Two Comments From A Blog Brawl

DiegoVan  Anthony McCarthy • 21 hours ago
The problem of controlling free speech is always, who will decide.

The courts and politicial theorists have decided that it is better to leave it alone and not control it in the way you say. Who will decide what are lies? What will be the penalties?

Our society, thank goodness, has decided that any harm caused by lying is not worth the greater damage caused by the curtailment of speech. There are libel and slander laws. Why aren't they good enough?

I find it ironic that the left, the traditional supporters of free speech, have come out against it in recent years. The left would similar support to what I am offering you, now.

BTW, would you mind posting some of the lies you think would need to be controlled or outlawed?

Do you think Hillary and the DNC lied in the released emails? Should their speech be curtailed? What about Benghazi? Did Clinton lie about that? Did Donna Brazile lie about leaking debate questions? Would they be prosecuted?
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Anthony McCarthy  DiegoVan • 2 minutes ago
Judges are tasked with deciding that all the time. The very media people who push that lie, that the lie can't be distinguished from the truth, would be the first to go to court if they thought their vendible scribblege had been cribbed by someone else. Judges are asked by the beneficiaries of "free-speech-free-press" to punish the people who pilfer their "intellectual" property all the time. About the only real sin for them is plagiarism. Plagiarism will get you banished in the way that the most consequential lies won't in the American media and academic world.

Lying is what brought us Nixon, his continuation of Vietnam and its expansion into Cambodia, Reagan and his terror campaigns in Central America, the middle east and elsewhere, George W. Bush and the illegal, catestrophic invasion of Iraq. How many millions of sacrificial victims does your alter of free-speech absolutism require per decade?

Donna Brazile? Really, that's what you're going to use in this argument? You, sir, are not a serious person, you are a dolt of the kind who populate the American media.

The Supreme Court pretty much exempted even the most monumental lies told against, mostly liberal, politicians from having any consequences. Thus the quarter of a century of lies Hillary Clinton had to run against, in opposition to one of the biggest liars in the world whose lies had been carried by and magnified by the freest-press in the world.

Why I Am A Christian

The Fretheim lecture given by Walter Brueggemann at the Luther Seminary which I linked to the other day was one of the most radical and practical political visions I've heard presented in this past year of my undisciplined but constant reading of what Brueggemann wrote, consulting the texts he sites and listening to the enormous number of his lectures, discussions interviews and sermons available online.  As I said at the beginning of last year I had intended to do something like that with what Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, and I might get around to doing that but I am far from done with Brueggemann's view of the Hebrew scriptures, revealing how entirely relevant they are to our present world, how they raise the same questions and the same issues and present variable ways of addressing the horrific and wonderful world and give advice and warning about the various ways people propose of addressing our world, today as much as their worlds when the many texts were written.

The often mentioned anger of alleged many Christians whenever other people point out the political issues and consequences that flow from taking the radical egalitarian content and the consequent moral obligations is, pretty shockingly, often found in those who pretend to take the Bible most seriously.   If they hold that politics is to be kept out of it, they couldn't more obviously demonstrate that either they don't know it or they choose to not see what it is all about.

The text of the Bible is saturated with the clash between human politics and the consequences of managing our lives and socieities as if economic and social justice don't matter. Every single book in it, including Genesis, is saturated with the political critique of the societies the poets and prophets lived in.   Even while the authors are held back by the social conventions that provide them their stock of references and images and metaphors there is always the radicalism that forces people who read those texts to face that truth even while they can do what the authors so often can't, transcend of disregard or stay in ignorance of those references, images and metaphors.  More often than not, that transcendence of those requires understanding what those are, why they came about and why the truth being pressed requires that those be left behind.  Walter Brueggemann points out, though, that to turn everything into a metaphor carries the danger of dissolving the thing that made that truth the reality behind the text.  These aren't easy books to read, outside of the general requirement of radical equal justice and other tests of truth, they can lead to misunderstanding and abuse to promote the opposite of that truth.

In the lecture and in the answer to questions after, this stands out as both a summary of what Brueggemann is saying and an idea that is as striking disturbing and productive as anything I've heard in the past year. NOTE:  The transcription is by me, including any errors or elisions.  The first questioner asked:

Q - Can you talk about the nexus between so many Old Testament texts that are about purifying, dividing you know no two kinds of of fabrics no two kinds cheese and meat have to be apart  everything has to be separate… purity including don't take any hostages don't intermarry the dialogue of all of that kind of holiness talk … with what you've just been explaining about dialogue, meaning, coming together, loving the other.     How do those things, how do those two channels work in interpretation.

Brueggemann – Which is why I said that I think a contestation  about neighborliness runs through the Bible.  It's not an unequivocal testimony to neighborliness,   it is an argument about neighborliness it ...its an argument in which we as the Christian congregation have to participate.   So there are many texts that want to fence out would be neighbors by labeling them as threats.   

There is a book by a scholar named Beck, I think it's called Unclean.  He lists all the things that disgust conservatives and then he has a shorter list of things that disgust liberals.  But he wants to argue that all these purity laws and so on grow out of what disgusts people who imagine that what disgusts me must surely disgust God.  

There is a book by Martha Nussbaum it's called The Clash Within.  I recommend it to you, it's an analysis of Hindus and Muslims in India and Nussbaum concluded that the clash in India is not between Muslims and Hindus,  it's between people who can allow the other and people who must eliminate the other.  And the title of the book is to indicate she believes that all of us carry this clash in ourselves of openness and exclusion and what counts is how we manage that clash. 

Now I think that one of the implications of your question is that we have to help church people see that the Bible is essentially an ongoing interpretive dispute.  We have allowed people to think that the Bible is all a seamless theological package to which everyone has agreed but the only people who could think that are people who have never opened it. 

And when I am a public persona as I am tonight I want you to think that I practice purity of heart which is one thing.  But I am like you, I am a conundrum of contradictions and what I wanted to argue is that the Bible says that God's struggles with these realities in God's own life that we are in the Image of that God.  Does that make sense?

So what I think the church has to do is to surface the contest that is going on everywhere in our society but we want to pretend that it's not going on.  I don't know if you have it in Minnesota but you see these church signs all welcome what they mean is all who are like me.   And you know that's the reality of our life.  But the Bible is a script for processing that reality.   That's my thesis.

That could lead to a month's worth of posts.

First, it is the opposite to what atheists and other anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-Islamic people present religion as being, a monolithic and rigid set of dogmas and doctrines whose blind allegiance is forced by violence.  And that view isn't unknown among those who claim to believe.  A lot of them like that violent dictatorship, and I think they have to be opposed.

But as Brueggemann said, it's an idea that can only be held by people who haven't ever read the Bible which contains within it a more exigent and brutal self-criticism than almost any other large collection of texts I'm aware of.  As has been pointed out, every sin of the ancient Hebrews which we know about, we know due to their telling on themselves, in many cases presenting the claims of divine approval and the rejection of those claims.  The questioner mentioning the exclusions against the other as a means of maintaining a distinct identity is the heart of the Trump campaign, the most exigent opponents of which include even some conservative churches.

The thing that I found the most striking in it was when he said,

But I am like you, I am a conundrum of contradictions and what I wanted to argue is that the Bible says that God's struggles with these realities in God's own life that we are in the image of that God.  Does that make sense?

Which presented me with a way of thinking about God which I'd never had before.  God as a person who struggles with these issues in God's own life.  A God who contains what we experience as contradictions and uncertainties and that God cares about those.   And that our own struggles are a real part of being made in the image of that God.  To answer his question, yes, that does FINALLY make sense.  That God is one I can really love, or, more honestly, that understanding of God is open to my heart and more immediate than the Great and Powerful Oz in the sky.  I think I can finally get that picture of God touching Adam on the famous ceiling at the Vatican.  Like the people who wrote the Bible, it was one of my folks who painted that.

I haven't transcribed it but at one point Brueggemann points out to the necessity of and the enormous opportunity that having so many different, often clashing ideas about God in the Bible, how even given the necessity of those views of God clashing makes that God superior to other, narrower, statements about divinity.  I agree with that, too.

On Listening To Jeff Flake And Susan Collins Preparing To Rubber Stamp Trump's Ship of Pirates Hosea 4 - For "Israel" read America

1Hear the word of the LORD, O children of Israel,
for the LORD has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land.
There is no faithfulness or steadfast love,
and no knowledge of God in the land;
2there is swearing, lying, murder, stealing, and committing adultery;
they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed.
3Therefore the land mourns,
and all who dwell in it languish,
and also the beasts of the field
and the birds of the heavens,
and even the fish of the sea are taken away.

4Yet let no one contend,
and let none accuse,
for with you is my contention, O priest.a
5You shall stumble by day;
the prophet also shall stumble with you by night;
and I will destroy your mother.
6My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge;
because you have rejected knowledge,
I reject you from being a priest to me.
And since you have forgotten the law of your God,
I also will forget your children.

7The more they increased,
the more they sinned against me;
I will change their glory into shame.
8They feed on the sinb of my people;
they are greedy for their iniquity.
9And it shall be like people, like priest;
I will punish them for their ways
and repay them for their deeds.
10They shall eat, but not be satisfied;
they shall play the whore, but not multiply,
because they have forsaken the LORD
to cherish 11whoredom, wine, and new wine,
which take away the understanding.
12My people inquire of a piece of wood,
and their walking staff gives them oracles.
For a spirit of whoredom has led them astray,
and they have left their God to play the whore.
13They sacrifice on the tops of the mountains
and burn offerings on the hills,
under oak, poplar, and terebinth,
because their shade is good.
Therefore your daughters play the whore,
and your brides commit adultery.
14I will not punish your daughters when they play the whore,
nor your brides when they commit adultery;
for the men themselves go aside with prostitutes
and sacrifice with cult prostitutes,
and a people without understanding shall come to ruin.

15Though you play the whore, O Israel,
let not Judah become guilty.
Enter not into Gilgal,
nor go up to Beth-aven,
and swear not, “As the LORD lives.”
16Like a stubborn heifer,
Israel is stubborn;
can the LORD now feed them
like a lamb in a broad pasture?

17Ephraim is joined to idols;
leave him alone.
18When their drink is gone, they give themselves to whoring;
their rulersc dearly love shame.
19A wind has wrapped themd in its wings,
and they shall be ashamed because of their sacrifices.

Dusan Bogdanovic - Levantine Suite

The guitarist isn't listed.  Interesting that he notated some of it on two staves.  I'm not sure I ever saw that before.

Being A Pathological Liar Generates Its Own Ironies

I just thought of it being an enormous irony that Simps tried to get into it with me over Nat Hentoff, using one of his frequently wielded and totally ineffective tools, my Irish surname.  I had forgotten what I'm sure he never knew, that Nat Hentoff credited his career to being hired by one of my mother's great heroines, the Boston-Irish woman who made a career out of exposing racism and anti-Semitism, who almost got excommunicated by going after the awful Cardinal O'Connell for not speaking out forcefully against it.  I'm talking about the largely forgotten Frances Sweeney.   I've got to go to an appointment or I wouldn't resort to the short bio of her at Wikipedia, as far as I can tell, it's accurate.

Frances Sweeney (c. 1908 – June 19, 1944) was a journalist and activist who campaigned against fascism, antisemitism, and political corruption in 1940s Boston. She edited her own newspaper, the Boston City Reporter, and started the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic to combat fascist disinformation. Seeking to counteract the influence of the priest Charles Coughlin, whose antisemitic broadcasts were popular with Boston's Irish Catholics, she led protests and wrote editorials condemning the Christian Front and similar organizations. She was secretary of the American-Irish Defense Association of Boston and vice chairman of the Massachusetts Citizens' Committee for Racial Unity. A Catholic herself, Sweeney was threatened with excommunication when she criticized Cardinal O'Connell for his silence on Catholic antisemitism.


 Hentoff dedicated his memoir to her memory.   Like I said, I didn't like Hentoff but he wasn't a compulsive liar.

Update:  Three sentences saying something they never thought before is too much information for the rump of regulars at Eschaton.   Duncan tried it and found they couldn't read it.

Update 2:  I would imagine anyone who comes here to read who I would care about already has all the proof they need that Steve Simels is an ignorant, stupid and not very nimble liar so I won't bother with that demonstration any more.  Anyone at Eschaton, where he proves it daily, who doesn't know that is even stupider than he is.  

I Don't Hesitate To Say Of The Dead What I Would Say About Them In Life

In my first blog post I took a swipe at Nat Hentoff who died the day before yesterday.  I don't regret that now, more than ten years later that he has, as all 91-year-olds eventually do, died.  Many die far younger, and sometimes with his help, as I'll point out below.   I didn't much like Hentoff who I thought was obnoxious and self-promoting whether writing about jazz or writing about politics or civil liberties.  I thought he was a man who enjoyed his straight-male privilege as he posed as a liberal and also enjoyed other things unavailable to other people whose equal rights were certainly not his first priority.

I held him to be a pseudo-liberal for much of his life.  It didn't surprise me much when, after the Village Voice discontinued his regular employment, he went to work at the corporate-fascist false front of the Cato Institute.  It didn't surprise me when he endorsed the idiot-Republican Rand Paul for president or the illegal, disastrous invasion of Iraq.  In the taunting notice I got of his death daring me to diss him now that, as we all must, he's died, I didn't see any mention of the hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent lives taken, not by natural death but by avoidable violence in that invasion which he supported, sold with lies .  I always assumed that it was on behalf of Israel, for which he had no problem with lying, distorting, twisting words and ideas and even violating his patented civil libertarian pose.

Rather tellingly, I thought, for a guy whose side did so much to enable the most repressive of pornographers, the atheist, Hentoff, was an opponent of women being able to obtain legal abortions. And I will put the emphasis on the GUY in that sentence.  According to what I've read he claimed he never thought much about the issue until 1984, which would have made him 59 before he thought about it.

And with typical Hentoffian fact twisting, he claimed the case that got him on an anti-choice tare wasn't even, in his telling, about abortion but infanticide.    Reading that brings up one of the things that I found most obnoxious about him, his twisting things to suit his own ends.   No matter whether or not he is honestly characterizing what people HE KNEW were saying about the case in question, it was not and was never a case of abortion.

"They were saying, 'What's the big fuss about? If the parents had known she was going to come in this way, they would have had an abortion. So why don't youconsider it a late abortion and go on to something else?'

"Here were liberals, decent people, fully convinced themselves that they were for individual rights and liberties but willing to send into eternity these infants because they were imperfect, inconvenient, costly. I saw the same attitude on the part of the same kinds of people toward abortion, and I thought it was pretty horrifying."

And before someone snarks about me linking to something written in the repulsive Washington Times, he wrote for them as well as the Village Voice.

The central issue in the debate about legalized abortion is whether or not the state has the right to compel a woman to carry a pregnancy to term, a legitimate interest to regulate what a woman does with her own body.   I hold that the state's legitimate right to make that decision for an individual ends at the skin if not considerably before that.  

You can argue whether or not that is the case, but if you give the state the right to compel a woman to be pregnant but, then, reject far, far less intrusive restrictions on aspects of personal integrity, ownership of your own body and regulation of your conduct you give yourself a huge problem of hypocrisy.  Especially if you make such arguments while entirely safe from ever being pregant.

It makes little sense to then say a democratic government has a legitimate interest in forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term but no legitimate interest in keeping someone from lying or promoting discrimination and the inequality of people.  To deny that egalitarian democratic government  has an interest in protecting the blessings of egalitarian democracy from its enemies but then claim that it does have an interest in whether or not a woman remains pregnant is grotesquely hypocritical.

A woman having control of her own body is of far less impact on other people or society at large or the nation as a whole as compared to fascists, Nazis, Klansmen or others with a history of mass murder and violence being allowed to promote and advocate their programs of inequality, discrimination and murder.  The body count of those groups runs into the tens of millions.  Even the limited obnoxiousness of the funeral disruption stunts of the Phelps cult has far more of an impact on other people , denying rights of privacy and a right to be unharassed and unwillingly being roped into being the center of the publicity stunts of hate groups, than a woman deciding what to do with her own body.

I think his positions on those things were a key to the hypocrisy of, not only Nat Hentoff but his entire theory of civil liberty.  I think, in the end, the results of it is the empowerment of the already privileged, the entrenched privileged, the majority race, etc.  It has certainly empowered the billionaires and the racists and enemies of democracy.

And that was only one aspect of Nat Hentoff's act as The Greatest Civil Libertarian In The World which I found repulsive.

I think even before that it was his eternal repetition of his role in producing that TV show with Billie Holiday that first put me off him.  I remember about the fourth time I read him repeating it I asked if he wanted people to figure he'd put every note she sang in her mouth.  I never could stand critics much and he could be one of the most annoying of them.

Update:  I have no problem with people opposed to abortion advocating to women, in general or those who seek their opinion, that they not have an abortion.  That is if they honestly represent that as their intention from the start.   I have no problem with people arguing that in general.  I have a huge problem with people advocating that abortion be made illegal and unavailable.  Not least because it is an absolutely guaranteed result of making a safe abortion illegal, unsafe illegal abortions in large numbers with many injured, traumatized and dead women will be one result.  Making abortion illegal does not end abortions, it merely makes them dangerous in the black market that will develop or in the equally dangerous attempts to self-induce or, perhaps most dangerous of all, involuntary boy-friend-husband induced miscarriage, which is, as well, a violation of womens' ownership of their bodies.

That is an entirely different thing from infanticide of a child who is not contained in the mother's body.  Once born, the issue of a mother's ownership of her own body is not part of the decision.

Update 2:  Someone has objected to my criticism of Peter Singer in the comments.  Peter Singer is not a liberal, he's a philosophy prof on the make who knows he can get big appointments on the basis of being hot and someone like him gets hot by making outlandish and offensive statements, especially those that promote the objectification of powerless and relatively powerless people in a way pleasing to such people as publish his stuff.  The kind of people who choose who to publish in the New York Times.

NO ONE WHO CALLS FOR KILLING PEOPLE ON THE BASIS OF HIS PREFERRED SCHEME OF VALUATION OF THEIR LIVES IS A LIBERAL.   His preferred scheme of valuation is whatever cult of utilitarianism he's pushing at the time.  From what I understand what is called "preference utilitarianism" gave him his preferred scheme for most of his career, now in the last couple of years, he's declared that it's now "hedonistic utilitarianism".  I will leave it to you to go see if you can tease out the differences between them.    My question would be if he can change something like that, what's the consequence for the reliability of his work up to that point?  What's the implication of it for what he's written after that change?  And why should actual lives be put into question on the basis of anything he says?

I would ask Singer if someone who came up with a scheme of utilitarian valuation of lives that resulted in them figuring that more people would be happy if they offed Peter Singer and his loved ones if he thought that would be a good idea.  I'm sure someone might be able to come up with some contorted figure of pseudo-algebraic stuff that could be made to come out that way, it's what he does.  Then he insists that his preferred scheme is to be the way that the problem is looked at. At academic departments of philosophy at major universities, I believe his is still Princeton these days, that is what will get you the big bucks and the attention and buzz.  Which is one of the reasons I agree with whoever it was who said that these days it's a lot more interesting to read theology.  Academic philosophy has pretty much gone down a rabbit hole into wonderland.  It's sad but that's their choice. Fields do go through their decadent phases.

It's kind of interesting that a guy famous for being a vegetarian serves up the amount of tripe Singer does.  Hitler was a vegetarian, I point out as someone who's been one for longer than Singer has been. I think it's really weird how he gets points for being a vegetarian as he blithly advocates killing people and it's completely OK and even swell with the academic establishment because he does so while being an academic.  It's like the mass slaughter of the 20th century, especially the enormous numbers killed with excuses of social and economic efficiency - though though they were  often designated as benevolence, taking advantage of the prejudices in matters such as disability - but in academia, it's as if those never happened.

I don't see Peter Singers' schemes of determining who isn't fit to live on the basis of his current sect of utilitarianism is much better than any other one that comes up with their list of people who are candidates for being offed.  I think that it's done in English at American and other English speaking universities doesn't put it in a different category than if it's done in North Korea in Korean today or in Germany in German in the 1940s or in Tasmania in English in the 19th century.    Though, when I have tried to read through Peter Singer going through his pseudo-mathematical means of coming up with who can be killed and why, I don't really see much of a difference from how Rudolph Hoess talked about his methods of doing the same.  From what I read, Singer aspires to come up with some kind of Darwinian based ethical system, which, after my long study of Darwinism and its actual relationship with eugenics, English and German, doesn't surprise me.  Scratch a Darwinist and you'll often find someone who wants to rank people in terms of valuation and, at times, propose killing them or sterilizing them.  Though the one can turn into the other with the change of a law or two.

Perhaps I don't see eye to eye with him because my father was severely disabled.  If he'd been born with his disability, Singer would say it was OK to kill him before he was old enough to object.

Still Ill - Here's Brueggemann - Why the Old Testament Must not Go Away

I have found that his view of the Psalms and the Prophets is a better preparation for the impending and tragic crisis of Trump-fascism than lots of other things.  It's a lot better than the world-weary, cynical, lazy encouragement to give up.

In the Regime of Free-Speech-Free-Press These Things Aren't Allowed To Be Thought Never Mind Said

The series of tweet attacks Donald Trump made against Meryl Streep again shows that our constitutional system has put the United States and so the world in the hands of an unbalanced, undisciplined, sociopathic little boy who never grew up and never had the capacity to mature. Donald Trump is like those incredibly rare individuals who can become adults without their bodies or minds ever developing past the stage of a baby, only it's his personality that never left the age of 2, the kind of 2-year-old who give other 2-year-olds a bad name.

The conditions set by the Constitution have always produced a range of quality in our presidents.  At their best they have given us an FDR, a Lincoln and I would include in that group an LBJ, the most liberal president we have ever had in terms of domestic policy.   But it has mostly produced lesser and even very bad presidents in far larger numbers.  The expansion in that range would seem to be mostly on the worst end of it in the past fifty-years, under the current interpretation of the Constitution.  In case you missed it, we have had more confirmation that on the worst side, that expansion began in 1968 with the election of Richard Nixon,  another who was a criminal eligible for impeachment as soon as he took the oath of office and he would compound that with criminality that murdered tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.  Millions, if you admit that he was directly responsible for producing the killing fields under Pol Pot.

In addition to him, the current political milieu, largely the product of the media, has given us the senile Ronald Reagan, the callow illegitimacy of George W. Bush and, now, Donald Trump.   I have every confidence that Donald Trump will be a contender for the worst president which our system has, so far, generated.   The conditions that gave us a Trump were produced in 1964 at the height of liberal achievement through the confusion of 18th century libertarianism for American liberalism by our highly educated Supreme Court.  If you think that's something I can't seem to stop saying, it's because it is the key to what went wrong in every way.  But the potential for that to happen was built into the American Constitution from the day it was issued and the moment it was ratified.   

I have pointed out before that the American fascists and racists in legal societies on law faculties and in think tanks studied hard to find all of the exploitable weaknesses in the American Constitutional system and the laws in individual states.   The availability of computers aided them in exploiting every weakness in our system, especially those which our system also makes hard if not impossible to fix.  Things have gone so far that, in some cases, even the father of that effort, Richard Viguerie is sometimes uneasy about the results.  

Now we know that they weren't the only ones looking to exploit those inherent weaknesses, the Russian government under Vladimir Putin was, as well.  Given his past as an apparatchik of the old Soviet government, I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't been studying that for at least as long as our domestic fascists and racists have been.  I will grant Putin that, he is far more wily and clever than our intellectual and writing class who won't even start to admit their part in producing this disaster.   And being as amoral as our domestic fascists, he realized his highest potential was with cultivating and promoting the same fascist class whose ascendancy was made possible by the utter stupidity of liberal intellectuals in the media and in the past.  It is no enormous shock that Putin would take advantage of the opportunities handed to him by us.  As I've pointed out in the past even someone as relatively stupid and brutal as Nikita Khrushchev understood the possibilities of exploiting the weaknesses intrinsic in our system, so much so that he bragged that we'd sell them the rope to hang us with.  

Our Constitution, our  revoltingly deified founders, our idiotic acceptance of the minor 18th century poetry of the First Amendment that makes it possible for people with law degrees from elite institutions to privilege lies over the truth, all of those were a set up of the American People which were obvious and exploitable by the worst among us and among foreign despots.  

Even Meryl Streep in her great and inspired speech, easily 95% of it about the best thing anyone has said about the rise of Trump, to date,  continued to make some of the same mistakes.   Of course when she talks about the media, the press, she doesn't distinguish between the media that tells the truth and the majority of it - including much of it based in Hollywood - that lies with impunity to give us the very Trump she attacked.  We aren't allowed to make that distinction, we aren't allowed to articulate their part in producing Trump or it's an attack on free-speech, free-press.  Only Trump is their creation, Trump is the one who they promoted with hours and hours of free air time and decades of lies told about Hillary Clinton.   If Meryl Streep had said it as well as making those connections, she wouldn't be the toast of liberals today, her speech would have been seen as self-contradictory or, in some way, problematic.  If she had pointed out that Trump is a product of the self-serving venality of those founders who framed the Constitution, of their distrust of the popular vote, even the limited one they allowed for, she would be slammed by them just as she is by Trump and his fascist followers.  

Hate Mail - I Prefer Music Made By People Who Don't Call Themselves Folkies

Last year, or maybe the year before that, someone sent me a Youtube of one of the old big-time folkies being interviewed.  I listened to it and realized that the guy was a total bore and blowhard, like the kind of drunk barroom philosophers who get loaded and want to get attention by making categorical declarations that everyone is stupid.   Again, I refer you to The Iceman Cometh in which that role is given to the eternally drunk Hugo Kalmar.  Quite often those I've run across are the stupidest of play-lefties, the kind who haven't quite gotten around to getting their I.W.W. card or, if they did, they waved it as proudly as the stupidest wannabee, phony Vietnam vet who conned their way into the American Legion and waved the flag by flapping their drunken lips,  and to about the same effect.  

I'd never heard of Eric Bogle before you sent me that link and, listening to the dolt, I'm looking forward to forgetting his name.  You guys always go for the cheap point against the easy targets, you never come up with anything that's going to change anything.  It wasn't the friggin' folkies who got anything done, that was the Black Church people who put their lives on the line, over and over again. Walter Brueggemann is a lot easier to take and actually has ideas that might lead to some kind of change.  

I prefer real folk music to singer-songwriter junk, anyway.  

If I want to hear a sermon I'd rather hear one by someone who isn't stupid.  The music in church is likely to be better, too. 

Update:  Note to Simps,  I'm not going to post your stupidest comments anymore.  They're stupid.   They all are but the stupidest ones aren't even useful for pointing that out. 

Google Ain't No Minnie Earl Sears

Not to pick on Kevin Drum, who I genuinely like and respect but he has had two recent posts that seem to me to exhibit far too much credulity for the superstition of machine intelligence.  The first one is more complex as it deals with his noting that Google Translate has "gotten better" recently due to changes in the algorithms used.  The implication is that Google, wherever or what ever that artificial entity is, is better at understanding human languages and transferring information from one to another.   That involves a lot of complicated and unanswerable questions about language and, tempting as it was to research and write about those and why Google the great and powerful didn't understand anything, the complexities in making that case didn't appeal to me with the world on the verge of having its biggest superpower become the plaything of the Russian Neo-Tsar and ruled by a fascist mad-man in his power.  I suppose that's the best prospect under the Republican-fascist regime that is taking hold, that at least the senile 2-year-old our system has elected will be under the control of an adult, though an evil adult.

Anyway, Kevin Drum gave me another chance to address the alleged understanding of computers and computer programs, even big, big ones in a later post.

A little while back I mentioned that Google Translate had gotten a lot better overnight when they switched to a new machine-learning algorithm. Their voice recognition got better too. And so did its question-answering capability.

I was chatting about this at Christmas with my family, and we all decided we should test it. But not with anything boring. We know that Siri and Google and other digital assistants can find nearby coffee shops or tell us the weather in Berlin. How about something harder? The conversation then morphed into something about pencils, and my mother said she only trusted erasers that are pink. But why are they pink, we wondered? Why indeed?

So there you have it? Not only did Google understand me, even with a cold, but it also understood the question and provided a brief and precisely on-point answer, which it read off very nicely. Impressive!

Anyway, this strikes me as close to Watson-esque. The thing is, this is not as simple a question as it seems. It requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of context and meaning. And finding a source that matches the question perfectly is also pretty amazing. If my phone can do that, how long before it can drive a car too?

The answer that first came to me and a number of his other commentators was that, far from Google doing any thinking, the results of its new algorithms are based on the thinking and choices of the many, many thousands of people who asked the same question, probably in a wide but limited range of forms the question could take and their choices in which of the results on older versions of Google they clicked on to find an answer to it.  The machine didn't do any thinking, the people who came up with the rules for matching and listing a string of characters input to it with an existing set of strings of characters did a lot of it and the rest of the thinking involved was in the choices people made about clicking the lists that came up from the entire line of entirely human thought.  The engineers who came up with the original means of doing that and the, hopefully, improved means of doing that, no doubt based on the choices people made in the past are the ones who did the thinking.

The machine no more thinks than the index in a book or a card catalog in an uncomputerized library does.   A well indexed book or a well cataloged library had more work, more thought, more insight put into the information retrieval aids than ones which are less well indexed or cataloged.  The same goes for a computerized library catalog, the main advantage of that is that the number of subject listings might be larger because the computer records won't take up room in a card catalog or be as expensive to print on card stock.  Though the numbers of those subject headings will be of variable usefulness.  I always found those in Sears Subject Headings to be very well thought out, like Google, they were chosen in consultation with a large number of librarians who did a good job of cataloging their small libraries.  The alternative of using the far more detailed Library of Congress headings would have been too expensive for a small library and most of them would probably not have been commonly useful.

It's even more basic than that, though, the choice of pixels or other means of symbolically recording thought are no more akin to the human acts of thought and articulation than the ink on a page that is given semiotic significance by the people who do that.  As far as the machine goes, it's far more like paper and ink sitting on a table, any information recorded with them depends on human action and any consumption of that information depends, as well, on human action.

The disabling effects of materialist ideology, not only preventing understanding of these mundane realities but creating their materialist phantoms and materially based ghosts in machines they generate the most stunning of ironies.   And a lot of the most educated and intelligent people among us fall for them.

I never thought about the time I spent working in a small, rural library - under the supervision of a professional (retired) librarian - as perhaps inoculating me against that superstition but I've never bought it.   I knew that to come up with useful subject headings to type on cards you had to consider it and even then it sometimes wouldn't work.  It worked best for mundane questions, not as specific as "Why are erasers pink?" that was more the work of a book indexer or an encyclopedia compiler.   I never mistook a book or a card catalog as an intelligent object, just a useful one, depending on how useful it had been made.

Try asking Google how Americans got duped into voting fascists into power and see how clear the answer is.  Answering that one takes some real insight that computers will never have.

By the way, I don't think the Youtube of the audio response Kevin Drum put up as the right answer is really an answer as to why [SOME] erasers are  pink, never mind why his mother didn't trust erasers that aren't pink.

That doesn't tell anyone why even the "Pink Pearl" is pink, which would involve who made the decisions that went into them not changing the color to something else.  I'm pretty sure they put some coloring in their products, Pink Pearls aren't a natural color.   They could have chosen to make it a different color.  Lots of erasers aren't pink.   Back when I did lots of music manuscript, I preferred a white eraser with a texture that wouldn't erase the staff lines or leave a stain that might show up when the page was photocopied.  But, then, I always worked in a soft pencil that looked like pen when it was photocopied.  I hated it when one of my teachers insisted on ink.  Friggin' mess, totally pointless, the guy was a jerk.  

As to why his mother didn't trust erasers that aren't pink, she's the only possible source of that information.  If Drum had asked Google to give him the answer,  "Why does my mother only trust pink erasers?" I wonder if it could come up with an answer that satisfied everyone.   I also wonder if maybe Faber or someone else might have Google bombed to make their product come up high in such a search.  Tell me when Google can protect itself against Googlebombing, that might impress me.  

Answer to Kevin Drum's Post About The Influence of Russia Today Television

I am surprised people didn't realize RT was a big part of the problem.  Though I would say that entities like the so often loony Pacifica are more of a problem for liberals and real, as opposed to play-lefties, as well.

Any media that lies is a problem for democracy and liberalism and in the United States the media has a carte blanche to lie with impunity thanks to the Supreme Court, such self-defeating, allegedly liberal institutions as the ACLU and the media which has both promoted its "right" to lie and enjoyed the benefits of it being allowed to lie.  Why would any foreign government or potential beneficiary from fascist-government being set up here not take advantage of that?  They must have noticed the role the Aussie T&A and fascism peddler, Murdoch has played in it and how much money he's made from it.

The laws of the United States have to be made to disable the power that lies can have.  Lies have many built in advantages over the truth.  They can be constructed for popular sale whereas the truth is frequently not bound to be popular.  Lies can be made sensational, attention-getting and tailored to benefit from our worst weaknesses, the truth has to be true.   The idiots on Supreme Courts of the past, especially the alleged liberals from the Warren Court till today enabled lies and we have Trump as a result of that as much as their enabling fascists, foreign and domestic.  Putin knows that a neo-Tsarist Russia, under his rule, will benefit far more from anti-democratic governments than from democratic ones.  He was able to use the regime set up by our so-called civil libertarians to put his puppet into the White House, using the party that benefited enormously from the kinds of lies I described.  They saw the advantage they were given the Ivy-league trained lawyers and judges and justices missed it entirely.

Comic Relief - Candy Matson - The Devil In The Deep Freeze

A while back someone asked me why I hardly ever post stuff from the "golden age of radio".  No reason except a lot of what people post from that period isn't very good.  They really churned it out.

Here's one that makes me smile, old fashioned and full of stereotypes as it is, the wise-cracking, tough-cooky, San Francisco woman-detective Candy Matson.  It even has an organ player.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Joanna Glass - American Modern

American Modern 

I posted a play by Joanna Glass a few months back,  Canadian Gothic.   Here's another one about a hoarder.  It seemed appropriate in a month when the Trump regime is going to start. Maybe it's what started about 12:00.  It's no more crazy than people who voted for Donald Trump.  

It strikes me as insane that we are about to have a president who is certainly insane, certainly corrupt, certainly a traitor, certainly the most dangerous person to have the office and everyone agrees there is nothing to do about it.  Beside that, what can be held to be insane?   

A Challenge - "Who Do You Think Is The Greatest American Writer If It's Not Twain?"

I am challenged to say who the best American author is.  Which I can't say as I've never read everyone who wrote while American.  Like everyone except my incredibly well-read niece and my late friend who was the only person I've ever known who outread her - she was in her 90s, I've never even read everything you're supposed to have read.   If the question were who do I think is the greatest of those I've read, that isn't hard to say, Emily Dickinson is at least heads if not also narrow shoulders above everyone else.

Others on the top ten would include, not in any particular order,  Tony Morrison, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter and Marilynne Robinson, William James, John Steinbeck, and Eugene O'Neill.  I don't consider the category to be limited to those who wrote novels or fiction, plays or poetry.

I am not one of those who say that Huckleberry Finn is the "greatest American novel," not by a long shot.  Marilynne Robinson's recent novel Lila is its superior, as were the two other "Gilead" novels. She is a far better writer than Mark Twain.  I'd say that among his contemporaries, Herman Melville was a better writer and far less conventional in his thinking.  Though I am not, then,  a slavish devotee of Moby Dick.

Mark Twain was certainly capable of greatness but he wasn't able to sustain it throughout a novel and often dispensed with it completely in his short pieces, especially those he wrote late in life when the deaths of his son, first one then, near the end, another of his daughters and his wife made him angry and bitter.  I have to conclude that far from being a religious non-conformist, he was entirely caught up in one of the worst of Calvinist errors, believing that good luck in this life is a sign of election. When the typical 19th century disasters of losing children young and of losing a wife at the not old but older than average age of 58 struck him, along with his bankruptcy (his own fault, the results of his greed and ignorance) and other tragedies and hardships struck, he reacted with anger and disappointment and denial instead of learning from them.  Considering how intelligent he was that choice is especially disappointing.

Robinson's novel Home, in which the old and dying Presbyterian [Twain was raised a Presbyterian] minister Reverend Robert Boughton is facing the vicissitudes of his ending life and the tragic waywardness of his son Jack, is deeper than anything in any of Twain's novels.  Jack's common-law marriage to a black woman with whom he can't live openly to raise the son he loves is a far more complex, far more subtle and instructive redemption than what Huck Finn goes through.  And it is far more meaningful than Twain's Huck can articulate, perhaps more than Twain was capable of.

Mark Twain choosing to put his best novel into the mind and understanding of a boy was a bad choice.  I'd much rather have heard what the adult Jim was thinking about things.  I don't know if anyone ever tried to write that book, especially a Black American author, but if one of them did, I'd certainly read it.  Only, if someone does, I hope they get rid of Tom Sawyer and that stupid ending Twain gave the story.   I do have to say that I find the huge corpus of lit'rature put into the mind and words of imaginary boys to have gotten really stale and old.  Even one told from the POV of a girl is less tedious, though it's still a self-limiting choice.   Having the story, Lila, start out in the mind of the girl who would become Lila, a child more absolutely destitute than Huckleberry Finn, develops as the novel continues into the mind and experience of the adult and very experienced woman.  We never get Huck Finn grown up to have an adult's understanding of even his own experience.

The scene in which Boughton's oldest friend, the Congregationalist minister John Ames, for whom Jack was named, the wayward son's godfather, comes to give his dying friend communion is one of the most intensely moving passages in any book by anyone writing in English I'm aware of.  I don't know if Twain was uninhibited enough to write something like that.  I think he would have thought it was unmanly, as would a lot of his intellectual inferiors who write hagiographic criticism.

I don't know but that I think William Borroughs or Henry Miller might be the worst of those presented as distinguished or significant but if I haven't read enough to know who the best is, the contenders for worst are so many that I suspect I don't event know who that actual worst one might be.  Well, there is Simps but, then, there are also Drudge and Dowd. Some of the worst are bad enough to at least be mildly amusing on account of their stupidity but that doesn't go far.  Especially when the jokey jokes are so old and chemical filled.  Such stuff is like those legendary Twinkies that never really rot but were never edible to start with.

P.S. I should note that "Home" is told through the mind of Boughton's youngest daughter, Glory, which is an interesting choice.  You get her take on some of the same things that John Ames narrates in the first of the novels in the series, "Gilead".   Glory is able to both understand and wonder about things as a middle-aged adult and to articulate so much more than a young boy would have believably been presented as understanding.  An adult can have the same thoughts as a child, a child can't possibly know enough to think like a mature adult.   I think if there's one thing America needs, it's to grow up.

Update:  Oh, give me a friggin' break.  Read the novels.  Put Lila, Doll, Glory, John Ames, Robert Boughton, Jack, even Teddy who makes a brief appearance up against the entire cast of major characters in Twain and you'll see the difference between full characters and cartoons.   Huckleberry Finn is about the only substantial character he ever wrote and he's a cartoon most of the time.  So is Jim.

Update Two:  I haven't decided whether or not to post the stupid comment by Simple Simels in which he makes the claim, "American literature begins with NAKED LUNCH" only, if that's the case, what's his beef with what I said about Henry Miller and Mark Twain?   I suppose it's Simp's idea of a joke, only, in that case, I wonder who was so stupid as to have said it in the first place.

Heaven help us.  If Borroughs hadn't murdered his wife he'd probably have never had a "literary" career.   Perhaps it's a relief for Simps that someone was so much more of an a asshole than he is.

And, yes, I was aware that this would set such dopes off.  I've got to have my fun, too, I'll resume serious writing when this cold lifts.

Update Three:  Well, you silly billy, I'm not the only person who said that if Borroughs hand't murdered his wife he'd probably have never had a "literary" career, this was said by the ultimate expert on that topic:

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

Yeah, right.  You ask me he killed her because their marriage was on the rocks, he'd started sleeping around with other women and men and she'd taken to insulting him while she was high on speed. And, once his brother sprung him by bribing the Mexican cops and officials, he figured he'd cash in on the possibility of turning his murder of her into a literary career.  And it worked.  So much of modernism is run on amoral and not unoften violent thrill seeking and vicarious thrill seeking.  It wasn't his writing ability that made his career as he had none.

Update Four:  Simps, when I can hire a copy editor you'll be last on the list.

William Bolcom - Free Fantasia on Oh Zion Haste and How Firm A Foundation

Jonathan Holmes, organ
Newcastle Cathedral Organ

He uses a much more forward registration than in any other recording of this piece I've ever heard.  I think the music more than stands up to it.  It certainly brings out the two hymns the piece is based on better than a more subtle registration.

I post this in loving memory of my old fried R.R. whose death I just learned about.   She was a saint in life and I don't have any doubt she is now, as well.

I've got a really, really bad cold, which is why I've been cranky and not writey.   I'll try to post something later.  

Late Hate - I Challenge You To Read A Whole Book Of His Short Stuff Without Skimming While Pretending It's Hillarious

I took the time to see if I could find what Jorge Luis Borges said about the ending of Huckleberry Finn.  This isn't what I recalled reading in a different interview (I recall reading it in the Boston Globe) but it is interesting and true.

BORGES
Look here, I’m talking to an American: There’s a book I must speak about—nothing unexpected about it—that book is Huckleberry Finn. I thoroughly dislike Tom Sawyer. I think that Tom Sawyer spoils the last chapters of Huckleberry Finn. All those silly jokes. They are all pointless jokes; but I suppose Mark Twain thought it was his duty to be funny even when he wasn’t in the mood. The jokes had to be worked in somehow. According to what George Moore said, the English always thought: “Better a bad joke than no joke.”

[I'll break in to say that would seem to be Simp's philosophy of writing, except his jokes are used bad jokes.  A Xerox machine is as original and has a better chance of repeating better jokes. But only if it's not Simps choosing what to feed into it.]

I think that Mark Twain was one of the really great writers, but I think he was rather unaware of the fact. But perhaps in order to write a really great book, you must be rather unaware of the fact.

Much, if not most of Huckleberry Finn is great, the ending falls through.   The parts with Tom Sawyer are probably the worst parts of it, though the plot twists at the end are really bad.  I think he got to the end of the river and he knew he had to do something and he couldn't figure out what to do.  I'd have them hire onto a boat to South America.  He could have done a sequel to it.  Maybe he should have asked himself what Melville would have done.

I do agree that Mark Twain could be a great writer, but his published work is uneven.  Try reading through his complete works and I'll bet you will be skimming not far into it and you'll resort to skimming until you're relieved to reach the end of it.  A lot of it is just not very good, he wrote a lot of forgettable stuff, especially short pieces he certainly wrote for the money. He definitely could have used some editing advice in just about every book.

If the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County hadn't already been written by the famous Mark Twain, if it were submitted to any publisher or magazine, today, as written, it wouldn't get published.  If it were submitted for criticism by any competent writing teacher, they would tear it to shreds in editing it. And it's far from his worst piece.  Lots of the worst ones are a lot longer and no one really reads them.  I challenge Simps and the Eschatots to read through "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg And Other Stories And Essays" without resorting to skimming.  They can't even get through one of poor Duncan's little attempts at writing, he having given up when they wouldn't read his longer pieces - some of which were, actually, pretty good.   If any of them claims they read every word, with attention, I'll sentence them to reading "My First Lie And How I Got Out Of It" aloud while pretending they really think it's funny or amusing or in any way droll.  I'm sure it can be done, the French did it with Jerry Lewis for decades.

I still think "Life on the Mississippi" is his deepest, greatest and best book.  I can say that every time I've read it, it holds my attention like most of his other books don't.  I'd put Huckleberry Finn second. The fall off starts after those two, though many of them have some really funny passages and some very good writing, just not a whole books worth.   I do think the short piece "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" is good and funny and and spot on as criticism, if sometimes quite unfair, though there is a lot in it that becomes quite ironic when considering a huge part of Twain's own output. Take #9.

They [the rules of good writing] require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the Deerslayer tale.

Measure the ending of Huck Finn to that rule.  And not just Huck Finn but most of his other novels, especially The Prince and the Pauper.   And measure practically the entire Hadleyburg volume and a lot of his other humor pieces, especially those employing his tall-tale style against #14,

Eschew surplusage.

If you really want to cringe, go to the Hadleyburg volume and read "The Esquimaux Maiden's Romance".    And, if you don't have the heart to go on, believe me, there is as bad if not worse.

Before Last Year I Never Would Have Thought That This Was Possible Never Mind A Likely Scenario I Do Now

What Mark Twain Left Out Of His Angelic View Of Sex - Or, Simps Cribs A Well Worn Passage Though I Doubt He Read The Book

Yeah, I read Letters From The Earth.  It's a bit amusing, not the best Mark Twain but OK.  And like some of his other polemical writing, not exactly a comprehensive view of things but a set-up job, influenced as much by his bitter disappointment that he was, as we all are, NOT favored to go through life without sorrow and hardship.   Considering how much death and hardship he certainly saw in his life, his skeptical thinking and cynical reflection didn't prepare him for the deaths of his children and wife very well.  Lots of those he would have looked down on handled worse far better.

I will say, having read all of the Twain that was available to me from our local library, including Letters From The Earth and some of his posthumously published stuff, when he was good he could be great, when he wasn't he could be pretty bad.  Lots of his humorous stuff has dated right out of being funny.  I think "Life on the Mississippi" is his best book and lots of it droops and sags.   I think Is Shakespeare Dead? is a lot better than Letters and hits the mark more squarely on.  Only you didn't think so, as I recall our go-round on it.  He was far too unconventional for you to process in that piece.   Oh, yeah, and Huckleberry Finn sort of falls apart at the end.  I don't think he was especially good with endings.  That's something he shared with Thornton Wilder.

I also have to point out that Mark Twain's view of sex and sexuality in that passage leaves out a lot of stuff he must have known about.   As a man he would seem to not consider the morality of the grotesque sexual inequality of his time which inevitably was part of the phenomenon of sex.   Since you're a straight, white man, it's no surprise to me that you can leave that out.  Sex during his time was subject to all kinds of consequences, many of which fell far harder on women than on men.  Not to mention the problems of men who had sex with men or women with women.

For instance, take this sample: he has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race -- and of ours -- sexual intercourse! It is as if a lost and perishing person in a roasting desert should be told by a rescuer he might choose and have all longed-for things but one, and he should elect to leave out water!

I have a strong feeling that like most men, Twain had a greatly exaggerated estimate of his sexual performance and the pleasure whoever he had sex with derived from it.  I'm certain you do, though, thankfully, not from personal experience.

I wonder why he didn't talk about the risks and consequences of syphilis, something he, perhaps from his days as a riverboat man, if not before, would certainly have known about.  I can't imagine a man of his experience in the world wouldn't have known people who contracted, suffered the ravages of and died of the disease.   I mean, have you ever really looked at [warning, some of these are truly horrific pictures]  photos of what syphilitic lesions look like?  And that's not including the other aspects of the disease, especially those cases of congenital infection inutero.

And that was only one of the consequences of freely engaging in sex in a human body and not as an angelic fiction constructed by Twain to debunk the religion that he felt, personally, had let him down. Considering how much he made of hookworms, you wonder why he left out an even more serious and widespread affliction which was far more easily avoided by practicing strict monogamy, as promoted in the Bible and by the religion he mocked.   Well, I doubt that point would be as well received by the readers, especially the literary men he probably figured would read it, eventually.   No one likes to hear about the possible consequences of their slipping around.   I mean, how many people quote Eugene O'Neill on the topic from The Iceman Cometh?

Unknown to Twain would have been many other possible diseases that were contracted through sex with an infected person.  Who knows what diseases were being spread unknown or unnoticed, how many deaths were attributed to other things or unexplained?   I doubt the entire catalog of those is known to us today.

Then there is unintended pregnancy, outside of or within marriage.  That's another thing which I would imagine Twain would have known about from a male perspective, the gender those consequences generally fall less seriously upon.  You can read the contemporary advocates for birth control on those consequences, especially for women for whom a pregnancy could prove life threatening or fatal.  You can find that all over the world, today.

And there is rape, sexual bondage, prostitution, forced marriage, .... For real people living in real life sex isn't the unmitigated fun that Twain presented it as being and he would have known that.  But, as with straight men today and a rather disgusting number of gay men who love to practice or imagine themselves as the dominant partner in sex that is always on their terms, for their pleasure and for their benefit, he chose to leave it out.

But, then, Twain has an angel making his case.  As a Catholic I've never been especially impressed by the Protestant conception of angels.  As I've grown up and considered the discription of them in the Bible, where they don't seem to appear without fear and even dread being part of the experience,  I'm not especially impressed with how most Catholics think of them.  A cousin of mine was disgusted when her parish - reorganized so the lousy Bishop could sell the church to pay out the fines to sex-abuse victims - voted to change its name to "Our Lady of the Angels".  She said, considering how most people thought of angels they may as well have called it "Our Lady of the Fairies".   What the fuck would a Protestant angel know about the less than heavenly consequences of human sex?   Most people don't seem to be able to think about those in a realistic manner without encouragement.

In looking for the text of "Letters" online, I came across the fact that Dan Savage did a stage version of it.  Dan Savage is, as I've pointed out, the greatest advocate for marriage inequality within gay marriage through his claims that the best marriages, committed, caring, FAITHFUL, uninfected, relationships among gay men are extremely unlikely if not impossible.   I strongly suspect he has done as much as anyone recently to encourage dangerous and irresponsible sex, so it doesn't surprise me he'd promote Twain on the topic.

Update: Yeah, when Huck and Jim just happen to wash up at the plantation of the aunt and uncle of Tom Sawyer who just happens to be visiting and can identify them and the news comes that Jim was set free and can live happily every after, it's just such a totally convincing set of coincidences, isn't it.

By the way, though he didn't specify that,  it's a point that that literary illiterate Borges pointed out as well,  that the end of Huckleberry Finn was problematic and sort of falls apart.  Up till that point the book is quite great, though, like Homer, he nods in places. On the other hand,  Thornton Wilder has a habit of just killing people morosely off to tie up the loose ends.  I'll never quite forgive him for doing that in The Eighth Day which could have, as well, been a great novel if he'd only been able to figure out a better ending for it.  I think he mistook having bad endings for his most attractive characters as a sign of quality, replacing gloom for profundity in the British manner.

You don't know how funny it is that someone like you who made a living passing judgement on other peoples' work, takes such offense at someone pointing out that not all of Twain stands the test of time.  Lots of his writing was throw away junk for quick money.  And I expect he knew it.   Though I wouldn't dignify the crap that you write with the word "criticism" even those guys who know what they're talking about are vampires on people who take the risk of producing something, most of which is bound to fail.  It's hard to produce good, never mind great work in the arts.  It's easy to produce crap, like you do.

You Have To Wonder How Much Snowden And Greenwald Contributed To The Election of Trump

I haven't read Edward Jay Epstein's book debunking the legend of Edward Snowden and I didn't read his recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal until after I started writing this piece.   But, from what I've read about the book and the passages I've seen excerpted, he provides evidence to back up my long standing skepticism about Snowden's intentions from the beginning and my repeated warnings that he was a traitor to the United States and democracy who certainly was providing the enormous cache of documents he stole from the NSA to the dictatorial Chinese and Russian governments.   Far from the hero exposing government surveillance on private citizens in the United States and elsewhere, I said from the start he is the man who stole it to either try to sell it or to profit from giving it to some of the most oppressive regimes in the world.

That large parts of the alleged left took his word and that of his accomplices, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras (later Oliver Stone),  and made him into a hero tells more about their shortsightedness and bad judgement and paranoia than it did to explain his course of conduct.   Now that we know more about what he stole and took to China and Russia, certainly to exchange for, at the very least, their protection and for his own profit, it is obvious that he was a traitor from the start, one who never deserved the blind faith of anyone.   The Snowden treason should also call into question the company he worked for, the very politically connected Booz Allen Hamilton, and the entire idea that for-profit corporations can be trusted in such matters.  Especially those connected to some of our most powerful political players.

After addressing the massive size of Snoweden's theft, he took so much there is no way he could have known what was in most of what he certainly gave to the Chinese and Putin governments, Epstine notes:

It was not the quantity of Mr. Snowden’s theft but the quality that was most telling. Mr. Snowden’s theft put documents at risk that could reveal the NSA’s Level 3 tool kit—a reference to documents containing the NSA’s most-important sources and methods. Since the agency was created in 1952, Russia and other adversary nations had been trying to penetrate its Level-3 secrets without great success.

Yet it was precisely these secrets that Mr. Snowden changed jobs to steal. In an interview in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post on June 15, 2013, he said he sought to work on a Booz Allen contract at the CIA, even at a cut in pay, because it gave him access to secret lists of computers that the NSA was tapping into around the world.

If he was able to steal that and information like that, who knows what else he took with him and handed to the Chinese and Russian governments?   Who knows what role his stolen information has played in things like the Russian hacking of Democrats?  Who know who else they or others are able to access because the legendary Edward Snowden stole who knows what from the NSA?

If people are uneasy about the NSA under civilian control in a (former?) quasi-democracy doing that kind of spying making a hero of a man who stole that information and gave it to two of the most oppressive regimes in the world should certainly scare the crap out of them.

The hypocrisy of so many on the alleged left in regard to Snowden first occurred to me when I considered the likelihood of that cache of stolen intelligence having information about the domestic opposition of the Chinese and Russian regimes.   Exposing those who provided information on the criminal and other activities of those governments and their extensions.   Compared to that the idea that the NSA might be keeping track of who was calling whom overseas isn't even worth worrying about.  I would say that just about everything I've heard rattling out of the more paranoid and less bound to the discipline of reality on the left is less worth worrying about than that Vladimir Putin's criminal regime might, now, have the ability to hack what the NSA only theoretically could.  The NSA is answerable to the formerly quasi-democratic government of the United States and, theoretically, at least, our courts,  the Putin regime is a law unto itself, the same can be said of the Chinese intelligence services.

I haven't seen Oliver Stone's movie  supposedly about Edward Snowden but from what I've read of it, it is a load of crap in the typical Hollywood hagiographic-paranoic style.  Anything that holds Snowden up as any kind of idealist or hero is a lie  Show biz and realism seldom, very, very seldom intersect.  But such is the level of stupiding-down of American culture under the regime of entertainment that it probably is all that many even allegedly educated people will believe they know about it.  I will bet that on many a lefty comment thread arguments would be made from that as readily as they are other inaccurate Hollywood products.  Those who know something else will now what Greenwald or Poitras or some other highly unreliable source will have said about it.  One of the things I think is worth thinking about is how Snowden's treason might effect people who are at real risk from governments, warlords and criminal enterprises.  As I said, that was my first occasion for skepticism about what they were saying when those stories were breaking.   While I can't vouch for the veracity of it, this comment at Daily Kos might indicate that, for people on the ground, working in some of the most dangerous places on Earth, things were far less of a breeze than it was for pseud-journalists living in the comfort of a mansion in Rio or in Berlin.


ivorybill  Things Come Undone Jan 01 · 10:37:20 AM
Real whistle-blowers release information relevant to specific acts of government malfeasance, not enormous archives of secret information.  I have a lot of respect for whistle-blowers, and had Snowden only stolen and released materials relevant to illegal collection of domestic communications, I would agree with you.

But that’s not what he did.  That’s not what Manning did.

I work in Iraq.  When Chelsea Manning released her huge dump of classified information, I had to call a human rights attorney to tell him that the Shia’ militias likely had his identity.  He had been working on a project to prevent abuse of children in Iraq’s criminal justice system, and to defend victims of human trafficking.  This attorney has more courage than Manning and Snowden combined. He continued the work; another attorney fled the country.  It was not a fun phone call. 

I was never a defender of Snowden, Manning or Assange.  But seeing all that happened in 2016, I want even more strongly for all three to find themselves facing criminal prosecution in federal court.  Whistle-blowing is one thing.  This radical idea that secrets should be exposed as a matter of some sort of weird philosophy is dangerous and misguided.  The way Snowden and Assange have collaborated with Vladimir Putin is truly horrible and alleged progressives should think long and hard about exactly who these two serve and what they are. They don’t serve you, that’s for sure. 

Just for the contrast:




While I am far more sympathetic to Chelsea Manning and think it's necessary to monitor her treatment in prison, she has my sympathy far more than I am anyone else in the story.  I'll remind you that the international scum ball, Trump supporter, Julian Assange also figures into it.  But even more so than Manning, I am far more worried about the people whose privacy and security and lives have been endangered by all of them.  I am far, far more worried for the real advocates of the poor and against the powerful in other places, those whose lives are or potentially are put in danger from this kind of irresponsibility.  A lot of them are real advocates for real rights, not people who profit from feeding the thrill-paranoia of would-be lefties with few but first-world problems.

I would really like to know if and who and how many may have had their lives endangered, destroyed or ended by the things that get the likes of Greenwald what he's gotten out of this.  I'd like to really know what the lifestyle Edward Snowden's treason, not only against the NSA or the United States government but to anyone whose work for and advocacy for real rights and even lives, allowed him to get from those who he traded secrets to.

To a great extent the game of paranoia and outrage about what the United States government does to endanger our rights is no less absurd on the left than it is on the far right.  That is especially true of the quite majority white, quite privileged play-left.   I think a lot of that was justifiable to some extent in the past, though I think even a lot of it was ginned up on behalf of communists and, even more so, anarchists who were not infrequently engaged in breaking the law or in some level of espionage or a lame-brained, pudding-headed attempt at subversion, not to mention, occasionally, actual violence.  I will hold back on the legend of the innocence of the Rosenbergs and the time and credibility wasted on that by the silly-left on behalf of the real left, for now.

I warned people that the adulation of Snowden could blow up in our faces because everything that was known about him from just about the start revealed that he was a liar whose actions spoke ever so much more to his betrayal of democracy than it revealed some kind of hero of civil liberties.   I also warned that the adulation of his accomplices and the trust put in them was as stupid, especially the libertarian phony Glenn Greenwald.  Now I am more certain of that than ever before.