Lies, All Lies - Have I Dissed Our Gladiatorial Cult Yet This Season? Hate Mail

ADVERTISING IS AN INDUSTRY DEDICATED TO SELLING LIES, when it's lies that will get its customers what they want and I'd be willing to bet that lying does in a clear majority of its cases.  A good short descriptions of how that works is in a piece by Charles Pierce about how the football industry is mounting a campaign of easily sold lies about head trauma peddled to the American People in ways the tobacco industry peddled its lies about the harm of using tobacco.

In December of 1953, the American tobacco industry was in deep trouble. Research into the deleterious health effects of cigarette smoking was beginning to pile up ominously all over the country. So the industry did what American industries do—it hired Hill and Knowlton, a power in the advertising industry even then, to spin itself out of trouble. H&K earned every nickel it made from this particular client. Its strategy included buying its own scientists to cast doubt on the mounting evidence. As medical historian Allan Brandt put it in his magisterial study, The Cigarette Century, “[This] strategy for ending the ‘hysteria’ was to insist that there were ‘two sides’ … This strategy would ultimately become the cornerstone of a large range of efforts to distort scientific process in the second half of the 20th century.”

“Hysteria” has been a weaponized word, useful when large industries don’t want to face up to the damage they may be doing. We saw it used with cigarettes. We’ve seen it used in regards to the public health crisis currently facing football at every level.

If there is going to be chronic denialism on this issue, it may not come from the NFL, although some of it surely will. It’s going to come from the people in the game, the fans of the game, and many members of football’s kept national press, who are unwilling or unable to change their moral calculus and who become aggravated when somebody suggests that they should. For example, in 2015, Jim Harbaugh, the coach at the University of Michigan, suggested that American football was “… the last bastion of hope in America for toughness in men, in males.” (So much, one supposes, for the SEALs.) Coach Bruce Arians of the Arizona Cardinals expressed concern that America’s mothers were refusing to let their sons play football because of the head injury issue. (Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be safeties.) Danny Kanell, then of ESPN, called attention via Twitter to the peril he perceived from the folks he called “concussion alarmists.” (Kanell also managed to work “the liberal media” into his tweet, thereby winning that week’s game of wingnut rhetorical bingo.) In support of Kanell, Jason Whitlock of Fox Sports bellowed his contempt for what he called “the media-driven concussion hysteria.” Hill and Knowlton would have been proud of that one.

To be fair, Whitlock later in the same piece admits that football is “barbaric,” which is better than other Football Under Attack pieces I’ve read. Let us be clear: I am not suggesting that we ban the game. That kind of thing never works in America and, generally, the attempts to do it end very badly for society at large. But I do find myself wondering if the shift in the moral calculus is profound enough to shake the purchase that American football has on the culture in so many different places—from high schools in Texas to the gambling floors in Las Vegas. And I think of John Urschel again, and I’m happy he was strong enough to give up something he loves in order to pursue something else that he loves. And I think of my father, who could swim for hours, when he was still who he was born to be.

Notice something about this situation, one industry hired another industry to lie about its product that was a. addictive, b. sold to new smokers through advertising, c. harmful to the health of those who believed what they were told about their addictive product.  The power of the concerted and magnified power of corporations is an intrinsic part of the problem, using that power to do essentially what the peddlers of heroin and other addictive drugs do to people.  The tobacco and alcohol industries are the most successful pushers of addictive, debilitating drugs in our history and the advertising industry whose product is ubiquitous have shaped the acceptance of both and their consequences, it is the most successful medium for peddling lies in our history. 

But while the football industry may hire outside advertising liars on its behalf, they don't really need to because every network, almost every newspaper, many other journalists are entirely ready to carry the ball for them and it's called, not advertising, but "journalism."   The corrupt part of the media in his example is as clearly built in as the movies of the 1930s through today which willingly and profitably place smoking and alcohol as paid promotion in what they produce.   Him using advertising as the main feature of his argument rather buried what I'd have made the lede.

Since I have repeatedly mocked Charles Pierce's idolization of James "Jemmy" Madison, idolized because of his role in the adoption of the dangerously aphoristic First Amendment, I'll use his piece as an example.  But, considering that idolatry on that basis, it is odd that the equally problematic and aphoristic Second one is never credited to him in the circles I travel in.  I will point out that blaming the advertising industry, as spot on as that is, lets off the "press" and the role it plays in this. Though Pierce mentioned them he didn't come out and call it what it is, lying.  The advertising industry, an industry which has no deep and notably important devotion to truth is a symbiotic entity which lives on and in collaboration with "the press" which now, thanks to ACLU elicited Supreme Court dictates, includes all electronic media, "entertainment" probably most dangerous, and all print no matter how malignant the content and how obviously death dealing and bigotry promoting it is. If you want to put it in terms of "speech" as well, you can include strippers and the epic battle to allow them to dispose of pasties and movie directors and producers putting alcohol, tobacco, etc. in their entertainment, getting paid to do that by the advertising industry.  Both, as they are in the United States in 2022 are saprophytes that live and thrive on what destroys egalitarian democracy.

Certainly the role football plays in American culture is maintained through presenting it in reverential, sappy, dishonest, sentimental presentations that cover up what is obviously a vicious, violent, pantomime of violent sex which regularly kills those who play it and whose players are entirely more like a crime gang than pillars of virtue. I'm always wishing I could ask those former players who are presented as pillars of virtue about the actual character of the game that made them famous.  The enormous amount of the media devoted to sports and sports alleged reporting has certainly contributed mightily to the bizarre attribution of virtue to what is at base a murderous, exploitative industry that feeds on the brains and bodies of the drugged up boys who are suckered into playing it, as Pierce certainly knew when he wrote that piece.  He mentions the role that sports journalists played in denying what the science was revealing about the brain damage that is ubiquitous, it happening before the public in every game they watch.   That damage was certainly entirely in evidence for the entire history of American football, the roll of those who died as a result of the game extend back to its beginning well back into the 19th century.  So do the fan riots which start in the aftermath of the first recorded inter-collegiate game in New Jersey.

Much as I admire much of his work, Pierce's personal history, what he experienced through his father and his father's family history of dementia, what he learned from that isn't strong enough to shake the purchase that America's free speech-press absolutism has on his own mind.  He buys into the 20th century myth that it is impossible to outlaw dangerous behavior or, rather, to importantly suppress it even when outright prohibition is not possible.  I think it would be quite simple in this case.  If legislation which made it possible for those whose brains are damaged or destroyed by playing football and their survivors to sue those who maintain the football industry and entice those it convinces to play it, it would disappear.  Football isn't like the making and drinking of alcohol which can be done at home or in a back-woods still or smuggled over the border, it is an organized activity.  Certainly it would disappear at its most insidious levels, in high school and younger when the boys who are injuring their brains are suckered into playing it by grown men and women, a number of them quite brain damaged from that before they become adults, I would be some before they become teenagers.

I know that mind-set, the mind-set of the typical secular liberalish, libertarian sort American of our generation nurtured on tales of the failure of Prohibition and the idiotic cult of liberal free speech absolutism.  I was as suckered by it as anyone until I realized the price that was paid was typically not paid by affluent,white males who can pass as straight.*  The price paid is paid by Women, People of Color, other minority groups, certainly LGBTQetc. the economic underclass and others who are the target of hate speech and debilitating stereotypes and social roles sold by the media.  Thought a lot of that would be impossible to regulate through laws it could succumb to widespread refusal to continue buying it, the absurd notion that we owe it to the corporations that are "the press,"  the media to tolerate them without push-back is one of those dopey post-WWII notions peddled by the media and entertainment.

But my criticism of the Sullivan Decision and its ever fouler successors,  Buckely vs. Valeo, Citizens United, etc. is that something which in our history before that was very actionable, lawsuits over libel and slander of individuals and non-profit groups, is protected by the idiocy of those rulings, starting with the landmark addicted Warren Court's 1964 permission given to the New York Times to lie about public officials with impunity. As I've been pointing out recently, anyone who, even in 1964, couldn't predict that would be used against Democrats on behalf of Republicans was too stupid to be sitting on any court. The really effective media, the electronic media, has always been owned by rich, conservative corporate gangsters who use it to enhance their own wealth and control.  It is exactly the result of that huge giant step in "freedom of the press," how creating a "right" to lie has been used for most of the past sixty years.

I wouldn't venture that the NFL and football fetishists would give up their addiction to brain destroying, self-denying subliminal sexual spectacles before the journalists face the fact that when they are bemoaning the death of democracy through lies, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for someone like Pierce to face that glaring reality.  It is exactly those "free press" rulings that made the careers of the FOX-fascists and the rest of the liars of Republican-fascist style media possible.  

The Warren Court could have let the ruling against the New York Times stand and required that they pay a small fine and court costs and maybe the New York Times would not have helped lie us into four years of Trump.  They might have instituted fact checking of what they carry, whether by their staff of reporters, those shifty and loosely attached to the truth "opinion journalists" or the paid ads they carried and may have produced far better journalism than they have in the era of anything goes.  That the guy they carried lies about in a paid ad about was a piece of racist shit who I'm sure those voting for the great gray rag wanted to shaft but the price the country has paid for that temporary satisfaction has been incalculable. FOX wouldn't be what FOX is without that freedom to lie and the protection of those idiotic rulings. We may never have had a Nixon without it, we may never have had a Reagan, we certainly wouldn't have had a Trump.  It is remarkable that the man who did so much to destroy the power of the truth in America's democracy was probably the greatest beneficiary of lies in the history of American politics.  And the media is still addicted to carrying his lies, even as he is entirely more discredited that Aaron Burr was, than Benedict Arnold was.   Only  as a TV star he has a cult of addled followers which, if Burr or Arnold had had, may well have changed the course of history, such is the power of, especially, the entertainment media which is seldom safely innocuous.

The great free press never learns, it's not capable of learning, it is an artificial, man made entity, made to generate profits and to peddle the most profitable political lines, an artificial entity that has no natural rights but which employs those willing to carry its profitable lies, even if they, personally see through the lies and don't especially like them. Corporations exist within the market economic system, if they don't maximize profit through doing evil, they die, almost any media which tries to tell difficult truth is attached to a church or non-profit entity, sometimes an educational institution.  There was a time I'd take something like The Nation magazine as an exception to that but I both have a far lower estimate of that publication and a knowledge that it is sustained as a hobby by wealthy people. There are a few tiny media entities that are maintained by the sincere honesty of individuals and a desperate need to try to rescue us from lies and ignorance.  They generally last as long as those individuals can keep it up, they often die with their owners.  I don't have a very high view of "journalists" since they allow liars to call themselves that.  I don't trust any of it without fact checking them, ever. It is a dangerous magnification of the power to lie that overtakes and overpowers whatever power it has to tell the truth.  Like the ad agency, like the football industry, like some sci-fi psychotic computer-robot, its prime directive has little to do with telling the truth and less to do with promoting the common good.  Jefferson and Madison's time when a man with a page-at-a-time printing press could publish the truth which, nevertheless, would have to compete with publishers of lies is gone forever.  Their naive faith in the ability of the truth to win out is exactly that, naive.  We don't have that excuse, ours is willful self-deception, journalists, self-deception in service to their own professional self-interests.  Our history of post-Sullivan freedom of the press and free speech absolutism shows us what you get with that, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and Trump, the Mitch McConnell Senate, the Rehnquist and now Roberts Courts, as the Republican party, the party of the big media owners and the owners of pro-football, has become an active and explicitly fascist party who are reviving our indigenous form of fascism.

*  This area in which a number of those who are destroyed being straight-white-males is not typical of how the victimization of such libertarian lying is handed out.  Though, since a very large percentage of those victimized by football are men of color, perhaps not too much should be made of that distinction.

As to passing as straight.  Never have done that since I was liberated from high school and first went to college and I never did date girls as cover even before then.  A while back I had the experience of a younger person who is a friend of one of my nieces meeting me for the first time, having been told I was an old gay man, he expressed surprise that I'm no where near as nellie as his imagination of me was.  He was disappointed that I seemed so "straight."  I was able to point out to him that I regularly make pies.  It didn't make up for it.  I can sew patches on my clothes, too but I forgot to mention that.  

Hate Mail

IN HIS "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States," the historian Charles Beard noted two totally different statements about the adoption of the Constitution given by the the most famous and influential Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the slave-holder John Marshall, two statements that make opposing claims about the character of that adoption which shows that the alleged means of it gaining authoritative legitimacy was hardly what we have all been lied into believing.  Certainly according to that mythology which is the common possession of all of us who had conventional civics educations and who took high school and university American history courses such statements coming from the likes of John Marshall must be authoritative, he was there, he was an active participant, he was an interested beneficiary of the framing of the Constitution and its further shaping, much of it directly under his hands.  Even under his own standards of judgement, the issue of the consent of The People is nothing less than the legitimacy or the illegitimacy of the "supreme law of the land."

I cannot give the two statements in running columns as Beard gives them, the better to be struck at how incompatibly they are with each other but you can still read them.  The first is from his Life of Washington, 1804-1807, the second one in his decision in McCulloch vs. Maryland.  I'll start with his comment on page 299 of his Economic Interpretation, which came after several pages in which Marshall's clear view of the economic interests in those who supported adoption of the Constitution being largely those who lent money and were owed debts and those who didn't support it who saw the economic crisis of those low down in the economic scale as requiring debt relief.  I will note that Marshall, himself, admits that in a number of the states the opponents of adoption of the Constitution were a sizable majority.  The means by which the ratification was wrangled was as sleazy as what the Court and Republican-fascist legislators are re-performing right now and largely in the same game of different sides.

4. Finally, so sharp was this division into two parties on the lines of divergent views of property rights, that the Constitution, far from proceeding from "the whole people," barely escaped defeat altogether.  So positive is this statement by the great Chief Justice and so decidedly does it contradict his juristic theory of the nature of the supreme law that the two should be studied together.  For this reason, the two views enunciated by Marshall are printed in parallel columns:

"So balanced where the parties in some of them [the states]  that even after the subject had been discussed for a considerable time, the fate of the constitution could scarcely be conjectured;  and so small in may instances, was the majority in its favor, as to afford strong ground for the opinion that, removed, the intrinsic merits of the instrument would not have secured its adoption.  Indeed it is scarcely to be doubted that in some of the adopting states a majority of the people were in the opposition.  In all of them, the numerous amendments which were proposed demonstrate the reluctance with which the new government was accepted;  and that a dread of dismemberment, not an approbation of the particular system under consideration,  had induced an acquiescence in it . . . North Carolina and Rhode Island did not at first accept the constitution, and New York was apparently dragged into it by a repugnance of being excluded from the Confederacy."
Life of Washington, 1804-1807


[and from his decision as Chief Justice]

"The government [of the United States] proceeds directly from the people;  it is "ordained and established' in the name of the people;  and it is declared to be ordained "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and secure the blessings of liberty' to themselves and to their posterity . . . .  The government of the Union the (whatever may be the influence of this fact on the case) is, emphatically and truly, a government of the people.  In form and substance it emanates from them.  Its powers are granted by them and are to be exercised directly on them and for their benefit. . . . It is the government of all; its powers are delegated by all; it represents all and acts for all."  
McCulloch vs. Maryland, 1818

When you put those two statements together one of them may be true but both of them cannot be true and, as Beard quite amply demonstrates in his book even in the terms of the time it was hardly what we are all to pretend it is, today.  Beard notes the difference between Marshall's discourse as an historian, in which he told an inconvenient truth and as the Chief "justice" of the Supreme Court in which he lies by characterizing the process in its adoption and, certainly, its administration in such abstracted, conventionalized pieties.  That such dishonesty comes from the most influential of all of the "justices" on that court is something that may have shocked me when I first read Beard's book when I was young, it certainly doesn't shock me anymore because I've read a good deal more about the actual history of the Supreme Court, the Constitution, especially the recent and far more rigorous historical documentation of the economic interests of the framers and the likes of John Marshall. 

More to the point, if consent of the People governed by a Constitution is how a Constitution becomes legitimate, certainly over time that consent must be actively given again and, if the terms in which, especially the Federalist party favoring the adoption of the Constitution claimed to be acting, that the informed consent to it was the actual means of gaining legitimate legitimacy, that consent in future generations has to be on the basis of accurate information, something which certainly has never happened in the history of the United States Constitution, the tacit acquiescence of a duped and ill informed public is hardly the same thing and I would challenge anyone who believes we have even had that flawed means of legitimating it.  It is notable how, once he became Chief "justice" Marshall's candor as an historian gave way to the lies of the lawyer.   The more I find out about John Marshall the lower my opinion of him goes.

I would recommend reading Beard's still extremely shocking and useful book, he is very good at documenting his generally primary documentary evidence to support his contentions.  I would contrast the precision care of the aristocratic lender class who prevailed in the Constitution and its "enlightenment" secular notion of law with the Mosaic Law which is certainly on the side of those who called for debt relief.  Since I am going deeply into the book of Jeremiah, using Brueggemann and Heschel as guides to it, I'll AGAIN give you a passage of what Brueggemann said in his Slow Wisdom lecture which touches exactly on my point that the "rights" specified in the Constitution are mostly those of abstractions of far more use to aristocrats and those who can afford lawyers (such as Trump bought for himself a few days ago) and not only say nothing about the actual rights which the economic underclass really need and do not get much (such as the partial debt relief that President Biden gave to some of those in education-debt).

The ancient city was in a moral default that could not be sustained.  It is no wonder that the poets, given how late it was wondered if it was too late or only very late.

So here in eight phrasings - I'm going to say the same things eight different ways - is my thought about these two triads of:

- might, wisdom, and wealth

and

-steadfast love, justice, and righteousness.

The triad of fidelity first focuses on the body whereas the triad of control focuses characteristically on abstractions of power and possession. The couplet of justice and righteousness are concerned with the ways in which the resources of the community are mobilized for the bodily reality of persons and the healthy reality of the body politic. The materiality of the biblical tradition has to do with the quotidian dimension of the vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor and the wherewithal for their dignity and well-being. Thus the indictment in the ancient city, they have grown fat and sleek, they know no limit in deeds of wickedness, they do not judge with justice the cause of the poor, they do not defend the right of the needy. And the same poet says if you truly amend your ways, if you truly act with justice, if you do not oppress the immigrant, the orphan and the widow or shed innocent blood and if you do not go after other gods, then . . . (W.B.'s hand gesture indicating continuation)

Jeremiah sees the bodily needs of the vulnerable that require a different ordering of the body politic. Righteousness is weighing in for the well-being of the community.  The poetic tradition always cares about food, clothing and housing. The materiality of this triad refuses the requirements of ideas, concepts, theories and ideologies that draw energy away from reality of those who stand in front of us. The flight to abstraction is an endless seduction for those in control so that social reality can be reduced to a program or a budget that depends always on a euphemism to hide the bodily reality next door.  

The seduction of the university not unlike the government and the church and the corporation is to traffic in abstraction.  And the challenge of the university is to bring the energy back to that quotidian reality so that resources and passion may be mobilized differently.

The financier class who pushed through, without warrant, the drafting of the Constitution and who pushed its adoption, in some states such as Massachusetts and others in a rather dodgy process that stinks of the namesake of Elbridge Gerry [who is one of the sleaziest of the sleazy New England politician-financiers of the time] contempt for the poor and debtors who were pressed by the financial manipulations of the Federalist class was as rampant as contempt for the underclass is in Republican-fascism, today.   

I've been really busy with putting food away from the garden, that's the reason for the spotty posting.  A frost will come sooner or later, then more active posting will probably resume. 

A REPUBLICAN publicly destroys her OWN PARTY over abortion ban

 

Republican hits Buttigieg with disgusting slur, Buttigieg makes her REGRET it

 

Aileen Cannon Should Be Gotten Off The Federal Bench, That Stinking Gangster-Lawyer Should Be The Last Straw That Breaks The System

GEORGE CONWAY asked if Aileen Cannon belonged on the Federal Bench, there is no question that she is such a total and self-seeking sycophant to Donald Trump and the Republican-fascist party that she should never have been put on the federal or any other bench by the Republican-fascist, Moscow Mitch led Senate.   That there isn't an easy and sure way of removing the grifter skank from the federal bench shows just how bad the parts of the Constitution setting up the courts and the Supreme Court are.   There is nothing you can say about her that you can't say about sitting members of the Court, Clarence Thomas to Amy Coney Barrett regularly do things that should get them removed from the Supreme Court but the absurd manner of confirmed by the anti-democratically constituted Senate and the lifetime appointment of members, for all practical purposes impossible to force off the bench and impossible to impeach, means that once the fascists put someone like that criminal gangster-lawyer on the bench, We the People are stuck with them till they die and go to hell. 

We have got to fight like hell to keep the Congress in Democratic hands every election from now on.  And to change the rules of the federal judiciary as possible and to amend the Constitution to clean up the Augean stables presented as the most august of the branches.   Make John Roberts cry. 

Reality Is Real, Life Is For Living It And A Better Use For Internet Comments - Perhaps the first Tuedsay Shorts, Tuesday usually being my busiest day

IF I AM LOOKING for advice about how to meditate more efficiently, I would look at the Buddhist Scriptures.  The focus of the Buddha and his followers was, for the most part, concentrated on meditating towards the end of achieving liberation from pain and sorrow and, so, that's the area of expertise those excel in. Obviously they don't have much to say about God unless you, as I do, think that's pretty much what the experience of Nibbana that is their goal is.

If I am looking for information to inform me about living life in order to achieve a decent society and life and the salvation that would result from a diligent application towards those ends, I look to the Jewish Scriptures, the Old and New Testaments because that was the primary focus of that tradition.  I've tried both and ended up more convinced by the Jewish tradition which I hold is the real font of egalitarian democracy.  I think the pagan Greek and Roman cultures had far less to tell us about much other than math and a few good plays, primarily those by Euripides.  They contain a lot of information about what not to do, most of what is wrong in the history of Christianity is a product of the worst of European and other traditions and cultures.  

The warnings of the Prophets about Israel and Judea being corrupted by evils opposed to the Sinai Covenantal tradition might have warned Christians in Europe about things in the indigenous cultures and others that they couldn't adopt without falling away from the Gospel.  I think the wisdom of many other cultures of smaller groups on all continents have more useful information and advice and examples to live by than those which have the greatest hold on our elite culture, since they will be drawn to everything that enhances the lives of the rich and, so, powerful, the evils of oligarchy and gangsterism.  A lot of the conflict between those who maintain a romantic view of the British monarchy and those who come from places still experiencing the aftermath of English then British colonial gangsterism in the reaction to the death of Elizabeth II is that right before our eyes just now.  Little to nothing wrong with the British monarchy isn't present in conventional American Constitutional hagiographic pseudo-history.  Including many if not most of the evils of British imperialism and its history of slavery.  Only instead of directly giving formal governance of colonies through appointed gangster bosses, we allow the corporations and others to do it through corruption of local oligarchs and dictators.  Hey, I'm a political blogger, you can't expect me to not get into that. 

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

I never knew who "Phila" was except for what information he gave about his activities on his blog and at the two blog comment threads where I encountered him.   I have not read anything from him in ten years when he abruptly stopped blogging and stopped appearing, at least under that name, where I went online.  He and his blog are one of the very few that I can say I have really missed.  There are certainly others on that short list, almost all of whom have given up blogging.  At least where I can find them.

One of the things I remember was when we agreed that one of the best uses of online comments was to test the strength of arguments, to see if we could defend our ideas as they were attacked by intelligent, informed commentators.  Unfortunately, the quality of online attack isn't high enough to sustain that in most venues, usually the attacks quickly fall into a rote pattern of cultural assumption based on no evidence and little logic.  I've learned a lot from that, too, mostly in how startlingly bad how many those with college-crendentials are at rigorous thinking.   I don't know if it was always that bad but it certainly is now.  And, if anything, the young'uns are worse at it than the olds are.

How To Deal With A Friggin' Liar - I Want Al Franken Back In The Senate, At Least

IF HEARING JOHN ROBERTS whining about the reputation of the court whose wrecking under his chiefdom is certainly due to his own Republican-fascist party makes you want to punch him in his his fat, smarmy disingenuous face, you might get some satisfaction hearing Al Franken refusing to sit silently as Alice Stewart lies her damned head off about the hypocrisy of Republicans in the Senate over the two stolen Court seats, the one denied to Merrick Garland because Republicans wouldn't even grant him a hearing and the one that they broke the "rules" they invented to do that to install Amy Coney Barrett in violation of that rule, one that Lindsay Graham pledged he would follow in exactly the circumstances of the Barrett speed-confirmation. 

 

This is the way for a Democrat on one of the damned talking-head shows to deal with a flagrant liar like this Republican shill.

This is why if it's at all possible, I'd love to see Al Franken back in the Senate refusing to idly and politely take the lies and bullshit of Republicans and others on committee and on the floor as he did so well and which others don't do at all.  

How Did The Idea of "Rights" Come To Mean Enabling So Many Wrongs?

THE SUPREME COURT of the United States in an act of monumental stupidity gave the media a "right" to lie about politicians and other public figures in 1964 and it is one of the least realized corruptions of our society and, so, our politics in every year since that. You may have caught me harping on this before because even as I do that I see every evidence it is the key to understanding the corruption of American life and, so, politics.  

The criminal who lost the presidency in 1960, Nixon, won the election in 1968  largely on the power of media lies told about Hubert Humphrey.  The common analysis that he lost it due to American involvement in Vietnam is certainly discredited by not only by Nixon's continuation but entirely illegal expansion of the American war into Cambodia and Laos, not to his political harm.  He won the next election in 1972, against the anti-war George McGovern, one of the most decent men to ever have gotten a major party nomination, even as Nixon's crimes were becoming obvious through even more lies told through and by the media. Lying has certainly worked far better for the oligarchs and the Republican, now Republican-fascist party who own the media and whose interest against the majority of The People needs lying to succeed.  Though that idea would have seem to have failed to gain the notice of the Warren Court who had lifetime tenure and didn't need to run for election or reelection to sit at a bench in position to make such stupid decisions.

I would like to get around to trying to research the etymology of that use of the word "right" to mean things we are entitled to do and have and how it once related to doing what was morally right and providing the necessities and goods of life to those who lacked them, trying to trace how that connection was corrupted to the point where "rights" are claimed by those who clearly are in the wrong and who are permitted by judicial pretenses of moral neutrality to get away with everything from petty conning right up to and including murder as a matter of "rights."  Especially when there is a demonstrable destruction of real and the most consequential of rights for far more People when such "rights" are invented.  Whatever that relation  is the whole notion of "rights" as they exist in the United States, under our federal and state Constitutions is seriously and dangerously screwed up.  

Our idolized Bill of Rights is highly problematic, even if my critique of the First Amendment makes you jittery consider the use of the Second Amendment by Republican-fascists to turn our schools into the shooting galleries of psychopaths.  If, as I suspect, that game is a consequence of 18th century enlightenment refusal to admit the practical consequences of immorality under the guise of judicial impartiality, such a study might be far more useful than it might seem at first.  Judges and, especially Supreme Court "justices" are never as impartial as they pretend to be, that's just another lie told with impunity like the ones Republican-fascists told during their confirmation hearings to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The idea that lying could exist as a right held, not only by individual human beings but the artificial corporate entities that "the press" are is an extreme danger to anything that depends on an effective majority of Americans knowing the truth.  We saw an extreme example of that in the media carried Trumpian-Republican-fascist lies surrounding Covid-19 and the efforts of those with the widest knowledge of what truth could be known about it to reduce and diminish the dangers and public and personal health consequences of the pandemic.  That is an ongoing consequence of the Courts and others pretending that there is a right to lie in the media which, fuck all else, will be the law of the land no matter how many tens and hundreds of thousands die as a consequence, no matter how long the promissory note of equal rights issued in the actual founding of the country is put off for members of oppressed minorities and Women and the working and unemployed poor.   And the American media, by and large, have been entirely irresponsible in that regard.

The lies in everything from the lowest of the gutter press to the New York Times against Hillary Clinton resulted in the United States having the loser of the 2016 election take the presidency.  Someone recently said Donald Trump was the man most investigated and least prosecuted in our history it is perhaps notable that known and proven con man and criminal that he is someone as obviously sleazy as he is was able to, even getting fewer votes, defeat the woman who is certainly the most investigated and most exonerated person in American history, and even more lied about than investigated.  The power of lies over the truth is something that is certainly proven in our history, our lived, experienced recent history, the danger of permitting the enormously powerful mass media and the social disease of social media to lie with impunity is as proven as any other mortal danger.  It is supremely ironic that telling the truth about the danger of free-speech-press absolutism is, effectively, one of the most forbidden areas of speech that there is.

The present regime of enabling and so empowering lies, especially lies amplified in the mass media and peddled by the expertise of advertising, a career of conning and carnival barking more effectively will destroy American democracy on behalf of organized criminals and billionaire gangsters intent on destroying democracy.  Even in issues where a majority of Americans seem to want one thing, the media and its effects on elections - mixed with the gaming of the corrupt American structure of government which has been so effectively gammed by those hired by the oligarch-gangsters - has thwarted equality, gun regulation, climate change policy, health care, etc. etc. etc.  Only a media freed from the entirely visible hand of the oligarch-gangsters has any possibility of telling the truth consistently. Though even such a press not required to try to tell the truth will be little to no help and will often be counterproductive in effect.  I would point to the old lefty media organs who were as apt to champion stupidly counterproductive policies and carry water for anti-democratic ideologies like Marxism as they were to really help in the struggle for equality and equal and economic justice.  We need a new lefty media that is totally and consciously free of that baggage.  Outside of some little financed and little read religious left sources, I can't think of a single one which is free of it.

I am not the most experienced reader of Scripture there is but I don't find much in the way of the promotion of the mass delusion present in our secular society that there is anything right about lying. About the only thing I can think of off the top of my head was the deception of the prostitute Rahab in concealing the spies Joshua sent to scout out how to take the city of Jericho.  And that's not exactly a good fit.  Perhaps there is something someone would like to point out in Scripture that gives the massive liars, the "christian nationalists" their Scriptural warrant to lie their heads off, not least of which is lying about who Jesus was and what Jesus said.  If there is something that shows just how reliant on a "right" to lie American-fascism is, that certainly makes the case.

The Re-Return of Saturday Night Radio Drama - Gerad Freixes Ribera - Escapism and Dime Novels

Escapism And Dime Novels 

 

Escapism and Dime Novels by Gerard Freixes Ribera tells the story of two writers, both working in a Spanish prison in the reign of General Franco - but on different sides of the bars.

Featuring a cast hailing from Spain, El Salvador, Chile and San Francisco,

Antonio Gil Martinez
José Miguel Jiménez
Leticia Vaquero
Fede Gonzales
Marcos Isla
Roger Gregg

Sound Supervision Mark Dwyer

Directed by Eithne Hand

This is one I just started listening to and haven't finished so we're kind of discovering it together.   The premise was different enough to make me decide to try it while I'm canning tomatoes. 

That This "Judge" And Her Self-Promoting Ruling Shows Why The Constitution In Regard To The Federal Judiciary Is Dangerously In Need Of Amendment

 

As An Egalitarian Democrat The Talk Of The Kingdom Of God Troubled Me Until I Remembered Just WHO Would Be The King of It

THE KINGDOM OF GOD that a reader found troubling IS a troubling phrase for an egalitarian democrat.  It becomes less of a problem if you remember that The Kingdom of God wouldn't be a human kingdom ruled by a human being, it wouldn't be subject to the evils that human kingship inevitably include, the injustices that God had Samuel warn The Children of Israel would come with them adopting a monarchical system would not be part of it, there would certainly be no injustice under the rule of God, God wouldn't be a human king with all of the nastier aspects of human personality coming with making a human being king. Or, rather, allowing a human being to make himself king.  We're not God, in case you forget and you shouldn't because human kings, whether Nebuchadnezzar, Pharaoh, Henry VIII, the Czar, Bush II or Trump or whoever the next Republican-fascist Ameriking crowned by the damned Electoral College or by the imperial Supreme Court and abjectly, cowardly and opportunistically proclaimed Ameriking by the "free press" are anything but divine.  

The Kingdom of God like so many other such terms in Scripture,  is a human term that tries to give a hint as to things that are not part of human experience and culture.  There is no human term for what the Prophets are talking about when they talk about the ultimate good.  Those metaphors are given given in a time and in a place where largely uneducated People and what they could understand were the audience of and the vehicle to bring of the Gospel to human minds and history.  Just as metaphors fill the Prophesy in the Old Testament. I'm not sure, given what I've seen, that educated People are any more equipped to understand than uneducated People are.

As human cultures have changed and human experience has varied, those metaphors take more effort to understand. The conditions of human minds that are continually mistaking metaphors for what those are supposed to elucidate is probably related to the fact that any human king is going to be anything from highly fallible to resorting to evil to maintain power to what Trump would have been if he'd pulled off the coup that CNN under new management, looking for new audience members in the minority who are Republican-fascists seems to want its viewers to think isn't such a big deal.  

God's kingdom won't come through the use of fear and the violence which are behind any human monarchy and which even the best egalitarian democracy we ever manage to construct would still require as long as human moral failure is a fact.*  I would guarantee you that anything that claims to be The Kingdom of God among human beings could be known to be false through a use of violence and fear to enforce what it was.  If the Kingdom of Jesus could not be found on Earth, we should not expect any governance of humans in life as we know it should ever be mistaken for God's rule.  Such rule would not require a staff of thugs to enforce it with violence and threats (royals, nobles, knights, lower-level feudal functionaries, judges, "justices," etc.) the laws will be written on the hearts of all People and they will choose to follow it without violence and without threats.  Here they had to depend on the Czar being far off and of little power, the Kingdom of God will be based in the imminence of the experience of God.  

It may not be fashionable to read Scripture to consider some of that Kingdom talk was talking about a "Kingdom not of this world" in the afterlife but to place the entire scope of Prophesy here, on Earth in human experience in time.  But I don't think it works as anything but an unachievable aspiration within the human experience of the material realm in which we need what we need to live but, above and beyond that, we WANT and want and want ever more than we need and we want luxury and, most of all, status above others around us.  I don't see the Peaceable Kingdom on Earth though we are charged with trying our best to accomplish something far closer to it than has ever been accomplished in the past.  I do think that that is part of the use of the metaphor though putting it all in the afterlife is no where near ambitious enough in terms of human life and action here on Earth.

I think of the phrases in the prayer Jesus taught "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven," as about the only evidence given of The Kingdom that is had in mind might be achievable on Earth and the Kingdom would certainly be a result of us doing God's will, of following The Law.  What it would consist of in terms of human will and action is something I can't imagine, those having produced more hell than heaven in my experience but it would have to be something far different than in our history. Everyone having their daily bread would certainly be part of it. Even when People are motivated by the best of intentions and even love, humans carrying the Commandments out well, never mind perfectly, isn't anything I've seen.  The prayer, itself, tells us we are to forgive the wrongs done to us as we would want our wrongs forgiven by God, so it includes the acknowledgement that such wrongs will be inevitable.  We have to ask to be led away from temptation and delivered from evil by God, that we will all encur "debts" (so there will be need and inequality on Earth) or, in the Catholic metaphor that is translated into, "trespasses," into other people's things.  So I think what is meant by that phrase is that we have a moral obligation to make as much of the real Kingdom of God present in the world according to our limited abilities expanded by grace.   I think many of the metaphors in Scripture are better read as applying on Earth and that they are talking about heaven too. I don't think Isaiah's vision of herbivorous lions eating grass next to lambs meant that carnivores were going to all become vegans, think of the problem of the balance of nature and what would happen to the limited grasslands on Earth.  Though maybe they'll all stop having offspring that risks the result of more than replacement levels of reproduction.   See, metaphors for things we haven't seen or experienced. 

* The problem with the police isn't that they exist, the problem with policing is that its culture is  corrupted with racism and other forms of bigotry and an internal culture which encourages that.  Not a little of that the product of the gangsters who run police unions and their appeal to the worst among their members to maintain their power.  The fact that the Supreme Court and other courts have made the job of policing impossible due to their putting automatic and other powerful guns and weapons in the hands of those who commit mass murder has more than a little to do with the deterioration of policing in the United States.  A lot of that was encouraged by programs such as C.O.P.S. and entertainment shows which are entirely unrealistic and the fascist vision of the Dirty Harry franchise and its spin-offs.  The part that the civil liberties industry played in it by getting such things as the Miranda warning which the Roberts Court just knocked down is a minor mitigation compared with what the gun industry, fascists on the Supreme Court and entertainment have done.  The extent to which the ACLU participated in that through its myopic advocacy is probably of much lesser import but it is very real and, because of the court rulings it gets, not insignificant.

Not an insignificant part of it is a product of discriminatory hiring in the past and the present. No police force should look so little like the population it is supposed to serve and protect as so many do.

And then there is the actual system of education, the formation of minds of the population of the United States, media, especially entertainment media. I have marveled at the oddity that so many novels, TV shows, movies, etc. have policemen as central characters when they really aren't that big a percentage of the population. In some ways I think they have been made into a sort of unintentional report on the anxieties and mental debility of the largely white, largely male, largely middle-class or affluent writers, directors, producers and actors who run entertainment which is then presented to a less pathological population as sex-violence entertainment and so has infected its audience, including law enforcement officers with a higher percentage of evil than you'd expect from those choosing to go into a helping profession.  That's my theory of the origin of the epidemic of bad policing, including murder, that we see around us.  

Some of us started predicting such bad consequences in the shift in entertainment starting in the 1970s reaction to the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and early 70s and downward into the Hollywood-TV fascist chic that deserved to be called that in the 1980s during the Reagan years. The explosion in the number of channels on TV and now online has only made it ever worse. Digital gaming and whining by the likes of Incel boys has made even that much worse.  Entertainment corrupts except on the rare occasions it chooses to promote good. And so bad are the writers, etc. so much more used to cynical negativity than in charity are they that the results are usually cloyingly nauseating.  The percentage of it that is not garbage has certainly gone to less than one percent of it, now.  

Note: I was going to post this yesterday but events led me to hold it.  Re-reading it I've decided to post it today.

A 96-Year-Old Woman Died

 and all that keeps going through my head is the brilliant Stanley Baxter doing Rose and Mrs. Bridges . 

No disrespect for someone who had more class and humanity than literally just about every Brit PM in her entire lifetime but it's a good bit of imitation.   That said, I hope Charles is ready for the brick bats that are going to be heaved onto him and probably are already. 

My Difficult Admiration For And Critique Of The Late Barbara Ehrenreich

LIKE MOST PEOPLE when I think of Barbara Ehrenreich I always think of her best known book Nickled and Dimed in which she did some Nellie Bly style reportage by taking some minimal wage, awful jobs and trying to live on the money she made while reproducing the living conditions, travel, etc. that are the daily experience of the working poor.  I admired the book very much and still find some of what she said in it insightful, especially her admission that she could only approximate the mental experience of People who knew they were trapped in that life because she knew it was a time-limited project and she would return to her life as a writer and intellectual.

I had more of a problem with her materialist-atheist-scientism, in fact encountering what she said and claimed out of that, the attitude it gave her to anything that she noticed might challenge her base ideology and most of what I've written and said about her has been about that.  I noted that given her hostility to Christianity and religion in general, it was probably an irony that her greatest audience were probably among religious book readers and book clubs seriously reading Nickled and Dimed as supplementary material in their following of The Gospel, the Law and the Prophets (at least in my experience and my observation.)   '

I did find reading about her book, her late-life memoir, "Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything" in which she approached what might be interpreted as her religious experience kind of amusing.  I noted that one thing was sure about her, she knew how to sell a book.   

Just the end of last February I slammed a disappointingly lazy, typical, lazy Lynn White inspired and very sloppy conception of human history, religion and the extinction crisis that she had in The Guardian.  I'll not quote from it here.

While I believe she'll probably have made her own peace with her career and life as she was surprised to find there is an afterlife, I don't feel any problem with what I've written about her.  I do admire some of her work, especially when her ideology was not foremost in what she did.  I think she was involved in some projects that may have seemed like a good idea at the time but which were anything from meaningless to unhelpful, such as the Socialist Scholars Conference which morphed into the comic "Left Forum."   Marginally more respectable she was involved with the abortive Students for a Democratic Society.  She had a typical white American lefty cum Marxist set of blinders for the mass murder that the Cultural Revolution in China was, something which is still typical of many of the scribbling class white lefties of that and the next generation.   Along with my realization that anyone murdered under Stalinism was as murdered as anyone murdered under fascism or Nazism came a realization that that was as true of those murdered in China, Cambodia, etc. under those variations on Marxism,  I've never looked back from that experience of shame and I never overlook it in others.  Especially those in the scribbling, babbling, publishing classes.  I could go on with other projects.

In the end I think her major work praised above has more than its match in far lesser read, far lesser promoted books, not a few of them from People who lived in those conditions and documented them from their own despair.  Though they didn't have lunch with Lewis Lapham but she did write her book and I honor its intention and whatever influence it had.  I think, unfortunately, her other activities did nothing to enhance its influence in politics and life. 

Senator Whitehouse on "Originalism"

 

 

People Are Equally Endowed With Some Rights, Their Ideas Are Not And We Shouldn't Pretend They Are - Hate Mail

THE POINT MADE by a philosopher who I disagree with about much, George Moore, that there are hardly any of the points of the most exacting of philosophy which people can know as experientially and reliably as something like 2+2=4 is something I agree with  wholeheartedly.  That some of the most exacting philosophy takes enormous pains and extremely long chains of symbolic statements and conclusions to reach the point where it can admit that 1+1=2, and even then it is something you would have to choose to believe makes me wonder why a more reasonable  conclusion to reach is that there is something deeply problematical with that particular philosophical specialty.  The refusal to admit that we know some of the things we know because, in the end, you can't reach a formal "proof" of it is one of the mental dysfunctions caused by setting an impossible standard, a refusal to admit that what we can know is known within the contingent limits of our abilities and those don't produce a satisfyingly final conclusion beyond any ridiculous question, finally answering all things.  

I will note that the conclusion that the exacting logical thing which pure math is does not produce a self-closing system certainly should call into question that the less exacting field of physics will ever have one for itself.  Having once gotten a particularly arrogant materialist fundamentalist to admit that there is not so much as a single electron which science knows completely and exhaustively (which admission, I'm still proud to have forced him into admitting, it was like pulling hens' teeth)  perhaps I should ask someone in the foundations of mathematics if there is a single number or other mathematical object which mathematics has a complete understanding of.  Even the number 1 would seem to be intimately tied up with every new facet of mathematics that is published and so those reveal new aspects of the number.  Which is a cheering idea, there will never be an end to what there is for professional mathematicians to discover.  That is if you take any of it as either true or significant and if you don't, so much for science.  And, therefore, someone might be willing to pay them while they do it. Many an academic gets paid to do far more dodgy stuff.

That said, even in what is seemingly an infinitude of possible facets to the number 1, there are certainly statements you can make about the number 1 which are knowably true and statements containing it which are certainly false.  And if you deny that, again, so much for science.  If those statements about the number 1 are not knowably true or false then there is just about literally nothing in philosophy or science which can be justifiably asserted to be known, including the validity of the mental apparatus of stuff used to deny that such self-evident and provable truths about numbers is knowably true or false, their debunkery exists as much within the contingent limits of minds as the things the debunkers want to debunk.

Even more basic than the idea that the basic addition facts are valid is that the mind containing and manipulating those facts is real, the reasoning of the mind, its evaluation of the truth value of its conclusions, that it does something which requires meaningful thought and produces meaningful and true results as understanding of things is there to do that, no matter what enormous chains of ideologically motivated and far from obvious argument seeks to convince you that minds in general, including yours, is not engaged in any meaningful activity which arrives at true conclusions those philosophy professors or those who prefix cog- or neuro- appended to their fields of speculation as science want to claim for publication to support their ideological preferences.  

If their conclusion is true the very activities they were engaged in to produce that work is as discredited as any other conclusions that anyone else engages in in contradiction of them. Their own work is as stripped of significance or the likelihood that it enjoys the value of truth.   Their idea has exactly the same status as the ideas denying their conclusions.  And of course, their own claim's validity is as debunked as anything they don't like in that philosophical two-step. Their conclusions have exactly the same truth value as the "folk psychology" which they dismiss.

But many of the ideas that claim that Peoples consciousness, that minds really exist and that their activities and conclusions have at least a chance to arrive at a meaningful truth are not self-discrediting in the same way.  Such ideas of minds and their activities include the possibility of arriving at truth or untruth so they permit the possibility that their conclusions are true. That's the difference between a self-set ideological trap and an attempt to find the truth.  I have never suspected the eliminative materialists to have not started out firmly holding onto their desired conclusion by which their claims are forced but they really aren't very good at thinking things out to the endpoint.  Like all ideologues, eventually they want to have an exemption from their own universal claims.

I hold that any idea that contains or forces its own contradiction or forces a conclusion of its invalidity is rightly held to be too stupid to publicly fund or support the promotion of and any institution or, especially in this case, school that does that is rightly questioned and held to have fallen into nonsense and, so, is unworthy of support.

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

. . .  that possibility of danger is no rational reason to make it far more dangerous by allowing the free expression and advocacy of ideologies and lies that ensure those dangers are more likely while their suppression will make them less likely

Not only in spite of but because I hold that all People are created equal and equally are endowed with rights, I reject the idea that all ideas are equally deserving of respect and to respectably hold a place in academia or science, no matter how nicely grammatical their writing and speech is, no matter how nicely they dress, how nicely they have gained credentials that allow them to put letters after their name or to insist that people call them "Dr.".  

Certainly any idea that debases or denies the validity of the very categories of respectability and even truth (which is certainly among those things which should render an idea under consideration as respectable and gain it a place in academic life) cannot then be said to deserve what it denies any consequential status to, it being claimed as being a respectable idea that might be true.  I think the consequences of materialist-atheist-scientism which include some of the most decadent claims and conclusions and consequences of those sort ever bull-shitted as intellectualism earns them a place on a roll of ideas that aren't deserving of respect or a place in anything respectable. I'm unaware of any formal logical fallacy that labels an argument that not only debases its claimed goal but also debases the very means by which its conclusions are reached but it would seem to me that there needs to be one invented to express just how much is wrong about eliminative materialism and its philosophico-ideological cousins.  That it is held to be an academically respectable idea is an emblem of just how absurd modernism becomes.  Given the importance of egalitarian democratic government, it is far more urgent that any idea which destroys the basis of it should have a special categorization as disreputable and unworthy of respect,  those which have a history of getting People killed and oppressed should be forbidden and actively suppressed.

People have equal rights in that it is a right to have a decent, peaceful, secure life in so far as People and societies can provide that. Their ideas?  Ideas don't have rights, I no more have to respect or hold as equal or as equally deserving of legal protection a political ideology that promotes evil treatment of entire groups of People, denying that they be allowed a peaceful, decent, secure life any more than than I do to the idea that 2+2= the recipe for original Coke or the ravings of some Biblical numerologist that a late night host picks up off the street to fill air time, only those would be innocuous whereas the ones you can expect the ACLU to mount a defense of get people killed.  

The absurd idea that an idea that targets an entire race, religion, gender or gender identity for discrimination, violence or murder is more allowable than the advocacy of violence against a single individual is just that, absurd. That judges, "justices," legal hacks, misguided Civics teachers, and the rest of us have been sold the idea that even in the face of the 20th century materialist-atheist-scientistic dictatorial regimes and the mountains of those murdered by them that we MUST allow them another chance to do it again is the most decadent of current superstitions.  Beside that the ludicrous notion that Noah put two of every animal in a big boat during a flood that drowned all the dinosaurs is harmlessly naive.  One gets millions murdered, one produced a wacky theme park with finances that make people whine.  Yet I know which one would never be considered as belonging in a university or defended on NPR or get respectful treatment among those held to be respectable outside of some particularly benighted areas of Protestant fundamentalism.  And it isn't the one that got millions murdered.

The idea that egalitarian democracy, on the basis of some wacky idea of "justice" or "fairness" must tolerate the now billionaire - foreign dictator-gangster as well as our own indigenous gangster class-  financed cabloid and webloid profiting promotion of ideas that deny equality and which are destructive of the absolutely essential prerequisites for democracy, giving them a chance to dupe and corrupt the electorate into giving them a chance to do what they proclaim they want to is one of the stupidest ideas to have gained currency in the modern period.  

It is also an idea that those who proclaim it tend to violate whenever it suits them.  That someone like James Madison or Thomas Jefferson or even John Adams may have promoted the idea that all ideas MUST be allowed is certainly contradicted by their lives.  Madison and Jefferson would certainly never have supported the communication of the idea among those they held in slavery that they had the same rights of rebellion against tyranny that they claimed as a natural right when it was a group of aristocratic white guys gathered in Philadelphia to break the ties to the English government.  

Though the infamous Alien and Sedition Act is held by polite college-credentialed People to be a far worse thing than the hypocrisies of Madison and Jefferson, Adams certainly didn't seem to think that when he was President dealing with what he had good reason to fear was an importation of the ideas that were leading to the Reign of Terror as "liberty, equality and fraternity" in France, with the support of not a few of his political opponents who were not in power but wanted to be.  The idea that resurgent fascism, our indigenous form of that in the Supreme Court enabled white supremacy which still oppresses and kills so many and the male supremacy which the Roberts Court has, as well, again made the law of the land, giving predominantly male, Republican-fascist legislators power over the very bodies and lives of Women that slave-holders held over slaves, to deny the ancestors of slaves the right to cast a vote, that that and Nazism or Stalinism or Maoism or even lesser demented forms of anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian MUST be allowed a chance to take hold here and flourish as Trumpism has is absolutely morally irresponsible and insane.  For the large majority of People who would suffer under those, there is absolutely no reason for them to agree that because Jemmy Madison said we must allow that the chance to happen.  If Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, our indigenous forms of fascism such as white supremacy were forbidden, suppressed and never advocated here would be all for the good.  

If you ask who gets to draw the line, the answer is as plain as it is for every law that is made, rightfully, we the People do.  There is no absolute safety in any human activity, there is certainly possible danger in establishing and maintaining a government but that possibility of danger is no rational reason to make it far more dangerous by allowing the free expression and advocacy of ideologies and lies that ensure those dangers wielding power are more likely while their suppression will make them less likely to.  Especially those ideologies that announce their intention of endangering, oppressing, murdering such as a good little ACLU contributor will feel very self-satisfyingly virtuous about paying to give them a legal representation on the insane belief that that's the best way to prevent what they admit they intend to do happening.

Anyone who cannot distinguish between the desire for all People to have the right to a decent, peaceful life and Nazism, Stalinism, American apartheid, Trumpism etc. is too stupid to be granted any benefit of the doubt and certainly should be held to hold an idea that is dangerously deserving of suppression.  The lives of scores of millions dead just within still living memory attest to that danger as the millions killed by white supremacy in the United States stand as testimony against our indigenous equivalent of that.  Yet it is the pretense that we are all incompetent to make that decision, that judges and "justices" and jurors who are given the responsibility to make life and death decisions when it is merely the very lives of human beings are incompetent to judge the difference between Nazism and equal justice for all.

Nother Busy Day So A Quick Answer

AGAIN, I CAN'T FIND the book which I was thinking of so I transcribed this short piece from a Youtube interview of Luke Timothy Johnson in which he gives an example of how idolatry in one definition of it is a habit with all of us.  

It's also important to distinguish sin from idolatry because for a long time I tended to equate them.  And the Bible has all kinds of stuff to say about idolatry. You know, "making false gods,"  taking something contingent and treating it as if it were necessary, making something the center of your universe and revolving around that. But I've come in my (old) age, I've come to understand that idolatry is the way we're constructed. We really can't not be idolatrous because we're instinctually  impoverished.  We don't molt, we don't migrate, you know, we're cursed with freedom.  And so since we're not centered naturally we have to center on something. Problem is, idolatry is, "I want to be the world's best scholar, that's what I want to be" that's my goal, that's what I'm centering on.  Now, there's nothing wrong with that. But my eight-year-old child calls from the other room daddy come play with me, I'm lonely. Idolatry is natural, sin is choosing the idolatry when a gift is available. My daughter's plea for company is a gift to me. She wanted to be with me. My making my scholarly paper more important is a refusal to discern that. 

I would say that's not that unrelated to the habit of those those impressive idol makers who would certainly deny that's what they do when they "instinctually" (I'd say "habitually") reach for the idols of scientism such as "DNA," "natural selection," "random-chance,"  "probability" and a very naive and superficial resort to the billions of years they hold that those had the chance to produce this or that phenomenon, not taking into account that, for example, they would all have needed the age of the early Earth capable of sustaining any life and not the age of the universe to give them their actual time-span in which to work their creation mythology and not the theoretical age of the universe.   I remember the time I pointed out to one of them online that "natural selection" couldn't have had the chance to do what they claimed it did before there was reproducing, mutating life so they didn't have the "13 billion years" that they cited as the time span it would have had to do what they claimed it did.  The construction of idols even among those self-defined materialist skeptics is always an act that eschews the actual complexities involved. 

The Bizarre Intersections of Right-Wing Religion, Body Builders, Woman Abusers And Popular Atheists - Two Pieces

HAVING WRITTEN A response to a piece of hate mail the other day, I decided I probably wouldn't post it but this morning this piece about the interview the misogynist media bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota with an actor I'd never heard of before, Shia LeBeouf, which discusses the psycho-misogyinist masculinity as muscular Catholic integralism is the topic.  I'd thought that Pope Francis appointing the media darling Barron to what is a rather out of the way bishopric might mute his media presence and tone down his masculinity obsessed media operation (he's got a real thing about hiring body-builders who have lots of issues and get into trouble) but apparently not.  The Bish's got issues.

The hour-and-a-half conversation between actor Shia LaBeouf and Bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, lasts only seven minutes before the tension surrounding the Latin Mass comes up.

While the motive of the interview is primarily to discuss LaBeouf's portrayal of the titular saint in the forthcoming feature film "Padre Pio", the major revelation of the dialogue is LaBeouf's conversion to Catholicism, which is first brought to light through the discussion of, essentially, the role of the secret within the sacred as it pertains to differences between the Catholic liturgy's ordinary and extraordinary forms.

LaBeouf's own words praising the Latin Mass are, for lack of understanding Latin: "I can't argue the word, because I don't know what the word means, so I'm just left with this feeling." Barron himself brings up that a secondary purpose of incense at Mass is that it obscures the action in the sanctuary.

"I don't know what the word means, so I'm just left with this feeling."  is actually a good summation as to what was so bad about the Latin Mass in the period after almost everyone except the ordained clergy (Women religious were not typically taught Latin for most of the history of Catholicism) understood what was going on.  It was useless for much more than giving vague or often pathologically twisted feelings.  Much, though not all, of the Protestant critique of that is far more valid than anything the Latin nostalgics have to say about it.   If they want a feeling without understanding, what else do they make crappy religio-sentimentalistic Hallmark equivalent movies for?   His religion doesn't even get to the levels of the cloying Going My Way or the Bells of St. Mary's.   Clearly both LeBeouf's and Barron's Catholicism has more in common with a Chick Publications style idea of The Book of Revelations.

LaBeouf also says, before his conversion, he did not initially feel compelled to have a relationship with Jesus because he only knew the "soft, fragile, all-loving, all-listening but no ferocity … meek" Jesus (Barron immediately offers the word "feminized"), and it was only when LaBeouf encountered what he considered to be "masculine" — "cape, dipped in blood, sword" — that Jesus felt "appealing."

We should be concerned about anyone who finds the Gospel most compelling in its violence or who is put off by the femininity of Jesus. If we are to understand Jesus as the savior of all, we must embrace his full divinity that has no gender, and we must confidently identify the goodness of both the masculine and feminine in the incarnation.

Throughout the interview, LaBeouf cites a number of tropes and returns to them often: cowboys, cavemen and gangsters. He repeatedly expresses gratitude for the men who accompanied him and "masculinized" his journey, "the hero's journey."

LaBeouf also discloses the heart of this pull to the masculine: He is drawn to those who treat him in a fatherly or grandfatherly way, and he is lonesome for friends. He finds all of these things in the Catholic world.

Someone's been watching too much Joseph Campbell.  I have more than just a suspicion that both the Bish and the guy who works in makeup and make believe have a conception of Catholicism which has little to no use for those who Jesus put at the center of his ministry,  perhaps their devotion of a liturgy in a language which the either understood not at all or not very well has something to do with that.  I have to say, every time I dip into the activities of Robert Barron I'm left without many good feelings and in the Latin mass cult of today's American Catholic-fascism, I've developed an almost Protestant level of hostility toward it, which is too bad because I really do love medieval and renaissance Latin language religious music.  

I'll leave it to you to read the rest of the disturbing article, here's what I have held back posting. 

 "Irish Catholic Fundamentalist" - Hate Mail

IN THE RECENT PACKING AND UNPACKING of my books, due to my moving to and back from my very little house, I can't find the book in which was noted that Biblical fundamentalism as an organized movement in Protestantism was intimately tied in with the 18th-to today Scottish "common sense" school of philosophy, which started that delusion called "the enlightenment."  If that is correct it is ironic because most of that so-called "enlightenment" thought was and is quite opposed to Christianity and religion in the atheist-materialist branch of that fashion which so influenced the framing of the U.S. Constitution.  The idea that you could just read the enormously complex, enormously varied, Scriptures, the product of an extremely long, very complex history and many, often not agreeing minds, many of them entirely unknowable to us as if it were a simple work of 18th century expository writing by a single author is and always has been ridiculous.  In the long history of serious consideration of Scripture in Christianity, it has often been considered to be extremely complex.  Even in the understanding of Scripture which I have gotten, mostly from Walter Brueggemann who notes that all of it revolves around the liberation of The Children of Israel from slavery, notes how extremely complex it is.

The idea it could be read in a "common sense" manner is so ridiculous that even some of those who were considered part of the "enlightenment" commented on the complexity of the least opaque and complex part of Scriptures, created in a very condensed period of time among a relatively related group of writers, the New Testament.*  The complexity of it was one of the things that the anti-Christian side of the "enlightenment" used as an argument against it, though they certainly didn't find that a problem with other things which were complex and far less productive of good like the English Common Law.  

Always beware of hidden motives and intents when people want to make such appeals to simplicity and "common sense."  I will set aside the temptation to go into a diatribe about Thomas Paine and the demonstrable lack of "common sense" in his biography at this point.  Scribbling is so much easier than living.

"Fundamentalist" is one of those words which began with a fairly limited range of meaning, in terms of Biblical fundamentalism, it named those Protestant denominations and individuals who signed on to a rigid, bigoted, and pretty awful set of claims published as The Fundamentals.  Unfortunately, largely at  the hands of some academics writing secondary, tertiary, etc. stuff about conservative Protestantism, the actual meaning of the word was expanded and distorted, often quite wrongly.  I would guess that it was from them that it filtered through those in "journalism" and even more popular writing and babbling, they having learned the word, first, from those secondary (etc.) sources and having further generalized its use into no more than something for "fundamentalists" to say yea to and those who didn't like conservative Christianity or real Christainty to slam.  It's expansion to cover Islam and Judaism and other things totally unrelated to any religious scripture reached the point where Stephen Jay Gould (from who I got it) talked of the pseudo-scientific fad of the 1970s-today of Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology as "Darwinian fundamentalism."   I've used that term quite a lot so, you see, I'm as much a sinner as anyone.  The inability of People to live up to their most definite professions is one of the reasons we should all practice mercy to others, they might get into the habit and return it on us.  But don't count on that as a sure thing.

I have gotten some use of the original meaning of the word when I mock people who talk about "Catholic fundamentalists" as you did because if there's one thing that is characteristic of The Fundamentals and many of those who pledged allegiance to that mock-scripture, it is its vicious anti-Catholicism.  The now billionaire-astro-turf bull shit of "traditional Catholicism" is more related to a particularly awful early 20th century phenomenon of "integralism" among right-wing Catholics.  It is now a neo-fascist-capitalist cult which, like all "Christianity" that makes common cause with the rich and hateful, has no real dedication to the Gospel, the Law or the Prophets, it has little to nothing to do with Scripture at all but feeds off of the detritus of the worst period of Catholic history when the Papacy and many local bishops held medieval type power in kingdoms of this world and alligned themselves with the degenerate feudal rulers of kingdoms of the Earth who, likewise, never intended to follow the teachings of Jesus, the Law or the Prophets. Though a lot of it is even more in line with the putrid cabloid network of "Mother Angelica" or, as I called her, "that Nazi-nun" and its cloying nostalgia for a Hollywood "religious picture" conception of what Catholicism is supposed to all be about.  Bing Crosby or Spencer Tracy playing a priest always made me gag.  They hate Francis because he thinks Catholicism should be about the Gospel, Acts and the Epistles.

There is nothing more radical than the Gospel, the Law and the Prophets a close second to that in a graph of radicalism.  And, with what has been done to the word "radical" I have to stipulate that as radical in a good way.

* It's telling how many of the atheist-fundamentalists insist that that the Fundamentalist style of Scripture reading is the only valid way to read them.  Of course, that's because "Fundamentalism" turns God into a series of idols which are easy to knock down in argument. The reason that reading so much of the pop-atheist lit reveals how shallow it is. Perhaps since the "common sense" philosophical school is intimately tied in with the extension of the method of science into an ideological framing of reality and its morally catastrophic results, that isn't any big surprise. I think modern atheism in the European style, especially the Brit-English-Language style is as much a product of that simplistic methodology of "common sense" philosophy as Biblical fundamentalism is.  Given enough time I might relate that to the degeneracy that pseudo-science and academia fell into in the "enlightenment" imposition of scientism as the only respectable intellectual position and its invasion of popular culture among the mid-brow, college-credentialed population, the ones who so futilely war with the "fundamentalists" who certainly have had a far greater success in terms of politics and influence.   

It's remarkable how dumbing stuff down is so much a part of that "enlightenment."  And if there's one thing that might be a truism, stupid sells when you scrap moral responsibility.

A Classic Example Of Why Ranked Choice Voting Is A Better Deal For The Majority Of Voters Of All Parties

AMERICAN APARTHEID future Presidential candidate Tom Cotton has been trying to make hay over the Alaskan election which the Democrat Mary Peltola won over the putrid carny show spectacle candidate of the kind Republican-fascists have been putting so much stock in, Sarah Palin, whining that a majority of those in the election voted for a Republican but the Democrat who "lost" will take the seat.

What happened under the great practice of ranked-choice voting is that the last choice of a majority, of those who voted for Peltola and for Nick Begich, the one who placed third would rather have had Peltola than the concussed Palin in Congress.

What happens in ranked-choice is that the majorities least favorite candidate loses,  which is certainly better than the majority having their least favorite candidate take office.  That is something that an American apartheid creep like Cotton can't live with because, given a choice to avoid the worst, most voters will opt for their second choice over the worst and Tom Cotton's Republican Part is the worst that wants the worst.  

I am certain that the second choice of those who voted for Mary Pelota put Begich as their second choice.  Though its conceivable some of them might have opted for the insane clown Palin.  A dangerous number of Alaskan voters seems to have wanted to send her to Washington to "represent" them.  Though she certainly would not have represented anyone but a small minority of the rich and corrupt, a  dangerous percentage of American voters are either too stupid or too full of hate to vote even their own best interest and ranked choice voting protects most of us from them and their gullibility.   Would that the damned Maine Supreme Court and the stupid Maine State Constitution had allowed us to have it in the election of the Maine governor because we are in real danger of having  the hating-stupid minority put Paul LePage back in office next year.

Rejecting "nostalgia for a sacralized world, a bygone society" As Well As "Secularism" As A Requirement Outside Of Governmental Administration

A BUSY DAY for me so I'll leave you with this passage from a piece by Michael Sean Winters which contains an excellent passage from Pope Francis on the difference between secularization and secularism which is certainly a useful refinement of ideas I've been giving in a cruder form.

The Spirit of God is at work not only in the lives of the faithful, but beyond the walls of the church as well. This is one of the Holy Father's most provocative and important themes, one he touched on in his address to the bishops, clergy and religious of Quebec. There, building on quotes from Pope Paul VI, he said:

    "Saint Paul VI distinguished secularization from secularism, a concept of life that totally separates a link with the Creator, so that God becomes "superfluous and an encumbrance", and generates subtle and diverse "new forms of atheism": "consumer society, the pursuit of pleasure set up as the supreme value, a desire for power and domination, and discrimination of every kind" (ibid). As Church, and above all as shepherds of God's People, as consecrated men and women, seminarians and pastoral workers, it is up to us to make these distinctions, to make this discernment. If we yield to the negative view and judge matters superficially, we risk sending the wrong message, as though the criticism of secularization masks on our part the nostalgia for a sacralized world, a bygone society in which the Church and her ministers had greater power and social relevance."

Instead of wringing our hands about the secularization of the ambient culture, a process that has been ongoing for centuries, Pope Francis invites us to accompany those outside the church, mindful that the Spirit is at work in their lives too, that our Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation demands we stipulate that God is at work in their lives.

I've made a cruder distinction between secularism as an entirely necessary formal practice within governments in an egalitarian democratic pluralistic country and the kind of cultural atheism that that secularism has been opportunistically distorted into and demanded by those who hate religion and, most of all, Christianity.  I think the distinction that Pope Francis and Paul VI made is compatible with the one I made, though it contains some important nuances missing from my idea of it.   I will note who Francis lays that responsibility on, the clergy and religious most of all.  I think a political blogger should try to, as well.