The Answer To Rachel Maddow's Question Of Last Night

BECAUSE ESQUIRE has put his online column behind a subscription requirement that I can't afford to breech, I don't read the estimable Charles Pierce as often as I used to. I generally like Pierce's pieces and I almost always agree with him but one of the things that he does that drives me up the friggin' wall is his adoration of James Madison. "Jemmy" Madison, in Pierce's frequent affectionate mentions of him is one of the things in American mythology that we are going to have to face realistically or we will never, ever save egalitarian democracy, BOTH OF WHICH "JEMMY" HATED OR AT LEAST DIDN'T TRUST.

That an aristocratic, well educated, slave-holder and protector of the institution that made him and a majority of his fellow Constitution and Bill of Rights writing aristocrats rich had a deep suspicion of the wisdom and morality of common people is hardly to be unexpected, look at the snobbery that pervades the merely middle-class, college-credentialed blog rats on allegedly lefty, allegedly egalitarian, blogs to get a milder version of what the "Jemmy" I imagine was like.  That is what I imagine him after doing what so few ever get around to doing, looking more deeply into his writing and primary documentation. The whole "founders" thin needs to be junked or at least subjected to deep and skeptical scrutiny.  That that look into, especially, Thomas Jefferson,  Madison's very uneven letter writing fellow genius among the Founders,  leads me to suspect he was an alcoholic who was frequently drunk as a skunk when he wrote.  Looking into not only the primary record but their contemporary critics  really has opened my eyes and informed my thinking of just how intentionally anti-democratic the government they framed is and just who it was intended to benefit from the beginning. We have been fighting tooth and nail, actual oceans of blood, against it since it was adopted, especially shed by People of Color and the also wage slaves.

Think about that this week as we hear journalists like the genuinely and equally estimable Rachel Maddow rightly rail against Senator Joe Manchin who has already announced that he will continue as being the person who puts guns into the hands of mass shooters - THAT ANY TWO REPUBLICAN SENATORS COULD MAKE THAT STAND MOOT SHOULD BE MENTIONED BUT MANCHIN HAS CHOSEN TO BE THE FOCAL POINT OF THIS SO HE OWNS IT. 

 

Think about that because the Senate was sold to skeptics of that anti-democratically constituted body as the saucer to cool hot tea passed by the actually more democratically constituted House to prevent things happening. That is what your "Evening Jemmy" not only planned but stated was his intention and, no doubt, that of his aristocratic colleagues who were afraid that largely Northern popular opinion would turn against slavery and the Southern economic system and free the people whose violent incarceration on their plantations made him and his fellow aristocrats AND THEIR NORTHERN MONEY MEN COLLEAGUES rich.

The Senate only cools things that are good, I'm having a hard time remembering much of anything bad that they prevented passing into law, and even a lot of the good that was made law in the past is destroyed by the Supreme Court which the Founders ensured would be staffed by people such as the anti-democratically constituted Senate would allow to get on it.

If the Senate is broken, and it always has been, the fault will not be corrected until we get over the goddamend founders fetish that is the irrational and stupid and totally ahistorical mythology of the college-credentialed class.

A popular mythological "Founders" and especially James Madison are wildly popular among journalists because of his reluctant paternity of the First Amendment, he had to promise the Virginia Legislature that in the First Congress he would push through a bill of rights and what he pushed through has bedeviled us in so many ways today. The professional interests of the paid media - who have benefited from the modern interpretation of the "free speech-press" provisions as certainly as the gun industry has benefited from the slave-patrol benefiting Second Amendment, will never face the fact that its interpretation allowing lies is why the goddamned Senate is even more broken than it might have been. Their profession, their lying colleagues whose rights to lie they would never want to see abridged lest they might get sued for their sloppiness, are as much to blame as a Joe Manchin who would probably be a lot less depraved if he didn't have to worry about a lie campaign against him in West Virginia. Or, I dare say, at least two of the Republican Senators who might be less depraved if Madison and his colleagues had bothered to note that allowing a right to lie would destroy not only democracy but any hope for any kind of decency.

That the First Amendment created an artificial right for an artificial, human enterprise, publishing, and unwisely made it legally equivalent to rights that are held by living beings is a defect.  It also ignores the fact that "the press" what is now "the media" are a means of exercising vastly more influence and, among those many of us susceptible to the media's methods, power and so permitting lies the impunity our idiot Supreme Court has granted to them is dangerous for exactly the same reason that that right was used by the gun industry and its lobby to get the same "rights" for that industry, the reason a Joe Manchin is acting the role he is

As things developed under the Constitution, the answer to Rachel Maddow's question of why a Joe Manchin OR ANY OTHERWISE NOT INSANE REPUBLICAN would do the bidding of the gun industry and the idiot 10% they have propagandized is obvious.  They can lie a Senator out of office.  You won't change anything about that until you remove the idiocies embedded into the Constitution by James Madison and his sleazier colleagues, yes, Alexander Hamilton among them. 

For Want Of A Cell Phone You Can Die

ACCORDING to some of the things I've seen, Maine is not at the bottom of the list for its response to Covid-19, I thank God and the voters of my state that we have Janet Mills as governor, one of the accomplished Mills family of public servants (her sister Dr. Dora Mills was the head of Maine's CDC for years and years).  If we still had Paul LePage due to the idiocy of easy ballot access by never-will-win 3rd party spoilers that put that human lump of dung into the Blain House for eight years, we'd be vying with South Dakota for most benighted state in the country.

I finally got my appointment for my first shot of vaccine, it took me weeks of trying by phone and online, I almost didn't get an appointment because the last screen requiring my personal information HAD A MOBILE PHONE NUMBER AS A REQUIRED FIELD!  Luckily, I had my sister's cell phone number which worked WHAT THE HELL WOULD THE MANY, MANY PEOPLE WHO DO NOT HAVE MOBILE PHONES DO?  

For fucksake, this kind of thing proves that among other things, things are set up to screw people too poor to have cell phones or too old to have one or who just don't.  I have to think it's proof of the either willful or ignorant cluelessness of those who make such systems.  Only in something like this it can mean life or death so no one should be able to do it either stupidly or intentionally.  

Will Susan Collins Have Her Concerns?

AS REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS come up with every lie they can to try to thwart statehood for the District of Columbia - and they will and all of them will have their most potent weapon against egalitarian democracy behind it, racism - it's good to remember such incidents in our past, starting with the admission of my state as a state in 1820. For those who don't know, until then Maine was a colony of Massachusetts, on the basis of which it became a part of the country with full representation in Congress, which is certainly not the case for the far larger concentration of American citizens who live in the District of Columbia. The issue for opponents of Maine becoming a state, in its own right was, of course, the damned Senate.

Heather Cox Richardson recently told it pretty well.

By the time most of you will read this it will be March 15, which is too important a day to ignore. As the man who taught me to use a chainsaw said, it is immortalized by Shakespeare’s famous warning: “Cedar! Beware the adze of March!”

He put it that way because the importance of March 15 is, of course, that it is the day in 1820 that Maine, the Pine Tree State, joined the Union.

Maine statehood had national repercussions. The inhabitants of this northern part of Massachusetts had asked for statehood in 1819, but their petition was stopped dead by southerners who refused to permit a free state—one that did not permit slavery—to enter the Union without a corresponding “slave state.” The explosive growth of the northern states had already given free states control of the House of Representatives, but the South held its own in the Senate, where each state got two votes. The admission of Maine would give the North the advantage, and southerners insisted that Maine’s admission be balanced with the admission of a southern slave state, lest those opposed to slavery use their power in the federal government to restrict enslavement in the South.

They demanded the admission of Missouri to counteract Maine’s two “free” Senate votes.

But this “Missouri Compromise” infuriated northerners, especially those who lived in Maine. They swamped Congress with petitions against admitting Missouri as a slave state, resenting that slave owners in the Senate could hold the state of Maine hostage until they got their way. Tempers rose high enough that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Massachusetts—and later Maine—Senator John Holmes that he had for a long time been content with the direction of the country, but that the Missouri question “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union It is hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”

Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, but Jefferson was right to see it as nothing more than a reprieve.

The petition drive that had begun as an effort to keep the admission of Maine from being tied to the admission of Missouri continued as a movement to get Congress to whittle away at slavery where it could—by, for example, outlawing slave sales in the nation’s capital—and would become a key point of friction between the North and the South.

I will leave it to you to read the rest of her interesting account of how Mainers, bitter at the slave-power trying to make that use of them went West and helped seed the upper mid-west with with abolitionism. My only qualms about it aren't due to Richardson's telling of the story, it is the general tendency of white people to act as if the primary force behind the abolition of slavery was not from people violently held in slavery, those who became free on their own initiative - by escaping North or those who became free through crossing the even more treacherous waters than those of the Ohio river. Hollywood loves to reinforce the idea that emancipation was a gift of benevolent white people when what it was was a mere down payment for, by then, already centuries of violently enforced, uncompensated servitude, destruction of families, rape and murder.

I would expect that Susan Collins will have her patented concerns about DC statehood - concerns that never furrow her brow or lead to her learning anything - I doubt anything any of her constituents say to her will keep her from doing exactly what she figures will be best for Susan Collins, but, who knows, maybe somewhere back in the vestiges of her family history that strain might have some effect on her. Though she'll probably do what she does, if she can do the decent thing, the right thing, the just thing, her calculation will be if her doing right will make a difference or not and if it won't make a difference, she'll do the right thing.

The Way Of All Flesh - Quarantine Has Had More Of An Impact On Me Than I'd Thought

SOMEONE KINDLY or maybe not so kindly pointed out that I've spent the last couple of days thinking it was next week.  I've got to get back into the habit of looking at the calendar in the morning, again.  I could shave a bit more often too, while I'm at it.  I'm still brushing my teeth, such as I've got left, if that makes you feel any better.

The Ending Of The Story Is True, Even If It Didn't Happen

SHOULD HAVE waited till I looked at the NCR today because the estimable Pat Marrin, in his Pencil Preaching column gives an interesting speculation as to why the early Christians might have told and inserted such a story into the Gospel of John.  

 

Commentaries speculate that if the adulterous woman story were an actual incident, it could have occurred during the feast of Tabernacles, when people lived in tents to commemorate the hut Jonah lived in while awaiting the destruction of Nineveh. The surprise exposure of a couple in the act by the religious officials and the capture of the woman but not the man strongly suggests a set-up designed to confront Jesus. His refusal to judge the woman but to make the accusers judge themselves is a brilliant response. The crowd disperses in shame. Jesus preserves justice by telling the woman to sin no more, but he also exhibits mercy by saving her life and refusing to condemn her.

Presenting these stories the week before Palm Sunday and Holy Week increases our sense of the growing hostility against Jesus and the extent to which his enemies are willing to go to find cause to condemn him. They attack him for being merciful, putting compassion before legalism, reaching out to untouchables and eating with sinners. Each charge only enhances Jesus’ stature and makes his crucifixion all the more inexplicable. This may be the reason the story was inserted into the fourth Gospel.

Today’s media concentration and public interest in sexual abuse and harassment of women highlights both an important social issue and the level of attention on personal information and private details sexual issues attract. This mirrors the blood lust mentality of the incident Jesus was drawn into. His response proclaimed human dignity and gender equality in a way that brings mercy and justice together in the Gospel for all time, every place and generation.

 

While I don't actually hold a position as to whether or not the story is an account of an actual event, I don't really see any reason to assume that it being missing from some of the early manuscripts we have, all of them from well after the John Gospel was composed,was an indication that it was missing from the "original". It's as easy to assert that it was cut out from an early one that others copied from as it is to claim that its presence in another one proves that it was a later insertion. I don't think that's relevant to the issue of whether or not what it says is true or not. True and as radical as the entirety of what Jesus said about the requirement to forgive those who wrong us directly. The story doesn't mention the woman's husband as being among her accusers. The justice of Jesus was as radical as the economic justice of Jesus. That's what it means.  

Kind Of Messy Monday In Holy Week - The Progress From Justice To Mercy

HAVING MISSPENT my youth and earlier adulthood on lesser things I am left in my old age as a beginner in understanding of the Scriptures and the wider meaning which it concerns.  In that I would think I'd join most of those who did spend their lives in a more concentrated study of them, the size of just the scriptures alone, their poetic inspecificity in many things, their confusing and not always agreeing multiplicity of voices - some of them clearly representing what Brueggemann refers to as the Solomonic-Temple establishment who weren't the most reliable representatives of the Mosaic religion and, I'd point out, that kind of thing is present in the Second Testament too, the Synoptic Gospels and Paul don't always agree and even more so the "Johannine" tradition that some scholars assert is quite a different take on things, well, obviously.  The "Johannine community" for or by whom the John Gospel and Epistles and the Book of Revelation are asserted to have been produced is certainly not taken as demonstrated and is disputed by other scholars.  But the difference between that Gospel, which is heavily featured in this year's cycle of the Catholic lectionary readings and the other three are real.  

I'm going to jump out of this years cycle and go to what Walter Brueggemann said for the Monday after Lent 5 based on the Year 2 readings of Exodus 4:10-31, I Corinthians 14:1-19;  Mark 9:30-41.

The Bible is a talking tradition.  Its many voices attest that utterance spoken out loud is an effective force that actually does something in the world.  In the case of Moses, being able to talk well matters on two counts.  Moses must effectively bear witness to his fellow slaves that God can be relied on to see them to liberty.  Moses also must witness effectively to Pharaoh that the power of God in the service of emancipation is real power that Pharaoh dare not dismiss.  On both  counts Moses' speech is effective, eventuating in Miraims dance of freedom.

The matter is very different in the church in Corinth.  The capacity to "speak in tongues" was an exhibit of enormous freedom of speech addressed directly to God and propelled by God's own Spirit.  Paul, moreover, boasts that he, "more than all of you," speaks in tongues.  

I'll break in here to say what Susannah Heschel once asked, who could have stood to live with Paul who had the annoying character trait of always having to outdo everyone else - which I think accounts for some of his less realistic demands for personal behavior and, also, why he was so susceptible to a surprising vulnerability in regard to the appearance of impropriety in things like women speaking to the Church. Paul never claimed he was perfect, he didn't claim that for even Jesus except in so far as Jesus was perfect in being free from sin.  

Such speech, however much it witnesses to unfettered freedom, by itself does not build up the body of the church.  For that, interpretation is essential.  Thus Paul prefers to speak "five words with my mind,"  that is, five words of meaningful interpretation. 

These two texts invite us to reflect on the practice of speech in our social context, about the power of speech and the restraint of speech, about who is permitted to speak and who is regularly reduced to silence, about how dangerous speech may become if it is left uninterpreted, and about who has the authority to interpret.  Or more personally we may reflect on the chances we have to bear witness to God's freedom outside the socioeconomic pharaonic restraints of our society or the chances we have to speak in the presence of pharaonic forces that enslave the vulnerable.  Five words that make sense might be,  "Let my people go free."  

I should mention that today's Catholic lectionary on the Monday of Holy Week, leading to Good Friday is all about injustice and doing justice to the innocent, of Susanna and the Elders and the young boy Daniel issuing his first judgement proving the filthy old goats framed her, sending them to their deaths for trying to get her killed when she wouldn't have sex with them.  That's a widely used and often abused story of justice for the innocent.

The Gospel is the story that people love to claim is a later insertion that wasn't in the original text of John's Gospel, of Jesus and the woman who was brought to him after she'd been found in an act of adultery.  The similarities are obvious as are the differences,  Daniel asserts Susanna was innocent, the woman in the story from John was presented as having been caught in the act.  Under The Law, she was guilty and the legal punishment for that was a brutal death (interesting that they didn't seem fit to nab the guy she was said to have been found with, maybe we're to assume he got away).  Jesus in the story certainly extended justice as found in the letter of the law into a requirement that those who wanted to kill her had to be without sin themselves.  I don't know if the "Johannine community" shared Paul's view of the nature of Jesus which would have made him unique in the history of human kind as being the only one eligible to kill the woman but there is certainly a strong implication in the story that he might have been.  He, however, says explicitly in the story "Neither do I condemn you."   You have to wonder first that if people made up that story about Jesus their understanding of him and his Gospel was consistent with it.  You also have to wonder at how, as soon as Christianity gained worldly power and the ability to enforce laws, that this story was immediately pushed to the back as effectively as all other lines of mercy for the clearly less radical and crueler "justice" that it clearly replaced.   I don't think people who would have heard that story any number of times in church if not having read it on their own could have been totally unaware of the discrepancy between it and the laws they made and enforced.   

I'm tempted to go into how you have to make that leap in generosity to get to egalitarian democracy but will just stop at mentioning that I think it is an important point in making secular governance less than depraved.  "Justice" goes to hell without it. 

This Is Who Chuck Todd Had On To Talk About The Tidal Wave Of Anti-Asian Hate Crime The Past Year

 

Great Listening For Holy Week

  How The Pandemic Is Challenging Our Understanding Of Poverty

I should start at least once a week not writing something and just providing you a link to Callie Crossley's Under The Radar, what is the best American radio program I know of. This week's program is all about the injustice that I talked about this morning in a lot more detail. Callie Crossley is a living treasure.

Now This Is What You Call "All Stars" - Red Norvo Octet "BLUES IN E FLAT" (1935)

 

Bunny Berigan - trumpet Jack Jenny - trombone Johnny Mince - clarinet Chu Berry - tenor sax Teddy Wilson - piano George Van Eps - guitar Artie Bernstein - string bass Gene Krupa - drums Red Norvo - xylophone

 

Right Into The Middle Of The Issue or Why Are We Doing Lent, Anyway?

IN THE PAST I've said here that an argument I got into with some American Buddhists was a decisive event in my adult conversion to Christianity.   I had been a somewhat serious student of Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, having read a large number of its enormous number of scriptures and not a little of the even vaster commentary on them.  I was and still am impressed with the quite modern phenomenon of engaged Buddhism, Buddhism of social engagement and good works and with the criticism of that by more orthodox Buddhists of a number of sects as introducing foreign concepts not part of the original scriptures, though those in engaged Buddhism have found some support in stories such as the Buddha's reaction to his followers neglecting a monk who was suffering from what is generally interpreted as dysentery.

In the argument I noted that Buddhism was largely lacking in that it didn't seem to engage in the Jewish conception of justice much, something I've come to see as a fatal flaw in any religion or philosophy or ideology.  The Buddhists I argued with told me that justice was a worldly delusion, making a number of arguments dismissing the concept.  I suspect that all of those I was arguing with were affluent, college-credentialed, white people, some men though I know there were women involved in the online-argument.  I wondered how much of injustice they'd experienced on their way to enlightenment and told them that if they were deprived of justice they would very much note its absence from their lives.   If they were unimpressed by that I guess it makes my point.

That argument forced me to go farther than I'd expected I was going at the time because it was the beginning of a number of things, including the thinking that led me to realize the role that human choice had in both what we choose to believe and what we choose to believe we know and that belief and knowledge aren't two separate realms of thought separated by a hard barrier but are intimately intertwined.  If there is something that may well be a delusion it's the idea that there is knowledge that is not dependent on beliefs chosen.  I have noted how Bertrand Russell experienced that when his older brother broke the terrible news to him that Euclidean geometry required the acceptance of axioms that could not be proved or else they couldn't go on, Russell noted that he made the choice to believe them so they could go on, he said even before then his attraction to geometry was that it was a means of proving things and he wanted to prove them.   I don't think that's a situation that has changed in the subsequent 138 or so years since that happened, nor in the period since the Elements of Geometry were first published.  I doubt there ever will be a proof of what you need to believe in order to go on. If that's true for the imaginary figures of geometry, it's even more true for the more complex issues of human experience.

In noting that all humanly invented ideologies, etc. were imperfect, would be found wanting and would be left behind in history and culture, I would have left out the struggle for justice as elucidated in the Jewish tradition and the further development of that in the Christian conception of love.  Those have proven to be an enduring feature of society and if not in society then in the lives of individual people.  There is never and has never been anything old about the resistance to injustice, there has never been anything that spoils in unselfish love.  Where those two things have been removed from the realm of what is considered, whether for mere expediency and efficiency as in the sciences and modern academic culture, or through a desire to be relieved of having to sacrifice from them - AND THERE IS NO GETTING PAST THE FACT THAT TO DO THOSE COSTS YOU SOMETHING - such as has been true of virtually every if not every modern ideology that got traction and won a wide following, often with the support of academics who became habituated to ignoring such considerations through their professional activities and social milieu or through those who sought power and plunder in the more gangster attractive fields of politics and, with supreme irony, the civil law. 

The extent to which Christian, Jewish, Islamic sects and denominations and cults lay aside the imperative for Justice and Love, the equality that those demand, the democracy that results from their actual practice is the extent to which no matter how orthodox or established or respectable they are, they are hypocrites and corrupt vessels of something that merely goes by the name.  The entire Trump "evangelicals" phenomenon, the Orthodox Jewish support for Trump, the Catholic Trump supporters are an extreme case of such people who, no matter how embedded they are in the official churches they belong to are apostates from the Jewish and Christian faiths, the only things that are sound and good in those so-called religions, the thing that Jesus said was eternal in The Law and in prophesy.  

The entire story of salvation which will be recited at the Easter Vigil Mass a week from last night is all about that, though dealing with aspects of life in all their complications, the presence of those issues isn't always apparent at first.  But it is there just as Exodus and the cry of the slaves under attack from Pharaoh and the response to that is behind the entire monotheistic tradition, no matter how much even the so-deemed pious and faithful so often want to bury that.  

Saturday Night NOT Radio Drama - Doug Roland - Seeing Through

 

 

Tereek - Stephen Prescod

Artie - Robert Tarango 

Tereek -- a young man trying hard not to reveal his lack of a home -- is desperately looking for a bed for the night, texting friends in hopes that he can crash with them. But just when something comes through, he finds himself helping out Artie, a deaf-blind man waiting for a bus home.

The encounter is anything but straightforward, not only due to their differences in abilities but also their different temperaments and ages. But as Tereek helps Artie navigate a ride home, he learns to see the world through another perspective beyond his own -- and broadening his horizons in the process. 

Writer-director Doug Roland's Oscar-shortlisted short drama -- executive produced by Marlee Matlin and in partnership with Helen Keller Services -- is a deceptively simple narrative that takes place over one evening between two characters. But this chance encounter -- captured with visual storytelling that's both natural, unforced and still deftly crafted -- uncovers riches of empathy, along with a profound revelation about how people can offer fellowship, help and care to one another, even in the simplest of ways.

Actor Steven Prescod's subtle yet precise performance captures Tereek's arc as a young man unmoored, looking out for himself because he has to. And that might cost him his humanity, especially when he snarls at a homeless man visibly less well-off than himself. But as he helps Artie move through the world, he takes on Artie's perspective and becomes his "brother's keeper," opening him up in both feeling and sensibility at a juncture in life where he may close himself off permanently.

A friend recommended this to me the other day.  It and the film made about how they found the deaf-blind actor to play Artie, Robert Tarango,  I thought about what a dramatic production for deaf-blind people could be like, what it would mean if you couldn't hear or see it.  I don't know but it would be interesting to hear them tell us, I haven't found any place where anyone has.  New things to think about, especially for someone whose favorite form is audio theater.  

Storm Warning

I WAS talking with one of my siblings about the time our father gave up coffee for Lent and got so grouchy that our mother forbade him from ever going without coffee again.  She said the same thing to me when I talked about giving it up during a period of low income, she insisted on buying my coffee for me to tide me over. 

My sibling told me something I didn't know, that it was a pact my father and the parish priest made that Lent and that my mother wasn't the only one who didn't want to put up with the results,  a number of parishioners told the priest to never try it again.   As he was one of the most popular priests in the history of the parish, a really nice and jolly guy,  the change must have had to get really bad.  

Going Holy Week and Easter Week without answering hate mail is going to be a real strain for me but at least you won't have to put up with the withdrawal.  At least I've got coffee now.

Let's Give This Senile Senior Judge What He Mistakenly Thinks He Wants

LIFE LONG Republican-fascist scumbag, Judge Laurence Silbermann had an 80s moment last week when he used a recent dissent to rail against the "liberal media"

"Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets," Silberman, wrote. "And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction. The orientation of these three papers is followed by The Associated Press and most large papers across the country (such as the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe). Nearly all television — network and cable — is a Democratic Party trumpet. Even the government-supported National Public Radio follows along."

The 85-year-old Silberman,, who was appointed to the court in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan, then quoted former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev who argued that the media was trying to impose socialism.

"'When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries,' Leonid Brezhnev, Remarks to the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers' Party (Nov. 13, 1968)," Silberman, wrote. "Thus, one [sic] a country has turned communist, it can never be allowed to go back."

 

To which I say this coot is way out of step with his fellow Republican-fascists because if people could sue newspapers and media for lying about them, the biggest beneficiaries of it would be Democrats and liberals who are lied about with impunity, especially on the basis of NPR, The NYT, the WaPo, the Boston Globe . . . reporting what "people are saying" and as "opinion journalism". If Hillary Clinton could have sued the New York Times for carrying false reporting about her in the 1990s, she would have been president. If Al Gore, John Kerry, a host of Democratic candidates for other offices could have sued media that lied about them, if media could be prevented from lying about policies that Democrats favored, we would be in territory that Lyndon Johnson hoped for this country instead of the Nixonian, Reaganite, Trumpian hell hole we've been in.

 

It was one of the major turns in American right-wing politics when they realized that the suppression of publication that they had used to suppress smut (when they weren't profiting off of it, but Murdoch doesn't enter into till they let the smut king come here to turn the country into a toilet mouthed sewer) and to go after those most pathetic and ridiculous of paper tigers, the American commies, worked to suppress the right-wing lies that would be a boon for the Republican party. When they realized that the Sullivan Decision freed the media that was largely owned by Republicans and some wealthy families who stood to gain from Republican policies favoring the rich, any "liberals" among them easily intimidated from too much criticism by merely saying they weren't being fair to fascists and nice to Nazis they realized that far from being a problem for them, "free speech" and especially "free press" was their golden opportunity to directly destroy egalitarian democracy by feeding the public a steady diet of lies.

That is the reason that neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, Murdoch style media, the even more overtly Putin allied media are the biggest fattest champions of "free speech" EVEN TO THE EXTENT THAT WHEN MEDIA EXERCISE THEIR FREEDOM OF THE PRESS BY KICKING VIOLENCE ADVOCATING AND LYING FASCISTS OFF OF PRIVATELY OWNED MEDIA THAT THEY WHINE ABOUT BEING DEPRIVED OF THEIR "FREE SPEECH" TO EVEN INCITE INSURRECTION, USING ACLU STYLE "FREE SPEECH" BABBLE WHICH SUCKERS IN THE MEDIA FALL FOR.  Probable virtual Putin assert, Glenn Greenwald's act consists mostly of that these days. 

So, the senile old coot, after a lifetime of service to Republican-fascism is merely behind the times, thinking back to the time before Republicans made what was, perhaps, a more corrupt bargain that was perhaps even more profitable to them than the one they made with the Dixiecrats and America's indigenous form of Nazi style fascism, white supremacy and Jim Crow, the bargain they made with the smut peddlers and the ACLU to free them andtheir owned media to lie with impunity, knowing that the owners of the American media would lie for them and that they could whip the kind of "liberals" in the media into doing their bidding by whining and crying that they weren't being fair to them.  THAT is the history of the American free press in the era after the Sullivan Decision.  If you want to knock the legal knees out from that, including the Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United, etc. decisions,  I can go along with that.  It's just that this senile Republican-fascist wouldn't like it if he really got what he wished for. 

Hate Mail - Mop Up - Notice, There Will Be No More Hate Mail Till After Easter Week - I've Got To Salvage Something Of Lent

THE OLD STUPID atheist joke that may have come from Bertrand Russell (I know he said it but never bothered to see if he was merely mouthing some earlier atheist) that Christians are atheists about the gods of classical paganism and they just go them one step farther is quite stupid, in so far as the classical gods are not the same sort of "thing"* that God is and if they were familiar with the Bible and classical religion they might know that.  It is one of the intellectual shortcomings of the atheist tradition that it so often substitutes ridicule for argumentation and disproof.

Well, in saying that I believe time is progressive, that we are supposed to be part of, participate in and experience going from before till after until we leave the realm of time that modern physics has tied to the material universe, existing in the change from past to future and that the future will, in turn, become past and move on.   I'm rejecting "conservatism" as much as I am "modernism" all "isms" as ideological constructs founded on a past that doesn't even keep up with the present and soon get old and, found to be inadequate, are surpassed.  

The modernism of Descartes and his contemporaries fell way to later 17th and 18th century modern thinkers, who, while they may have admired the progress in the establishment of science that Descartes and his predecessors and contemporaries invented weren't willing to let things rest there.  

In turn the "enlightenment" era thinkers, as their thinking was found inadequate gave way to 19th century thought, especially the "romanticism" that started in the 18th century and was, itself left behind in a more self-consciously self-named "modernism" which, builidng, ironically enough on some of the more pathological decadence of all of those already mentioned, now finds itself to be considered inadequate.   

"Post-modernism" may have already outdone those in the ephemeral character of its shelf-life, if there really ever was such a "thing" as "post-modernism".  It has seemed to me to have fallen aside even as the last adherents of mid-20th century "modernism" are not going gently into that dark night which their nihilism should have prepared them for as the fate of their own ideology as they are content to consider all other things and even entire populations of human beings.  

That's the thing about modernists, scientistic-atheist-materialists,  they require that you stop your criticism just short of their own ideology, of applying the same tools of critical destruction that they demanded as necessitating the destruction of their rivals and predecessors.  That they need to do that points out one of the most dishonest aspects of their ideology, they do not want a no-holds-barred, "objective" (there is no such thing as objectivity, it is a delusion), etc. intellectual inquiry.  As Richard Lewontin once pointed out to Carl Sagan, if you want that kind of thing you should go watch the action at a New York Orthodox study hall.  

If you are upset that I reject modernism because you believe that must necessitate that I want to return to some past you aren't understanding what I said at all.  A. "conservatism" is an aspect of modernism, one that may, at times, be as ill informed as other modernist thinkers as its character because they are thoroughly modern.  Especially those who allege themselves to be "classical liberals" by which they appeal to the libertarian atrocity that stole the name from a more actually enlightened liberalism based on the Mosaic commandments to do justice and economic justice to the poor and despised.  B. I have never rejected liberalism if by that you mean what someone like Marilynne Robinson asserts was the original English language meaning of that tied into the supply of ample charity to those who need it by those who can afford to give it or even by those who can't spare it (there are no economics more radical than that taught by Jesus, not even the one taught by Moses), C. I believe any "ism" human beings are capable of formulating by intention or by accident is imperfect and will, with time, dissolve into the lost past, any attempts to continue them into the future more likely to risk distorting that future for the worse than in moving things in a better direction. D. I believe that, similarly, no human articulation of religion is perfect enough to begin to be adequate and should never be conceived of as durable and unchanging.  Christians certainly have no right to claim such a status for their religion as the Gospel builds on that guarantee in Isaiah that I started this with of a new heaven and a new earth quite unlike any that human beings have managed to create with their ever new and improved ideologies and denominational declarations.

* I think it's one of the defects of human language that we are forced to talk about God who is not a thing as a thing, an object susceptible to understanding and treatment like other things.  The same defect, certainly in English, leads us to talk about people and animals as if sentient creatures were the same sort of things that non-sentient objects are from which perhaps comes the habit of regarding people as objects of utility or uselessness that the entire Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition can well be seen as dissenting from, any part of those that accommodates itself to the objectification of people as a deviation or betrayal of the central aspect of the Abrahamic or at least Mosaic religion. 

Update:  Well, there are different possibilities as to why God would have created the universe.   Maybe your question as to what was in it for God is assuming that God did it for selfish reasons - how human - when it's possible existence was a gift God gave to we, God's creatures who God called into existence.  I believe that, in so far as modern cosmology seems to expect there to be an end of the universe, that it's possible that all of existence, those things which now exist, are yet to exist, have existed and ended will all be reconciled "saved" as it were.  Of course if modern cosmology made convincing arguments that the last hundred fifteen years or so got it wrong and the universe is eternal other explanations will be possible.   The atheist claim that it would put a nail in the coffin of God is as ridiculous as the claim that the current cosmology does.  I am a lot less confident that current cosmology is the last word than I am in the idea that the universe has purpose and that the long arc of history bends in the direction of justice.  I mean, atheists are always arguing things out of what believing things get you.  The idea that the universe has a life friendly purpose gets you a hell of a lot more than the atheist-materialist-scientistic nihilistic one which gets you depravity and meaninglessness and a freedom that is less than being the ruler of hell, which the purposeless Darwinian struggle and bloodshed get you.   That's a neo-Nazi desideratum because that's the kind of thing that benefits from it, in the end. 

If you don't ask "who benefits" from these ideological claims being widely bought you are a chump.  That's what all ideological activity is based in, the reason that people choose to believe what they believe.  I wouldn't trust a materialist completely, not even those I have deep affection for.  

You should be ashamed of [fill in whatever here]. . . Hate Mail

OH, NO I'm shameless on that point.  I will tell you that I'm a lot more embarrassed that I didn't catch that I typed "ensure" when I meant "assure" the day before yesterday, in fact I assure you of that.  

The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. famously said, "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."  Well, one of the things about there being a UNIverse is that there is one universe.  The "moral universe" is the same universe that all of the rest of it fits into.  I believe what MLK said, I choose to believe it just as nihilists choose to disbelieve that and with that disbelief they choose the nihilistic depravity that comes with that rejection.  That is why I made the remark about Nietzsche that I did the other day, no one who chooses Nietzsche has any credibility in asserting any form of morality.  I looked over a couple of lists of those who either admitted to being influenced by him or are credibly considered to have been influenced by him demonstrates that even their better natures were damaged by the kind of thing that Nietzsche asserted.  

Anyone who repeats or pretends to believe that assertion by MLK is expressing the idea that the universe has purpose of a very specific kind and if you believe that about one aspect of it, you cannot deny that other, I would assert all, aspects of it are similarly moved in a particular direction.  I could go into the problems that merely seems to be for the concept of freedom but that would take a hell of a long series of posts.  I believe that the reality of morality requires that our minds be free and that freedom is one aspect of why we have importance within the framing of morality.  I believe any life which demonstrates volition is contained within that framing, perhaps all of reality does. 

If you choose to believe that the universe is meaningless, then you have disconnected the very concept of meaning from any claim to it being real or important.  THAT seems to me to lie behind the horrific reality of the Trump phenomenon, FOX news, the refusal to accept realities such as that wearing a mask during a pandemic of air borne disease is moral and requiring them is a duty of legitimate governance AND LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE DENIAL OF REALITY.  Such denials of reality are a result of the rejection morality as a real force in the universe, something real through the installation of morality as a feature of our one universe, one as real as subatomic particles, perhaps more certainly real than the Higgs particle so much beloved by those who foolishly think that such things can have a known reality separate from the minds and lives of those who "know" them.

Those lists of those people who were heavily influenced by Nietzsche are chock full of those whose lives and work, were, I believe, blighted through their choices of believing in materialism, in scientism, in atheism. Many of the writers, composers and scientists and even a few of the philosophers on those lists, the ones I'm familiar with, probably couldn't have come up with a deep explanation of why they made that choice, for a lot of them I don't think it went much farther, in the beginning, than wanting to fit into the respectable side of an academic-so-called intellectual milieu as a means of entering the middle or upper classes.  A lot of them, I think, wanted to feel free to screw around with their students or other people, some of them wanted to feel free to do other things that morality would inhibit.  It's clear that the neo-fascists want to debase the population in general because people without a sense of morality or reality are easier to cheat, gull and control. 

I would be the first person to acknowledge that the effects of that are deeply embedded in many, perhaps most of the Christian Churches, in many Synagogues (especially, ironically, it would seem Orthodox ones) in many of the denominations of Islam (again those considered most Orthodox seemingly some of the worst).  All of those are human institutions, all human institutions are liable to immorality and its near cousin, moral failing on account of ignorance, lazy thinking and the retention of bad habits, bad habits retained by a failure of moral self-criticism as often as not.  I know from reading a lot more theology over the past decade that far from being uncritical, the best of theology practices what might be the most rigorous program of internal criticism in all of intellectual literature.  If you want an example of that, I would point you to Hans Kung's Does God Exist which will both give you a rigorous criticism of a belief in God from the viewpoint of various opponents of religion, including Nietzsche, as well as point you to more of that than you're likely to ever get from your typical English language popular treatment of the topic.  Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy is froth compared to it.

One of the unadmitted aspects of modern thought is that it is riddled with a dyspeptic and depressingly pathological negativity and a hostility to the humane and the life affirming. 
That is what I think is given away by the academic attempts at coming up with a replacement for morality which seems to always lead to a list and schedule of who it's OK to kill being a part of every one of those I'm aware of.  Peter Singer and the other academic utilitarians are a living demonstration of the tender mercies of the wicked being cruel.   Is it any wonder the lack of morality among Republican governors is tied into the concept of "herd immunity" which is a superstition based in Darwinist materialism, thinking of human lives in terms of animal husbandry?  The way Nazis though to the slaves they worked to death, the physics of how to keep crematoria burning on calculations of human fat so as to save money on coal?

In Lieu Of A St. Patrick's Day Post - Hate Mail

I ONLY watched a little of the 1970s series of TV plays The Glittering Prizes based on a novel by Frederic Raphael. It was about the school days and lives in years later of a group of Cambridge University graduates, that was something that was already getting old for me back then. As the gorgeous Tom Conti played Adam Morris, the moral center of the stories, it's kind of funny that I didn't watch the whole thing. As it is, other than finding just about every character but him and Morris's wife repugnant to one extent or another, it didn't make that much of an impression on me.  I couldn't stand the mandatory gay character, I felt like shooting him when the stupid queen got himself arrested through entrapment.  I never felt much sympathy for people who got into trouble looking for anonymous sex.  I was also a bit tired of that tired old plot device by then, too, probably. 

 

I do, though, remember the last of the six shows in the series, A Double Life, which I think might the the only one I watched in its entirety, in which the stupidity and selfishness of many of the characters was coming home to roost and Adam Morris and his wife were trying to hold onto their idealism as the liberal assumptions of the 1960s were crashing all around them. What I remember most is the opening in which Morris is addressing a tiny crowd of elderly Jews on why he didn't support Zionism or, at least, opposed the policies of the Israeli government against the Arab population. 

 

What you said about the moral responsibility of "monotheist religion" for all atrocities in response to what I said reminded me of a scene from that to lead me to see if it was Youtubed and, guess what, it is. Here it is.

 

 

 

If you listen to the whole thing you will, I hope, notice a complete disconnect between the conclusions of Morris as to who was ultimately to blame and the quote from Bertrand Russell, given as,  

 

If we could be certain that eternal bliss could be obtained for all mankind by exterminating the Jews then there could be no reason for not exterminating the Jews.

 

A quote which I can't place in the Russell canon, though I wouldn't be at all surprised if he said something like that, the old fart loved to get the kind of attention that saying such things would have gotten him.  

 

And also notice the requisite Russell style condemnation of God and so religion as being the most depraved thing of all, which was part of the general denigration of monotheistic religion, a requirement to be intellectually and socially respectable in the milieu that would have watched the shows. The fact is that without God Adam Morris is quite at a loss to explain his morality, its validity, why he has any right to assert to other people he has a right to advocate that they be governed by it. That's a central and fatal problem with all such assertions of morality.

 

As it's been about 45 years since I saw it and I don't have a script, I think I'm right in remembering Morris has a discussion with his cynical teenage son, almost the same age he was in the first of the series as he tells his old Jewish aristocratic father why he thought giving up a millenia old tradition was a good thing. In the discussion it's apparently news to the middle-aged idealist that his son has become a devotee of the nihilism of Nietzsche, though it would be interesting to go into that in light of the assertions made to the tiny audience of unconvinced elderly Jews and the rancorous discussion he has with them, his rejection of Russell's utilitarian assertion of what it would take to make it morally justified to murder all of the Jews (utilitarianism as well as other atheist ersatz replacements for morality always seem to devolve into writing up lists and schedules of who to kill) and his son's further rejection of the Jewish tradition of morality of which his father* who also died in the last show was an already faded representative of. Perhaps someone who has the script or the whole show might want to send me some ideas on that.

 

I seem to recall that the series end in Morris saying that he can only cope by carving out an imaginary refuge from the essential contradictions between his various stands, the disappointments of life, the failing idealistic yearnings he has had. I seem to remember that's how it ended, though it has been more than forty years and I'm sure I only saw it once. 

 

Lost in the whole thing was the fact that literally every sin that can be asserted against the Children of Israel in Scripture is known to us by their own confession of guilt and that every sin that can be laid against Christians allegedly acting out of Christianity is a sin against the Gospel, too.  You can't say that if the utilitarians came up with what would satisfy them as  "certainty" that killing all the Jews would result in their genocide against Jews they would not have a logical justification of that in their own phony substitution for morality.  It is one of the recurring topics on this blog how one, after another, after another iteration of atheist-materialistic ideology has come up with a reason for the most appalling evil up to and including genocide.  I have infuriated many by pointing out that a belief in natural selection, the quintessential ideology of the atheist-materialist-modernist educated class and even of religious types who want to be respectable with that realm of existence is rife with assertions of the salubrious effects on the future of one genocide or another.  I would wonder if Raphael ever dealt with that fact in his many published works. 

 

* Eric Porter, whose acting style seemed to clash with that of the younger actor, though maybe that was intentional given the context.

 

Update:  Ha, ha, on me.  Reading this through I realized I'd misremembered four decades out.   Eric Porter didn't play Morris's father, he played the Brit-fascist who Adam Morris goes to interview.  It was Leonard Sachs who played the father. 

 

 

 

I Am Mightily Pissed Off Over This And Will Always Be

LAST NIGHT'S Rachel Maddow show had these two excerpts from the Director of National Intelligence report on Putin interference in the 2020 election.  

 

A key element of Moscow's strategy this election cycle was its use of people linked to Russian intelligence to launder influence narratives including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden-through US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration.

and 

Derkach, Kilimnik, and their associates sought to use prominent US persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to US officials and audiences. These Russian proxies met with and provided materials to Trump administration-linked US persons to advocate for formal investigations; hired a US firm to petition US officials; and attempted to make contact with several senior US officials. 

 

Why aren't the "US media organizations" and "prominent US individuals" made public so we know how to judge their credibility on this or any other issues. What are the "media conduits to launder" Putin's narratives "to US officials and audiences." Who were the "US persons" Trump administration-linked WHAT WAS THE "US FIRM" HIRED TO PETITION US OFFICIALS"?

 

Any of those referred to in the report who acted in this way, were open to those sources of lies to be inserted not only into the Republican-fascist press but also directly into the United States government, the Congress, the Executive, who knows, into the Judicial branch - AFTERALL, IT WAS THE SUPREME COURT THROUGH THEIR "FREE SPEECH-FREE PRESS" RULINGS WHO OPENED US UP TO THIS ANTI-DEMOCRATIC CORRUPTION. All of that means that it isn't just the right of We The People to know the identity of those guilty of crimes against democracy, we have an absolute need to know who are active agents of foreign gangsters, including those in our domestic billionaire-millionare gangster class who worked hand in glove with the gangster dictator of Russia, those working for and with him in other countries, almost certainly such gangsters who have done what the Republican-fascists wanted to do here, gain absolute control of the United States government.  

 

I want this rubbed in the face of John Roberts, Alito, Thomas, etc. those who through the Republican-fascist dominated Supreme Court opened us up to this corruption, I want them to be forced out of power through their knowing or at least informed collusion with this effort. They were warned what they were doing in Citizens United and a series of other Republican-fascist-billionaire-millionaire enabling corruptions of our elections going back to Buckley v Valeo, on behalf of one of our more genteel fascist families and the goddamned ACLU who supported ALL of those rulings and others corrupting American demoracy.  

 

 

If you "choose to believe" something, it means you don't really believe it. - Hate Mail

WHEN I said that I chose to believe that the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition of monotheism was true I was being provocative but I was also being honest about things and how things are.   I choose to believe in physics, chemistry, well-supported areas of biology,  I choose to believe in evolution while I most certainly don't believe in natural selection,  I choose to believe that the assertions and proofs of the quite separate realm of  mathematics are generally true in some, though not all, of the applications to things in the physical sciences, though I most certainly do not believe that the so-called social sciences have any level of demonstrable reason for believing that their mathematical manipulations relate to anything much that is real.    If mathematicians and scientists were honest the would admit that what they know they would not accept as being known without a long series of choices to believe things being in place by the time they arrived at their first bit of scientific knowledge.   

Philosophers would be far more honest if they admitted there is not only NO sharp distinction between belief and knowledge but there is the most intimate of relations between the action of believing and knowing, knowing, as we talk about it, being a product of belief at the earliest of ages, I would say predating our first sentient use of words and language.  Social scientists are seldom honest enough to even admit the scientific illegitimacy of most everything they do and teach so maybe they're a lost cause, the odd one here and there excepted.

The assertion that things happen by random chance, that nature is not aimed at goals and that the progressive conception of reality is a delusion is nothing that is knowable through science, mathematics or philosophy, the millenniums arguing about that have produce nothing except a few temporary periods where one or the other conception has seemed to get the upper hand, I think that the idea that the materialists who invented and asserted those conceptions, including those pagans who conceived of their gods as aspects of the material universe (Paul had interesting things to say about that in Romans, by the way) . . . that those guys had somehow escaped the realm of expressing ideas from the realm of belief  is unbelievable considering how consonant their exposition of the universe and reality is with their hostility to revealed religion as found in the Jewish-Christian-Islamic and other traditions which believe in a God (generally from those I'm aware of an expression of the single God who is definitely NOT an aspect of the material universe but its Creator).  

What you assert is the real, right sciencey, modernistic knowledge of the universe is not scientific, it is ideological, as modernism is an ideological framing in itself, a materialistic, scientistic, atheistic one.  What atheists misrepresent as superior thinking on that account merely expose themselves as the victims of their own allergy to rigorous examination of their own thinking, testing themselves for the sins they accuse religious believers of because, brother, you guys are as bad as the worst of the fundamentalist Bible thumpers in that regard. 

Update:  Back during my long period of agnostic cowardice I fell into the place of being impressed with G.E. Moore's A Defense of Common Sense which, in light of philosophy's inability to come to a single universal truth established to the claimed requirements to be considered as "known," threw up his hands and said that there were things known by "common sense" that are known to a higher degree of reliability than the kinds of things that philosophers had been disputing the reality of like forever.   I wasn't as impressed with his clear motive in the paper of using his claims to assure his fellow Brit atheist philosophers (and the general run of academic philosophers) that he was safely atheistic - they are generally less pluralistic in their ideological purity than even many religious people are, certainly not within their profession. 

I think after that long, long period of philosophers running up against the impossibility of their being able to find a single thing they can hold to be known absolutely, the problem is with their claimed requirements for holding that.  I think it's a problem that does, in fact, go back to Socrates as Plato likely invented him, of running up against the idealized conception of pure knowledge as it runs smack into the limits of our minds.  I think the standards of Western Philosophy along that line are what is unsupported and likely is a product of uninformed imagination and unacknowledged wishful thinking based on a dislike of religion. 

Let me turn to one of my favorite dear old commies, I. F. Stone who I think said it best in his wonderful book The Trial of Socrates.

 Socrates demands not only perfect definitions of the shoe and the horse but - more difficult - a perfect definition of knowledge, itself.  Here is how Socrates puts it to Theaetetus,  who is perhaps the least wide-awake of all of the submissive yes-men given Socrates in the Platonic canon:

Socrates:  Then he [the shoemaker] does not understand knowledge of shoes if he does not know knowledge.

Theaetetus: No

Socrates:  Then he who is ignorant of knowledge does not understand cobbler or any other art.

Theaetetus:  No

Any bright Athenian could have made the obvious objection to this stratospheric nonsense:  A shoemaker need not to be a philosophizer, and a philosopher is not necessarily a good shoemaker.  Indeed, the customer who brought a piece of leather to the cobbler was interested not - as a philosopher would say - in universals but in particulars.  He wanted a pair made to fit his particular feet, not some metaphysically perfect definition of a shoe.  Then as now, the right foot was not the same as the left.  So no shoes even in the same pair were identical, however perfect the definition of "shoe."  And the customer wanted his particular pair made in such a way as best to utilize the particular piece of leather he had chosen.  At every point the "particular" was more important than the "universal."  In one vital aspect the shoemaker is ahead of the philosopher.  The shoemaker can make a shoe.  But the philosophers still can't turn out an absolutely perfect definition - either of shoes or of knowledge.  Insofar as their respective crafts are considered, the shoemaker is clearly the better craftsman than the metaphysician.  

I don't think there is any obligation on the part of anyone to wait around another 2.5 thousand years to see if they're going to come up with one before admitting that what they claimed about the nature of knowledge as compared to belief was worth less than a load of bullshit which at least could be composted and used to fertilize crops.

From The Lectionary For Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent

Thus says the LORD:
Lo, I am about to create new heavens
    and a new earth;
The things of the past shall not be remembered
    or come to mind.
Instead, there shall always be rejoicing and happiness
    in what I create;
For I create Jerusalem to be a joy
    and its people to be a delight;
I will rejoice in Jerusalem
    and exult in my people.
No longer shall the sound of weeping be heard there,
    or the sound of crying;
No longer shall there be in it
    an infant who lives but a few days,
    or an old man who does not round out his full lifetime;
He dies a mere youth who reaches but a hundred years,
    and he who fails of a hundred shall be thought accursed.
They shall live in the houses they build,
    and eat the fruit of the vineyards they plant.

 Isaiah 65:17-21

Needless to say we haven't come close to that yet, we still await that extent in change, though I wonder what Isaiah would make of our world.  

The Jewish idea of time as being progressive, as opposed to the materialistic-pagan view of reality as static, is one of those things I chose to believe when I chose to believe.  That is that I chose to consider it as a reality even as materialists reject it for those kinds of unstated, unadmitted ideological motives I mentioned earlier today.  

The consequences of choosing to believe that there is change, that change is possible, that change is the will of God who created the universe and life for a reason and towards an end are not guaranteed to be adopted, you have to also accept the Jewish idea of justice, which extends to not only all of humanity but to animals and all of creation, as well, something that is often laid aside or neglected or denied by even those who put on a display of piety and orthodoxy but a belief in God at least makes that a coherent possibility,  there is a reason for morality being moral and that is because it is what The Creator wants, a part of the reason for the creation of the universe and life.  Without that all of the many materialistic replacements for morality, relativism, utilitarianism, the ridiculous substitution for those biological-materialistic atavism often as ill defined as asserted and far more open to the corruption of selfish and hateful motives than the Jewish-Christian-Islamic conception of reality mentioned above.  In fact, they can't even get started with providing a reason that anyone, even accepting the ersatz replacement of non-selfish assertions of ethics, should feel any obligation to act unselfishly if they figure they can work it to their ends, in the end. 

A traditional barroom style atheist would call the vision of Isaiah "pie in the sky"  but at least there is some mention of pie for all in that desideratum as opposed to what atheism offers.   Atheism can't even tell someone why they should figure they have a right to "live in the houses they build, and eat the fruit of the vineyards they plant," nor give the rich and powerful who can steal the product of the labor of those beneath them an absolute reason they shouldn't .  Overcoming the universal and original sin of selfishness takes a lot more than the entire history of academic, intellectual, atheist-materialist-scientistic creation of replacements for revealed religion, it takes an acceptance of a very specific idea of God.

 

Can't blieve I missed that Chick Corea had died last month

 

 

Hope he's making great music.