Someone Shut Up Bill Clinton

BILL CLINTON has a history of causing disaster for Democratic presidential candidates,  most clearly for Hillary Clinton when he irresponsibly, stupidly and recklessly met with Loretta Lynch as Hillary Clinton was under the American media inquisition over her e-mails.   That and what the Republicans and the American media and, lest be it  forgotten the sanctimonious partisan hack  James Comey did with is is as much of why we got Trump I as anything. 

Now the asshole has done it again with an anti-Palestinian speech in Wisconsin which the play-left, the legitimate pro-Palestinians and others are using to try to sandbag Kamala Harris in a close election in a critical state. 

BILL CLINTON SHOULD NEVER, EVER AGAIN BE PUT OUT THERE TO CAMPAIGN FOR A DEMOCRAT BECAUSE OF THIS RECORD AND DUE TO HIS EPIC IRRESPONSIBILITY WHILE HE WAS PRESIDENT.   He was a mediocre Democratic president, at best, about the best thing you can say for him is that he kept Republicans out of the White House for eight years.   He is on the same list as Trump as someone who I could happily hear nothing from or of or about the rest of my life and it would suit me just fine.   If Kamala Harris is elected I hope she listens to Hillary Clinton,  I hope she listens to Jimmy Carter (the greatest ex-president in the history of ex-presidents),  I even hope she listens to Barack Obama but Bill Clinton is one person she really doesn't need advice from.  Like those guys who ran his campaign who should have been retired from being involved with Democratic campaigns, he should do a quick fade starting right now. 

Sr. Mildred Barker - I Looked And Lo A Lamb

 

MICHAEL MOORE has my permission to go soak his head and keep it under water.   Other than little Bobby Kennedy, he is the most useless figure of the play left who always gets attention for himself by trashing Democrats at crucial times.    To quote Tim Walz, what a jerkwad. 

"Comedians" As The Only Sacred Thing - American Comedy c. 2024 Is Not Funny

WHEN I HEARD that the rapidly curdling Jon Stewart came out in defense of the racist, sexist, Trumpian-fascist bit done at Trump's Nazi rally I went to look where it was written up.   If the top hits on google are any indication it was mostly written up in the Republican-fascist and "entertainment" rags and sites.   I'd had about  enough of Stewart earlier in the year when I read and heard him on first the best president we've had since LBJ,  Joe Biden was being sandbagged and then later,  I mean I remember with fondness his over the top take-down of Glenn Beck when he was still doing The Daily Show, which I laughed at but I would guess that's more the writers than him.  I'm wondering if in ten years he's going to be a sour old man like Jerry Seinfeld is, whining that People of Color,  Latinos, Women, others are calling out the holy, sacrosanct "comedians" when they peddle hate against them defending those poor, unjustly persecuted white male comedians against the onslaught of People who are tired of the kind of shtick that was one of the most effective means of keeping "those" People in their place.   Of course the People who endured that and overcame that are mostly white,  the Irish, the Italians, white Jews,  as enough of them rose in wealth and, so, prominence and influence and mostly white men, at that.  

If that Hinchcliffe asshole had used the "c" word in his shtick as he wanted to,  I have no problem imagining that Stewart would have defended him.   Given how degenerate American "comedy" is these days,  I can imagine him defending him if he'd done a Roseanne Barr style Holocaust "joke".    I'd like to know if he's ever addressed that recent innovation in edgy "comedy."  

Why would Stewart think that the very jerks who are making everyone else into a target should be immune from commentary, mockery, rejection?   Why shouldn't the population at large have the opportunity to do what any stand-up audience has the right to do when someone like him bombs and objects to it?   That's pretty much what America has been doing since Sunday.   

Apparently for Stewart "comedians" are the only thing not allowed to be booed.   What a self-serving stand to take.   Especially as he rejects far more important and serious ones.   He has forfeited any right to be taken seriously, from now on.   It is less than a week till we find out if American Hitler 2024 is going to take power, afterall.

White Catholicism Has A Serious Facism Problem - People's Exhibit #n=infinity But Not Nearly As Serious A Problem as Current "Comedy" Does

THE SCUMBAG RACIST "comedian" Tony Hinchcliffe who is now infamous is a product of Ursuline High School in Youngstown, Ohio.   Also, too, he was a member of the wrestling team.   There's something deeply creepy about wrestling, perhaps especially the kulcha of wrestling in mid-western states.  See also:  Denny Hastert and Jim Jordan.

More to the point and probably far more relevant to anything he's a product of thorough conventional American "comedy."   Not caring to dip too far into the sewer that is Hinchcliffe,  I looked him up on his, no doubt, self-typed Wikipedia page:  

In 2007, Hinchcliffe moved to Los Angeles in order to pursue a career in comedy.[2][4] He started performing stand-up at open mics at The Comedy Store in West Hollywood, California.[2][9][3] He was hired to work the phones and the cover booth, eventually becoming a paid regular at the venue.[2][5] He also started opening for comedians Joe Rogan and Jeff Ross on tour.[10][9][5]

Hinchcliffe became known at The Comedy Store for insulting other comics and audience members during shows.[3][11] He is also known for broaching uncomfortable and sensitive topics during his stand-up sets.[9][3][11][12] Hinchcliffe's style of roasting[13][3][10] and dark sense of humor appealed to fellow comedian Jeff Ross, also known as the "Roastmaster General" of the television series Comedy Central Roast.[3][5][11] Hinchcliffe refers to Ross as his "mentor" and he helped get Hinchcliffe his first writing jobs.[3][5][11]

Hinchcliffe has written for the Comedy Central Roast episodes featuring James Franco, Justin Bieber and Rob Lowe.[2][9][14][10][15] Hinchcliffe's contributions to the series include writing Martha Stewart's set for the Justin Bieber roast and Ann Coulter's set for the Rob Lowe roast.[10][15] Hinchcliffe has also written for the comedy panel show The Burn with Jeff Ross and appeared as a contestant on the first season of Jeff Ross Presents Roast Battle.[5][16]

He also appeared as a roaster on the All Def Digital Roast of Snoop Dogg in 2016[9][14] and The Roast of Tom Brady in 2024.[17]

Since 2013, Hinchcliffe has produced and hosted a podcast called Kill Tony, a weekly live show recorded at The Comedy Store.[14][13][18] During the show, Hinchcliffe and co-host Brian Redban (of The Joe Rogan Experience and the Deathsquad Network), along with a changing panel of comedians and other celebrities, act as judges for amateur comedians.[18][19] The contestants enter their names into a bucket and are selected at random throughout the show.[18][19] Each selected contestant gets to perform a one-minute comedy set,[2][14][13] followed by a discussion and critique by the panel of judges.[19] The show aims to give young comedians a chance to showcase their talent and build their professional reputation. It sets no limits on topics the contestants can present, allowing for potentially offensive or politically incorrect performances.[20][21]

Hinchcliffe's first one-hour stand-up special titled One Shot premiered on Netflix in 2016.[2][13][14] His special was so named because it was shot in one camera take with no edits.[2][14] In 2017, he headlined the Monster Energy Outbreak Tour where he toured 20 American cities in 22 days.[2][13][10]

In September 2020, Hinchcliffe announced that he would be relocating to Austin, Texas, to join Joe Rogan and Brian Redban.[22] The Kill Tony podcast, previously filmed at The Comedy Store, relocated to Antone's Nightclub in downtown Austin, Texas. The show relocated to Vulcan Gas Company on 6th Street in May 2021. Due to an incident that month, his agency WME released him as a client and Antone's announced that it would no longer work with Hinchcliffe or Kill Tony.[23][24][25] As of 2023, the show is hosted at Joe Rogan's Austin based comedy club, Comedy Mothership.

On New Year's Eve 2023, Kill Tony hosted its first live arena show at the H-E-B Center at Cedar Park.[26] 

American "comedy" has no sense of morals, no sense of anything being sacred, no sense of anything being wrong and also isn't at all funny.  "Comedy" is entirely compatable with Republican-fascist Trumpian Nazism. 

See Also: Last Friday's Post and the comments.  

 BOYCOTT AMAZON

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Come Closer Now

 Come Closer Now 

Katie Hims’s love letter to radio drama as the form celebrates its centenary.

Annie is writing a radio play about a hundred years of radio plays, and it’s also, curiously, the story of her own family. As she writes she unearths the myths, half-truths and lies that have been woven into her family’s fabric for generations. Stories that are written to cope with uncomfortable facts. Stories that warp and twist reality. Stories stowed in the studio walls. Stories that crackle with electricity. Stories that move across space and time, and end up right in your ear, right in your head. Stories a bit like this one.

From gathering around the wireless to listening on-demand on headphones, the listener, and the medium, has transformed over the century. And across this sweep of time, radio drama has remained an innovative, yet deeply intimate art form, with infinite possibilities. It’s often called the most visual medium there is.

CAST

Annie ….. Rebekah Staton

Farley ….. Joseph Kloska

Connie and Jane ….. Rhiannon Neads

Older Jane ….. Jessica Turner

Younger Jane ….. Maisie Avis

Dan ….. Don Gilet

Joe ….. Tyler Cameron

Michael ….. Josh Bryant-Jones

Nora ….. Kitty O’Sullivan

The Boy ….. Milton Dighton

Written by Katie Hims

Directed by Anne Isger

Sound by Ali Craig and Andy Garrett

Production Co-ordination by Jenny Mendez

A BBC Audio Production for BBC Radio 3

Katie Hims wrote her first play for radio in 1996, and has been writing extensively in the genre ever since, to great acclaim. Katie’s play Waterloo Station was the winner of Best Radio Drama at the 2023 Writers Guild Awards. Her other original audio work includes Black Eyed Girls (winner of the BBC Audio Drama Award for Best Original Drama), Lost Property (winner of the BBC Audio Drama Award for Best Original Drama), The Gunshot Wedding (winner of The Writer’s Guild Best Original Radio Drama). Katie was lead writer on BBC's Home Front and has written multiple leading adaptations for BBC Radio 4: Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'ubervilles, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls and The Martin Beck Killings by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.

In theatre, Katie is currently on attachment at the National Theatre. Her recent stage work includes a contemporary retelling of Kafka's The Trial which ran at The Unicorn Theatre in 2023 and received 4 and 5 star reviews.

I'm Reduced To Posting My Comment Thread Comments

A COMMENT posted on Stephanie Miller's Youtube. 

Hollywood, show biz, TV, "comedy" has normalized the basis of Republican-fascism, increasingly since the 1970s.   The glorification of gangsters, dirty Harry,  Clint Eastwood characters, etc.  The ridicule and mockery of all of the moral bases of egalitarian democracy.  They produced Trump, they produced Reagan before that.  The pseudo-journalism that followed on after the entertainment divisions of broadcasting, the editorials and reporting that followed on the entertainment features that led the ink on paper rags.   Until you address what created the basis of amorality that led to Trump,  you're wasting your time.

I won't feel better until I know Kamala Harris both won the election and will be inaugurated.  That the situation we are in right now is possible under the goddamned Constitution and the law as defined by the corrupt Supreme Court is an indictment of both of them.  A Constitution and legal system that were legitimate would have kept Trump from being a candidate,  he would have been in prison by now.   The gutting of the sections of the 14th Amendment that would have kept him from running, by not only the Republican-fascist majority but, also, non-fascists on the Court proves that the rot in our system is in no small part due to the festering, infectious rot in our judiciary and the legal profession, as well.

We Don't Have The Luxury Of Getting Lost In The Complexities Over Israel And Palestine Anymore - The United States Must Stop "Israel Right Or Wrong" Now

ONE OF THE most intelligent, moral People in their twenties who I know has told me she isn't going to vote this year, even though she knows how dangerous Trump getting another chance is.   It is a result of the Israeli genocide and the Biden administration's policy supporting it.   She, like may other People of good will has been entirely taken up by the Israeli genocide against the People of Gaza for the entire time since the Israeli military started it.  Before that she was horrified by the attack on Israel which initiated the campaign of murder, destruction and occupation that the Israeli government used that to justify.

You will notice I haven't used the euphemisms "The Israeli Defense Forces" and "The Netanyahu government" because what the Israeli military has done isn't defensive, no more than the Israeli government ignoring the warnings it was given that an attack from Gaza was imminent before the initiating attack.  Nor can Israel as a nation be let off the hook by blaming what not only has happened this year but has repeatedly happened in Gaza, in Lebanon over the decades the Israeli fascists of Likud and their political allies have governed Israel WITH THE CONSENT OF A MAJORITY OF ISRAELI VOTERS.   Unlike the People of Gaza who got the all too typical first and last free election which brought Hamas to power, the People of Israel have had innumerable occasions over the past fifty years to reject the fascist face of Zionism and they chose, in the majority, in favor of fascism, of apartheid, of genocide.   The extent to which that is understandable due to the fact that Israel has been under more or less continuous attack by the Palestinians who were displaced and expelled from the lands Israel claimed for itself is undeniable.   The predictions of such a situation arising from the Zionist project go back to almost the origins of Zionist ideology,  many of those most opposed to the idea were the very People who Zionists claimed to speak on behalf of, Jews.  

I prefer to take my information about situations in other places among other peoples from the People who are most involved with the risks and consequences instead of those who have nothing to do with it.  Perhaps that is related to the rejection of abstractions that the excerpt I posted from Gabriel Marcel mentioned but it is mostly from the fact that those who are most involved.   I listen to Israelis in opposition to fascism and genocide - I know the Israeli fascists, like all fascists are flagrant liars so I don't bother with what they say - and Gazans and other Palestinians who are victims of Hamas and other terrorist fascists though far less so than they are of Israeli fascists.  

One of the things I've been doing that is related to and only supplemental to reading those directly in danger from both Israeli and Palestinian fascism is reading is the Jewish anti-Zionists because more than seventy years after its self-declaration of existence as a nation,  I have no faith that the Israeli state will ever be more than an increasingly apartheid state both attacking and murdering Palestinians but also being under attack and in danger of murder from a non-ending opposition to its existence.   I have mentioned a number of times that my belief that that is the case was sparked by the Argentinian journalist and victim of the Argentinian fascists dirty war, Jacobo Timmerman who relocated temporarily to Israel under the "right of return" and, revolted by the 1982 Lebanon war (I wonder how many Americans even remember there was one) in which the Israeli military and government acted in concert with Lebanon's "Christian" fascists, wrote a book and became an Israeli critic of the government and a live-long Zionist who seemed to become skeptical of the claimed goals of Zionism.   He noted that much of the antisemitism in the post-WWII period was a direct result of the existence of the Israeli state and, admitted what was obvious, that the modern state of Israel had certainly not made Jews there or around the world safer.  

One of the things that any outsider dipping into the extremely complex and long and infinitely detailed and drastically varied thinking and history around Zionism and the establishment and history of the Israeli government has to contend with is that extreme complexity and the extremely strongly held devotion to nuances in even seemingly related, sometimes only apparently similar positions held.  Jacobo Timerman retained his Israeli citizenship even after he moved back to Argentina, making any resumption of his Argentinian citizenship contingent on him retaining the citizenship of Israel, a country he had been far more critical of than almost any American has been, even as he seems to have become critical of the Zionist ideology he'd once held with.  I have to say that Timerman is someone who I respected because he was the kind of journalist who tried to truthfully tell the bad about any place he lived in honestly, even after he'd been kidnapped, tortured and had to face the fact that he might have been murdered as a consequence of his truth telling.   There aren't many if any American "journalists" who have that history of journalism and they aren't really worthy of being wearing the same label.

I have no idea how Rabbi Yakkov Shapiro thinks or would think of Jacobo Timerman but I have to say that from what I can check of what he says about the ideology of Zionism, both in claims and in practice, seems to me to be honest and make sense.  I say that even as I can say that after listening to many hours of his talks and interviews the past two weeks, I have no idea of the extent to which we would agree on much of anything in politics.   I am, of course not a Jew so I am considering what he says about the antisemitism that is intrinsic to Zionism from the view of an outsider, though I was aware of the atheism and hostility to both the Jewish religion and Jewish identity that was rampant among the founders of Zionism and, especially, the "Reformed Zionism" of Jabotinsky which formed the basis of the fascist gangsters who Jewish intellectuals warned against in 1948 and who have, either personally or in their next generation, have ruled Israel for much of its history, now.  I'm including the offshoots of Likud in that. 

I would recommend listening to Rabbi Shapiro though there are others who share his opposition to Zionism as being opposed to Judaism. Before listening to him I was ignorant of the nature of the irreligious character of Modern Hebrew, which, I he is correct, would seem to have intentionally baked in ridicule and disdain for the Jewish religion.  

I have no great hope that if Kamala Harris wins the election that she will change American policy in a way that would force the Israeli fascist government* to end its genocidal policies or its whipping up wars to both steal land and manipulate domestic politics to keep itself in power.  But I know if Trump rules,  his son-in-law and, probably, he will be bidding on land seized by Israel on which to build luxury properties over the blood and bones of Palestinians.  I've tried to reason with young woman I mentioned above but I really don't have any arguments that will talk her into choosing the far, far, far, lesser of "evils."    I agree with her that AIPAC has to have its influence broken because it and other, similar agents of the Israeli government have far too much influence in American politics.  It's far from the only one but it's one of the most dangerous.  

I have warned her that a lot of the supposedly pro-Gazan and anti-Israeli stuff she gets sent to her on her phone is probably as dishonest as the pro-Israeli-pro-genocide stuff is, quoting Howard Zinn's vitally important point that every government and side lies.  Though I can't fault her for what she says about the genocidal war that the Israeli government is waging against the People of Gaza,  Muslim, Christian (some of what I read says they're obviously targeting Palestinian Christians, though how you can make that distinction in the general Lebensraum that is happening is hardly an important question).   I wouldn't be surprised if there are many more opponents of Hamas who have been murdered as supporters of Hamas in the Israeli genocide.   A lot of the problem of trying to distinguish lies from the truth is in the attacks on reporters, journalists, aid-workers, medical practitioners, etc. who seem to, as well, be the object of targeting, though, again, in the general murder it's hard to tell if that's the case.  It's clear they haven't been following international law against the killing of such People. 

One of the things that needs to change is the rote accusation of "antisemitism" made against those who insist that a nation, such as Israel, can't be allowed to escape either criticism or opposition in the way that every single other country is held to be liable to by any rational, moral Person in the world.   Rabbi Shapiro has made a conclusive case that that is based in the insistence of Zionists that they represent all Jews and that Zionism is the same thing as Jewishness.   I've criticized the recent campaign to legally define "antisemitism"  in such a way as to legally exempt Israel and its governments, even the fascist governments that have ruled it for most of the past fifty years from having the truth told about it.   I think Rabbi Shapiro has made the best case against that I've yet heard. .

*  A fascist government that can count on the majority of voters supporting it has no need to suppress elections, especially when they can manipulate things to foment violence and military actions that will enhance that support among voters.  I don't hold that such elections are a reliable distinction between fascism and real democracy because real democracy as any modern person of any morality should use the term is based on equality.   Elections, by themselves, are a necessary part of democracy but in a country such as Israel, they certainly don't guarantee either democracy nor are they a means of exempting fascist rule from being honestly identified as fascism.  Especially in a situation of apartheid practiced by a majority over a minority. 

Bela Bartok - Piano Concerto no. 3

 
 

Zoltan Kocsis playing Bartok's PC 3 with the NHK under Hans Drewanz, live on 12 June 1985.

Free Press Absolutism Is A Guarantee Of Media That Kneecaps and Sandbags Democracy Not For Profit Media Sold Us Out First And Fastest

READING YET ANOTHER journalist complaining that Kamala Harris's "closing message" has "fallen short" which, if you think about it in the context of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance means absolutely nothing,  I remembered the very first blog post I wrote on a Saturday, May 13, 2006 and the thing that finally got me to write something like that and post it,  listening to NPR's Saturday Edition hack Scott Simon holding up liberals to a standard that required the highest standards of accuracy, veracity, and adherence to some absurd standard of imaginary purity that he, the rest of the hacks at NPR and, in fact, just about the entirety of the media never, once held a conservative or a Republican-fascist to once in the history of American mass media or narrow media.  

So here almost twenty years later if anything that's gotten worse.  I'll repost that very first blog piece I wrote only for "liberal" you should understand it to mean Democrat, Democrats and Democratic in the context of late October 2024.

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

I have no intention of getting it right every time. I begin with no expectation of getting it entirely right a plurality of the time. No guarantee of such is given or offered. I will not allow considerations of the possibility of failure from keeping me from action. On occasion I'll plow straight ahead if conditions seem to warrant it. I, friends, am the thoroughly bad sort and claim as mine, as the sacred possession of every liberal and leftist, the absolute right enjoyed by the rest of humanity to get it wrong. And not only this but I claim as the birthright of leftists to present our side of things to the advantage of our side. I have absolutely no intention to be fair to fascists either, but that's for another day and I hope that Nat Hentoff doesn't die before I get to it.

The Code of Liberal Ethics is a standard operating setting required in every organ of the media. It is applied without consideration, without thought, as a matter of habit. It is a solid state component of the minds of far too many liberals. It is a weapon used exclusively against liberals and leftists and is applied to no other segment of the political spectrum. Everyone, from mushy moderate to rabid fascist is allowed their failings and their biases. But not liberals. Certainly not leftists.

No more. Here, today, I issue our own manumission, my fellow leftists. We have shaken off the chains of perfection, we are free of the lash of faultlessness. We claim our right to consider our own opinions superior and worthy of dominance. Never again will we present the arguments of conservatives as if they merit equal treatment. We will scorn their folly and expose their lies and their entertaining hypocrisies without apology. We will get off our knees and kick every fascist where it counts. In all seriousness, our lives, the lives of our loved ones, the life of the biosphere absolutely depend on it. We must crush out of ourselves and our kind the remains of these mind forged manacles and wipe their residue from every voice and their assumed existence from every ban. Friends, we have nothing to fear. We are free.

Disclaimer: I make no pretense of being a journalist. At best, if someone wanted to insult me, they might claim me as a columnist, an unskilled occupation of which I do not claim to be a part. I would never want anyone to assume that I pretend to be a real journalist, a reporter.

If Kamala Harris and Tim  Walz win the election, especially if they win big I hope one of the results is that it vindicates a decision to bypass the legacy,  hack, Republican-literally-fascist enabling corporate media, which I hope will be the beginning of the end of it.  We need a media but it is not that media, what we need is real journalism which you can hardly find in the legacy media, starting with that Sulzberger run house of presstitution,  the New York Times but including virtually all of the big media.  I think I mentioned a month or so back listening to a journalist from a small Latino newspaper who said the NYT today was a gaming company that had something that passed as a news operation still going.  For example, there's today's third worst person in the world, according to Keith Olbermann,  the NYTwit Jeremy Peters as aided by MSNBC's Katy Tur.  

There is a massive study waiting to happen on the topic of the complicity of America's freest press in the history of the "free press" in the age of impunity for lying, rejecting community service, rejecting any kind of even the pathetic excuse for "fairness" that was the Fairness Doctrine.  Not only its complicity of such a media in the age of free speech absolutism but what I think is a near certainty that such a media serve the enemies of everything from electoral government to even abolishing the identity of the truth as opposed to lies of the most transparent kind.  Such a media, such a "press" is the opposite to what the dolts who drafted the dangerously inspecific First Amendment imagined would be such a media left entirely to its own devices, as exempted from even the libel and slander penalties that kept such media from doing its worst even in its entirely inglorious past and into its infamous present. 

I fucking hate NPR.   I wish I'd never sent it a penny back when I still stupidly supported it.   I have learned not to trust alleged "not for profit" media because they were among the first and worst sell outs, bought out by Koch money, the fascist Heritage Association and which pushed shit like Politico and The Hill even before I'd read them and realized they were even worse in full than before.   Just like I used to watch Brian Lamb on C-Span pushing the worst of the worst,  helping make Matt Druge's career,  pushing Judicial Watch and countless other sewage. 

On First Opening Marcel's Man Against Mass Society

I AM BOTH ticked off and ashamed to find that this late in life I wished that back when I was reading a lot of the then still fashionable existentialism that I never came by or bothered to find out about Gabriel Marcel, a French philosopher, playwright, critic, etc. who I now find out is sometimes identified as one of the first existential philosophers.  I will speculate that my early disgust for the approved, canonized (literally in the literary sense of the word) atheist-existentialists I read (and read of) probably had something to do with me not finding out about him earlier, though some of that might have had to do with which ones were placed more prominently on book store shelves and mentioned in journals and magazines.  I think it was sometime after I read Sartre in the original and realized his plays were stupid and his philosophy maybe even more so, his girlfriend Simone de Beauvoir and found her as worthless a writer that I pretty much said adieu to existentialism.  

Apparently what became of the word "existentialist" was not what Gabriel Marcel would have chosen himself to be identified with later in his life because he wanted to distance himself from the more famously promoted existentialists such as a student of his work, Jean Paul Sartre and others in that camp.  

I'm not far past the first chapters of his post-WWII work translated into English as Man Against Mass Society and I want to start discussing it and encouraging People to read it.  Translated in the language of seventy years after he wrote it, it's as fresh as any of the more informed of current writing on our current troubles. In fact, it's a lot fresher than even most of that, mired as so much of it is in the kind of academic-journalistic abstraction he railed against.  

Most interesting to me in terms of what I post here is the section that starts here:

. . . On the other hand, this hostility of mine towards the spirit of abstraction is quite certainly also at the roots of the feeling of distrust aroused in me, not exactly by democracy itself, but by the sort of ideology which claims to justify democracy on philosophical grounds.  At no time in my life, for instance, has the French Revolution inspired in me anything at al akin to admiration or even attachment; one reason may be that, when I was still very young, I became aware of the ravages in French social life that are due to a sort of egalitarian bigotry.  But another feeling had its effect.  It was also when I was still very young that my parents - for what reason, I am still not too clear - compelled me to read Mignet's very dry history of that great event;  and the other feeling, which that reading aroused, was my innate horror of violence, disorder, cruelty.  

At that time, the glaring abuses in French social and political life which had dragged on until 1789 struck less feelingly hom3 to me than the crimes of the Terror.  Naturally, as time went on, I arrived at a more just or at least a more balanced estimate of the French Revolution.  But the feelings of indignation which the September Massacres and the other mass crimes of the Revolutionary period aroused in me in adolescence, were not, in the end, essentially very different from those much more recently aroused by the horrors of Stalinism or Nazism, or even by the shameful aspects of a purge nearer home.

Can there be any doubt, then, that a bent of mind so deeply rooted is the point of departure of my whole philosophical development?  But my readers, very naturally, will want to ask me if there is any connection that can be grasped between my horror of abstraction and my horror of mass violence.  My answer is that such a connection does certainly exist.  Even for myself, however, it existed for a long time below the level of conscious understanding.  It is, certainly, only at a fairly recent date that it has become explicit to me; since, as I hope to show in detail in the present volume, the spirit of abstraction is essentially of the order of the passions, and since conversely, on the other hand, it is passion, not intelligence, which forget the most dangerous abstractions. Now I can say without hesitation that my own thought has always been directed by a passionate love (but passionate at another level) for music, harmony, peace.  And when I was still very young I grasped the truth that it is impossible to build true peace on abstractions;  though I grasped it, of course, in a form that had not yet reached the stage of conceptual elaboration, (In passing, the fact that it is impossible to build true peace on abstractions is the deepest reason for the failure of the League of Nations, and of other pretentious organizations which resemble it.)  Perhaps also the sort of prejudice which I have always had in favor of Christianity, even during the very long period in which I could not envisage the possibility of becoming a practicing and confessing Christian, may be explained by the unconquerable conviction that I had that, so long as Christianity remained true to itself, Christianity could be the only authentic peacemaker.  

A reader may ask, 'But so far as that goes.  Christians of the Left think as you do;  and it is not perfectly permissible to suppose that Christianity of the Right will always remain conformist in spirit,  that its essence is to try to appease and to manage by tact those who hold power in the world, or even to lean on them for support?'  To that my answer would be that in fact I have always been extremely suspicious of a Christianity of the Right!  I have always thought that such a Christianity runs the risk of distorting in the most sinister fashion the true message of Christ.  (I have even been tempted to adopt as my own certain phrases of Pascal Laumiere's from the final act of my play.  Rome n'est plus dans Rome. [Rome isn't in Rome, anymore].)  Only I should like to add immediately that the men of the Right are very far from having a monopoly on the spirit of conformity and appeasement;  there is a conformism of the Left,  there are men of the Left who hold power in the world, there are 'right-thinking people' (in the conformist sense of the phrase) on the Left as well as the Right;  I remember one day before the war saying something of this sort at the Ambassadeurs,  thus greatly shocking Jacques and Raissa Martian.

One must add that conformism of the Left, not only because it has, if I may put it so, the wind behind its sails these days, but because it is in such glaring contradiction with the principles that the Left claims to be defending, must be denounced just as ruthlessly as conformism of the Right.  Not, of course - this hardly needs saying - that there is any excuse for allowing conformism of the Right, with all it to often implies of blindness and unconscious cruelty, to cash in on that weight of reprobation with which, on this count, one must load the shoulders of the Left.  One must recognize the fact that, in certainly countries of Europe and the Americas, the spirit of clericalism, with the hateful political connivances that it implies, is tending to take on a character that, for a truly Christian conscience, becomes more and more offensive.  The note of a truly honest mode of thinking in these matters, as in book-keeping, is to have a system of double entry, and to prohibit oneself from marking down-by an intellectually fraudulent operation - to the credit of the Right what one has to mark down to the debit of the Left.  I am thinking now of people who, because of their horror of the Soviet world, are today tending to regard Nazism with a certain retrospective tolerance.  That is an aberration - end a criminal aberration.  In any case, who could fail to see at once the simple mechanism of the mental conjuring trick by which we belittle a danger that is past, simply because it is past, or because we believe it past?  Is it really past?  Or may it not in fact appear again, and in a form not radically altered?  In this realm of discourse we must learn once more to express ourselves categorically and to denounce the errors of amoral relativism which is, as may be easily shown, radically self-centered.  Human nature being what it is, the movement which I condemn morally is too often the movement which hurts me personally;  and I am likely to go on condemning it for as long as (and just so long as) it is really able to hurt me.  

I hadn't expected to type out so much of Marcel's introduction but I felt compelled to go on once I started.  I will continue this in the coming days but I want to make several comments on the above.

One of the ways in which the Left and certainly the Right that Marcel wrote about in the late 1940s and early 1950s used to refuse to address what someone like him said was to dishonestly associate him with Nazism or Marxism or some other disfavored ism of the time.  I'm not aware enough to know what his detractors in France and in the English speaking world may have done in that regard to Marcel Gabriel's thought but I know it was the typical way of such discourse.  Something like that, today, is rampant in the attribution of "antisemitism" to any critic of Israel and its many crimes against humanity and in the almost comic clowning of the American Neo-Stalinist fanboys and gals (now uniformly Trumpian Republican-fascists!) calling the most conventional of moderate, democracy loving Democrats "communists" and "Marxists."  

There is fodder of that kind in some of what he says, such as his criticism of Jean Genet.

. . . the novels and characters of Jean Genet are a striking case in point.  From such a novelist's point of view, a middle-class hero practicing the dreary virtues of his retrograde social group is a much less brilliant character than a thief and pervert who has the courage to put into action those desires which, for the plodding bourgeois, never get beyond the stage of unadmitted day dreams.

I am sure that someone old enough to still have the rote-reaction against any criticism of Jean Genet - a hero of the mid-brow "left" who knew the name and that he was "homosexual" and risque and allegedly some kind of persecuted artiste.  I may have held that view of him myself until I did what so few of them bothered to do, read some of his work and I have to say, my reaction to what I read there was akin to my reaction to the crimes against humanity during the French Revolution.  Maybe it's because by that time I had been the victim of a violent crime, ironically, one committed on the basis of my sexual orientation.*

I'm sure many if they read him would be inclined to view Gabriel Marcel through the phony, stupid, left-right "which side are you on" pantomime of political identity which I rejected about fifteen years ago.  Or, more typically, those who might skim him to find the kind of dishonest grounds for launching such a leftist (or rightist) fatwa against him such as is mentioned above.

In regard to Genet and his then fashionable elevation of the gutter level of the demimonde of "perversion" and criminality, pretty much the only reason he ever became a championed figure of the fashionable "left" in France and beyond, I'd seen enough of that even in the pre-Stonewall gay milieu to realize it was a vestige of political and legal oppression and violence which was not sustainable or even desireable.  Ironically, thinking about this since reading the above on Monday, I think one of the most striking "artistic" portrayals of that is in the decidedly non-intellectual, decidedly of that genre John Waters movie Female Trouble in which a rich, thrill seeking couple go trawling through the demimonde of Baltimore, Maryland to thrill at the trashy criminality of the character played by Divine and her two cat thieving, probably prostituting "cheap girl" sidekicks, filming the perversity and violence they encourage, including her character murdering her daughter and (in her first star turn, members of the audience).  I mean, if the John Waters of that period saw through that kind of thing, how much more obvious could it get?  

Of course one of the things that will be grasped onto in that way by the several mid-brows who troll me is his mild semi-criticism of democracy and the phrase "egalitarian bigotry."  I will note that the "democracy" he almost certainly meant was the liberal democracy of post-WWII France, probably that of the United States (which had a long, long list of crimes committed by a government democratically chosen), which I have, as well, come to see as something to be overcome, not maintained.  His phrase "egalitarian bigotry" as well has to be seen in the context of the society and times in which he wrote it.  A society in which morality and virtue, even highest levels of those unattached to self-gain or even self-esteem, were disdained.  The popular literature of the 20th century, especially the most fashionable of it, reveled in violence and moral depravity and the virtue of the mentally and morally lazy, cynicism.  The value placed on spectacle, in line with what was in popular literature, and so depravity and violence, is the predominant strain in even what passed and passes even more, today, as high-art.  The kind of equality which I say is the actual foundation on which a genuine egalitarian democracy has to be founded is an equality of human beings, of natural living beings not an equality that covers their ideas or, really, their preferences generally based on their desires and self-gain.  That ties in with Marcel's condemnation of abstraction but it also figures highly into his skepticism of any democracy, any equality which values those things more highly than it does the lives of People and other living beings.  

My reading of the promoted, and so, in a way, approved atheist existentialists, Sartre, Camus. I suppose de Beauvoir, . .  had, by 1975 filled me with a disgust for the word that I'd pretty much stopped paying attention to it.  I don't see Gabriel Marcel as being anything like that, from the little I've read of him and I feel a kindred feeling with him, I could translate a lot of what he said into my own biography.  Even during my long, stupid and cowardly agnostic period I held to the morality of the Gospel and the Prophets and even much of the radical egalitarian economics of The Law.  I could never acquiesce to the elevation of abstractions over the lives and pain of any others, those who looked and spoke like me or those who I only read about in newspaper estimates of the victims of individual or mass slaughter and maiming.  Clearly the ersatz atheist saints of that time, such as Sartre could blithely support Mao as his regime was murdering millions of Chinese People, just as the Left talked about above could the millions already credibly reported on being murdered by Stalin and Lenin before him, just as D. M. Mackinnon in his Foreword to the English edition points out:

There is a deep, albeit unrecognized kinship between the man who in 1937 was denying Guernica, and the man who in 1947 is justifying, or denying Stalinist deportations and slave camps; ('progress' and 'tradition' are excellent examples of the sort of abstraction from whose tyranny M. Marcel would free us).  

The same kinship finds its banality right now in the American free press which recapitulates that in its "journalistic ethics" that excuse and normalize even the neo-Nazi ravings of Donald Trump and his camp with a monumentally lop-sided "even handedness."  But that will get me on to the dangers of viewing even freedom in the abstract as removed from the inconvenience of morality and the concreteness of reality.

I will try to continue this.

Trump using Pavarotti during his post-literate Nazi rallies confirms my dislike of his bellowing going back decades.  

This Is How Stupid Our Media Is

I HAVE YET to read anyone in the corporate or non-corporate media writing about the DOS attacks that have taken Archive.org off line for going on about a week,  if it happened to the organ of idiocy that Twitter(won't call it "X") is they'd be having hysterics over it. 

Archive.org deserves support and protection from its corporate (publishing) enemies as well as those who do things like this, we need it in ways that no one needs Twitter,  the social-disease-media that did at least as much to choke off the promise of online, non-profit journalism as Facebook.   I've got a couple of projects that are stuck because I didn't download books I needed before this happened.   Rachel Maddow, you need to get on this for tonight. 

Some Notes On The Failure Of Catholic Fromation Since JPII

OPINION POLLING is rank pseudo-science of the most obvious kind, there being no way to check the most basic act of it, "data" collection for accuracy or even honesty.   There is little more control over the honesty or validity of the method of structuring questions and asking them and anyone who has looked at the industry and its practices over the past half a century who came away without suspecting the various companies rig those to get results that those paying them to do it want is a chump.  Such chumps comprise most of the corporate media, much of the non-corporate media and huge numbers of those who should know better.

Still, for reasons of argument and because I think there is a real and dangerous phenomenon behind this,  I'm going to assume the reliability of this recent Harris Poll which shows that the Catholic Church and Catholics have a fascism problem, at least in so far as a small majority of white Catholics goes. 

Catholic voters in seven battleground states favor Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by 5 percentage points, but the vice president leads the Republican nominee overwhelmingly among Hispanic and Black Catholics in those swing states, according to a new poll conducted by the National Catholic Reporter.

With just more than three weeks to the election, Trump leads Harris 50% to 45% in the closely watched battleground states, a margin that could be an important factor given the closeness of the contest. Most polls say the race is too close to predict, and margins are extremely narrow in the decisive states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Among Hispanic and Black Catholics in the battlegrounds, Harris has an advantage over Trump with nearly seven out of 10 Hispanics and more than three-quarters of Blacks favoring the sitting vice president. The lead among Blacks and Hispanics stems from a strong aversion to Trump as well as an alignment with the vice president on values and key social issues, the poll shows.

That anywhere near 45% of Catholics of any identity could support Donald Trump in 2024 is proof of a complete failure in the morality of Catholics,  when you concentrate on the fact that that 45% is identified as "white" focuses the problem even more on a particular part of the Catholic population.   As someone who would be identified as a "white Catholic" that fact troubles me a lot.  What is it about the past half a century of the Catholic Church that has led to something I'd have found bizarre back then when most of the Catholics of my experience were Democrats, most of them very solidly Democratic voters.  

I would expect the long papacy of the arch-conservative John Paul II would have a lot to do with it, along with the long reign of the even more right-wing "Mother Angelica" at her ETWN, which was sort of a Catholic FOX "News" before FOX "News" was much of anything.   The influence of that putrid outlet on the Trumpization of a large number of Catholics cannot be overestimated.   After her death it has, if anything, become even worse than it was when she ran it. 

I would like to know how much of that 45% are products of the affluent Catholic prep to Ivy Equivalent system.   I saw a little of that back in the 1960s as one of my sisters attended a Catholic Women's College where she was one of the few non-nun blue-collar students there.  I recently looked at the program of her graduating class and of those I knew something of, all the others were what might have been called "Catholic American Princesses."   At least one of whom was rumored to be the daughter of a mobbed up father.    I know at least a few of them were College Republicans.   More recently there is the current Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court with at least five Catho-fascists arguably from that class,  I will always remember Charlie Pierce pointing out that the prep that Kavanaugh went to was nothing like the blue-collar Catholic schools that those of my class attended.  I'm not unhappy that there was none in my town so I am a product of the public schools. 

What has happened to Catholic formation that could have produced such support for the most amoral materialist, overtly pagan to have ever run as a major party candidate?   One with his track record of mortal sin and crime, reveling in violence, reveling in theft and grift and the secular sins of treason and, that most serious of mortal sins hardly considered to be one LYING AND BEARING FALSE WITNESS.  How could that many millions of Catholics, no doubt considering themselves the genuine article favor him over Kamala Harris.   If other polls are to be believed a majority of that 45% would not have their support hinge on anti-abortion because a majority of it almost certainly doesn't hold the official US Catholic Conference of Bishops line on that one issue - they certainly don't fall in line with that line when it comes to their own sex lives and reproductive choices - as Trump certainly never has.  I mean, he's on record as having encouraged what became his second wife to have an abortion when she became pregnant, that is certainly relevant to any consistent anti-abortion voter, you'd think.  

The papacies of John Paul II and his chosen successor Benedict XVI were pastoral disasters, both globally and in the United States in particular.   Their appointments as bishop were notable for their incompetence, their pastoral indifference, their legalism and their unconcern with local parishes (which they shut down more than built) and the religious formation of Catholics.   The current make-up of the U.S. Conference is a moral catastrophe in many regards, including its support for Republican-fascism.  They embody the old anti-Catholic accusation that Catholic majority countries have a better record of producing fascism than democracy.    

It's not only white Catholics which produce these problems and questions, it's white Americans, especially white-male Americans, a group which, as it climbed in affluence went farther right, following other white sub populations in that.  Only you can't have it both ways, you can't both be an adherent to the Gospel and a Trump supporter.   You certainly can't claim to be faithful to Catholic social teaching and support the Republican-fascist party in 2024.   

Good Pope Francis has recently added Cardinal electors to the College of Cardinals, most of which will vote for his successor,  some are pointing out he is doing so as a means of getting ready for that event which will come sooner than later, most likely.   He has now appointed a very large percentage of them.   He is also replacing bishops here as the appointees of JPII and BXVI either die or reach the age of retirement.   That change, if it is change for the better, can't come soon enough.  I go back and look at the American bishops of the 1970s, many appointed by the disappointing Paul VI and it looks like an age of moral light instead of clerical darkness today.   His successor will be faced with the problem of the billionaire-millionaire AstroTurf anti-Francis establishment that is both well financed and entrenched, ETWN being only one part of that.   They will also have to address the Catho-fascists who have been installed in the Judiciary and who are in the Congress, now.  Many of those are the kind of converts who are about as sincere in their Catholicism as Henry VI of France.   Newt Gingrich,  Candice Owen, J.D. Vance, etc.?   There was a push to get fascists to convert and the reason had nothing to do with the Social Teaching of the Church.   The crypto-fascist priests and others involved with that should certainly be investigated.   A similar take-over effort has marred American Orthodoxy, which the Orthodox philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart laments may as well be an arm of the Southern Baptists, now. 

Even The Best Possible Outcome Of The Election Will Be Inadequate In The Long Run

THE ELECTION has me so worried that I have been trying to avoid thinking too much about it.  So much is at risk if Democrats don't both win the presidency and the Congress that I can't sleep as it is.  I've been too ill to have much participation in the election, this time.  Which may account for why I'm so anxious.  Being involved, working on it in the past has helped to alleviate the anxiety about it, the feeling that what ever happens for the bad, it isn't my fault.  I can take some comfort in that my district in my state isn't likely to vote Republican though the Second District of Maine could there's little I can do from the other end of the state to have an effect on that.  

New Hampshire, the only state that Maine has a border with, is also believed to be more or less safely voting Democratic, at least for president.  

That leaves what little effect writing something here would be and I'm pretty certain most of those who read what I write will be voting a Democratic ticket.  My political writing has a far more radical agenda than would be effective on an electoral level, radical reform of the Constitution, including the sacrosanct First Amendment and the god-damned Second Amendment,  such a radical reform of the Supreme and federal courts as to find the recent proposal made in the Senate is inadequate.  Nothing less than a Democratic President and Congress imposing term limits on the sitting "justices" that would remove at least the three longest sitting Republican-fascists, a binding ethics code with criminal penalties on the "justices" and summarily nullifying Marbury vs. Madison would be enough to protect egalitarian democracy from what has in our history been the most corrupt of the branches of government in my reading of American history and the daily news.

Getting rid of the Electoral College is another on the must-do list to save even the dangerous and inadequate liberal-democracy we have now.  And scrapping liberal democracy for egalitarian democracy - INCLUDING ECONOMIC JUSTICE - must be on the agenda of anyone who really cares about any real democracy in the modern sense of the word.  There can be no democracy worth trying for which is not egalitarian.  The modern stupidity that puts "liberty," "freedom" as the paramount virtue of democracy over equality is not only stupid, it is a proven flop.  Economic inequality under liberal democracy is the thing which has made us dangerously vulnerable to the billionaire-millionaire world-wide movement to impose oligarchic fascism.  If the Clinton and Obama administrations had made real moves towards real, effective economic justice to the poor, the middle-class and the destitute, the billionaires and millionaires wouldn't have found such fertile ground in which to plant Trumpian fascist rule.  Of course, what little they did being misrepresented by the "free press" was no help but the Ivy-league lawyer-presidents were never going to touch on that because of the false piety given to the First Amendment even as they were lied into impotence through the mass media feed to lie under it.  

The part played by the entertainment industry in this has to be faced in a way that the idolatry of the First Amendment prevents.  Trump as Reagan before him was a product of that industry.  The producers of The Apprentice, its directors, writers and others which created the phony Trump presented on it, the colluding mass media which presented him first as a clown-prince, then as an increasingly frightening dictator  are who gave us this national and world nightmare.  That the stupidest, sleaziest, liar, rapist, crook and con-man to have ever gained actual power in not only one of the states but over all of them was an As-Seen-On-TV fraud should be generating journalism and academic and political commentary and analysis of the dangers that "The Free Press" as entertainment media is stupidly called.  That all of those are afraid to take on the dangers imposed through the modern reading of The First Amendment, starting under Holmes and Brandeis but most of all through the Warren, Burger, Rehnquist and now Roberts Courts, and the vague 18th century poetry of the Bill of Rights proves how far we are from saving even liberal democracy.   I attribute that failure to liberal democracy, itself, what gave us the 18th century structure of government under the Constitution, including all of its intentional corrruptions - the pro-slavery and pro-oligarchy aspects of it - and the false piety for things like the First Amendment.  I have written extensively over the past eighteeen years about the danger of "free speech absolutism" which is a product of the stupidly phrased First Amendment, something which has led even someone as well intentioned as Maya Wiley to foolishly talk about a "right to lie."  It is lies in the mass media, everything from what passes as journalism to the cesspools of "reality TV" which is as phony as can be to hate-talk media and comedy which have brought us here.   The numerous laments about the "death of truth" the profit from the lie machines that are Trump and the like of J. D. Vance have not dared to address the fact that it was the Warren Court, under that dangerously libertarian interpretation of The First Amendment which has produced the delusion that there can be a "right to lie" as granted to the great grey whore, the New York Times and which is the extremely successful business model for FOX Lies.  Murdochian media sets the pace for the rest of it, CNN, the DC and NYC punditry in all of their career polishing vileness.  

Any political or legal ideology which puts the welfare and freedom of words over the lives of People, even under the guise of liberal democracy, will eventually go for those lies which generate the most profit for those willing to lie.  That's as true for "journalism" as it is for hate-talk comedians and shock jocks, it is infamously what makes the legal professions, now judges and "justices" as well as for the jr. level of that in mere lawyers, so famously disreputable.  Judges and "justices" gave their fellow lawyers carte blanche to lie and playing let's pretend even before Holmes, Brandeis and the Warren Courts invented a "right to lie" for the New York Times and, so, all of media.  It's one of the lessons I've had from seeing the antics of the Trump lawyers before judges and "justices" the extent to which lawyers can tell the most transparent lies in legal filings and even before the bench without suffering any real consequences.  You can look at the status of the worst of them and how few of the worst of them have really been removed from the legal profession to see just how much lying is not only tolerated but given free reign in the Courts and the law profession, no doubt out of the professional interest of other lawyers who can expect to profit from that kind of lying while being paid by the billing hour.  You can see that in the career of what Trump took as his ideal advocate, the entirely corrupt and crooked Roy Cohn who was only finally disbarred in the fabled bar of New York as he lay on his death bed, dying of AIDS, even as he lied about even that.   

We are in need of so much reform that even if Kamala Harris gets a Veto proof Senate and a large Democratic majority in the house that most of it will probably not be attempted or even imagined as needed.   I've been considering the skepticism of "freedom" not in the terms that the materialist-atheist-scientistic cult talks about it but as it is asserted under libertarian-liberal democracy, raised by thinkers such as Marilynne Robinson, on one side, and David Bentley Hart on another.  I think the problem with that conception of "freedom" is that it is detached from moral considerations.  I don't mean what most Americans mean by "morals" or "morality," that is the restriction of what Women or LGBTQ+ People do with their own bodies, prohibiting those who want to smoke pot or resonsibly use hallucinogens, harming no one- often not even themselves, I mean the religious morality of doing to the least among us what we would do for God, of doing to others what we would have done to us, OF ECONOMIC JUSTICE TO THE POOR AND DESTITUTE, things like that.   The 18th century definition of "liberalism" as is embodied in the political conceptions of framers of the American Constitution was permissive of the most grotesque immorality of kidnapping and enslaving human beings, of treating them as chattels, of genocide against the Native Americans, of the rankest objectification and submission of Women, etc.  That is the "liberalism" that the prissy "classical liberals" and the tech-bro fascists mean when they talk about "freedom," the freedom of the richest to do whatever they want as the large majority of humanity goes to hell, useful to them only as masses to be manipulated through the lying, algorithm manipulative media can manipulate them, as can be seen in the idiocy of those panels of "undecided voters" who are willing to consider going with Trumpian fascism, yet again.  

But the "left" which is detached from the moral absolutes of religious morality aren't much of help, either.  Well before the tech-bros considered most people as mere "masses" that word was bandied about in such lefty talk, if you go back and read the literature of the American and European and other "lefts" you will find that they were as bad if not worse than the disciples of 18th century European "liberalism" in that regard.  It's no great mystery how they could witness the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. with the kind of equanimity as those who see the crimes of the Israeli government do right now, of the goddamned Green Party Republican-fascist tools like Jill Stein who can't bring herself to admit that Vlaidimir Putin is guilty of crimes against humanity.  

I think the only hope for egalitarian democracy is in that morality, whether it be in the Christian synthesis of Hebrew justice with the Gospel of Love from Jesus or the other monotheistic religions or in the equivalent moral holdings of other, non-Abrahamic religions - though so far in history, those have yet to produce a national government which is egalitarian-democratic.  It's not as if the United States has really accomplished that, either, despite all of the talk about it over the past two-hundred plus years.  Our 18th century Constitution is one of the major inhibitions against equality and real democracy, I think other countries which have more modern Constitutions and a parliamentary system of government have a better chance of taking that step.  You'll never get it under a regime of materialism, intellectual or the far more influential vulgar materialism which even the "intellectuals" of materialist-scientistic-atheism really follow.   You'll never get it under an ideology which puts the rights of words over the rights of living beings, which pretends that privileges granted to artificial corporate entities (such as corporations and "the press") are the same things as rights naturally inhering only to natural living beings, which values legal fictions over even the hardest and most exigent of lived realities, such as flourishes in our "liberal democracy."   If those worked we would never have gone from the exposure of the many crimes of Nixon, including his war crimes in South-east Asia, to the crimes of the Reagan-Bush I administrations, to the Rehnquist Court imposed Bush II regime, to that of Trump in just over a half a century.  All of those crimes, all of them were not only permitted by but happened under the umbrella of what is really permitted under the American Constitution, as acquiesced in by the false-protection of the "free press" and the judiciary, all of them sold to a duped plurality of American voters under the anti-democratic and increasingly non-democratic Electoral College and the gerrymandered, rigged districting of Congress, fed by our lying media.  

Of course, I will be voting by next week for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and a straight Democratic ticket down ballot - I even do that in our local non-partisan elections, now.  I will never vote for a Republican-fascist or a phony turd-party or so=called independent (excepting those who caucus with Democrats, now).  But I am not optimistic about American democracy because the changes necessary to even keep the false substituent we have now won't be made during my lifetime.  But I will be pushing and protesting and pointing out the lies, the hypocrisies and the realities of what is needed.  Starting with the Gospel of Jesus, the radical economics of Abrahamic monotheism, the presence of those in other religious traditions.  I'm not wasting any more time pretending there is a non-religoius force that can substitute for those, there simply is none, including what is sold as an equivalent in our secular civic pieties.  Those have had more than two centuries to produce and they are worse than a flop.  They never really intended to produce equality or democracy.  They certainly have not produced economic justice.

Sorry About Those Line Breaks

Got to remember to type things into a text editor, not a word processor from now on. 

God is known through God’s compassionate involvement in the sufferings of people, Book Report - Theology A Very Short Introduction by David Ford

IN MY RECENT illness, I was looking online and found that there is a Christian Universalist Association book list - as part of their ordination program which I'm not especially interested in - which I decided to read through.  I've already read several of the classics on the list, available in PDF's online so I figured I'd work through the rest of them as I could find them.  One of the books is Theology - A Very Short Introduction, by David Ford, one of the series of books including The New Testament- A Very Short . . . by Luke Timothy Johnson which I recommended as surprisingly good for a "very short introduction."    

So I decided to read the book by David Ford.  It is, also, very, very good as well as being less than two-hundred pages.   Not anything like a survey of the literature, which would take a very long introduction to even get close to, but something which describes the field and some of the most basic ideas of Trinitarian Christianity and theology in general.   I would definitely recommend it as an effective first book to read on the topic for the large majority of those who have never read any theology.   It is a good inoculation against the ignorant prejudice that stereotypes theology as an unworthy intellectual field,  an opinion held in complete ignorance by a very large percentage of our alleged intelligentsia as well as the far larger camp followers who would like to be mistaken as part of it but aren't even willing to put that much of a non-effort into knowing what they talk about. 

Among the other virtues of the book is the description of how the doctrine of the Trinity was a product of serious and rigorous engagement with the experience of the first generation of what would become Christianity, by report, and the continuing experience of believers who experienced what LTJ would all The Living Jesus,  the name of one of the best books on the topic, in my experience.  

I am struck by how much of the content description of The Living Jesus in Johnson's book is said in somewhat different words by.   I'll risk copyright infringement to give you a part of this section which I was so impressed with I typed it out.    I'll try to get the lines to wrap right but there might be breaks.  

Mainstream Christianity believes in God as a Trinity. This God is very different from the vague notions mentioned above, and if someone says ‘I do not believe in God’ they do not usually mean that they have considered
and rejected the Trinity. Faith in the Trinitarian God is remarkable enough to require some basic explanation as to how it came about and what it means. I will tell the story about this from a mainstream Christian standpoint and also point to some of the big questions about it. Jesus and the first Christians were Jews, and so the God they worshiped is to be identified mainly by looking at the Jewish scriptures, which Christians call the Old Testament. One key story there is about Moses at the Burning Bush in Exodus Chapter 3. It is what is called a ‘theophany’, a
manifestation of God, and it became one of the main texts used in Jewish and Christian discussion of God. Moses in the desert near Mount Horeb comes upon a bush that is blazing but not consumed, and a voice addresses
him which says: ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ (Exodus 3:6). The voice goes on to say: ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt … I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them …’ (3:7–8). God sends Moses to Pharaoh and promises to be with him, and when Moses asks God’s name he is told: ‘I AM WHO I AM’ (3:14. Other translations are: ‘I am what I am’ or ‘I will be what I will be’). What conception of God emerges from that? The discussion is inexhaustible, but for now three points are crucial.

First, God is identified through key figures who worshiped him: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; their stories are the main way to understand who this God is. Second, God is known through God’s compassionate involvement in the
sufferings of people, and is on the side of justice. Third, that mysterious name ‘I am who I am’ or ‘I will be what I will be’ means at least that God is free to be God in the ways God decides: there is no domesticating, there is
‘always more’, and God can go on springing surprises in history. 

Now leap over hundreds of years to Jesus (of whom much more will be said in Chapter 6).  He is in this tradition of worshiping God. But, as his followers tried to come to terms with who he was and what had happened
through his life, death, and resurrection, they came to affirm that he was one with this God. Is there any way of making sense of that extraordinary conclusion? His resurrection is the pivotal issue. We will look at it in more
detail in Chapter 6, but for now let us look at it from the standpoint of the early Christians.

For the first Christians the resurrection was a God-sized event which affected their understanding of Jesus, of history, of themselves, and of God. In terms of the Burning Bush story, God was now decisively ‘the God of
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus’, and through Jesus God was compassionately involved in history at its worst. The resurrection was the great surprise. They ascribed it to God, seeing the raising of Jesus from the dead as comparable to creation. The content of this event was the person of Jesus, who in this way could be seen as identified with God by God. Jesus was seen as God’s self-expression (or Word), intrinsic to who God is, so that their worship began to include him. There was a wide variety of
expressions, names, and forms of behavior with reference to Jesus, but the central tendency was to see him as having unlimited significance, liveliness, and goodness, inseparable from God. Not only that, his life was shareable in unlimited ways. This was expressed in the New Testament’s stories of the  pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the risen Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit into his disciples.

So the basic theological structure of the resurrection event could be summed up as: God acts; Jesus appears as the content of God’s act; and people are transformed through the Spirit that comes through him. That can be seen as the seed of the later doctrine of the Trinity. A creator God says ‘I will be what I will be’; and this God’s decisive self-expression and selfgiving are in Jesus and the Spirit. It is directly in line with the God of the Burning Bush, but tries to do justice to a massive surprise.
 

Yet it took over 300 years for these implications to be worked out and agreed in the doctrine of the Trinity. That process in itself says a great deal about the nature of Christian theology. The complex setting for theological
thinking included teaching the faith to new members (culminating in their baptism ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’), continually worshipping this God, deciding on the contents of the New
Testament, interpreting scripture and tradition, wrestling with the most sophisticated contemporary philosophy and culture, responding to challenges from pagans and Jews, settling internal Christian disputes, and engaging in ordinary living in faith. As the church moved from being a
persecuted community to becoming a major force in the Roman Empire, there were also new political dimensions in Christian debates about doctrine.

That was a messy, complicated process. It makes a fascinating story which it is essential to study in order to be educated in Christian theology. The points it suggests about the nature of theology as understood by Christians
include the following: theological conclusions are not just deductions from authoritative statements, but are worked out by worshipers responsibly engaged with God, each other, scripture, the surrounding culture, everyday
life, and all the complexities, the ups and downs of history; the Bible is the model for this sort of thinking which is deeply involved with both God and real life; the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus show the extent to which
God is vulnerably involved in life, allowing people the freedom to misinterpret, misunderstand, and do great evil, while yet never letting that be the last word; there is an endless process of learning to live with each other before this God, and theological thinking is essential to that.
There are still intensive debates about the issues of that time, but as regards our present topic, God, there is to this day a remarkable agreement among the vast majority of Christians that the conclusions of those early centuries were right. It has become basic Christian wisdom that God is Trinitarian, and in the 20th century there was a new explosion of theologies of the Trinity. From many quarters the doctrine has been thought through afresh— by Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, feminists, liberation theologians, missiologists, natural scientists, psychologists, social theorists, musicians, poets, philosophers, Africans, Asians, Australians, theologians of world religions, and so on!

 The rest of the book is like this, some of the ideas were unfamiliar to me and those which I was somewhat familiar with I now understand a lot better due to how David Ford said it.   

While I'm sure a lot of People who've got college credentials like I do would pooh-pooh the reading of these "Very Short Introductions" but this morning I had occasion to remember the role played by reading the World Book Encyclopedia over the course of several years in my childhood - one of my brothers mentioned reading through it as well.   It was a very good elementary school level encyclopedia and back before the internet, it was as close to having that kind of diverse knowledge at your fingertip as it got when we couldn't get to the library.  Considering how prevalent a smattering of ignorance is on diverse topics among those with elite educations - I might get started at how many even PhD level adults seem to believe that movies are real and that the similar level of common received lore of their late adolescence suffices as expertise, I don't think anyone has a right to disdain such a series.  I say that having some deep reservation in the experts who were chosen to write books on some subjects in the series - Susan Blackmore on Consciousness?  Peter Singer on Marx? - those I've read so far are actually excellent, each an invitation to keep going on the subject and not figure reading one book is sufficient to give you an education on a topic.   

Knew I'd Get Covid, It Was Worse Than I Anticipated

FIRST, in lieu of a real post,  here's a comment I left at Sabine Hossenfelder's Youtube channel, it contains a real question one which I hope someone answers though I suspect no such study of the reliability of mathematical speculation within physics or any other science has ever really been done.

I'm curious, has anyone ever made a list of the predictions made by theoretical physicists on the basis of mathematical speculations to see what percentage of those which were later confirmed by physical observation were wrong?    The success of such speculation seems to be based on what would almost certainly be a minority of those which were made and published with great confidence.    I started calling this "science fiction written in equations" when Hawking and Mlodinov insisted that the equations about "other universes" alone were what legitimately should be considered confirmed physical theory,  something which you seem to have noticed, as well.   It seems to me that this whole matter of confidently made theoretical claims made without either physical observation or even the possibility of that (especially true of claims made of such lost information as comprises evolution within biology and mulit-verse story telling) accounts for a lot of the decadence of science.   I think this also has a dangerous effect in the general culture as can be seen in the "genetic" speculations of neo-fascist and racist politics and legal theory.

I could point out that this is especially seen in the racist Republican-fascist party right now in the United States and in similar politics in other countries.   I wish I could find out the percentage of criminally billionaire tech-bros who read The Selfish Gene as part of the smattering of ignorance they gained during their so-called educations and believed it.   I suspect the percentage might closely match the percentage of them enthusiastic for or at least not bothered by the flagrant, crude, vulgar, white supremacy of the Republican-fascist party they are funding and using and trying to keep in power.   I suspect the percentage of those in the media and legal profession and judiciary might be at least as high if not higher.  

Considering the part played by the kind of racism that a naive affluent, white liberal c. 1970 stupidly felt confident would soon be a thing of the past in not only U.S. but world politics and given the prediction of a number of dissident biologists, geneticists, etc. that the rise of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology would lead to a renewal of the kind of racist, very potentially murderous eugenics that has flowed out of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, it seems to me to be one of the most important unexamined problems with politics and how to keep and protect egalitarian democracy.   I will point out in relation to that that the liberal democratic ideology which was championed by so many a naive, affluent, white liberal of the 70s and now has proven to not only be entirely comfortable with the renewal of America's indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, its equally indigenous form of that in white, especially affluent male supremacy,  the question of that libertarian liberalism as a direct contributor to the current flourishing of fascism is as pressing a question.

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It was obvious that sooner or later I'd get Covid again as I went back to teaching in person - it being impossible to distance while teaching an instrument - but I wasn't expecting it to pack such a wallop .   Still tired but back on my feet.  I'm going to have to learn how to teach without showing the fingering on the keyboard.  With a ventilation fan going.  

Jay Semko - Gospel

 

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