more confusing than others.  I think he told his listeners rather explicitly what he was doing in those which he compared the Kingdom of Heaven to the sewing of seeds and putting yeast in bread dough.  He was planting seeds and leavening dough with his elevation of the commandments of equality, the Golden Rule, his commands to love.  Those have certainly not yet taken though, perhaps, they are still embedded in the culture that was forming.  They had, in fact, been part of the Law of Moses, already.  They are certainly negated and destroyed by a conception of morality and rights divorced from equality and the practice of love, concepts that slave holders and genocidalists and sharp businessmen have no use for, especially on an equal basis.  

I don't remember, perhaps it was the moral brute Churchill,  who noted that Americans will always do the right thing but only when they have no other choice.  I think the conditions we live under right now leave us with no other choice, though getting past the mythical status of the Constitution and our legal and political traditions will have to be overcome just as the slave provisions in those had to be overcome to come to even the point of progress we are at now.  Slavery and lynch law endured with the insouciant acceptance of and tacit understanding of the majority of those with power for a long, long time.  The same powers which profited from those are trying to bring them back, the Republican-fascist party, the party of Trump and the backlash against the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, the other laws which were adopted in the 1960s and 70s and a few after, are still powerful and using the Constitution and the mythical conception of our history and traditions to reimpose them.  The Roberts Court, the Republican-fascists in Congress, the American mass media are all part of that.  I don't think the American left really needs to help them by holding that it would be a terrible affront to "ethics" to suppress snuff porn and S&M, B&D promotion and the promotion of racism and fascism.   That anyone could hold that Nazism or Stalinism should have another chance at power, that our indigenous form of that as embodied in the KKK should have a chance to redo it here AS A VALUE OF THE AMERICAN LEFT HAS NO CREDIBILITY, AT ALL..  

We certainly have to get past the ACLU conception of freedom, they're some of the worst enablers of America's indigenous form of fascism which has taken hold of the country, a large number of states, as the slave states were always under their control from the start.   We need to scrap them for a real civil liberties entity, not like that thing.  I don't trust them at all.  One which does not hold that the KKK and Nazis are to always have a chance to do it again as they preen in their First Amendmenty purity.   I've long thought of Alan Dershowitz as an advocate of torture who plays a civil libertarian on TV since about the turn of the century.  I wasn't at all surprised when he turned out as he has.  Now I understand that even better than I did twenty years ago.  Such a conception of freedom will always trend that way.

* Since I'm sure some will take advantage of the difficulty of scientifically or mathematically determining what is wrong, I'd base a political and legal definition of that on the basis of every person's right to bodily autonomy, the right to live in a viable environment and the moral obligation to treat others as they would want to be treated.  Taking into account that mental illness can twist those desires in a small number of People BUT that such Peoples' desires are not useful for making a rule of general governance instead of turning that insanity into a rule under which all are supposed to live, as the stupid "enlightenment" comes down to when that question is pressed.  That's why an educated idiot like de Beauvior could ask if we must burn de Sade instead of living under a regime of "freedom" in which his psychotic fantasies re held up as a beacon of liberty.  I will point out that she and her boy friend Sartre, were supporters of Maoism as Mao and his inner circle was competing with Hitler and Stalin for whose mountain of corpses would be highest.  Such was her erudition on the topic of "liberty" and "equality."   Don't get me started on Pollitt's nostaliga for the Maoist "Progressive Labor Party."  They are in every way the exact moral equivalent of the German American Bund and the French collaboration.  

** The "liberty" of the oil, coal and other extraction industries to peddle lies through American TV and radio about global warming should stand as the absolute proof that such a conception of "civil liberties" is prepared to get us all killed in the name of "liberty."   That is a more subtle lesson of experience than them turning America into a shooting gallery through the same promotion of lies in the mass media but it's more deadly in the end.  Civil libertarianism and Constitutionalism is a demand that we don't even learn from even the hardest lessons of experience.

People Get The Vapors When You Make A Realistic Criticism of the Sacred Constitution - A Few Friggin' Obvious Defects In The United States Constitution

HOW ABOUT the constantly repeated statement that Trump could run for president while he's in prison after being convicted of felonies?   

How about the fact that the claims of his sleazy Saur lawyer to the appeals court that the president can commit the most serious felonies in office and unless convicted in that fictitious means of removing presidents, the never has happened and never will happen conviction by 2/3rds of the Senate, he can get away with it entirely?   The "impeachment power" of Congress is one of the worst jokes contained in it, it is a total fiction.   There is no actual means of removing the most depraved and criminal of presidents, we, in fact, live in an electoral monarchy. 

That either of those are glaring defects in any constitution and that those could even be argued as being Constitutional under the US Constitution, in any court shows just how deficient the document is.  Let me go on.

That the Electoral College is still in existence,  that the electoral vote of a state is based even partly on the anti-democratic number of Senators.*    I suspect that will never be abolished because of  the absurdly unrealistic means of amending the damned thing.   The near impossibility of doing that to get rid of some of its worst and most anti-democratic features certainly counts as another of its greatest defects. 

I'd like to go into a lot more, such as the slave-power implanted ban on the federal government taxing exports - something which has been an economic disadvantage which every American has had to pay for, from the beginning, which shows that the friggin' Constitution was, as Wendell Phillips called it, a pro-slavery compact.  Lincoln and the Civil War Amendments didn't get rid of some of the worst of those which the Republican-facists and white supremacists still use and which still puts money in their pockets.  

The pardon power, that anything like the fascistic "unitary executive" theory is not obviously unconstitutional.  Elite law school faculties are always trying to come up with that kind of anti-democatic, anti-egalitarian crap and the judges and "justices" as well.   That anyone could hold such a position while promoting fascism is certainly an indictment of the legal profession and judicial system under the Constitution.   You can be a fascist AND a Constitutional scholar in the United States, a real egalitarian democratic Constitution and legal system would never produce that result.

The Second Amendment is a mass murder permitting catastrophe, born in the desire to protect slave owners against those they kept in bondage.

And, since this has to be a short post, today,  don't get me started on the permission to lie in the mass media and for the media to sell the most evil and depraved crap (as FOX Lies, does)  in the First Amendment, and numerous other clear defects in it.**


* That's something that matters disproportionately when you consider the number of states with lowest number of electoral votes but whose combined numbers, both in the Senate and the Electoral College, makes their votes count many times more than those who vote in the largest states.

Anyone who has a 6th graders knowledge of American history knows that the white supremacists in the slave states and beyond made themselves even more politically powerful by denying the vote to Black People, under slavery and under the de facto continuation of it in Jim Crow, the Jim Crow that the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts are bringing back.  

Any honest electoral system would elect a president based on the national majority vote, getting rid of the corrupt electoral college.   Its congressional representation would, as well, be based on the potential size of the electorate in the state.  But, given the white supremacist use of voter suppression, in the past and, under the Roberts Court and its destruction of the Voting Rights Act, today,  both Congressional representation and any disgustingly retained Electoral College should be enumerated on the basis of the percentage of ELIGIBLE VOTERS AS DEFINED BY A NATIONAL STANDARD AND ON THE BASIS OF THE NATIONAL CENSUS which votes in any decade.  You'll have to incentivize the permission of voter participation, state by state, if you want to overcome the practices of America's indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy.  Imagine if Texas's or South Dakota's or Wisconsin's delegation to the Congress were dependent on allowing all People of Color to vote how that would change things and fuck the white supremacists shit.  They'd probably repeal the lifetime ban on voting by those convicted of crimes, one of the ways that they have used the injustice system to suppress minority votes.  

**  The definition of "free speech" that is capacious enough that it permits the production and dissemination of snuff porn with the Supreme Court's approval is certainly something that could have been better drafted by those amateurs in the Constitutional Convention and the First Congress.   It's legal for companies to pay people in Indonesia to torture monkeys to death while it's live streamed or on video for the depraved pleasure of American sadists.   It's legal for those videos you may have read about that showed up on Twitter after Elon opened it up to Nazis and fascists where kittens are killed in blenders to be shown.  And we haven't gotten to what is done to human beings under the First Amendment as stupidly written and as amended by Supreme Courts in the 20th century.   Of course, it was legal to do things like make picture postcards of Black People lynched and send them through the mail under it during the 19th and 20th centuries, so you see the hole in it is bigger than the biggest door in an aircraft hanger in the world.  In fact, they used their "free speech" to announce impending lynchings, even through the mail, to get a bigger crowd.  I don't recall reading of that ever being stopped by law. 

And the one that allows con men and hucksters and, yes, Neo-Nazis, to use the freedom of "religion" to operate freely is another.  That the thing doesn't explicitly ban anything promoting inequality and destructive of democracy is another of its most dangerous short-comings.   

I've asked every member of my family

who voted in the 1990s, all of whom voted for Bill Clinton if they would have any problem with him spending the rest of his life in jail IF he were guilty of having sex with minors in the continuing Jeffrey Epstein scandal and every one of us said we would have no problem with him going to prison for the rest of his life if he did.   I am certain that by a large majority Democrats would take that position.   Look at how they dumped Al Franken on the trumped up accusations made against him by a Republican operative.  

You can compare that to the reaction of Republican-fascists to the at least as probable if not far more probable possibility that Trump committed that crime and the excuses already being made for him by them.   

There is no Democratic equivalent to the Trump cult which rules Republican-fascist politics and politicians. 

Hate Mail - I Meant Every Word I Said About Pollitt's Ideological Position And A Lot More Words I Could Have Said

PERHAPS I SHOULD explain how I came to go from resolutely avoiding the topic of religion in my political blogging to coming to see it as, perhaps, the most important issue there is in understanding politics.

It was in the early months of my political blogging, when I had been invited to be the weekend blogger on a far more popular blog.   It was 2006 as the obnoxious, ballot box poison of the "new atheism" was everywhere on the online comment threads of us lefties.  I knew that it was ballot box poison so I posted a piece that said it was and that it was counter-productive and the religious left and the atheist left had to work in common.   My post was attacked and misrepresented by some of those who were riding the "new atheist" fad hard, it was, probably, the most attention that one of my posts had gotten at that time.  I pointed out the misrepresentations and asked, then demanded that they retract the lies they had told about it to uniform refusal.   Even by those who were representing themselves as "journalists." 

The theme I'd chosen for my blog was to investigate why the side which had many more of the facts on their side could so consistently, over the previous fifty or so years, fail politically in the United States and elsewhere.  I knew a few, though not most of the answers to that, the not infrequent snobbishness of so many of the college-credentialed lefty crowd being among the most friggin' obvious of those.  Their obsessions with stupid issues, some of them more in the area of lifestyle than of anything important, high among those.   Among the other things I'd already annoyed some on comment threads with was saying that while I didn't especially care for prayers in the public schools (though, I've come to understand, not for the reasons the ACLU opposed it) and totally unimportant things like the erection of manger scenes and crosses on public property as something worth costing the left among voters.  Disestablishment on such issues as prayer in schools or manger scence may be a mildly good thing in itself but it was hardly a life or death issue or likely to become one.  It was no hill worth enough for the left do die politically on.  So I was already pointed in the direction I've taken.  I hadn't noted that their presence before the Warren Court banned them had been a major contributing factor in preventing what is, in fact, the highest point of the American left, the period in 1964 and 1965 when the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid and a whole host of other legislation had been passed, things that did more for more People than the entire program of the secular left had managed to achieve in their entire existence.  

In the brawls I got in over such things I started to sense that the middle class and affluent college-credentialed lefties who had little to nothing to lose if Republicans won elections were quite willing to see all of the progress made die so their mere preferences could be asserted and, at times, win in courts from the leftover judges and "justices" who were willing to give them wins.  In the meantime, the perpetual American underclass, especially People of Color, didn't really count as much to them.  It was more a lifestyle and club membership than a matter of real importance to them.  

I was still naive enough to think such people were more reasonable than the, then, Bush II cultists.  But that naivety didn't last long.  I try not to hold on to illusions for any longer than there's evidence to support them.  I started looking more into the "new atheism" and quickly found out that it was hardly new, they were merely reiterating the tired, old, threadbare slogans and claims that the old atheists had always made.  I'd read much of that from the likes of, from the somewhat higher end, Voltaire, Bertrand Russell, down through the mid-brows such as Clarence Darrow and Mark Twain, to the decidedly low-brow crap such as made its way into articles in the lefty media and organized atheism.  

But I'd also read much of the religious left's literature, Dorothy Day, liberation theologians, . . . and, increasingly in those days, Protestant liberals and radicals.  And I have to say that in virtually every case, I had a lot more faith in their practicality and devotion to the basic program of the left than that of those whose primary devotion wasn't doing better for the least among us but to the promotion of atheism.   That is, I think, the real primary goal of the alleged atheist left, that and the promotion of their materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology.  Something which, as I investigated that, convinced me that it was not only ballot box poison but, in fact, is inevitably destructive of the very basis of any real left which has an aim of equality and democracy and the preservation of life and the biosphere on which we all depend.

Among the milestones at about the same time pushing my own liberation from the mindset of the conventional American secular, college-credentialed left was noticing, by chance, one of the barroom style atheists on the conventional lefty blog I frequented making the claim that "science" had debunked the idea of free will" and that there was no opposition to the idea.   I suddenly realized that believing that nonsense was fatal to any real left based on equality, on any idea of people being free to make a free and informed choice on who will hold political power and govern.  It was, in fact, something that would not bring egalitarian democracy but the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche realized was an inevitable result of his materialist-atheist-scientism.   That led me to read more of the thinking of such materialist-atheitst-true believes in scientism and, to a person, they were either entirely pudding headed on the matter of governance or they were devoted to some ideological position which was, in fact, opposed to egatltarian democracy, Marxism, of course, some non-Marxist though atheist articulations of what they called "socialism" but which inevitably looked more like state capitalism to me, or, perhaps stupidest of all anarchism.   I found that having access online to very large if not all inclusive samples of the old-line left going back for centuries was a real eye-opener to the actual thinking of such people mistaken as heroes of the contemporary secular left.  I've presented such thinking a lot on this blog and at the previous blogs I wrote on.  Darwin is certainly one, Voltaire,  Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, Emma Goldman, etc.  I also had much more access to the ability to fact check the historical and biographical claims that are and have long been current in the lore of materialist-atheist-scientism and very often found that, if anything, that lore is constructed of lies.  Lies which are never fact-checked by the journalists and other materialist-atheist-even scientistic scribblers who will rely on the secondary, tertiary claims and junk and even more remote from the actual primary documentation to repeat that common received lore.  Many of those I respected highly on the contemporary left did that, though there were some few who were far more scrupulous scholars and writers.  There are still a few of those I respect for their unusual honesty.  

One of the things I have become absolutely convinced of it is that the materialist-atheist-scientistic holding the People and other living beings are mere objects, of no more transcendent character than the kinds of objects physicists and chemists study,  is not and cannot be made consistent with egalitarian democracy and any such basis for any politics or legal system will, inevitably and eventually, result in everything from injustice to genocide, to the destruction of the biosphere and life on Earth.   No materialistic ideology is compatible with any left which has any right to the label.

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Why am I bringing that up now?   Because of a complaint about what I said in my critique of Katha Pollitt the other day on the matter of moral absolutes.

One of the arguments I early got into was on the whining in 2006 that opinion polls said that a majority of Americans said they would not vote for an atheist as president or, as I recall, for lower offices.   It figured in that first most controversial of my posts I mention above.  I pointed out that if that was something atheists didn't like the only People who could change that opinion among American People were atheists who could make themselves more appealing and trusted by voters.  I pointed out that the anti-religious snark which blanketed the lefty blogs and in magazine and other articles by atheists was that ballot-box poison which it was and if they wanted voters to vote for them, and this was news to them, THEY HAD TO BE LIKABLE.  No one is likely to vote for someone who they believe doesn't respect them or disrespect them.  THEY SEEMED TO BELIEVE THAT THEY HAD SOME KIND OF RIGHT TO HAVE THE VOTES OF PEOPLE THEY DERIDED AND MOCKED AND WHO THEY CLEARLY NOT ONLY DIDN'T RESPECT BUT DESPISED.

I asked how many of them would vote for a Southern Baptist or what the shorthand was already calling "evangelicals."  I don't recall any of them taking the point that that question made.  

As you no doubt will understand, these guys who figured they were the smartest people there were, were entirely clueless about how real People think and react to that kind of thing.  In the back and forth that came as a result from that post I realized that their ideology, apart from any issue they claimed to support, was inevitably worse than counter productive, it was self-destructive.

In further arguments along those lines, the claim that morality was nothing but a product of common consensus of a majority opinion of any society at any given time.  I asked how they could complain if a society came to a consensus or majority opinion that you shouldn't trust atheists with political power, then.   Or how anyone could hold that within a society in which Black chattel slavery or the subjugation of Women or the brutal inequality of LGBTetc. People was believed to be right doing those things was, in fact, wrong.

Of course I said that such a basis of morality or "ethics" could ever call any society in which a majority believed it was the right thing to do to kill all Jews, wrong if they did that.   I may have already pointed out that such a secular-legal position was taken by Senator Robert Taft in his opposition to the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis on the basis that what they had done in the Shoah was legal under the laws the Nazis had adopted and, therefore, the legal process against them was illegitimate.   A position so depraved that it took that Harvard trained lawyer, JFK, to identify Taft's moral depravity as "A Profile in Courage."  As I indicated above,  I'm not so warm on  Constitutional secularism and, especially, as that has developed in the lore and "ethics" of the American legal profession.  I'm impressed with how frequently a training in the secular law will make the most obviously morally depraved position acceptable as the "right" position and course of action, or inaction.   Especially at the Ivy-League level of respectability.  

The fact is Katha Pollitt AND VIRTUALLY EVERY OTHER MATERILAIST-ATHEIST-SECULAR lefty scribbler does what the great musician Eduard Stuerrmann called "Vienese double-counterpoint"* on "ethics" or what is really morality.  They hold all kinds of "ethical" positions that are impeached by their underlying materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology.   And their instance on their "secularist" (really M-A-S) ideology creates all kinds of intellectual problems but, in reality and far more importantly, undermines real morality.  I have come to see that as one of the most important reasons that the American left and so many other secular would-be lefts have failed so catastrophically.   I think it is one of the reasons that liberal democracy was doomed by coming out of that same ideological stream and why any liberalism that has a chance has to be based on the kind of moral absolutes that are found in Scripture.  I believe those can come from other traditions than the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, any religious holding that holds that People are equally endowed by their Creator with rights that are absolute an inalienable, and that there are absolute moral obligations of the right kind could provide a support for egalitarian democracy and real equal justice but the fact is, in the United States, other aspiring democracies, for the most part it is, as the atheist-materialist philosopher Jurgen Habermass DID ACTUALLY SAY, that has no other source or source of nourishment than than the Jewish "ethic" of justice or the Christian one of universal love.   Something which, when the Christian apologist John Lennox (unlike his critics, a fluent German speaker) quoted Habermass as saying, atheists online blatantly lied about what he said.  When I pointed that out, repeatedly and exhaustively using the exact words of Habermass in the original, they still claimed Lennox was lying.

I think the current failure of liberal democracies is a strong indication that the very bases on which those are founded, especially such things as the failure of the acknolegement that there is a right to tell the truth but no right to lie, a right to promote equality but no right to promote privilege and discrimation against groups, THE MEAT-HEADED IDEA THAT MEDIA COMPANIES OR CORPORATIONS HAVE A RIGHT TO LIE AND SPREAD HATE WHEN CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE AND HAVE NO RIGHTS, is fatal to them,  And I think those were all adopted out of that self-destorying scientistic ideology taken from the frequently dangerous exemption that science was given from the consideration of morality in the thinking of the 17th and 18th century "enlightenment."   I'm not sure that was ever a wise decision to make in the scientific pursuit of the knowledge of and manipulation of the physical universe, I KNOW IT IS A DISASTER WHEN IT IS APPLIED TO THE REAL LIFE POLITICAL AND LEGAL REALMS REGULATING THE BEHAVIOR OF PEOPLE.   I don't see that there is any difference between the death lists of the Nazis or those that current "ethicists" are always drawing up on the basis of the economic valuation of human beings.  I think you really have to be educated and acculturated into true depravity to do such things with the human population's experience of the scientific genocides of the 20th century.  And such a depravity is promoted and made mandatory by our secularized Constitution and legal rulings and legal lore and in the most insane, brain and soul-dead culture which is the norm in our journalism, academic writing and popular culture.  A lot of that is imprecise and inexact adoption of the original ideas but even watered down and alterered slightly, they have become quite poisionous to egalitarian democracy.  

I've come a long way since 2006.  A long way much farther to a real left to egalitarian democracy and the presevation and improvement of life.  I don't think I hold much of anything else strongly enough for it to be called an ideology.   As FDR said,  I'm a democrat and a Christian, nothing else.  I'm not stupid enough to think any of this is discernible with the methods of science, not as asserted by the ideology of those I'm criticizing.   I think rigorous and honest consideration of history is a superior method of finding out about that.  Their scientism certainly hasn't worked out as prediction after prediction fails in the test of time, which is what is supposed to be the source of the credibility of science.  The failure of the secular left is what got me going on this to start with.

*  As I recall, he mentioned someone who was a member of the Nazi party but who, nevertheless, asked someone for an introduction to Alban Berg because he wanted composition lessons with him.