On The Idea That Moses And The Law Are "Too Jewish" For The United States

Tell my brothers to be always watching unto prayer and when the good old ship of Zion comes along, to be ready to step on board.

Harriet Tubman Letter to her family 1854  

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

Martin Luther King jr. Last Sermon

Here is what is shown online as Benjamin Franklin's proposed design for the front of a Great Seal for the United States depicting Pharaoh's army being destroyed as Moses follows God's instruction for closing the path through the Red Sea

 

 

 Here is Thomas Jefferson's design showing the Children of Israel running away to freedom from their enslavement by Pharaoh.  

 

 

There is an enormous irony in the fact that the very thing that the slave-owner Jefferson wanted to use to symbolize the United States is a constantly referred to event in the abolition movement at its most basic level, the Spirituals of those enslaved escaping slavery against the very law of the United States embedded into the Constitution and which was not eradicated by the Civil War, the abrubtly cancelled Reconstruction, the great Civil Rights struggle of the post-WWII era, the culmination in that of the abruptly cancelled Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts and the presidency of Barack Obama as we are still suffering under the Pharaonic regime of anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian features embedded in the Constitution for the protection of the slave holders and their progeny.  

If I had time I would list only some of the citations of The Law of Moses in the historical foundations of the United States, of the Exodus story, both the good and the bad of it.   Moses and that first event of slaves being freed from slavery is as American as  Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King jr,  and even Franklin and Jefferson and they're just the start of it.  

After I wrote the first draft of this I checked out the news in several places, like I always do in the morning and I saw a piece by Thomas Reese at the National Catholic Reporter speculating on what the most Catholic President in our history, Joe Biden will talk about when he meets with Good Pope Francis tomorrow.   He made this observation:

The White House sees in the pope an ally on the world stage, although the pope is probably closer to Bernie Sanders than Biden on economic issues.

I would venture to say that Benedict XVI and even John Paul II, who I would never count as my favorite Popes, at least in their official writings are probably closer to Bernie than Biden because their theology is informed by the Mosaic Law as, in fact, the Gospels and Epistles are.  The Law is probably the most radical of all economic documents in human history, it makes Marxism pale in comparison in its radical egalitarianism, what Moses didn't explicitly equalize was equalized by both Jesus and Hillel in their abbreviation of The Law and the Prophets in their positive and "negative" expression of "The Golden Rule."   If those who claimed to follow those traditions obeyed that law there never would have been slavery among those who profess Christianity, there would never have been poverty or unequal treatment.   There is nothing more radical than that, every secular, ersatz substitute for that morality most assuredly included, including, unfortunately, most of what gets called "socialism." 

Moses is more American than apple pie.  "Mishpat" is a far better word for egalitarian representative government of, by and FOR The People than the entirely damaged word "democracy."  It has been used too often to mean unequal, non-representative gangster government.  Including some of the worst dictatorships of the 20th century.   "Democracy" is what the Republican-fascists are calling their ratfucking of electoral democracy even as I am typing this.  

Update:  Oh, and that 1 Samuel 8 passage I said was about the greatest warning against gangster government ever given.  It is so great that the big fat religion hater, Thomas Paine cited it positively, one of his primary historical testimonies in in his treatise against monarchy.

Betty Carter And Her Trio - Autumn Leaves

 

Direct link to the video

Cyrus A. Chestnut - piano 

Curtis Lundy - bass 

Clarence I. Penn - drums 

Betty Carter - singer

With such great jazz musicians as Betty Carter and those she worked with those standards were anything but standard. 

How About We Be Honest And Call Legitimate Governance "Mishpat"

Mishpat ehad yieyeh lakem kager kaezrah ki ani YHWH Elohim.  Leviticus 24:22

EGALITARIAN  representative government of, by and FOR The People is the only legitimate form of government.   There I said it, I hold that as an absolute truth and hold it as a more important and consequential truth.   If you can find a way in which it contains not only the self-contradicting but entirely self-consuming internal defect that I've identified in scientistic, atheist materialism, go for it.  

I would love to replace the common use of "democracy" for that legitimate egalitarian, representative government which is of, by and FOR The People, with the word "Mishpat" because that is what I firmly believe it is based in, both conceptually and historically.   Maybe I should start using it here.  I would tend to avoid anything with Greek or Latin forms though I supposed those would come up naturally as they are such a feature of the English language now.  

You can find the basis for egalitarian representative government in the Hebrew Scriptures, for example, as given above:

You shall have the same rule [mishpat] for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the Lord your God. RSV

as well as one of the most impressive warnings against choosing gangster governance in all of literature.*  It also contains numerous warnings of the human susceptibility of going that route even against the warning given by God, it happened over and over again and it lays out the consequences of that.  All of the historical books in which the Hebrew Scripture writers confess the sins of the Children of Israel are full of such warnings.   You can't find the basis of legitimate government in scientistic atheist materialism.  That seems to produce the opposite wherever it is adopted as the basis for governance, close to if not every time.  

*  Notice that in that passage God doesn't give them a king, Samuel does when the People demand it when the humanly instituted governance by judges fails due to the fallibility of Samuel's sons.  God allows them all to make mistakes, gives them the freedom to choose and do the wrong thing.  I think that's quite as significant as the warning of what their wrong choice would lead to. 

Note:  Forgive the transliteration of the Hebrew, the transliterations I found online didn't agree much but I wanted to make the point of how Mishpat is morally superior to the classical conception of "democracy." 

The Consequences For Truth Of Sabine Hossenfelder's Preferred Ideology Negates The Basis Of Her Argument - That's Quite A Definitively Refuting Consequence

What are the historical origins of the argumentum ad consequentiam, the argument from (or literally, to) consequences, sometimes featured as an informal fallacy in logic textbooks? As shown in this paper, knowledge of the argument can be traced back to Aristotle (who did not treat it as a fallacy, but as a reasonable argument). And this type of argument shows a spotty history of recognition in logic texts and manuals over the centuries. But how it got into the modern logic textbooks as a fallacy remains somewhat obscure. Its modern genesis is traced to the logic text of James McCosh (1879).

Douglas Walton:  Historical Origins of Argumentam ad Consequentiam

SUSPECTING THAT this dodge of accusing someone of committing this "logical fallacy" which I'd never had a pop-atheist throw at me before would become a more often resorted to dodge, I decided to see what I can see.  As the paper the above abstract introduces says, the "fallacy" is merely an "informal" one and one of fairly recent origin and, from what it looks to me, not particularly well thought out by those who use the term.  From what he shows it is sometimes confused with a somewhat related mode of thought that Aristotle gave a name that can easily be confused with it.  I'll leave it to anyone curious enough to go into that to read it for themselves,  the author of the paper is quite concise and clear in a way someone typing out a quick answer won't be.

The most important point is made after he discusses what Aristotle said, distinguishing what he presented as a (sometimes) useful mode of reasoning with what is presented as a "logical fallacy" by SOME modern logic textbooks and, outside of the academic realm by pop-atheist would-be logic ninjas from the philosophical school of Carl Sagan, James Randi and Michael Shermer.  He sums that up:

The long and the short of this digression is that the fallacy of the consequent is an interesting type of fallacy in its own right, and it is somewhat related to the kind of inference called argumentum ad consequentiam, but two the two things are quite different.  Argument from consequences is a very common, and generally quite reasonable form of argument to the effect that a projected course of action is a good (bad) course to take if the consequences of it are good (bad).  The fallacy of consequent is the error of turning a conditional around when such a turning around (converting) of the conditional is not warranted (generally because the inference from consequent to antecedent is weaker when turned around).  But the fallacy of consequent is certainly something to pursue, because of the neglect of any adequate and useful treatment of it in modern logic. 

Being a political blogger, a firm and complete believer in egalitarian democracy as the only possibility of establishing a legitimate government which is likely to produce the least moral atrocity, I will begin with a hard truth.

If people are incapable of free thought, free will then democracy is a sham and a delusion, no more legitimate than dictatorships, monarchies, oligarchies, plutocracies or inegalitarian governments including those make a show of "democracy"  in which one class of people get to lord it over other classes of people, ruling without the consent of the governed.*   Human history has shown that the consequences of that assumption are virtually everything bad ever in the recorded history of our species and its present.   

The contented, well-paid cattle in university faculties who are generally well subsidized by the state or by the patronage of the rich, whose families are safe, fed, housed, clothed, have access to health care, may not feel any immediate or credibly suspect they are in any danger of violent oppression - so long as they keep to the rules for maintaining their positions - are probably quite content to give up the belief in free will because those consequences are reserved for those lower on the economic scale.   They have far more of a stake in Christians acting like they're told to in the Gospel and Epistles which are rejected by those who love the idea that freedom is an illusion.

However, when the consequences of the fashionable and respectable materialist-atheist, scientism are pressed on its true believers, especially those consequences impinging on  the necessary demotion of the minds they use to follow their passion and professional bread and butter, they don't much care for it.   

The fact is, the real consequence of the demotion of all of the things they like from their other ideological preference is real, the consequence of not believing in the monistic character of materialism (the denial of "natural law" is imaginary. 

It's OK with them as long as they can apply such dogmas as the denial of free thought to religion, to politics, to consumer choices but when it is pointed out that literally everything they do, from the most speculative and often at odds with each other  denominations and sects of current theoretical physics down to the sciences of lesser prestige (though often of entirely more exigent necessity) and on down to the most basic of foundations on which all of that rests in mathematics and logic must be as devoid of transcendent significance as what they disdain, mock and dismiss as unimportant they either will not admit the point that their universalist-totalitarian monistic materialism cannot provide for their thoughts what it denies for the thoughts of those they don't like or they will refuse to follow their argument to its logical and inescapable end.  

Nietzsche did understand that consequence of total nihilism required by the ideology of materialism, a materialism, ironically, demanded by the scientism of "enlightenment" modernism.   And you didn't find it only in the expression of the line that came from Nietzsche.   It is the position that Nicolai Bukharin took when he told Michael Polanyi "Under [Leninist-Stalinist] socialism the conception of science pursued for its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously turn to the problems of the current Five Year Plan."   Though the scandals of modern science as seen in Retraction Watch prove that capitalism and scientists serving in corporations are as able to corrupt science as Polanyi feared would happen under Stalinist communism.   Scientists are certainly prone to all manner of decadence as their refusal to rigorously follow the consequences of materialism right down to the bitter reduction of everything to no more significance than iron oxidizing, water evaporating or any other banal natural phenomeon, devoid of any transcendence as truth.  

That is quite a consequence and totally unnecessary if a materialist would give up the pretense that it is a totally potent explanation of things, the dogmatic holding that materialism is an adequate monistic explanation of everything.    The fact is that if you believe in the possibility of miracles you don't have to not believe in the validity of some of what scientific method, mathematics, logic demonstrate.  The number of scientists, mathematicians, logicians who believed in God and that God could do miracles is not insignificant, among them some of the most accomplished of all scientists.   I don't think Stephen Hawking is ever likely to replace Isaac Newton for top position as the greatest physicist on those ranked lists they love to make.  I don't think, Pascal's mathematics will ever be discredited, not for all of the snarking about his "Wager" which is discussed in the paper linked to above, though I doubt anyone has ever believed in God and acted accordingly based on it, excepting, perhaps Pascal.  There are a lot better reasons to decide to believe in God, better ones than to believe in any number of theories held by current science, certainly better than some of the competing theories of current theoretical physics which Sabine Hossenfelder ably critiques, though those who hold it are among those who determine what gets into science.  

* The touted Athenian "democracy" was such a gangster government in which only old-family white, Greek males governed, all foreigners (you couldn't become an Athenian citizen except through birth) women, slaves, etc. were denied a say in the government.   I would like to have a different word for the modern, egalitarian governance with all of the governed having a say in who governs on behalf of The People because it's a far different thing from that classical era gang rule system. I am convinced that modern democracy is far more a product of the Hebrew tradition than the classical Greek tradition, it is certainly not a product of the Roman Republic which the slave-owners and financiers who wrote the Constitution emulated.  That the Roman Republic degenerated into the Roman Imperial era and never recovered the Republic should have been a warning of what their emulation of it might spawn in the fullness of corruption they maintained.

Mary Lou Williams Trio - Baby Man

 

Direct link to the video

Mary Lou Williams, piano

Buster Williams, Bass

Mickey Roker, Drums

I know I posted this not that long ago but it's a cold, damp, broody night here and I needed to hear it again. 

Here's a different take I didn't post before:

 Direct link to the video

 

The Fact Is She Also Is Arguing From Consequence She's Just Not Admitting That She Is Doing So

In this video I explain why free will is incompatible with the currently known laws of nature and why the idea makes no sense anyway. However, you don't need free will to act responsibly and to live a happy life, and I will tell you why.

Sabine Hossenfelder:  You Don't Have Free Will, But Don't Worry

IN ARGUING AGAINST what Sabine Hossenfelder said about the impossibility of us having free will due to such a thing having to contradict "the laws of physics" I was accused of possibly violating the ban on "arguing from consequence," a novelty in my experience so I thought I should think it out.

I looked for a standard definition of this claimed "fallacy" and decided to settle on what an atheist-materialist Youtuber probably did, one of those would be smarty-pants atheist materialists who put up websites of such things.  Here's what the Wikipedia article on it starts with:

Appeal to consequences, also known as argumentum ad consequentiam (Latin for "argument to the consequence"), is an argument that concludes a hypothesis (typically a belief) to be either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences.  This is based on an appeal to emotion and is a type of informal fallacy, since the desirability of a premise's consequence does not make the premise true. Moreover, in categorizing consequences as either desirable or undesirable, such arguments inherently contain subjective points of view.

Here is what the next one Google threw at me says:

Description: Concluding that an idea or proposition is true or false because the consequences of it being true or false are desirable or undesirable.  The fallacy lies in the fact that the desirability is not related to the truth value of the idea or proposition.  This comes in two forms: the positive and negative.

Since Wikipedia is under the constant ratfucking, um,  "editing" of dedicated materialist-scientistic-atheist groups and the later one looks like it's put up by a member of the same ideological side, that's enough to start with.  Though I wouldn't regularly rely on that kind of stuff.

Since Hossenfelder's arguments against free will are that it violates physical law her argument was a far more direct example of  "arguing from consequence" because undelying it were several things she holds as desirable which she wants to protect with her arguments against free will:

a. the truth and totalistic efficacy of her conception of physical laws and their extension well past where physical law can be known to hold any validity, 
 

b. the exclusive and totalistic nature of material existence to not only explain everything but to comprise everything,
 

c. the non-existence of anything that renders either of those false or untrue or diminishes their exclusive status as true.  That is the essential and always unstated position of every scientistic-materialistic atheist I've ever encountered whenever they talk about such things.

Based on that I would say that if anyone was relying on argument from consequences, it was the atheists in the argument, including most of those in science who come up with assertions that they've demonstrated that.  I would say any time any of them, especially the ideologues who call themselves "skeptics" argue against something because "it violates the laws of science, physics, etc." they are making a hidden appeal to consequences, supported by an unadmitted and rather massive skeleton of such desired consequences.   Though those very desires are often stated within the very arguments they make.  

Their argument fails entirely if someone doesn't accept that their ideological totalitarian system comprises the entirety of reality or can credibly explain it.  And it doesn't make sense on its own terms.

In the case of asserting the materialistically deterministic and reductionistic character of our minds, what Hossenfelder takes up in her video-essay, the consequences for her preferred ideology are as real as it is for the things she doesn't like because they don't fit into her preferred ideological straight-jacket, more real, in fact because of the rigid and exclusionary monism of her preferred materialism.   Nothing she likes, science, physics, up to and including the mathematics and logic that those should be based in (though often, as even she points out, that is more honored than practiced) can possibly escape the acid of discrediting any more than those ideas and thoughts she not only rejects but disdains.   You should be careful when you throw such universal acid because it will eat through a lot more than you intend it to.  

I will not go into the very long passage I wrote about the stupendous improbability of any one individual organism or a small group of organisms having the correct antecedent physical materials in their brains so as to produce, out of all the random possibilities of what could be there and what those could result in being true in a significant way but I would guess if such a probability could be accurately worked out it would make the near impossibility of a universe producing intelligent minds pale in remote probability.    The typical atheist confronted with such an assertion would immediately make resort to those creator gods of atheism "natural selection" and "DNA" though I bet the probability of them explaining how Sabine Hossenfelder and her fellow ideologues managed to twig onto  the truth as those creator gods left so many of their equally and not infrequently far more reproductively successful human beings in the dark would not be significantly more probable.   Clearly many minds don't seem to contain the material antecedents of her kind of scientistic, materialistic atheism, that would seem to be a rather rare thing.  You might call it "improbable."   I think it might just add another layer of improbability onto what I already laid out.   If they did twig onto it in such numbers it must be through some miracle that their own ideology detests as repugnant. 

I have pointed out that her very attempt to change the minds of her audience proves that she, herself, rejects those consequences of her position that she doesn't like the logical consequences of it.  She has that in common with every single other atheist I've ever read on this except, possibly Nietzsche who was a pathological amoralist and loved to contemplate violence that he, himself, was too much of a coward to practice and the far more admirable Richard Lewontin who admitted the truth that his rejection of things outside of his materialistic-atheist ideology was merely a matter of preference and not hard reasoning.  

For me, not being a materialist monist, or a monist in matters of material or mental experience, I don't have any problem with the idea that science, mathematics, logic can find things generally and sometimes specifically true about physical reality nor that human beings can make judgements about their experience and observations (observations being a category of experiences) that can be true and honest and that those have actual significance on something other than chance and probability. 

That's one of the things I guess I should think on more.  Being a non-materialist has freed me from that kind of monist straight jacket.  Perhaps that's the reason that atheist-materialists are so dubious about the possibility of free will, their system doesn't allow them the freedom to accept it, it doesn't even allow them to really take a hard look at what their ideology confines them to thinking about.    Materialists reject freedom and aren't too good at getting the benefits of it.

Monday Night Standards - Ella Fitzgerald - Let's Begin

 

Direct link to the video

Jerome Kern, music - Otto Harbach, 

Ella Fitzgerald, voice 

Nelson Riddle, arranger conductor

Trombone solo by Dick Nash 

I've resisted posting standards because they get too much exposure as it is.  But I keep getting requests for them so I'll do it once a week.   Figured there wasn't a better place to start than with these.

She Didn't Say Yes 

  

Direct link to the video 

Credits as above 

An Answer To A Snarky Question

THE FIRST TIME I MANAGED NOT TO AVOID hearing the Rolling Stones song Brown Sugar, I immediately knew it was a. racist, b. white supremacist, c. sexist, d. pedophiliac and e. repulsive for all of those reasons.  And throw in advocacy of violence, nothing to do with slavery can escape the violence it took to keep people in slavery, up to and including murder.   

It would have been some time soon after it was released in the United States and played on the radio.  Now, fifty years later enough opposition to it has been brought that old, old Mick and his remaining old stones are perhaps permanently, perhaps temporarily dropping it from the set list of their geriatric tour where they will suck in money from ancient fans who have managed to not grow up in the mean time and to others.  Only a dozen years before he'll be boogying with an oxygen tank on stage, that Oxygen Tank Tour I predicted he'd do when he was 90.

I don't know when the first time I expressed hatred of that song online was but it's come up a number of times, that and the assholes who produced it.   I certainly expressed hatred of it from shortly after hearing it the first time because it was one of their most popular songs and I pretty much hated everything they did from the first time I heard them.  

Half a century ahead of the times, I guess.  I'm glad to see young people aren't taking that bullshit anymore in large enough numbers.

Roger Sessions - Symphony no. 2

 

Direct link to the video

San Francisco Symphony 

Herbert Blomstedt, conductor

This note from the program of a performance by the American Symphony Orchestra is informative.

Premiered on January 9, 1947 by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Monteaux
Performance Time: Approximately 26 minutes

Roger Huntington Sessions was born in Brooklyn and raised in Hadley, Massachusetts. His ancestors included Samuel Huntington, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and the Rt. Rev. Dan Huntington, a noted Episcopalian Bishop of Central New York. Sessions noted, “I come from an old family and that is undoubtedly part of my life, because I realized that with that background I always had a basic sense of social security; I mean a security in American society.” This august pedigree extended to his education as well: Sessions studied at Harvard University, at Yale University under Horatio Parker, and privately with Ernest Bloch. Sessions was an immensely influential composition teacher, and he served on the faculties of Smith College; Princeton University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the Julliard School, among others. During his lifetime, Sessions received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rome Prize in 1926, and two Pulitzer Prizes for Music. He was also elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

William W. Austin wrote in handsome tribute to Sessions: “In all his works the vast range of his craft and the intensity of his thought are evident. . . . For those capable of appreciating his technique, the music is deeply rewarding.” One of the most rewarding of Sessions’ scores is his Symphony No. 2 (1946), which was commissioned by Columbia University’s Ditson Fund. It is touchingly dedicated “To the Memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” An unusual aspect of the orchestration is the prominence of both piano and harp. Cast in four movements, the symphony includes a short, satirical scherzo as the second movement and a kaleidoscopic finale. Its heart, however, is found in its brooding slow movement. In his trenchant article on Sessions, Joseph Kerman singled out this movement for special commendation: “The sombre crisis before the ending (but not the ending itself) remains in mind as the focus of the whole symphony.”

The Terrible Accidental Shooting

THE NEWS OF THE ACCIDENTAL SHOOTING during the filming of what would have probably been an entirely forgettable western movie certainly proves that Hollywood will never, ever get things right unless they are forced to by law or by ruinous lawsuit (yeah, right, as if that would happen).   As details and rumors from the production come out it's clear that it was not an isolated incident as people warned that there had already been two or three accidental "discharges" I would imagine meaning guns were fired when they should have been.  Yet this still happened. 

It reminds me of that interview of the Canadian playwright Judith Thompson conducted by the Canadian actor R. H. Thompson I posted last summer in which he said that the only actor he knew of who refused to hold a gun in his career was Dustin Hoffmann.  It also made me think of the author Marilynne Robinson who remarked on the appalling amount of fiction that centers around the crime of murder - I wonder if there has ever been a "western" movie that has ever not had that as a central feature or a plot device.   Like Marlboro cigarettes, it certainly hovers in the background in that genre, the violence and gun fanaticism it fosters is a major blight on the United States and elsewhere.

I wonder what the motives of those in charge of the production, the producer, the director, maybe even the actors who had the decision to use actual discharges from a gun, a "prop gun" in the filming when others use computer effects to mimic them, if they wanted "authenticity" that would come from something containing an explosion of powder.   The idea that that, clearly dangerous thing could be one of the very few things that they needed to make "authentic" when everything about movies is as phony as a carny side-show is absurd.   I heard one person who works in that part of the industry who said that in order for the "mistake" to have been made, in which, movie-like, a bullet was put in the thing instead of a dangerous-enough-to-be-stupid-to-use blank, not one but at least three violations of the written rules on using a gun in a production would have had to be committed.   I hope whoever was responsible for breaking those rules is or are prosecuted for whatever New Mexico law would allow them to charge them with.

I would be curious to know if anyone was ever killed in the making of a radio drama.  Apart from one make-believe Ellery Queen who-done-it I seem to vaguely remember - and it was poison in that case - I don't remember ever hearing of one.  I despise Hollywood.  

Do The Kew-el Kids Still Say "Well, Duh!"

OF COURSE I used the term "real medium" to be provocative, you think I'd use it without knowing it would provoke the people who've been attacking me for going on two decades and who I delight in triggering?  

I don't know whether or not what real mediums do is real sometimes or many times.   When I say a "real medium" I mean someone who isn't as-seen-on-TV but who has paying customers.   As I said, people I know and trust, at least some  of them taking precautions to prevent the medium they consulted knowing their identity, said they told them things they couldn't have learned by googling them or asking someone. one impressed on me that they were the only possible source of what they were told and they'd never shared it with anyone else.   I wasn't there.  I have to do what anyone has to, respect their judgement of their own experience of something I didn't witness.     Something the "skeptics" never really do as they pretend to knowledge of something they can't have.  They don't respect anyone who isn't part of their ideological atheist religion. 

I will say that I take the traditional Jewish-Christian reservations about consulting them seriously because, like psychologists and psychiatrists and what they see on TV, the movies and Facebook, they can seriously screw people up. 

The claim that if you believe someone on something that seems incredible you have to believe everyone on even those things that seem impossible is an absurd exaggeration.  EVERYONE, including every friggin' big-name "skeptic" who ever lived believes in things that are incredible and they do what everyone else does, they pick and choose which things that are unevidenced and unverified they choose to believe.  If that atheist-materialist-true believer in scientism claim that to believe anything means you're compelled to believe everything were true that would apply to them as much as it would the most credulous dupe of any conman in the world because they do believe things that are unevidenced.

I cannot tell you how grateful I am to the atheist computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum who forced me to admit that everything, including those things held to be "known" and not "merely believed" are the product of choices to believe, even the most basic facts of math and our expectations of how physical objects will behave.  We choose to believe those reveal some hidden "law" or even truth about how everything is.  Being freed of the psychology manufactured separation of "belief" being a product of choice while "knowledge" is something we are compelled to accept involuntarily was a huge step in my understanding that there is really no bright line between the two.  The same mind does both and believes and asserts the conventional notion that there is a difference out of the most non-rigorous of investigation and conceit.    

Update:  I make no apology for dealing with the comments of those who love to hate on what I say on my terms and not theirs.  If they expressed their hate reasonably, with supporting evidence, honestly I might apologize for that and do it the conventional way, but they don't so I won't.

On Being Told Yet Again That I've Transgressed The Limits Of Respectability - Hate Mail

IN THE PROCESS OF INVESTIGATING a number of commonly and most ubiquitously held and rigidly required beliefs among the college-credentialed and even PhD'd population of the English Speaking Peoples, I've come to the conclusion that they are no less prone to every bad habit of thought they love to believe are the sole domain of their ideological opponents and those they disdain as ignorant and déclassée.   That's not to say that there aren't real differences in the morality of at least parts of their various programs or even real differences in the validity of what they hold, it's that none of us has possession of impeccable or admirable minds and lives and all of us are susceptible to bad habits and falling to temptation.

A lot of that is due to the choice to stick with a program of thought through thick and thin no matter how thin the arguments to retain the holdings essential to a blameless and acceptable life get.  It's my experience of arguing those out that even presenting the absolute and decisive evidence to destroy those mind-forged manacles that keep people from admitting the truth will not move someone off of their common received folly.   I have yet to have anyone admit it was true, those presented with the proof that Francis Galton said that it was his reading of his cousin's book On The Origin of Species which led directly to him inventing eugenics - the only reason I got started on my search and analysis of the primary documentary evidence that led to my complete apostasy on the matter of natural selection - and the confirmation in the very words of Charles Darwin that he was aware of Galton's and such others as Haeckel's use of his theory of natural selection AND THAT HE ENDORSED AND APPROVED OF EVEN THE MOST GENOCIDAL SCIENTIFIC CLAIMS THEY MADE FROM IT.   And that has consequences still, today, as Trump's rejection of virology and epidemology was supported with "Darwinian economics" and the eugenic claims of "herd immunity" not to mention the ongoing inspiration of neo-Nazi eugenics explicitly supporting genocidal eugenic claims such as William L. Pierce and his followers have made as they became ever closer to mainstream Republican politics and power here.

That case refuting the post-WWII lie that Darwin and natural selection had nothing to do with eugenics, "social Darwinism" made in Darwin's own words, EVEN HIS EXPLICIT EQUATION OF HERBERT SPENCER'S "SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST" IN THE LAST EDITIONS OF ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES is as conclusive a proof as things as complex as that question can get.   There is literally no honest case to be made to the contrary.  

Those rigid ideological requirements are so strong that recently when I made a comment on one of those dumb PBS Youtube video shorts that made a ridiculous speculation that the deadly poison of the infamous death cap mushroom evolved as protection from animals that would eat it.   

Since the story was, of course, all about human beings eating and being poisoned and killed by eating them the humanly told just-so story asserting that would require skepticism because human beings evolved so late in the development of that species, though other animals were certainly around - some of whom can and do eat the things without any toxic effect, at all.  I would guess that in the forever lost history of the evolution of modern death cap mushrooms that there have been enough squirrel like animals who have no problem eating them to make the evolution of such a defense mechanism unlikely.  

On top of that the fact of human predation that leads to the death of the stupidly confident would-be forager gourmets requires that they collect and eat the tiny part of the organism that grows into mushrooms, from the viewpoint of the organism eaten, it's too late to give the offender the death penalty.  In order to have a protective effect, the closer the death to the eating of it, the more plausible the just-so story - though even that would probably not "explain" as much as it would need to.  

I have not made a study of the totally conventional, accepted as valid science just so stories of that kind to test them for whether or not the explanatory myth has that rather large defect not so hidden within it or not but I would guess that such problems are routinely overlooked in coming up with a claim that things like mushroom toxins "evolved" (and by the way, do we have any idea as to their first appearance in the millions and millions of years in the evolutionary history?  I don't think so.) to ward off predators in line with the story told.

When I answered the person who pointed out that squirrels can eat the mushrooms, in response to my skepticism that there was any explanatory power to the claim of "natural selection,"  they were, nonetheless, upset that I said I was skeptical that natural selection was more than an ideological construct made by human scientists to fill in an enormous chasm in one of the most complex phenomena science has ever taken on and that it is far more a product of ideology than valid scientific methodology.   They said "natural selection is real" and "there is no question" as to its reality and explanatory powers.  Only that's not true, there are questions as to its reality and whether or not its "explanatory powers" are real or not.  I doubt there has ever been a really rigorous examination of those claimed "powers" because scientists hold onto Darwinism as a required and harshly enforced ideology, more rigidly I'd guess than the agreement with the 39 Articles of Anglicanism were for holding a professorship in many English institutions.   Believe me, questioning any of this is one of the greatest thought crimes among the English Speaking college-credentialed class that there is.  Its questioning only one of a number of highly questionable "unquestionable" items in the required dogma of respectable college-credentialed society.  

I don't find that even on an intellectual level that society is all that respectable, not when it can construct and maintain such blatant and morally consequential lies such as the one I started out with.   And its required ideology leads it directly into amorality such as I've pointed out in what you object to.   I can tell you that one of the milestones in my apostasy was realizing that promoting eugenics, promoting even genocide even infanticide is held to be less of an academic sin than neglecting to give a citation to a colleague or even one more remote or having spelling errors in your written text.  Though the connection required going to a bigger picture to finding a more general source of that depravity, founded in snobbery, class interest and an anxious desire to be respectable within that milieu no matter what depravity you had to find acceptable.   I find myself not caring much when such people withhold their respect from me because I don't want it anymore.  

Saturday Night Radio Drama - A.L. Kennedy - Confessions Of A Medium

 

Direct link to the video

Thomson     Bill Nighy
Parker     Robert Glenister
Morton     Jonathan Keeble
Mr Gordon     Jonathan Keeble
Gentleman     Jonathan Keeble
Wilson     Jonathan Keeble
Waiter     Jonathan Keeble
Mills     Andrew Westfield
Butler     Andrew Westfield
Miss Foster     Fiona Clarke
Mrs Gordon     Fiona Clarke
Lady No.1     Fiona Clarke
Miss Blackstone     Daryl Fishwick
Woman     Daryl Fishwick
Pianist     Daniel Browell
Writer     AL Kennedy
Director     Pauline Harris
Producer     Pauline Harris

I'm not especially either an enthusiastic believer nor opponent of mediumship, though I think it should be regulated to keep too much money from changing hands since we know some of it is a fraud. The kind of "physical mediumship" that this concerns is almost certainly almost all a total fraud.  I've never been to a real medium, it takes a lot to get me to part with money but I have talked to people who report remarkable experiences.  

This is very well written, I will be looking for more of the A. L. Kennedy's work, a significant amount of it for my favorite non-text medium, radio. 

It's posted as an early Halloween piece.  It is a bit scary.

John Jenkins - Kenny Burrell - From This Moment On

 

Direct link to video

Alto  Saxophone: John Jenkins
Bass  Guitar: Paul Chambers
Drums: Dannie Richmond
Guitar: Kenny Burrell
Piano: Sonny Clark

Everything I Have Is Yours 

 Direct Link to video

You Really Don't Need To Sharpen Occam's Old Razor To See The Simplest Explaination Of Sinema

APPARENTLY, THOUGH I HAVEN'T FOUND OUT where it is, someone has been whining about my questioning whether or not Krysten Sinema's treachery,  self-serving hypocrisy and, as some speculate, nest feathering is not something that makes a lot more sense in someone who is an atheist-materialist true believer in scientism than the identical behavior in someone who professes their belief in Christianity.   Anyone who can point me to where the whine is, I'd like to link to it.

That kind of treachery in atheists on the alleged left, where Sinema first appeared in American politics as a Green party fixture, is a long standing phenomenon such as from those who started out as true believing commies, actual members of Communist parties, sometimes holding positions of relative power in those pathetic counter-productive futilities (which are not any different than the Greens in actual effect) but who ended up as everything from ex-Trot neo-cons to extremely rabid John Birch, and even neo-Nazi friendly Republicans.   Most of the first generation neo-cons have that as a feature in their biographies, there were others Max Eastman was one,  Whittaker Chambers one of the most famous.   The number of turn-coat commies is impressive for something that is such total flop of never a very large size.  And all of those commies could be expected to have been atheist-materialists and largely a fan of "science" though sometimes "science" in Marxism was more of an ideology in service to their overarching ideology than it was actual science.  

Since the religion of professed Christians is used when they do terrible things EVEN THOUGH THOSE THINGS ARE CONTRARY TO THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS, PAUL, JAMES, ETC.  not to mention The Law and the prophets,  is something I would not at all be surprised if the CFI-honored atheist Sinema would likely have either brought up or noddingly agreed to when one of her fellow atheists did it, I don't see why the amorality she exhibits now, something that is not in contradiction or violation of anything in atheism, materialism or scientism,  is unfair in attempting to explain why she's betraying the people who thought she was a woman of her word when she pretended to be a progressive Democrat in order to get elected. 

The behavior of the professed Catholic Manchin is impossible to square with the radically egalitarian social justice teachings of even the most conservative Catholic popes of the last century and a half.  Not to mention the far more radical economic justice teachings of the best of recent Popes.  But he's hardly alone in that, there is no one in the Republican caucus of the Senate who professes Christianity whose actions are at all compatible with the teachings of Jesus, Paul, . . . Moses, even back to the initial act that led to the covenant between Abraham and God, his hospitality to the stranger.  But the majority of the incumbent U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops couldn't square their actions with that, either.   They act a lot more like I may have predicted Sinema to act, if I'd had reason to believe she was not a person of good will and of her word,  than someone who takes Catholic social teaching seriously. 

See, I have no problem with calling out Christians who do evil stuff which can't be squared with the Gospel, why should I have more of a problem when what Sinema does is far easier to explain?   There was a time it wouldn't have occurred to me to bring that up, as recently as the first year or two when I started blogging.  I'm sadder but perhaps wiser on that count, now.  People like her are why.

Atanas Ourkouzounov - 3 Figures fractales

 

Direct link to the video

Jérémy Jouve, guitarist 

Been too long since I posted something by Atanas Ourkouzounov, one of the interesting composers in the ongoing renaissance of composing for the guitar.  I'd put him in the same class as Leo Brouwer and Dusan Bogdanovic.

With Further Comment

IN REGARD TO THE post-truth, moral relativism that refuses to do that first and most consequential act of moral behavior, choosing the clearly right side, practicing the most morally atrocious and repulsive of both-siderism, "teaching the controversy," etc.   This is exactly the kind of thing I warned was bound to happen fifteen years ago, a consequence of the witnesses to one of the most clear cut of genocides dying. 

Elliot FriedlandOctober 19, 2021

In the fallout from NBC News’ revelations that teachers in Texas were told to teach “opposing perspectives” about the Holocaust, many people are asking what teaching “opposing perspectives” of the Holocaust looks like. I know from personal experience, since I attended a Holocaust class that invited us to consider the Nazi perspective in middle school. The school was our local public school in Oxford, and the class in question occurred when I was in Year 6 (the equivalent of 5th grade) in the U.K.

The experience was enraging and humiliating.

The teacher started with raw video footage of the concentration camps. We sat on the floor cross-legged and watched a bulldozer shovel piles of naked, emaciated Jewish corpses into a pit, the way they dispose of trash at landfills.

The hopelessly age-inappropriate film without context was bad enough. But our teacher decided, for reasons I will never understand, to explore industrial genocide through the medium of interpretative dance.

We could play the role of either a Jew getting murdered or a Nazi guard doing the murdering. Our choice.

After explaining to us how Jews were rounded up on trains and herded into gas chambers, our teacher invited us to consider the perspective of the Nazi guards overseeing the operation.

After all, there was a war going on at the time, she explained. They had probably signed up to defend their country, just like British troops. Nazism was a totalitarian one-party state. Nazi soldiers had families and lives too. It would have been really dangerous to stick their necks out and defend the Jews. Sure, they sealed the doors and pressed the gas button, but might they not have done so as just a cog in a system much bigger than themselves?

Were they not just following orders?

She asked us to consider these emotions and express them when performing our individual dances.

Each child performed their dance individually. Around half the class chose to be Jews, and the other half chose to be Nazis.

I chose to be a Jew (obviously). When it was my turn, I mime-danced being shoved into a gas chamber, terrified. I pounded my fists against the doors slamming shut, trying to get out, and then dramatized choking to death on Zyklon B. Acting out the horrible fate of two-thirds of European Jewry impressed on me the reality of the Holocaust. I felt profoundly sad that so many Jews had died in this awful way, murdered simply for the crime of existing. I felt deeply uncomfortable, and yet totally unable to object to performing.

After being forced by my teacher to portray my own execution at the hands of the Third Reich in front of all my peers, I then had to sit respectfully, and watch them take their turn to be Nazis. Through dance.

The first thing that is troubling about this is that I have no problem believing it happened within the past sixty years.  It should be unbelievable to the extent where you'd have to have proof it happened to believe it.  Such is the result of free-speech absolutism in its fullest manifestation. 

There is no articulation of "free speech,"  "free-expression," "academic freedom," "even-handedness (yes, even even handedness between murderers and their victims) that would keep me from saying that idiot of a "teacher" should have been fired and banned from ever being part of the profession of influencing the minds of the young, along with any administrators or others who kept them on and enabled this to happen.   

I should probably have included  the ridiculous judicial extension of "speech" to include stripping in that list of absurdly created and asserted "rights."  No doubt it would have contributed to the "right" of this teacher to create such a dance in that school and the idiotic sense of virtue that defending such an atrocity would led to the "liberals" who supported the right of a teacher to do that without getting their ass fired.  Dance is about the stupidest of the art forms.  At least opera singers have to sing words that contain some level of denotative meaning.  I can think of nothing less likely to teach a child anything than to have them dance it. 

I wonder why they wouldn't insist that school children do the "both sides" thing on 9-11, Pearl Harbor, the Mexican war against the Americans bent on stealing Texas, etc.   One wonders how that would play with those who weren't bothered by this. 

The Problem With The Superficial Invention Of And Assertion Of Ersatz "Rights" Is Clearly One That Will Have To Be Fixed Or Real Rights Will Die

CONSIDERING THE CONSEQUENCES of people believing in lies for society and for individuals living in society, for the country, etc.  it seems to me that the idea that believing what isn't true is an inalienable "right" is a major folly with extremely dangerous results in that folly.  In the case of Covid-19, so far, that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, the illness and injury of many thousands - I don't know, perhaps even more people - the damage to others who are unable to get hospital care and who die or suffer permanent damage and everything down to the economic damage that results from those lies and the belief in them.  Lies, especially lies told in and by the "free press" the media,  have killed more than a hundred times more Americans than who died in terrorist attacks on 9-11, 2001.  Lies are, by any rational definition, our most deadly enemy right now.  More than all of our opponents in most if not all of our declared and undeclared wars.  Republicans in office, by a stupendous majority, are the fifth-column that is killing us on the side of lies and pandemic disease, right now, the media, too.  

To believe that there is a "right to lie" as, in fact, the Supreme Court has ruled without honestly admitting that is what it has held, and that the mental disability that believing dangerous lies also constitutes a "right" seems to me to be among our most serious and basic dangers right now.  Covid-19 has the feeling of a final warning of danger, so does the attempted January 6 putsch, the ongoing war of Republicans against democracy, the packing of the courts, etc.  All of those are results of people believing or pretending to believe in lies they were told by FOX, other billionaire owned and run sources of lies, hate-talk media, the social-disease media such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube are allowed to get away with being on the basis of "rights" to carry lies and distribute them with algorithms designed to make those most susceptible to believing them having the lies promoted to them.  

This isn't something that can be continued to be allowed due to the sloppy, inspecific language of "The First Amendment" as if that was a divinely given and perfect commandment of universal and absolute law.   Deifying the very flawed, very fallible, in some areas extremely dodgy United States Constitution was always dangerous and as lawyers and scholars of the law, many of them under the patronage of the filthy rich and the anti-democratically corrupt came up with ways to game the document and the legal apparatus that has been glued onto the thing, those original dangers have become not only incompatible with egalitarian, electoral democracy but with the continuation of life, itself. 

In coming to this realization at the insanity of the creation of "rights" for things which are as dangerous as "rights" to lie, to be lied to and to be deluded, not to mention the lie of pretending you believe that vaccination requirements are an evil thing as you work fully-vaccinated in the vaccine-passport mandated and, so, safer offices and studios of FOX news, I think I have come to another of the fundamental reasons that not only the vulgar-materialist, 18th century, style of ACLU secular "liberalism" is a total flop, along with the ideological "left," but why those who should be of better will and more wisdom flop along with them.   If there is a human future, a future for reformed and protected egalitarian democracy, the ACLU with its fetish for the First Amendment language regardless of the results deserves to have its name permanently attached to what went so wrong in the period when those kinds of "rights" were exercised in all of their secular, amoral, regardless-of-the-results folly. 

"An unfettered pursuit of money rules. That is the dung of the devil."

LOOKING AT THE NRC, I saw that one of my favorite religious journalists, Sean Michael Winters also wrote about Pope Francis's address.  The passage I took as the title of this post is worth the price of admission to all of this.

Pope Francis delivered another remarkable address last weekend when he spoke to the fourth World Meeting of Popular Movements. The gatherings of community organizers are like a meeting of theologians, only the theology is done with one's hands rather than with one's words. They seem to invite Francis to show the world that side of him that was previously known only to those he visited in the barrios of Buenos Aires.

The worldwide gatherings have occasioned some of the pope's strongest social teaching as witnessed in 2015 when he spoke at the second such gathering in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. There he said, "And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea, one of the church's first theologians, called 'the dung of the devil.' An unfettered pursuit of money rules. That is the dung of the devil."

Those words should be emblazoned over the entryway of every business school at a Catholic university, but they aren't.

This weekend, the pope's comments about the protests after the murder of George Floyd rightly captured the headlines. The pope said that he thought of those protests when he thinks about the good Samaritan.

"It is clear that this type of reaction against social, racial or macho injustice can be manipulated or exploited by political machinations or whatever, but the main thing is that, in that protest against this death, there was the collective Samaritan who is no fool! This movement did not pass by on the other side of the road when it saw the injury to human dignity caused by an abuse of power."

Call me an ultramontanist, but I am always impressed that this 84-year old Argentinian, who has never spent much time in this country, can identify and name an inflection point in U.S. culture that so many U.S. Catholics failed to even grapple with.

one of the absolute proofs of something being a "right" is that it produces general good and not general evil

RECENTLY THE LAWYER-JOURNALIST Ari Melber was talking about the Covid denialists, both those who spread lies and their dupes and he talked about a "right to be wrong, the right to believe things that are not even true", and, though he didn't go that far as I recall, even in his even-handed, too generous articulation of the problem there would be a "right to lie" behind that. 

Let me say for the record, I like Ari Melber and I do respect him, my reservations about him and his program are generally things I discern are a result of his legal education and his acculturation into the thought habits of educated, modern westerners. 

 The things that he declared a "right to" in his educated thinking on this were things that those who were wrong and believed things that aren't even true believe were put there by FOX, by Facebook and Twitter and Youtube and the Republican-fascist lie machine.   Apparently there is a right to be lied to behind that assertion that being wrong and deluded are matters of rights.   I will note, up front, that here, Ari Melber notes that the United States with our fetish of "free speech-press" absolutism that is the closest thing there is to an absolute and all-overriding "right" to, no matter what is said within the exercise of those absolute rights, is a world epicenter of this oppressive regime of lies and liars that is getting hundreds of thousands of us killed.   Those "rights" he counts in this are certainly, in practice, put in a superior position to the right of people to not be infected needlessly, the right of people to not be injured, hospitalized, intubated, ventilated and to die.   That the legal and judicial professions can put all of that difficult, unpleasant and deadly consequence of their assertions and decisions off on the first-responders, the medical profession, the hospitals and other institutions, not to mention an industry they have been quite deferential to, the insurance industry is certainly one of the reasons they are so willing to put those malignant "rights" in the position they have. 

It reminded me of a time when one of those short lived Lesbian-gay newspapers (it was before LGBTQ) of the mid to late 70s around here asserted, as a rote-off-hand remark,  there was a "right to be stupid."  And that brings up all kinds of other assertions of things which are conventionally called "rights" but which any level of rational thought applied, it would be clear that to call those "rights" would be to seriously diminish the value of the whole idea that there are rights and that such "rights" would be a thing which would promise good to the human and wider population and not be what such carelessly enumerated "rights" are so often in reality, an assertion of selfishness that does everything from infringe on genuine and beneficial rights held by others to fatal to individuals to fatal to the entire planet.

Off the top of my head, here are just a few of the things that have been designated as "rights" by courts.

- A right to lie (the requirement of those lied about to  divine the mental state of the liar being the fig-leaf the courts have put on that permission to lie.)

- A right to lie about history, the Holocaust, American apartheid, genocides, ongoing violence.  Certainly that it is the same political side who lies about Covid-19, vaccines, masking, etc. is not unrelated to that. 

- A right to lie about a whole host of other things.

- A right to broadcast lies and the permission of the cabloid and other media to lie with effective impunity.   This enormously magnifies the power of the lies to such an extent that it is really nothing like the "right" an individual has to lie by word of mouth or even by letter, assuming the letter isn't reproduced and spread like a viral Tweet.

- A right to hire prostitutes and have them crush and torture guinea pigs, gerbils, etc. in "crush porn" videos.  Generally the right to promote all of the evils you can see promoted by pornography. 

- A right to spread even the most dangerous lies about health and snake oil medicines.  Actually, the Congress, and especially the Senate had a big hand in that at the behest of the snake oil industry.

And speaking of that:

- A right of the billionaires and millionaires to lie us out of democracy and into gangster governance.   That "right" in Buckely v. Valeo was peddled on the careless and sloppy "rights" language so successfully that even the Justice who should have known better than any other how devastating a right to lie  and slander for the profit of the wealthy could be for an entire race of people in the entire history of the Court, Thurgood Marshall bought into it.  That, among other things that have resulted, is the destruction of the Voting Rights Act makes his concurrence in that case one of the most tragic in the history of the Court.  That it had the name of one of the premier voice American fascist oligarchs attached to it is no accident.

Lawyer that he is, Ari Melber really should consider just what this whole "rights" business is and that, given that framing,  there must be a real distinction between "good rights" and "bad rights" and that there is no moral obligation on the part of anyone to permit the exercise of really "bad rights," and, in fact, a moral obligation to prevent such "rights" being exercised.   The moral obligation would be to stop the lies and, so, the evils that flow from them.

This whole "rights" business, considering how much of our political, social and moral discourse are caught up in it really should be considered at least well enough so that lying, being duped by liars, willingly believing in lies or asserting to believe in them (I don't for a second believe that all of the people who lie and spread the lies believe what they're saying) is not misnamed a "right" especially for legal purposes and political purposes and other exercises of power which can compel people to do things or restrain them from doing things. 

No rational person should be allowed to habitually believe that such things as lying, intentionally lying, lying about things you don't believe to be true yourself (as FOX as a corporation does), believing those lies, buying into them, pretending to believe them for political and ideological purposes are within the realm of genuine human rights.  

Yet that is the entirely unconsidered default position of a large percentage of, perhaps most college-credentialed citizens of the United States.  They certainly have not up to now had to confront a strong logical and reality based case that a huge number of things called "rights"  by the Supreme Court and other courts, asserted to be "rights" by law professors and scholars and paid-lawyers on the make and by the hardly objective and not financially uninterested "press" and journalists are really rights.  

There is no right to lie, there is no right to believe lies, believing lies sold in the media is a violation of the right to be told the truth and to the benefits of individuals a majority of voters in a democracy believing in the truth and voting accordingly. 

-----------------

I have not had time to go far into it but Pope Francis gave a remarkable address to The Fourth Meeting of Popular Movements:

In the name of God, I ask the technology giants to stop exploiting human weakness, people’s vulnerability, for the sake of profits without caring about the spread of hate speech, grooming, fake news, conspiracy theories, and political manipulation.

In the name of God, I ask the telecommunications giants to ease access to educational material and connectivity for teachers via the internet so that poor children can be educated even under quarantine.

In the name of God, I ask the media to stop the logic of post-truth, disinformation, defamation, slander and the unhealthy attraction to dirt and scandal, and to contribute to human fraternity and empathy with those who are most deeply damaged.

In the name of God, I call on powerful countries to stop aggression, blockades and unilateral sanctions against any country anywhere on earth. No to neo-colonialism. Conflicts must be resolved in multilateral fora such as the United Nations. We have already seen how unilateral interventions, invasions and occupations end up; even if they are justified by noble motives and fine words.

This system, with its relentless logic of profit, is escaping all human control. It is time to slow the locomotive down, an out-of-control locomotive hurtling towards the abyss. There is still time.

Earlier in the address he laid out how the pandemic relates to other looming disasters in one of the best articulations of it I've ever seen:

You felt that the current situation merited a new meeting. I felt the same. Although we have never lost contact, it is already five years, I think, since the general meeting, isn’t it? A lot has happened in that time; a lot has changed. These changes mark points of no return, turning points, crossroads at which humanity must make choices. And new moments of encounter, discernment and joint action are needed. Every person, every organisation, every country, and the whole world, needs to look for moments to reflect, discern and choose, because returning to the previous mindsets would be truly suicidal and, if I may press the point a little, ecocidal and genocidal.

In these months, many things you’ve long been denouncing have become totally obvious. The pandemic has laid bare the social inequalities that afflict our peoples. Seeking neither permission nor forgiveness, it has exposed the heart-breaking situation of so many brothers and sisters, the situation that so many post-truth mechanisms have been unable to conceal.

Many things we used to take for granted have collapsed like a house of cards. We have experienced how our way of life can drastically change from one day to the next, preventing us, for example, from seeing our relatives, colleagues and friends. In many countries, governments reacted. They listened to the science and were able to impose limits to ensure the common good, and so they managed at least for a while to put the brakes on this “gigantic machine” that works almost automatically, in which peoples and persons are simply cogs.

The whole thing rests on those "rights" that so many, including Ari Melber, I believe unthinkingly, in the rote expression of a "cog" in the mechanistic apparatus of the law and American journalism declared to be "rights."   I don't think he would make that mistake again if he really considered that one of the absolute proofs of something being a "right" is that it produces general good and not general evil.  There is no right that can produce an evil result and lies, especially in the mass media produce some of the greatest evil there is.