As I said the other day Lawman Robert Mueller's reported friendship with William Barr after the first two of the three things on the Honorable Mazie Hirono's list of Barr's obstruction for a Republican president and administration was one of the things which led to me being skeptical of his sterling character. We're not talking about just one lawyer paling around with a lawyer who was also a massive sleazebag, we're talking about a lawyer who had been a prosecutor, who had held several very high offices in federal law enforcement, who, certainly, had sent or would be entirely prepared to send nobodies, the powerless, the middle-class to destitute to prison for far lesser instances of covering up for much pettier criminals over far pettier instances of law breaking. I would love to have a comprehensive list of the people who Robert Mueller either had put away or helped put away with the information to see what the financial condition of those criminals were as compared to William Barr and those who he helped get away with high crimes up to and including, literally, murder.
Robert Mueller certainly knew that about William Barr by the time the Republicans and the corrupt judges on that infamous three judge panel set up Ken Starr to chase after Bill Clinton's penis looking for something they could whip up into an impeachable offense - their publicly funded campaign to find an actual crime the Clintons had committed coming up empty. By that time the OLC memo that William Barr had suppressed over the matter of George H. W. Bush invading Panama to arrest Noriega had come out, it came out early in the Clinton administration. And the George H. W. Bush's cover-up pardons penned by William Barr were always known. I can't believe that Robert Mueller, Lawman, would have been social buddies with some other lawyer-gangster who had done things like that. Call me skeptical, but I doubt he'd maintain a friendship with someone who did that for a Democrat, though, as we know from the Ken Starr investigation, no Democrat has committed those kinds of crimes. Just like I heard Linda Chavez, as she declared herself a never-Trumper yesterday, praised what he and Mitch McConnell are doing to the judiciary. I strongly suspect Republican Robert Mueller probably likes that kind of thing, as well. There are few Republican never-Trumpers who I don't suspect of liking everything about this except the vulgarity and irregularity of it.
The long, long drama we are sitting through in regard to Robert Mueller is turning into the longest, most absurd and frustrating production of a Becket play in history. I'm beginning to suspect the godly Godot of this production is never going to get here. Hearing someone talking on one of the talk shows about how these things take time made me remember another famous scene, the big one, Hamlet Act 3, scene 1
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes
I'm hard put to decide whether Mueller is an example of patient merit or unworthy, an example of the insolence of office or maybe it's that he's too proud of his professional reputation in the law to facilitate justice. Or maybe he's not all that bothered by what Republicans have been doing in this regard his entire professional career.
One of the biggest eye-openers for me in this disaster, is the sickening sentimentality that people who have worked as federal prosecutors, in the FBI, in the so-called Department of Justice have for those institutions, I think someone who ever claims someone is "an institutionalist" within reach of my fist is going to feel it in their teeth. It has to be willful blindness of the kind that Mueller had to have practiced to be friends with William Barr. When former prosecutors on MSNBC express their disappointment in their former colleagues, they choose to be blind to the real character of people like James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, William Barr and countless others. Not just Republicans either, a number of them have either been Democrats or of unknown party affiliation. That those are the very same people who have set up Robert Mueller in similar terms makes me all the more skeptical of his actual character. I'm about out of patience with St. Robert Mueller, I'm beginning to think the dragons he slays are more likely on the scale of geckos than Gekkos.
I strongly suspect that once before the House Judiciary Committee, Robert Mueller will hold himself above the level of disclosure that will be necessary to move us towards safety. I expect him to be more like a marble statue of justice, than a professional administering it. The longer he is silent, allowing his buddy Barr to shape the narrative that fits on FOX, the longer he participates in letting Trump and his crime family get away with this and going on to do worse. I'm fed up with him in a way that is tasting a lot like it was when I'd had enough of James Comey's posing and posturing.
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The habit of media and insider babble sets up the legal arm of the federal government, the courts, and that overlap between the judicial and executive branch that is the bizarre and often bad Department of Justice as being above the vulgarity of politics, as higher than the Congress, of which the House is actually, set up as the most democratic part of the government. That is the biggest load of crap there is. I have been researching the history of attempts by Congress and legislatures to get the corrupting influence of money out of our politics and the long and disgusting history of the least democratic part of the government, the Supreme Court in destroying those efforts to clean big money and the influence of the billionaires and millionaires to control the government for their own benefit. That history, alone, should shatter that absurd hierarchy of repute. There have been corrupt Houses, we just had one under Paul Ryan, the Senate has always been far more prone to being a corrupt and anti-democratic through its anti-democratic constitution. The presidency is more characterized by incompetence when it wasn't characterized by corruption. But none of them have done more to produce the disaster we are in than the Supreme Court.
Friday, May 3, 2019
Thursday, May 2, 2019
Literally The Stupidest Idea Ever Pushed Within Academia
No, I didn't listen to Daniel Dennett's TED Talk "The Illusion of Consciousness," which you sent me. I've spent too much time on the idiocy of Daniel Dennett and Paul and Pat Churchland and other idiots whose emotional attachment to materialism and whose university philosophy dept. salaries depend on them holding to such idiocy as the idea that consciousness is an illusory epiphenomenon of molecules arranging and rearranging in brains. Their every articulation of their philosophy is dependent on their denied assumption of consciousness, their own and that of their students and audiences. ,
Eliminative materialism is, literally, the stupidest idea to have ever been pushed within academia. Literally. And I say that with Jordan Peterson running around, these days.
The idiocy of that philosophical dung heap is most easily shown by pointing out the fact that illusion is a state of consciousness, as is every single thing they build their paper castles out of. Any professional philosopher who could hold that consciousness is an illusion has proven only one thing, materialism is an illusory state of consciousness that leads to the ultimate in intellectual decadence as personified in Daniel Dennett, Paul and Patricia Churchland and the current field of English language philosophy, at least in so far as that philosophy is based in the ideology of materialism. Anyone who can think is entirely justified in ignoring their bull shit and thinking less of any philosophy department that maintains them on salary. TED, too.
You know, asking me if I listened to Dennett and wanting me to be convinced by it all depended on you caring about my consciousness. Though I suspect I just told you something you hadn't thought of. Daniel Dennett isn't so much a meat head as a puzzlewit.
Eliminative materialism is, literally, the stupidest idea to have ever been pushed within academia. Literally. And I say that with Jordan Peterson running around, these days.
The idiocy of that philosophical dung heap is most easily shown by pointing out the fact that illusion is a state of consciousness, as is every single thing they build their paper castles out of. Any professional philosopher who could hold that consciousness is an illusion has proven only one thing, materialism is an illusory state of consciousness that leads to the ultimate in intellectual decadence as personified in Daniel Dennett, Paul and Patricia Churchland and the current field of English language philosophy, at least in so far as that philosophy is based in the ideology of materialism. Anyone who can think is entirely justified in ignoring their bull shit and thinking less of any philosophy department that maintains them on salary. TED, too.
You know, asking me if I listened to Dennett and wanting me to be convinced by it all depended on you caring about my consciousness. Though I suspect I just told you something you hadn't thought of. Daniel Dennett isn't so much a meat head as a puzzlewit.
Hate Mail - Cut The Crap, Precious
I absolutely demand my right as a gay man to call Lindsay Graham "Princess" on the solid ground that it would piss off the little faggot fascist. I claim a cultural right to do so as an old gay man who hates that little faggot fascist with the best of causes, his hypocrisy as a life-long and active faggot while denying it as a Republican-fascist.
I claim the same right to point out the whoring of the media, the legal profession and other such venues of elite prostitution. If any actual whores want to bring that up, I'll listen to them and take their objections, advisedly. As a member of the middle-upper class (I know who you are) who will never know a prostitute except as a john, unless you or you loved ones have had your bodies rented for money, you have no standing to make that objection. Graham is a whore, as well but I agree putting him in the same category as people exploited and destroyed by the sex industry would be going too far. Everything about Graham's whoring is far more morally degenerate than that trade. And the same could be said of every single Republican in the House and Senate right now.
I claim the same right to point out the whoring of the media, the legal profession and other such venues of elite prostitution. If any actual whores want to bring that up, I'll listen to them and take their objections, advisedly. As a member of the middle-upper class (I know who you are) who will never know a prostitute except as a john, unless you or you loved ones have had your bodies rented for money, you have no standing to make that objection. Graham is a whore, as well but I agree putting him in the same category as people exploited and destroyed by the sex industry would be going too far. Everything about Graham's whoring is far more morally degenerate than that trade. And the same could be said of every single Republican in the House and Senate right now.
Inequality That Favors You Will Eventually Enslave You
People may think it's over the top when I call the Republican Party the Republican-fascist Party but yesterday the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee and House Judiciary Committees proved that that is exactly what the Republican Party is. And we know that because of their tacit approval of one of the most extraordinary things that William Barr said during his appearance at the Senate committee
"The point I was trying to make earlier is that, in the situation of the President, who has constitutional authority to supervise proceedings, if in fact a proceeding was not well founded, if it was a groundless proceeding, if it was based on false allegations, the President does not have to sit there, constitutionally, and allow it to run its course, the President could terminate that proceeding, and it would not be a corrupt intent, because he was being falsely accused."
That is an articulation of the power of absolute dictatorship, an absolute dictator is one who is answerable to no one and no one has the power to restrain or remove. Any president would have the power to commit any act and because they believe they have committed no crime, they could end any investigation into it - keep in mind how dependent the Congress is and has been on investigations conducted by the FBI and independent investigators who, under the U. S. Constitution are part of the executive branch. That has been true in every significant investigation into crimes committed in the executive branch that I can recall.
And William Barr made that declaration of Republican-fascism it was with the full knowledge that an American President had given any future one such as Trump all the excuse he needed to do just what he wants to do in this infamous exchange Richard Nixon had with David Frost
Frost: “Would you say that there are certain situations … where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation and do something illegal?”
Nixon: “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
Frost: “By definition.”
Nixon: “Exactly, exactly. If the president … approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president’s decision … enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise, they’re in an impossible situation.”
And, apparently, it's such a president who decides which situations are those "certain situations," and "impossible situations." That was something an elected Republican President said after he had been forced to resign in the one and only instance when Congressional action, or its possibility, has done that in our history.
Nixon's presumption is one which we can see the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee certainly are willing to extend to presidents of their own party because of their behavior in regard to the flagrant lawbreaking of Trump and other Republican presidents before him. But, as in the case of the gap between the Lindsay Graham of the 1990s who was ready to impeach Bill Clinton over him lying about his sex life, Lindsay Graham has slavishly become the tool of Donald Trump. That before it was clear Trump would become president Graham was predicting disaster if Trump were elected only proves how craven the Republicans in Congress are, even those who, formerly, wanted to pose as men and women of principle who believed in a nation of laws and not men.
That was all pose. They never meant it. That is made clear by their caving to Trump's gangster regime. They are every suck up for every bully and gangster you've ever seen in life and in the movies. That is a guarantee among the devotees of inequality.
I also know that some people think I'm hard on the Founders - well, someone has to be. But this is one case when the unitary executive fascists that the Ivys and Ivy equivalents have defecated over democracy are obviously not originalists because if there's one thing the Founders didn't do, it was give the United States an absolute monarchy, though they gave us a system which was bound to devolve into one if allowed to develop in that way. And ours has. At least it has when it is the list of Republican criminals I gave here yesterday, Nixon through Trump, every one of them has committed impeachable crimes except Ford and what he did in pardoning Nixon was probably the most dangerous single act any of them ever took. If Nixon had been convicted and imprisoned for his crimes, the crimes of the Reagan and Bush I administrations and the Bush II and Trump regimes would almost certainly have been fewer and less serious than they were.
A couple of days ago I mentioned that while they were in the Fuhrer Bunker in the final days of World War II Goebbels read Hitler from Carlyle's biography of Fredrich the Great to encourage him to fight to the end. It may be a little known in the United States that Hitler took that 18th century monarch as an inspiration for his absolute dictatorship.
The Founders certainly knew of him and other such monarchs, it was the predominant form of government in every country they knew, including the one whose control of the 13 colonies they were throwing off. Though some of them, like Hamilton, were warm to some level of monarchical rule, they ultimately rejected it.
An absolute monarch is an absolute dictator, one of the things that the Founders knew in a relatively milder form in George III and they knew they didn't want to recreate that in the United States. But they didn't want egalitarian democracy, either. All being rich, aristocratic men, slave owners and financiers, merchants, they wanted the benefits of liberty for themselves unimpeded by a king who might impinge on what they wanted to do. They wanted inequality that favored them. Especially the slave owners among them, they wanted to avoid the rising idea that all men being created equal with God-endowed rights included those they wanted to enslave ever endangering the slavery that made them rich. That is the reason that the very institutions that imposed Trump on us, as it did Bush II before, the electoral college, the anti-democratic inequality of the Senate, was able to overcome the power of the popular vote.
The Republican-fascist legal establishment of which William Barr is certainly a member, as is Rod Rosenstein, the Republican members of both Congressional Judiciary Committees, favor the kind of inequality that the Founders favored for themselves, they clearly despise every attempt at equality for Black People, for Women, for People of Color, certainly, most of all and in every age, members of the economic underclass. It is their entire reason for what they do.
Now, the seeds of that self-interested inequality embedded in the Constitution have come to fruition and we find that the very freedoms and liberties and advantages that the rich gave themselves are coming back to enslave us all. It is no coincidence of history that the last two Republican presidents have been the result of Constitutional provisions slave owners put there to favor them. Now it is resulting in fascistic powers being asserted by the Attorney General confirmed by the Republican Senate. What William Barr said to no objection by Republicans gives away their game. A president who can do what he claims he can is an absolute despot. No one with genuine despotic tendencies cares about whether or not what they do is wrong, if they did they wouldn't have despotic tendencies, they don't care if what they do is wrong. If they are the ones who get to decide if an investigation into them is legitimate, Barr would give exactly the worst kind of person the most power. And it is clear that the Republicans who don't repudiate what he said are perfectly willing to do that in the person of Donald Trump.
Wednesday, May 1, 2019
A Gay Man Of A Certain Age Shows His Age By Being Incorrect
It's just as well I'm not on the Senate Judiciary Committee because after Lindsay Graham did his patented outrage act after the most wonderful and truthful grilling of Barr by the most Honorable Mazie Hirono I think I'd have said, "Come off it, Princess, you're not impressing anyone."
Lindsay is the Republican-fascist's drama queen, he's done it on three occasions, his arranged setting off of Alito's wife, his rescuing Kavanaugh from the truth told by the heroic Dr. Blasey-Ford and, now, to pull William Barr's ample fat out of the fire before it ignites and burns down the whole Republican-fascist party. Lindsay Graham is on that long list of Republicans I'd dearly love to see in orange and leg chains being walked before the cameras.
Lindsay is the Republican-fascist's drama queen, he's done it on three occasions, his arranged setting off of Alito's wife, his rescuing Kavanaugh from the truth told by the heroic Dr. Blasey-Ford and, now, to pull William Barr's ample fat out of the fire before it ignites and burns down the whole Republican-fascist party. Lindsay Graham is on that long list of Republicans I'd dearly love to see in orange and leg chains being walked before the cameras.
Phil Points Out Why Corbyn Is An Idiot
I had to take a break from Barr's lying and the frustration that the Senate Judiciary Committee is at the best of times - this is about the worst of times, there.
The adoration of Jeremy Corbyn among the play-lefty types in the United States is a sign of their stupidity and immaturity. The idea that someone who is this much of a counter-productive idiot is someone the left will succeed with is an exercise in complete lefty lunacy. Because he's supposedly the leftist with the mostest and that's the reason to support him (if you think I'm kidding, go listen to Majority Report for a while) all of his duplicity and hypocrisy and incompetence and failure is supposed to be OK. I hope, hope against all reason that Jeremy Corbyn will be the last straw that breaks the hundred fifty or so year delusion that there is anything for the left in the authentic and formerly effective American liberal tradition in Marxism or Fabianism.
See Also:
By chance, going to check that last piece at the NPR website, they have this picture of the esteemed actor Lauren Bacall with Sinatra in 1957, the same year Bogart died from lung cancer. Looking at it, I can't help but remember reading that when Bogart started becoming aware of the dangers of smoking, he switched from Chesterfields to filters. I wonder if the stylish cigarette holder was adopted for that reason.
Remember, this is the same woman who appeared in that ad I posted the other day. I don't have the date but as Bogey died in January, chances are it was after he died.
I will give Lauren Bacall this, ever much later, when she was in her 80s, she gave a very frank, horrible account of Humphrey Bogart's last act, his terrible death from smoking induced cancer, the very thing that had been so much a part of his celebrity and hers, something they'd made a lot of money out of. I suspect the images in the movies, Bacall and Bogart lighting up has a lot more impact on peoples' behavior than the anti-smoking ads of a few years later. I thought I remembered some of those featuring her or him, but I can't find those online. I can find dozens and dozens of movie clips of them smoking together at the direction of the director, perhaps the writers and producers, too.
I haven't watched TV since the high-definition switch was made, so I don't know. Do they even have on anti-smoking ads anymore? I'm sure the smoking scenes are still aired, regularly.
Update: Oh, yeah, and I should mention the drinks they've got, too.
Remember, this is the same woman who appeared in that ad I posted the other day. I don't have the date but as Bogey died in January, chances are it was after he died.
I will give Lauren Bacall this, ever much later, when she was in her 80s, she gave a very frank, horrible account of Humphrey Bogart's last act, his terrible death from smoking induced cancer, the very thing that had been so much a part of his celebrity and hers, something they'd made a lot of money out of. I suspect the images in the movies, Bacall and Bogart lighting up has a lot more impact on peoples' behavior than the anti-smoking ads of a few years later. I thought I remembered some of those featuring her or him, but I can't find those online. I can find dozens and dozens of movie clips of them smoking together at the direction of the director, perhaps the writers and producers, too.
I haven't watched TV since the high-definition switch was made, so I don't know. Do they even have on anti-smoking ads anymore? I'm sure the smoking scenes are still aired, regularly.
Update: Oh, yeah, and I should mention the drinks they've got, too.
Defund And Kill NPR
OK, I had to cool down before typing this one. As I decided to type this out NPR's Morning Edition had on two female talking heads whose names don't matter, even before we've heard from Mueller or the House committees have seen the relevant evidence, spouting the "time to move on" "dragging this out will cost Democrats" lines, making NPR an active part of the cover-up for Putin regime corruption of our election. NPR is repeating that shit taken right out of the mouths of the likes of Lindsay Graham without challenge. NPR is good at that, I'll grant you, getting and repeating the current line coming from the likes of Lindsay Graham.
NPR, the stated reason I told my local public station that I wouldn't donate to them, anymore, is an always reliable outlet of the current Republican talking points, it should be defunded and killed, I told my local station that when they started using the Trump budget cuts to public broadcasting to rally their listeners. "Public" radio in the United States is less than useless, it is a force for corruption. Not that I'd advocate something like Pacifica and the likes of Democracy Now! or The Young Turks as an alternative, they're just pushing the same kind of enablement from a slightly different angle.
Cutting all government funding for NPR is about the only thing I agree with the Trump regime and the late John McCain on but I don't agree with them for the reason they wanted to do it. I'm for it because NPR is a Republican whore house.
NPR, the stated reason I told my local public station that I wouldn't donate to them, anymore, is an always reliable outlet of the current Republican talking points, it should be defunded and killed, I told my local station that when they started using the Trump budget cuts to public broadcasting to rally their listeners. "Public" radio in the United States is less than useless, it is a force for corruption. Not that I'd advocate something like Pacifica and the likes of Democracy Now! or The Young Turks as an alternative, they're just pushing the same kind of enablement from a slightly different angle.
Cutting all government funding for NPR is about the only thing I agree with the Trump regime and the late John McCain on but I don't agree with them for the reason they wanted to do it. I'm for it because NPR is a Republican whore house.
We've Got To Take High Level Law Enforcement Out Of The Hands Of Republicans
I believe I'm right that the FBI has never had a director who wasn't a Republican. I've looked and other than Andrew McCabe, who may or may not be a Republican, every other one seems to have been. I just thought I'd lead with that. That I couldn't find out what party Andrew McCabe belongs to may speak to his ethical superiority in removing his personal political identity out of his work, of all of the figures from within the Department of Justice during the Trump era, he's the only one I can muster respect for.
I doubt that if Robert Mueller had been reporting on the crimes of a Democratic President he would have done his Sphinx act in the face of Barr's cover-up of his report into seriously harmful and dangerous criminal acts by a president and his campaign mixed up into the Putin regime's corruption of an American election, I doubt if Barr hadn't been one of his long time Republican colleagues that he would have held back for MORE THAN A FRIGGIN' MONTH, he wouldn't have if another, especially a Democratic Attorney General, misrepresented what he had found in his investigation.
In thinking about the leaked letter he sent to Barr A FRIGGIN' MONTH AGO! complaining that he was misrepresenting the Mueller Report, I can't believe that Robert Mueller would have acted so weakly if Barr was not one of his Republican colleagues of long standing, reportedly a (maybe former) personal friend. How anyone who values equal justice before the law could have been friends with Barr after his role in the George H. W. Bush cover-up pardons, A FRIGGIN' LAW MAN, FOR PETE'S SAKE, is something I don't understand. I've broken with people over far smaller points of morality.
As this drags on the repeated, rote assertions as to the professional excellence and sterling character of Robert Mueller ring increasingly dull. I will point out that until a couple of weeks ago, a lot of those people issuing those encomia were lauding Rod Rosenstein, someone who I had figured for a sleaze all along. Many of them gave us assurances that William Barr's professionalism and devotion to the Department of Justice would keep him from being a lump of crap.
The excuse that is being given that Mueller is currently an employee of the Department of Justice is something that Mueller could fix with a resignation letter. I wonder why someone who feels the way he claims to about the handling of what might be the most important work he's ever done figures that the Trump DoJ is going to be moved by anything but the House taking decisive action, decisive action that is awaiting the testimony of Robert Mueller.
I'm not impressed with Robert Mueller's pose of professional restraint, it has already only aided the Trump cover-up for one crucial month, dragging it out until May 23rd will only help the Trump cover-up more. I would expect that the Honorable Jerrold Nadler had reasons for setting that date for Mueller's testimony, I wonder if that date didn't have something to do with Mueller's schedule and not one set by Nadler. The longer this cover-up goes on the more it helps Trump run out the clock. If there is a more subtle plan in this that ends up with Trump and Barr and the rest of these criminals and sleazes indicted and, hopefully, convicted, I don't see any sign of that. I trust Congressman Nadler, certainly to the extent that he can control things, I am sure there are things he can't control in this. I'm not so sure I trust Robert Mueller's judgement, his reported friendship with the always sleazy cover-up master William Barr and his party membership as a Republican in 2019 are enough to arouse my skepticism.
I think one of the things we need to do is force Democratic presidential candidates to promise to not appoint another Republican to high positions in law enforcement. The character of that party, the criminality of the Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, administrations, the Bush II regime and now, the most florid corruption of the Trump regime (not to mention Republicans in the Congress) should be enough to impeach the ethical character and judgement of anyone who would retain membership in it. That's especially true of those who are legal professionals. William Barr who probably adds treasonous inclinations to the kind of corruption that John Mitchell practiced, should be the poster boy of that brand.
Barack Obama has reportedly said that James Comey to head the FBI was the worst appointment he made, it's one of those rare occasions I'd agree with him. Certainly one of Bill Clinton's worst was Louis Freeh as the head of the FBI, I remember the lobbying for them from the media and the DC insider class. The next Democratic President should take those two instances of Democratic presidents being suckered like that to heart and find a dependable professional who isn't part of the indigenous criminal class that the Republican Party 2019 is. No more Republican FBI directors, they've held that office way too long, already.
I doubt that if Robert Mueller had been reporting on the crimes of a Democratic President he would have done his Sphinx act in the face of Barr's cover-up of his report into seriously harmful and dangerous criminal acts by a president and his campaign mixed up into the Putin regime's corruption of an American election, I doubt if Barr hadn't been one of his long time Republican colleagues that he would have held back for MORE THAN A FRIGGIN' MONTH, he wouldn't have if another, especially a Democratic Attorney General, misrepresented what he had found in his investigation.
In thinking about the leaked letter he sent to Barr A FRIGGIN' MONTH AGO! complaining that he was misrepresenting the Mueller Report, I can't believe that Robert Mueller would have acted so weakly if Barr was not one of his Republican colleagues of long standing, reportedly a (maybe former) personal friend. How anyone who values equal justice before the law could have been friends with Barr after his role in the George H. W. Bush cover-up pardons, A FRIGGIN' LAW MAN, FOR PETE'S SAKE, is something I don't understand. I've broken with people over far smaller points of morality.
As this drags on the repeated, rote assertions as to the professional excellence and sterling character of Robert Mueller ring increasingly dull. I will point out that until a couple of weeks ago, a lot of those people issuing those encomia were lauding Rod Rosenstein, someone who I had figured for a sleaze all along. Many of them gave us assurances that William Barr's professionalism and devotion to the Department of Justice would keep him from being a lump of crap.
The excuse that is being given that Mueller is currently an employee of the Department of Justice is something that Mueller could fix with a resignation letter. I wonder why someone who feels the way he claims to about the handling of what might be the most important work he's ever done figures that the Trump DoJ is going to be moved by anything but the House taking decisive action, decisive action that is awaiting the testimony of Robert Mueller.
I'm not impressed with Robert Mueller's pose of professional restraint, it has already only aided the Trump cover-up for one crucial month, dragging it out until May 23rd will only help the Trump cover-up more. I would expect that the Honorable Jerrold Nadler had reasons for setting that date for Mueller's testimony, I wonder if that date didn't have something to do with Mueller's schedule and not one set by Nadler. The longer this cover-up goes on the more it helps Trump run out the clock. If there is a more subtle plan in this that ends up with Trump and Barr and the rest of these criminals and sleazes indicted and, hopefully, convicted, I don't see any sign of that. I trust Congressman Nadler, certainly to the extent that he can control things, I am sure there are things he can't control in this. I'm not so sure I trust Robert Mueller's judgement, his reported friendship with the always sleazy cover-up master William Barr and his party membership as a Republican in 2019 are enough to arouse my skepticism.
I think one of the things we need to do is force Democratic presidential candidates to promise to not appoint another Republican to high positions in law enforcement. The character of that party, the criminality of the Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, administrations, the Bush II regime and now, the most florid corruption of the Trump regime (not to mention Republicans in the Congress) should be enough to impeach the ethical character and judgement of anyone who would retain membership in it. That's especially true of those who are legal professionals. William Barr who probably adds treasonous inclinations to the kind of corruption that John Mitchell practiced, should be the poster boy of that brand.
Barack Obama has reportedly said that James Comey to head the FBI was the worst appointment he made, it's one of those rare occasions I'd agree with him. Certainly one of Bill Clinton's worst was Louis Freeh as the head of the FBI, I remember the lobbying for them from the media and the DC insider class. The next Democratic President should take those two instances of Democratic presidents being suckered like that to heart and find a dependable professional who isn't part of the indigenous criminal class that the Republican Party 2019 is. No more Republican FBI directors, they've held that office way too long, already.
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
More From "Firewater"
Today, we seem to be short of good scouts. Many of the artists don't seem to realize their role: to protect us, to go out as a scout to warn us what is coming. If the artists imagine only violence and sex, we cannot complain if we live in a very violent and pornographic society. If, in all our stories, in our movies and television shows, we always imagine alcohol as a central part of our social structure, we cannot complain if everyone around us is drunk. This is what we have imagined for the people. These are the stories we've given them to live with.
However, we can be thankful that there are some artists out there who are scouts,who give us stories of goodness to live by, scouts who live without alcohol, who show us a path to follow. Buffy St. Marie speaks about how she doesn't use drugs or alcohol; Ricard Wagamese is proud of his sobriety and sanity. In The Reason You Walk , Wab Kinew writes of how both he and his father left self-destructive behaiviours behind choosing instead to live without alcohol. Tracey Lindberg, author of Birdie, and Richard Van Camp, author of The Lesser Blessed, share their words of abstinence with us in letters near the end of this story. [You should read the book.]
There are starting to be more and more artists. If these and other artists go out, scout for us, and imagine a future without intoxication, give us art and stories that are more than about sex, drugs, and violence, stories where ethics and morals and values are more important than immediate gratification and making money, perhaps the rest of our people can and will begin to move in that direction.
I know enough about the current culture of the arts to know that in any group of artists of any size any expression of the responsibility of artists to anyone but themselves will be met with derisive and cynical mockery and the declaration that artists have no responsibility to anyone but themselves.
That is certainly a consequence of the culture of materialistic scientism I brought up yesterday, which, though it started in the 18th century and grew into dominance among intellectuals in the 19th century (realism) found its most developed form as an artistic expression in 20th century modernism. And as a direct consequence of rejecting morality or even social responsibility during the rise of electronic media, art increasingly became no different from the culture of business, advertising and maximizing profits by appealing to the worst weaknesses in the buying public. The substitute for morality in secular republics, the law, was hardly unaffected by that same program of amorality. I've pointed out any number of times that his own intimate friend and secretary, the lawyer and Nuremberg judge Francis Biddle described that most unlikely of legal heroes. anti-saint of free speech, free press, Oliver Wendell Holmes' enthusiastically adopted view of life was in line with what George Orwell described in the passage I posted below.
But many or even most artists isn't all artists, some are not self-seeking sociopaths. I generally find that's most true of those from communities and of identities who are not advantaged. Harold Johnson is entirely right, those efforts by writers and artists such as the ones he named to present people with the material they need to imagine themselves as happy and sober, happier, able to respect themselves, able to be respected and loved without needing to consider conditions that anyone who gets drunk will inevitably require being overcome, need to be promoted and encouraged. When I read his emphasis on People needing to be able to imagine themselves in new ways, better ways in order to become better, he is absolutely right. They've been encouraged to imagine themselves as violent drunks, as sexually violent, domineering thugs by writers and directors and producers AND ACTORS WHO ACT THOSE ROLES. They've been encouraged to by celebrity endorsements and product placement and advertisements of sexy men and women. You're not going to get out of the results of that as long as peoples' imaginations are formed by those ubiquitous media images. Peoples' imaginations and actions are formed from those images they take in. Anyone who denies that is either too stupid or crooked to take seriously.
I'm going to post some of those authors, starting here with the late Richard Wagamese
More about him, here.
Inevitably, Medicine Walk will also highlight Wagamese’s lifelong battles with post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism, both of which figure prominently in the book. In March 2010, Wagamese was arrested and charged with three counts of driving under the influence of alcohol. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced in Kamloops provincial court on Nov. 21, 2011, to six months of house arrest, 50 hours of community service, and a 10-year driving ban.
Wagamese says he was ready to tackle alcoholism in Medicine Walk because he’s moved past it: “I’ve been sober for multiple years and I’ve been beyond PTSD issues for multiple years, so now I have clarity.” If a work of fiction puts his personal story under the microscope, so be it. “I can actually offer my sons and offer my friends and offer anybody clarity,” says Wagamese. “I couldn’t do that before.”
That's the best thing about doing this kind of thing, I find new things to read that I haven't read yet.
However, we can be thankful that there are some artists out there who are scouts,who give us stories of goodness to live by, scouts who live without alcohol, who show us a path to follow. Buffy St. Marie speaks about how she doesn't use drugs or alcohol; Ricard Wagamese is proud of his sobriety and sanity. In The Reason You Walk , Wab Kinew writes of how both he and his father left self-destructive behaiviours behind choosing instead to live without alcohol. Tracey Lindberg, author of Birdie, and Richard Van Camp, author of The Lesser Blessed, share their words of abstinence with us in letters near the end of this story. [You should read the book.]
There are starting to be more and more artists. If these and other artists go out, scout for us, and imagine a future without intoxication, give us art and stories that are more than about sex, drugs, and violence, stories where ethics and morals and values are more important than immediate gratification and making money, perhaps the rest of our people can and will begin to move in that direction.
I know enough about the current culture of the arts to know that in any group of artists of any size any expression of the responsibility of artists to anyone but themselves will be met with derisive and cynical mockery and the declaration that artists have no responsibility to anyone but themselves.
That is certainly a consequence of the culture of materialistic scientism I brought up yesterday, which, though it started in the 18th century and grew into dominance among intellectuals in the 19th century (realism) found its most developed form as an artistic expression in 20th century modernism. And as a direct consequence of rejecting morality or even social responsibility during the rise of electronic media, art increasingly became no different from the culture of business, advertising and maximizing profits by appealing to the worst weaknesses in the buying public. The substitute for morality in secular republics, the law, was hardly unaffected by that same program of amorality. I've pointed out any number of times that his own intimate friend and secretary, the lawyer and Nuremberg judge Francis Biddle described that most unlikely of legal heroes. anti-saint of free speech, free press, Oliver Wendell Holmes' enthusiastically adopted view of life was in line with what George Orwell described in the passage I posted below.
But many or even most artists isn't all artists, some are not self-seeking sociopaths. I generally find that's most true of those from communities and of identities who are not advantaged. Harold Johnson is entirely right, those efforts by writers and artists such as the ones he named to present people with the material they need to imagine themselves as happy and sober, happier, able to respect themselves, able to be respected and loved without needing to consider conditions that anyone who gets drunk will inevitably require being overcome, need to be promoted and encouraged. When I read his emphasis on People needing to be able to imagine themselves in new ways, better ways in order to become better, he is absolutely right. They've been encouraged to imagine themselves as violent drunks, as sexually violent, domineering thugs by writers and directors and producers AND ACTORS WHO ACT THOSE ROLES. They've been encouraged to by celebrity endorsements and product placement and advertisements of sexy men and women. You're not going to get out of the results of that as long as peoples' imaginations are formed by those ubiquitous media images. Peoples' imaginations and actions are formed from those images they take in. Anyone who denies that is either too stupid or crooked to take seriously.
I'm going to post some of those authors, starting here with the late Richard Wagamese
More about him, here.
Inevitably, Medicine Walk will also highlight Wagamese’s lifelong battles with post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism, both of which figure prominently in the book. In March 2010, Wagamese was arrested and charged with three counts of driving under the influence of alcohol. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced in Kamloops provincial court on Nov. 21, 2011, to six months of house arrest, 50 hours of community service, and a 10-year driving ban.
Wagamese says he was ready to tackle alcoholism in Medicine Walk because he’s moved past it: “I’ve been sober for multiple years and I’ve been beyond PTSD issues for multiple years, so now I have clarity.” If a work of fiction puts his personal story under the microscope, so be it. “I can actually offer my sons and offer my friends and offer anybody clarity,” says Wagamese. “I couldn’t do that before.”
That's the best thing about doing this kind of thing, I find new things to read that I haven't read yet.
Footnote On This Morning's Post
I do, actually, think there should be an almost complete right to publish the truth in the mass media, the only restriction on that that comes to mind is when publishing the truth could lead to the deaths of, for example, those who inform on criminals, those who inform on the activities of foreign enemies of democracies.
What I think should be punishable and bannable is the publication of lies, malign misinformation, hate speech, incitement to violence. I don't think there is any real right to lie or to incite hate or violence. It is insane to think anyone has a right to do that which supersedes the right of The People to the truth they need to govern themselves, that is superior to the lives of those who will be discriminated against, injured and killed by the "free speech - free press" of liars and hate mongers. The idea that people are too stupid to regulate those, as claimed by lawyers and judges and "justices" who decide far less obvious questions all the time would mean that they are unqualified to hold the jobs they do and should be replaced by those who aren't so stupid or dishonest.
Also, if gunmen where going into law schools and law faculty lounges, courts and shooting up judges, and "justices" I think they would change their dogmas and doctrines given down from Supreme Court benches, those would change, pronto. If the prospect of hanging clears the mind remarkably, I suspect a Republican-fascists in robes staring down an AK-15 might have an even more immediate effect. I don't think the Supreme Court should be allowed security which they deny to citizens attending their Synagogue, Mosque or Church, schools, concerts, etc. Neither do the other branches of government that leave us all open to being murdered by any demented degenerate with one of the guns they allow them to get.
What I think should be punishable and bannable is the publication of lies, malign misinformation, hate speech, incitement to violence. I don't think there is any real right to lie or to incite hate or violence. It is insane to think anyone has a right to do that which supersedes the right of The People to the truth they need to govern themselves, that is superior to the lives of those who will be discriminated against, injured and killed by the "free speech - free press" of liars and hate mongers. The idea that people are too stupid to regulate those, as claimed by lawyers and judges and "justices" who decide far less obvious questions all the time would mean that they are unqualified to hold the jobs they do and should be replaced by those who aren't so stupid or dishonest.
Also, if gunmen where going into law schools and law faculty lounges, courts and shooting up judges, and "justices" I think they would change their dogmas and doctrines given down from Supreme Court benches, those would change, pronto. If the prospect of hanging clears the mind remarkably, I suspect a Republican-fascists in robes staring down an AK-15 might have an even more immediate effect. I don't think the Supreme Court should be allowed security which they deny to citizens attending their Synagogue, Mosque or Church, schools, concerts, etc. Neither do the other branches of government that leave us all open to being murdered by any demented degenerate with one of the guns they allow them to get.
"what is now fashionable to call ‘realism’, meaning the doctrine that might is right"
Thinking about what Harold R. Johnson wrote about Orwell being an artist-scout for the rest of us, I remembered one of his most insightful essays I've read in which he contrasted the light fiction of the authors of the gentlemen thieves, Arsene Lupin and Raffles with the writer of more pathologically amoral, violent modern pulp fiction, James Hadley Chase.
It is a shame that that essay is so little known, I suspect because the great George Orwell, the citation of whom is so often welcomed as a great hero when he was criticizing dictators and other political figures was far less welcomed when he pointed out the role his own profession, writers, artists, had and have in producing depravity. It is remarkable how much of what he wrote more than 70 years ago, change a few names, clarifies exactly what we're seeing right before our eyes. Take this paragraph.
In borrowing from William Faulkner's Sanctuary, Chase only took the plot; the mental atmosphere of the two books is not similar. Chase really derives from other sources, and this particular bit of borrowing is only symbolic. What it symbolizes is the vulgarization of ideas which is constantly happening, and which probably happens faster in an age of print. Chase has been described as ‘Faulkner for the masses’, but it would be more accurate to describe him as Carlyle for the masses. He is a popular writer — there are many such in America, but they are still rarities in England — who has caught up with what is now fashionable to call ‘realism’, meaning the doctrine that might is right. The growth of ‘realism’ has been the great feature of the intellectual history of our own age. Why this should be so is a complicated question. The interconnexion between sadism, masochism, success-worship, power-worship, nationalism, and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate. To take merely the first example that comes to mind, I believe no one has ever pointed out the sadistic and masochistic element in Bernard Shaw's work, still less suggested that this probably has some connexion with Shaw's admiration for dictators. Fascism is often loosely equated with sadism, but nearly always by people who see nothing wrong in the most slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini, nor from the efficiency experts who preached ‘punch’, ‘drive’, ‘personality’ and ‘learn to be a Tiger man’ in the nineteen-twenties, nor from that older generation of intellectuals, Carlyle, Creasey [*] and the rest of them, who bowed down before German militarism.[**] All of them are worshipping power and successful cruelty. It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes. A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and ‘the end justifies the means’ often becomes, in effect, ‘the means justify themselves provided they are dirty enough’. This idea colours the outlook of all sympathizers with totalitarianism, and accounts, for instance, for the positive delight with which many English intellectuals greeted the Nazi-Soviet pact. It was a step only doubtfully useful to the U.S.S.R., but it was entirely unmoral, and for that reason to be admired; the explanations of it, which were numerous and self-contradictory, could come afterwards.
Change ink on paper to electronics, spoken words and pathological depravity spouted and committed by Hollywood beef cake, change a few names and you've got 2019 nailed spot on.
All of what Orwell describes is a product of the scientistic materialist culture. It's unfortunate that the habit of historians, social commentators, etc. to break down the history of culture into epochs does so much to blind people to the commonalities that unite a tradition that that division into ideological schools hides. 18th century "enlightenment" its scientism, its materialism, its secularism were largely retained through allegedly different epochs of romanticism, Victorianism, modernism, I think the uniting themes were a negation of moral responsibility or, in the case of some of the romantics, a modification and restriction of the range of moral responsibility. I think that secular, scientistic, materialistic strain of western culture was, before the respectable churches started to give way to scientism, countered by the remnants of earlier Christian morality. In the United States the abolition struggle grew out of the Quaker and Puritan traditions, not out of the "enlightenment" thinking of the Founders generation which proved to be entirely compatible and, in the case of someone like Jefferson, enthusiastic in its scientific justification of slavery. It is the increasing influence of scientistic materialism in the "realism" of the late 19th century that turned into modernism which, contrary to what so many a naive and ignorant liberal or lefty will think, was remarkably compatible and, in so many cases, enthusiastic about fascism, Nazism, and, as Orwell pointed out, its equivalent in Marxism.
The current fashion of American "free speech - free press" jurisprudence certainly found its origin in the Darwinist scientistic materialistic savagery of Oliver Wendell Holmes*** and his fellow jurists on the Supreme Court. That was what certainly influenced the largely Marxish when not overtly Marxist founders of the ACLU and so many other vintage institutions which have enabled our descent into fascism through their advocacy of "freedom" without regard to moral responsibilities or even consequences.
* I would guess he means the British military historian Edward Creasey and not the 20th century Brit scribbler of crime novels.
** Here is something I wrote a few years back about that man, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the area of Brittish intellectual "MORALITY!" of the 19th century, Thomas Carlyle, which showed that his attraction to the depravity of German militarism went both ways:
I think the role that British and other intellectuals played in creating the conditions that produced Nazism and fascism are too little known or considered. It is known that Thomas Carlyle and his "great man" theory of history, especially his biography of Fredrick the Great had a huge effect on Goebbels and Hitler. I recall reading somewhere that Goebbels was reading it to Hitler in the bunker as motivation to keep the war going. Carlyle's hatred of democracy was certainly influential in proto-Nazi German thinkers such as Nietzsche - though Nietzsche, understanding that both morality and materialism can't be true criticized Carlyle for both his idealism and his moral assertions. Carlyle, in his book on "Chartism" is a hodge podge of stuff, but among other things he contemplated was the possible "necessity" of exterminating the Irish. He also shared the typical British elite hatred of the poor, he favored enslaving the entire population of the underclass and was an opponent of abolishing slavery, in general.
*** Here's my archive of going into Holmes' depravity.
It is a shame that that essay is so little known, I suspect because the great George Orwell, the citation of whom is so often welcomed as a great hero when he was criticizing dictators and other political figures was far less welcomed when he pointed out the role his own profession, writers, artists, had and have in producing depravity. It is remarkable how much of what he wrote more than 70 years ago, change a few names, clarifies exactly what we're seeing right before our eyes. Take this paragraph.
In borrowing from William Faulkner's Sanctuary, Chase only took the plot; the mental atmosphere of the two books is not similar. Chase really derives from other sources, and this particular bit of borrowing is only symbolic. What it symbolizes is the vulgarization of ideas which is constantly happening, and which probably happens faster in an age of print. Chase has been described as ‘Faulkner for the masses’, but it would be more accurate to describe him as Carlyle for the masses. He is a popular writer — there are many such in America, but they are still rarities in England — who has caught up with what is now fashionable to call ‘realism’, meaning the doctrine that might is right. The growth of ‘realism’ has been the great feature of the intellectual history of our own age. Why this should be so is a complicated question. The interconnexion between sadism, masochism, success-worship, power-worship, nationalism, and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate. To take merely the first example that comes to mind, I believe no one has ever pointed out the sadistic and masochistic element in Bernard Shaw's work, still less suggested that this probably has some connexion with Shaw's admiration for dictators. Fascism is often loosely equated with sadism, but nearly always by people who see nothing wrong in the most slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini, nor from the efficiency experts who preached ‘punch’, ‘drive’, ‘personality’ and ‘learn to be a Tiger man’ in the nineteen-twenties, nor from that older generation of intellectuals, Carlyle, Creasey [*] and the rest of them, who bowed down before German militarism.[**] All of them are worshipping power and successful cruelty. It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes. A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and ‘the end justifies the means’ often becomes, in effect, ‘the means justify themselves provided they are dirty enough’. This idea colours the outlook of all sympathizers with totalitarianism, and accounts, for instance, for the positive delight with which many English intellectuals greeted the Nazi-Soviet pact. It was a step only doubtfully useful to the U.S.S.R., but it was entirely unmoral, and for that reason to be admired; the explanations of it, which were numerous and self-contradictory, could come afterwards.
Change ink on paper to electronics, spoken words and pathological depravity spouted and committed by Hollywood beef cake, change a few names and you've got 2019 nailed spot on.
All of what Orwell describes is a product of the scientistic materialist culture. It's unfortunate that the habit of historians, social commentators, etc. to break down the history of culture into epochs does so much to blind people to the commonalities that unite a tradition that that division into ideological schools hides. 18th century "enlightenment" its scientism, its materialism, its secularism were largely retained through allegedly different epochs of romanticism, Victorianism, modernism, I think the uniting themes were a negation of moral responsibility or, in the case of some of the romantics, a modification and restriction of the range of moral responsibility. I think that secular, scientistic, materialistic strain of western culture was, before the respectable churches started to give way to scientism, countered by the remnants of earlier Christian morality. In the United States the abolition struggle grew out of the Quaker and Puritan traditions, not out of the "enlightenment" thinking of the Founders generation which proved to be entirely compatible and, in the case of someone like Jefferson, enthusiastic in its scientific justification of slavery. It is the increasing influence of scientistic materialism in the "realism" of the late 19th century that turned into modernism which, contrary to what so many a naive and ignorant liberal or lefty will think, was remarkably compatible and, in so many cases, enthusiastic about fascism, Nazism, and, as Orwell pointed out, its equivalent in Marxism.
The current fashion of American "free speech - free press" jurisprudence certainly found its origin in the Darwinist scientistic materialistic savagery of Oliver Wendell Holmes*** and his fellow jurists on the Supreme Court. That was what certainly influenced the largely Marxish when not overtly Marxist founders of the ACLU and so many other vintage institutions which have enabled our descent into fascism through their advocacy of "freedom" without regard to moral responsibilities or even consequences.
* I would guess he means the British military historian Edward Creasey and not the 20th century Brit scribbler of crime novels.
** Here is something I wrote a few years back about that man, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the area of Brittish intellectual "MORALITY!" of the 19th century, Thomas Carlyle, which showed that his attraction to the depravity of German militarism went both ways:
I think the role that British and other intellectuals played in creating the conditions that produced Nazism and fascism are too little known or considered. It is known that Thomas Carlyle and his "great man" theory of history, especially his biography of Fredrick the Great had a huge effect on Goebbels and Hitler. I recall reading somewhere that Goebbels was reading it to Hitler in the bunker as motivation to keep the war going. Carlyle's hatred of democracy was certainly influential in proto-Nazi German thinkers such as Nietzsche - though Nietzsche, understanding that both morality and materialism can't be true criticized Carlyle for both his idealism and his moral assertions. Carlyle, in his book on "Chartism" is a hodge podge of stuff, but among other things he contemplated was the possible "necessity" of exterminating the Irish. He also shared the typical British elite hatred of the poor, he favored enslaving the entire population of the underclass and was an opponent of abolishing slavery, in general.
*** Here's my archive of going into Holmes' depravity.
Monday, April 29, 2019
Stupid Mail - The Village Voice Isn't What It Used To Be And It Never Was
A stupid person complains that the Village Voice couldn't possibly be a factor in pushing the lie I was talking about, the claim of the innocuous effects of media violence, bigotry, racism, sexism, etc. which is ubiquitous in movies, TV shows, etc. because a couple of years back it died the death of dead tree journalism and is in the process of dying off, altogether. You wonder if that's the rule for a media corporation (no doubt a corporate "person") why you can't declare all dead human criminals to be blameless in the roles they played in the crimes committed during their lifetimes.
The reason I mentioned The Village Voice this morning was, primarily, due to the long, long term presence of the late and awful. self-centered bore Nat Hentoff one of those media assholes who pushed every possible line of "free speech - free press" absolutism that he could. That was his brand. Hentoff, when he was very, very old and had repeated his habitual themes and memories over and over again for decades, got boring and expensive and got canned by The Village Voice and he took up the logical perch that his ideology prepared him for, at the Koch funded, fascist-libertarian Cato Institute.* I've despised Hentoff for decades, even before I singled him out in my first blog post. But he's hardly the only such figure in that pseudo-liberal-pseudo-lefty rag's history.
I know enough about the legendary Village Voice to know it's origins were far from admirable. Its founders, the dirty book writer Norman Mailer, the future adviser of Ed Koch, Dan Wolf and the psychologist - hack, Edwin Fancher, were hardly likely to lead to a viable future that was adequate, even by the standards of the later 1960s. It is a very New York City, male, very white male, very affluent or aspiring to be affluent, college credentialed style of liberalism. Perhaps that's why so much of its "free speech - free press" orthodoxy, it's one and only (and self interested) durable substitute for moral absolutes, is now so useful to the corporate fascist right and racist neo-Nazis.
This ancient, 1959 meet the press style interview of Ed Fancher will make you cringe, it shows that the very 50s style NYC "liberalism" was never going to lead to much that was good. I think it was mostly affluent people who never intended to go very far in changing in ways that they didn't feel entirely comfortable with. Before many years were out ol' Norman Mailer was battling against feminists, Ed Wolf was an adviser to the flagrantly racist Ed Koch and, well, you can hear where Fancher was coming from in that interview. I don't think he was, at that time, really very interested in much more than his neighborhood in that most parochial of American cities.
-------------------------
This piece from The Nation, a sort of long obituary for the Village Voice contained this interesting characterization of it.
The Voice was an original, but it wasn’t unprecedented. More than two centuries ago, French newspapers began printing a feuilleton—a supplement, or “leaf,” attached to political or business pages—that talked about the arts, literature, culture, fashion, and, of course, gossip, in a personal style. Later, especially in Vienna, the feuilleton became a form of journalism in which coverage of the arts and fashion was informed by politics, and vice versa.
It’s a little hard to imagine today, when the most linked-to piece on NYTimes.com might be a recap of Game of Thrones, but that kind of journalism was once frowned upon in America—or at least relegated to the supermarket tabs. Before World War II, there were the “little magazines,” aimed at a small, discerning class of serious readers. But there was nothing like the Voice, a pop tabloid that often gave the impression that it was being written at ground zero of the postwar cultural shift.
For anyone who might want a perspective on that style of journalism the V.V. practiced from one of the too little known heroes of journalism, here's a piece I wrote about Karl Krauss, someone who should be remembered in place of just about all of the celebrities of satire since then.
* The old Koch funded asshole, with his son, got scared right before he finally croaked and tried to sound the alarm about Trump's endangerment of the media and journalists. I like to think of it as him seeing his own flock of chickens coming home to roost.
Update: It's too stupid for me to care about what that ass posted at Duncan Black's boring blog. It's apparent that only the most voluntarily retarded of Black's ever dwindling rump of his former community is stupid enough to believe he characterizes what I wrote. And you can't fix that kind of will-based stupidity. No, I didn't even bother to look at the link, this time. I predict that the ever fewer number of adults who post comments there will gradually go elsewhere or die off. Black will drop it when it stops producing revenue for him, it's the only reason for it to still be actively updated.
The reason I mentioned The Village Voice this morning was, primarily, due to the long, long term presence of the late and awful. self-centered bore Nat Hentoff one of those media assholes who pushed every possible line of "free speech - free press" absolutism that he could. That was his brand. Hentoff, when he was very, very old and had repeated his habitual themes and memories over and over again for decades, got boring and expensive and got canned by The Village Voice and he took up the logical perch that his ideology prepared him for, at the Koch funded, fascist-libertarian Cato Institute.* I've despised Hentoff for decades, even before I singled him out in my first blog post. But he's hardly the only such figure in that pseudo-liberal-pseudo-lefty rag's history.
I know enough about the legendary Village Voice to know it's origins were far from admirable. Its founders, the dirty book writer Norman Mailer, the future adviser of Ed Koch, Dan Wolf and the psychologist - hack, Edwin Fancher, were hardly likely to lead to a viable future that was adequate, even by the standards of the later 1960s. It is a very New York City, male, very white male, very affluent or aspiring to be affluent, college credentialed style of liberalism. Perhaps that's why so much of its "free speech - free press" orthodoxy, it's one and only (and self interested) durable substitute for moral absolutes, is now so useful to the corporate fascist right and racist neo-Nazis.
This ancient, 1959 meet the press style interview of Ed Fancher will make you cringe, it shows that the very 50s style NYC "liberalism" was never going to lead to much that was good. I think it was mostly affluent people who never intended to go very far in changing in ways that they didn't feel entirely comfortable with. Before many years were out ol' Norman Mailer was battling against feminists, Ed Wolf was an adviser to the flagrantly racist Ed Koch and, well, you can hear where Fancher was coming from in that interview. I don't think he was, at that time, really very interested in much more than his neighborhood in that most parochial of American cities.
-------------------------
This piece from The Nation, a sort of long obituary for the Village Voice contained this interesting characterization of it.
The Voice was an original, but it wasn’t unprecedented. More than two centuries ago, French newspapers began printing a feuilleton—a supplement, or “leaf,” attached to political or business pages—that talked about the arts, literature, culture, fashion, and, of course, gossip, in a personal style. Later, especially in Vienna, the feuilleton became a form of journalism in which coverage of the arts and fashion was informed by politics, and vice versa.
It’s a little hard to imagine today, when the most linked-to piece on NYTimes.com might be a recap of Game of Thrones, but that kind of journalism was once frowned upon in America—or at least relegated to the supermarket tabs. Before World War II, there were the “little magazines,” aimed at a small, discerning class of serious readers. But there was nothing like the Voice, a pop tabloid that often gave the impression that it was being written at ground zero of the postwar cultural shift.
For anyone who might want a perspective on that style of journalism the V.V. practiced from one of the too little known heroes of journalism, here's a piece I wrote about Karl Krauss, someone who should be remembered in place of just about all of the celebrities of satire since then.
* The old Koch funded asshole, with his son, got scared right before he finally croaked and tried to sound the alarm about Trump's endangerment of the media and journalists. I like to think of it as him seeing his own flock of chickens coming home to roost.
Update: It's too stupid for me to care about what that ass posted at Duncan Black's boring blog. It's apparent that only the most voluntarily retarded of Black's ever dwindling rump of his former community is stupid enough to believe he characterizes what I wrote. And you can't fix that kind of will-based stupidity. No, I didn't even bother to look at the link, this time. I predict that the ever fewer number of adults who post comments there will gradually go elsewhere or die off. Black will drop it when it stops producing revenue for him, it's the only reason for it to still be actively updated.
Minds For Sale Advertising Minds For Sale
As I'm typing this with the radio going, NPR has a piece on about Franz von Suppé, it's apparently his 200th birthday today. The hook isn't his music which is kind of uninteresting because it was written to be popular in its time, light-opera, the equivalent of musicals and movie music. It being the ever more superficial NPR that's the hook they're using to take up air time with von Suppé, its use in cartoons and crappy movies, that is its industrial use.
It could probably have been the music of most other otherwise forgettable composers of light theater music so it being von Suppé is unimportant as is the music, itself. As are the cartoons and crap movies which are a commercial product though their persistence in the collective memory of so many millions of people means something. The movies and cartoons had that effect, information from them persists in the memories of those who watched them, though that information probably doesn't have much of an effect on how people see themselves and imagine themselves. Not all information taken in so casually has the same, innocuous, effect.
The Woody Allan movie Play It Again Sam is light entertainment, too, but less light and its theme deals with the movies' stronger effects in reality. The movie has a theme of how the Woody Allan character, "Allan" is influenced by his idea of admirable manliness, formed by watching Humphrey Bogart movies, and it has a decidedly mixed result in his relationships. I used to think Woody Allen movies were totally imaginary though his own life proved that wasn't necessarily the case. some of them are horrifically biographical.
I've often pointed out the double-game played by the entertainment media, that, when it is in their interest, defending the negative content, violence, violent sex, encouraging inequality, encouraging addiction, they claim that their product is entirely innocuous, that they have no effect on the behavior of those who watch movies, TV shows, play video games.
But the same people who claim their product has no effect on how people act make a lot of money by selling advertising time, product placement and other opportunities of putting other information in the very same movies and TV shows and media because they and the companies paying them know that their opportunistic claims of media having no effect is a convenient lie. Buying is a real life action, in real life, advertising has a very real life effect in motivating that action which is all important to business and to show business. Their lie which is backed up with pseudo-social-science, probably by those with credentials in the pay of the media industry or which is also conducted by people whose ideological preference is in line with that load of bullshit. Science, alleviated by convention from moral consideration, is very often for sale, it is one of the more lucrative possibilities in prostitution. Especially in the social sciences.
One influence of Humphrey Bogart in the movies that is more generally admitted, even by some social science, is that he was one of many, many Hollywood stars who were part of product placement whenever he lit up a cigarette, especially when he and Lauren Bacall sexily lit up together.
The tobacco industry's product placement campaign started about as soon as the commercial industry started and it continues right down till now. It wasn't only within the movies, themselves, though that is why there is so much smoking in the movies, the shared interest between the movie idustry and the tobacco industry had its most explicit expression in ads like this one:
I think that Bogart wasn't primarily associated with cigars but with cigarettes gives this ad even more evidentiary value in showing what a huge lie the claim that the movies don't have a strong effect on peoples' behavior is known by those who say it to be a lie. If they didn't have a high level of confidence that what people see in the movies will cause them to become addicted to their addictive products, they wouldn't spend so much money on that effort. They knew from well before the first movie was made that tobacco was addictive. Their campaign to produce addicts was as intentional as that of the Sacklers to create opioid addicts, even knowing something of the effect on the death rate that would have.
Yet the law, the Supreme Court, lower courts, the lawyers of the civil liberties industry (where they get their money would probably tell a very similar tale) and the quasi-journalistic flacks writing for everything from the right-wing tabloid sewer of journalism to the allegedly higher venues like the Village Voice repeat and repeat the lie that what people see and take in as entertainment is innocuous for purposes of responsibility to the world at large.
This is a long introduction to another excerpt from Harold R. Johnson's book, Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing My People (And Yours) about the responsibility that entertainment media has, but which they refuse to accept, for either getting people to choose to drink or to not drink. After a paragraph in which he outlines the practice among traditional hunter-gatherer communities to send out scouts to see where the band should go next, he says:
Today's society is much the same. We are constantly moving - we are advancing, becoming. Yet, many of our leaders don't seem to be leading. It seems that the politician looks at the polls and figures out in which direction the people are headed, and then runs out front and pretends to be leading.
I'm going to break in here and again to point out that a lot of where the people are going - where politicians are forced to go - is influenced by the same mass media discussed above.
I have no doubt that the real reason the United States can't address the mass shooting plague is the selling of violence and paranoia, the mythic West - Johnson addresses the impact of such racist mythology about First People in North America as one of the major components of alcoholism among his People - the Jim Crow conception of racism, hatred of Arabs, antisemtism, etc.
I would bet that in just about every case the almost always men who murder have been motivated in part by what they saw in movies, on TV shows, in video games. I would bet that a lot of the cops who murder Black People watch C.O.P.S. or other shows like that, I'll bet more than a few of them found Dirty Harry to be an inspiration. The effect that that same diet of Hollywood violence and racism and regional resentment has on the general population is certainly there.
And it probably accounts for a huge part of the descent into neo-fascism in the United States and abroad, perhaps more so than peoples' daily lives that might present them with the problems they're frustrated with and their reasons to vote for fascist strong men. It's no accident that Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are media creations. It would be interesting to see how many of those who become fascist strong men who rise to power came from the media, entertainment, the pro-wrestling equivalent of hate-talk radio and TV.
The thinkers have stopped talking to the people.[*] The thinkers in this society are the scientists and the academics. They tend to talk only to themselves, and have even created complex language that only they understand. The jargon created by each separate field of study has become so extreme that even a scientist or academic from a related field often cannot understand what is being said.
Breaking in again, what better example of that is there than the legal profession, in which the legal scholars and the elite members of high courts babble in language designed to not be understood by the lay public and which is often little more than an excuse for the highest reaches of that on Supreme Courts to produce injustice on behalf of the wealthy, on behalf of industrial and commercial interests, for those ideological positions that serve the interests of billionaires and millionaires, media corporations being a particularly good way to make a lot of money. And, then, in a program of intellectual incestuous inbreeding, take the language they come up with to serve the "personhood" of corporations, the "free speech" rights of those corporate persons they invented, the "equal rights" of money (in which dollars have already been magically turned into "speech") and other such legal slight of hand to give those very things as excuses for giving more freedom to plunder and harm in the language of such "civil liberty". All without any sense of responsibility for the consequences of their rulings. It's no wonder that politicians who, unlike the judges and "justices" have to be elected are cowards instead of leaders of people gulled and corrupted by that media relieved of any and all responsibility.
There was a time when even conservative Republicans voted for gun control - and courts, ever increasingly, have overturned such efforts at leading us to a less homicidal world, using the first two amendments of the Constitution. If such responsible Republicans run for office, they are turned, by the media and gun industry propaganda - often through the same media, into non-politicians through losing elections, they don't even win primaries. That effect has turned the Republicans from a conservative party into a fascist party. It was the media freed by the "First Amendment" crowd that got them replaced by pathologically irresponsible fascists, many of those in Congress and running the country the creations of that same media. Donald Trump is all you need as an example of that.
The scouts today are the artists. We go out in our imagination and imagine the future and bring it back for the poeple in our books and our songs and our art. For example, George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949. In it, he predicted Big Brother and constant government surveillance. His predictions have come to pass in many ways. Look at the Edward Snowden affair and the recent Harper government's attempt to spy o its citizens, or the closed circuit TV networks set up in major cities like London and Chicago, which keep a close eye on us, watching. Big Brothers of all sorts are definitely out there. But yet, we do not live in the world that the character O'Brien describes as the "picture of the future" in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always - do not forget this, Winston - always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever."
The reason we do not live in the world Orwell predicted is because he predicted it. Every time the government infringes upon our privacy, we reference Big Brother and demand that the government stop because we know, thanks to Orwell and our artists, where that type of surveillance will lead.
I read that and, especially, the quote from Orwell and it's clear to me, what he was imagining is personified by Trump, by Putin, by Duterte, by so many of the rising class of neo-fascists brought to us through the mass media. What Orwell described is Trump's gangster-political MO. And it is supported by FOX and other mass media which is ever more corrupting the minds of people to prepare them to accept Trumps. I disagree with Harold Johnson about how close we have gotten to Orwell only to agree with his larger point in this, the responsibility of those in the media, artists, in both avoiding the catastrophic future which the media of the past century has created.
Today, we seem to be short of good scouts. Many of the artists don't seem to realize their role: to protect us, to go out as a scout to warn us what is coming. If the artists imagine only violence and sex, we cannot complain if we live in a very violent and pornographic society. If, in all our stories, in our movies and television shows, we always imagine alcohol as a central part of our social structure, we cannot complain if everyone around us is drunk. This is what we have imagined for the people. These are the stories we've given them to live with.
* How can an academic-intellectual culture that has rejected the reality of moral responsibility, of morality, drowning in the universal acid of materialistic-scientism be expected to care about The People, to feel any sense of moral obligation to The People and their welfare or well being or everything up to and including the whole biosphere?
What we are seeing is a direct consequence of the secular regime imagined by the 18th and 19th century materialists, including those who wrote the Constitution of the United States. One of the unacknowledged consequences of inventing science as an area of thought freed of moral consideration is that scientism, materialism, will always tend to ever increasing amorality in which only personal enrichment and empowerment are meaningful. That exemption from morality given to scientists and materialistic philosphical clap trap was only ever safe the extent to which it was not the dominant force in societies and cultures. Mary Shelley may have been on to something, whoever it was who first imagined the Faust story definitely was. As was the author of Genesis 2:4-3:24
I'd like to know where an intellectual, artistic culture which buys into the amorality of scientistic materialism is to find that moral responsibility. Where a general culture which has been taught and instructed in that amoral scientistic materialism is supposed to find those things necessary to avoid turning into Orwell's nightmare future. See Also: Jack Levine's statement on modernism on the masthead of this page.
Sunday, April 28, 2019
You Keep Telling Yourself That, Bunky, Whatever Gets You Through The Benight
The idea that I'm unable to enjoy life in my sobriety is rather funny though I suppose it comes as a comfort to those who clearly feel a need to think I'm miserable. The fact that they're desperately trying to convince themselves of something so off the mark gives me a lot of pleasure. I suspect they're jealous and know they're rather unimaginative.
I Hope That Fixed It
After trying to figure out why only one post was appearing on the home page, the only thing I came up with was the graph I put in it was causing the problem. Taking that out seems to have fixed the problem at least for now, it turned out to be the wrong graph, anyway, something I didn't notice till trying that.
And here I expected to get the trolls in a lather all day by dissing his godship, Tom Lehrer.
Here's a variation on something I said at NTodd's blog, today.
It's funny how thinking life is serious and important is counter-cultural in our time of such widespread college-credentialing. I think it's one of the bases of real democracy to think life is serious and important. Acting like life is a joke leads to only a simulacrum of democracy being possible.
I got that thought as I remembered that the quote from H. L. Mencken, his definition of "Puritanism" was something Ronald Reagan used to explain his philosophy of life. Looking around to see if I could find a video of him saying that, I found that H. L. Mencken seems to have his greatest fan base among Republican-fascists and foppish libertarians. Considering he was a racist, reactionary, superficial ass, that's not any great surprise.
The educated class gets all upset when you violate the prohibition on taking life as being important and, so, serious. If it wasn't something that was important I might do it just to be counter-cultural. The Playtime and Funtime boys don't ever change anything for the better, comedy changes little to nothing, it can only verify existing attitudes, that's how comedy works. I'm smiling in anticipation of the lather they'll get in while I'm typing that.
And here I expected to get the trolls in a lather all day by dissing his godship, Tom Lehrer.
Here's a variation on something I said at NTodd's blog, today.
It's funny how thinking life is serious and important is counter-cultural in our time of such widespread college-credentialing. I think it's one of the bases of real democracy to think life is serious and important. Acting like life is a joke leads to only a simulacrum of democracy being possible.
I got that thought as I remembered that the quote from H. L. Mencken, his definition of "Puritanism" was something Ronald Reagan used to explain his philosophy of life. Looking around to see if I could find a video of him saying that, I found that H. L. Mencken seems to have his greatest fan base among Republican-fascists and foppish libertarians. Considering he was a racist, reactionary, superficial ass, that's not any great surprise.
The educated class gets all upset when you violate the prohibition on taking life as being important and, so, serious. If it wasn't something that was important I might do it just to be counter-cultural. The Playtime and Funtime boys don't ever change anything for the better, comedy changes little to nothing, it can only verify existing attitudes, that's how comedy works. I'm smiling in anticipation of the lather they'll get in while I'm typing that.
The Industry Created Myth Of Healthy Drinking
Continuing on with Firewater: How Alcohol Is Killing My People (And Yours):
The Medical Model fails most dramatically when we examine its success rate. It doesn't have one. The number of people who quit drinking as a result of going to a treatment centre is about 2 to 6 per cent. The Alcoholics Anonymous twelve-step method works best for middle-aged, middle-class males who are prone to guilt and who are the first-born or only child. This is the method upon which most treatment centres rely. This is where the courts send people who are placed on probation orders or conditional sentences. This is where Indian Child and Family Services sends the parents of children they have apprehended as a condition to getting their children back. This is the solution that may of us recommend to our relatives when they ask us what they should do about their problem.
We frequently hear from our elected leaders that we need more treatment centres: we need treatment centres closer to our communities so that people don't have to travel so far, we need more treatment centers so that the waiting times are shorter. We have come to depend upon this one, single solution,and it doesn't work for 94 to 98 per cent of the people who either are sent there or who go there in one last attempt to get their lives back in order.
We have to find a better way. Somehow we have to turn our communities into treatment centres, so that the whole community becomes involved in finding healthy alternatives.
First, before someone snarks about spelling, I retained the Canadian rules spelling used in the book. Just to get the truly unimportant out of the way.
As I said, for those People for whom AA works, measuring in small numbers when considering them as a percent but, considering the large number of alcoholics, numbering in many, many thousands, it works. Considering the near total failure of the Medical Model in other cases, it is certainly worth it to keep and expand and study to see if ways can be found to make AA more effective for more people.
One of the most important things about AA is that it is free, none of the other Medical Model approaches is free. That becomes an entirely important thing for alcoholics who lose their jobs, lose their insurance, lose everything to their higher power, the ethyl alcohol molecule. But Harold Johnson is right, it isn't enough. We do need more effective ways to get people who generate problems with their drinking to stop. I strongly suspect, though, that the most effective means of lessening the burden of alcohol is to encourage people to never drink to start with. Alcohol consumption isn't something that is a constant, there have been enormous differences in abstinence over time and across different countries.
There is every reason to think it would be worth trying to find ways to encourage people to never drink, to not develop the habit and the addiction. That will, though, require the mass media, especially entertainment media, to stop presenting drinking as an expected, even required thing to be socially acceptable, unless they change that message, as well as stopping their promotion of propaganda likely sponsored by alcohol producers, nothing that will make this problem better will happen. Regulating alcohol at a level that will discourage drinking while minimizing the black marketing of liquor is probably important, too. Making it harder though not even that hard to get liquor is necessary.
Harold Johnson's proposal for making our communities treatment centers is something that can only work in very cohesive communities of people of a similar culture, he is addressing primarily, though not exclusively, First Nations Peoples communities. I don't think there is much prospect of this working among most other communities in North America, especially in cities and towns that are at all large and people move in and out and don't really have close connections with more than a small number of people, often living far from their family, if they have any.
As people spend more and more time online in front of screens, abandoning down-towns, abandoning the outdoors, that isolating effect will get worse. Some families living in the same house barely talk. For most of us, what forms our stories we imagine about ourselves, what informs our behavior will have to come from electronic media and, today, that by a wide margin favors alcohol use, a percentage of that rather amazingly in favor of getting everything from slightly buzzed to sloshed. I was astonished when I went online how many even highly educated younger adults, some in their thirties and forties, took binge drinking as normal and positive.
That pamphlet from the Center for Disease Control which I excerpted contained the rather startling fact that alcohol, which "science" as spread by the mass media determined was good for the heart does, in fact, cause heart disease. As it causes cancers, not only cancer of the liver and pancreas, as might be expected, but such cancers as breast cancer. The idea that moderate drinking is healthy - Harold Johnson's suspicion is that those studies are likely done on the liquor industry's money - is further erroded by the fact that just about everyone who is deemed to abuse liquor, who becomes an alcoholic, was, at one time, a moderate drinker. It also doesn't take into account that there is some damage to health by even moderate drinking, alcohol is a toxin and most alcoholic drinks have many, some of them quite unregulated, ingredients. I would bet you that the things that give whisky and bourbon their flavors are quite dangerous, in themselves. Your imaginary drinking man unwinding with a drink in front of the TV at the end of the day would probably be a lot better off with a nap. Or a walk. Or almost anything else that wasn't dangerous and poisonous.
But people need to be able to imagine themselves as not drinking before they can stop drinking. They have to be presented with those images.
Introducing characters and story lines that present sobriety as a positive thing would be novel for scribblers and directors and producers and is probably beyond their damaged, limited, to nonexistent imaginations. It would certainly be interesting to see how a good writer would do such an unusual thing in English literature, in any of the literatures I'm familiar with. There are many centuries of pro-drinking propaganda to go up against, made worse in the United States by TV free to present alcohol ads by the "freespeech" industry. Judges, "Justices" lawyers, they need to be made responsible for the results of their legal theories,
Update: I don't know why this is the only piece appearing on the page, I can't see anything different in the blog settings. If you want to see older stories you can click the older story link under this piece or use the index in the sidebar. I'll see if I can figure it out, if it's something I can fix.
The Medical Model fails most dramatically when we examine its success rate. It doesn't have one. The number of people who quit drinking as a result of going to a treatment centre is about 2 to 6 per cent. The Alcoholics Anonymous twelve-step method works best for middle-aged, middle-class males who are prone to guilt and who are the first-born or only child. This is the method upon which most treatment centres rely. This is where the courts send people who are placed on probation orders or conditional sentences. This is where Indian Child and Family Services sends the parents of children they have apprehended as a condition to getting their children back. This is the solution that may of us recommend to our relatives when they ask us what they should do about their problem.
We frequently hear from our elected leaders that we need more treatment centres: we need treatment centres closer to our communities so that people don't have to travel so far, we need more treatment centers so that the waiting times are shorter. We have come to depend upon this one, single solution,and it doesn't work for 94 to 98 per cent of the people who either are sent there or who go there in one last attempt to get their lives back in order.
We have to find a better way. Somehow we have to turn our communities into treatment centres, so that the whole community becomes involved in finding healthy alternatives.
First, before someone snarks about spelling, I retained the Canadian rules spelling used in the book. Just to get the truly unimportant out of the way.
As I said, for those People for whom AA works, measuring in small numbers when considering them as a percent but, considering the large number of alcoholics, numbering in many, many thousands, it works. Considering the near total failure of the Medical Model in other cases, it is certainly worth it to keep and expand and study to see if ways can be found to make AA more effective for more people.
One of the most important things about AA is that it is free, none of the other Medical Model approaches is free. That becomes an entirely important thing for alcoholics who lose their jobs, lose their insurance, lose everything to their higher power, the ethyl alcohol molecule. But Harold Johnson is right, it isn't enough. We do need more effective ways to get people who generate problems with their drinking to stop. I strongly suspect, though, that the most effective means of lessening the burden of alcohol is to encourage people to never drink to start with. Alcohol consumption isn't something that is a constant, there have been enormous differences in abstinence over time and across different countries.
There is every reason to think it would be worth trying to find ways to encourage people to never drink, to not develop the habit and the addiction. That will, though, require the mass media, especially entertainment media, to stop presenting drinking as an expected, even required thing to be socially acceptable, unless they change that message, as well as stopping their promotion of propaganda likely sponsored by alcohol producers, nothing that will make this problem better will happen. Regulating alcohol at a level that will discourage drinking while minimizing the black marketing of liquor is probably important, too. Making it harder though not even that hard to get liquor is necessary.
Harold Johnson's proposal for making our communities treatment centers is something that can only work in very cohesive communities of people of a similar culture, he is addressing primarily, though not exclusively, First Nations Peoples communities. I don't think there is much prospect of this working among most other communities in North America, especially in cities and towns that are at all large and people move in and out and don't really have close connections with more than a small number of people, often living far from their family, if they have any.
As people spend more and more time online in front of screens, abandoning down-towns, abandoning the outdoors, that isolating effect will get worse. Some families living in the same house barely talk. For most of us, what forms our stories we imagine about ourselves, what informs our behavior will have to come from electronic media and, today, that by a wide margin favors alcohol use, a percentage of that rather amazingly in favor of getting everything from slightly buzzed to sloshed. I was astonished when I went online how many even highly educated younger adults, some in their thirties and forties, took binge drinking as normal and positive.
That pamphlet from the Center for Disease Control which I excerpted contained the rather startling fact that alcohol, which "science" as spread by the mass media determined was good for the heart does, in fact, cause heart disease. As it causes cancers, not only cancer of the liver and pancreas, as might be expected, but such cancers as breast cancer. The idea that moderate drinking is healthy - Harold Johnson's suspicion is that those studies are likely done on the liquor industry's money - is further erroded by the fact that just about everyone who is deemed to abuse liquor, who becomes an alcoholic, was, at one time, a moderate drinker. It also doesn't take into account that there is some damage to health by even moderate drinking, alcohol is a toxin and most alcoholic drinks have many, some of them quite unregulated, ingredients. I would bet you that the things that give whisky and bourbon their flavors are quite dangerous, in themselves. Your imaginary drinking man unwinding with a drink in front of the TV at the end of the day would probably be a lot better off with a nap. Or a walk. Or almost anything else that wasn't dangerous and poisonous.
But people need to be able to imagine themselves as not drinking before they can stop drinking. They have to be presented with those images.
Introducing characters and story lines that present sobriety as a positive thing would be novel for scribblers and directors and producers and is probably beyond their damaged, limited, to nonexistent imaginations. It would certainly be interesting to see how a good writer would do such an unusual thing in English literature, in any of the literatures I'm familiar with. There are many centuries of pro-drinking propaganda to go up against, made worse in the United States by TV free to present alcohol ads by the "freespeech" industry. Judges, "Justices" lawyers, they need to be made responsible for the results of their legal theories,
Update: I don't know why this is the only piece appearing on the page, I can't see anything different in the blog settings. If you want to see older stories you can click the older story link under this piece or use the index in the sidebar. I'll see if I can figure it out, if it's something I can fix.
On Just The Latest Synagogue Shooting
New Zealand passed a ban on automatic weapons three weeks after the Mosque shootings. The United States has had decades of mass shootings and it is farther away from effective gun legislation than ever, as we are getting mass shootings every week or two.
The United States Constitution is an antiquated slaver-gangster written pact, it is killing us and the longer we worship that idol the more lives will be sacrificed to it. I'd trade what we have for what New Zealand has in a heartbeat. Anyone who wouldn't is a thug or an idiot.
The United States Constitution is an antiquated slaver-gangster written pact, it is killing us and the longer we worship that idol the more lives will be sacrificed to it. I'd trade what we have for what New Zealand has in a heartbeat. Anyone who wouldn't is a thug or an idiot.
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