Thanks, Andrew. That looks like a rich vein. I will follow it up.

I don't know how the Russian revolution fits in to all of this. False equivalency, perhaps. We all get nutty from time to time. Just like all politicians are the same. Gimme a break. Or a drink.

That the State can be responsible for the health and basic welfare of its citizens and, at the same time, allow for freedom of thought and expression and a free market is not rocket science. That these are mutually exclusive is becoming a tough sell. Especially when you start messing with health care. Go to a town hall meeting in say (of all places) Tennessee.

Did they ever take a poll on how many Americans believe that Jesus was American (that is, from the States- Mexicans are Americans too)? I'm really curious how that would turn out.

O Lord, protect us from ignorance (and get rid of the f#@king electoral college).

(I too loved the link, Nigel.)

Looks like my point may have been missed, as well. Probably my fault.

But just as a quick and friendly rebuttle: I was not impying (at least not intentionally) that there was only one Left, or one desire, or one vision. All I meant to make clear is that the 1918 Revolution was perpetated by those whose political views are considered leftist. Radical left, certainly.

I consider myself Left on come issues, and Right on others. I don't consider myself a political moderate because I don't ride the fence on most issues, like for instance civil rights. Militant police states and radical theocracies, in general, are considered Right, and don't give a fig for rights. Of course this makes them Wrong, not Right. I ride the fence only on certain few issues where rights and ethics are in conflict, as in abortion. While I'm, on one hand, all for the sovereignty of a woman's rights to her own body, I'm also conflicted as to the morality of abortion, in particular late-term abortions. I think it should be legal, but that doesn't necessarily mean I think it's ethical (save in the case of a woman who's been raped. In that case, should she decide to abort, no-one with a shred of decency should condemn her for it. If abortion of a fetus conceived in rape is an offense to God, then let God deal with it).

Anyway, I decide how I feel about things one issue at a time, and I could never imagine letting my faith trick me into feeling convicted about the rightness or wrongness of something out of fear of pissing off God. I figure God knows what I feel deep in my heart anyway. If my difficulty with the concept of damnation is an offense to God or Christ, then let come hell or highwater. It's just how it is. I've discussed this with Charlie, and I've been trying to make peace with major cognitive dissonance on that particular bugbear. I think execution by public stoning is a heinous disgrace, but it's condoned in the Bible. So what can one do? I certainly can't just shrug and say, well, it's scriptural so it must be okay. Just can't do it. And with that bugbear, I don't even bother trying.

I like the Camus quote, but I think Utopia is a pipe dream and as long as we have human nature to deal with, it'll be impossible. Unless some folks consider some kind of nightmare out of Orwell or Huxley to be an acceptable solution to humanity's endless conflict, crime, and warfare?

Sure, we can be like the famous Jose Delgado (before old age made him much wiser) and advocate for turning people into sheeple via direct intervention in the brain, but I'd rather I and my children were dead than live in a world like that. I don't know about you?

**I won't explain my defense of Charlie, as it would be a breech of privacy. You're all welcome to judge what he writes here, but he's been a complete gentleman in private, even after I wrote him a bunch of babble that was offensive to his beliefs.

**James, my point is simple, and totally noncontroversial: the 1918 Revolution was perpetrated by people from the radical Left. A discussion has been going on that tends to make the Left look like a bunch of sainted humanitarians. Of course, many of them are! But Trump's presidency has whipped certain people on the Left into an irrational frenzy. Denying that my 1918 example of the potential danger of the Left "fits into all of this" makes no sense to me. Please don't forget that I said the Right can be just as dangerous, and just as deadly. And it has been, and no doubt will be again.

***One more thing. I'm willing to be educated. What do you all think of the French Revolution? What would you call the mobsters who beheaded all those people? And were guilty of such a bloodbath? Were they on the Left or Right? Or were they neither? I'm all ears.

Before I say anything more about that revolution, yes, I've read up on it, but am certainly no authority. Like I said in another thread, I'm teachable.

Bill,

To paraphrase Ralph on Walt, you said some things incomparably well, as they must be said... I can only quote a few of my idols, in the knowledge that they contradict each other, and yet they all speak the truth.


The Great Day

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.

-- WB Yeats


From: Law Like Love

Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.

And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.

-- WH Auden


“It is always a question of tilting the scales in the favor of the oppressed.”

-- Simone Weil (from memory...)

I love those quotes, Michael.

Rebellion is in our nature. We're a rebellious lot. It's normal to rebel, and to shake our fists at the high and mighty, when we feel they have lost touch with reality, and with us. It's healthy.

My sole reason for bringing up 1789 and 1918 was to simply suggest that when people of any political persuasion get whipped up, all hell sometimes breaks loose.

Take Berkeley recently, just as an example.

~~

**Andrew M, I call foul on your telling Charlie to "shut up". What happened to freedom of speech?

Forgive the log quotes that end this. But I think they are extremely relevant to the moment.


The Berkeley black bloc action served to show that they will not allow free speech to be a cover for stupid jackboots that wish to undermine the roots that free speech come from. You should thank them.

And it was shut up AND read. Then comment on the ideas being presented. The idea of utopia in Camus work is well known and clearly not what either for you reacted to. His work in the Rebel, and in Combat, and his eesays on Germany and Algeria are dated in places but remain first of all rooted against the Revolution with a capital R for abstraction and against exactly the concept of Utopia you both trumped up. It is hard to keep up with every thread of reading on here. Too much to ask for sure. But it is not too much to ask for someone to get a modest gist of the argument before jumping in on one of the extremes.

The extremes we are facing today are not helped come into focus with with talk about the Terror or over-simplified ideas about 1918 (yours or mine.) The only tumbrels rolling into the square are the one of the status quo, of which Trump is clearly just the unspoken-of groping Uncle. The extremes of the resistance I am aligning with are about an extreme application of human rights and the rule of law, extremes of care for the earth and each other, the radical idea that for once we get on to the work of actually extending our so-called principles over more than just the privileged and recognized subsets of peoples and species. The structure of this status quo threatens all life as we know it with its weaponry, its consumption, and its suicidal single species focus. More than windows are going to break if we keep playing footsy with what we have become.

I agree with Andrew F. that we have to hear from all people and hear where they are coming from. Freedom of speech is not just about silence William. "Falsehoods are just as much the opposite of dialogue as silence." Which is why I repeat to you my interest in hearing where my claims about Charlie's ideas and their logical conclusions lead to are "lies". It does no good to say look here "I am no xxxxist, I have seven xxxx in my own living room right if your art, your party, and your theology all uphold something quite different.

Again Camus (though I beg Emitt's pardon for his rather foolish use of the term dog as a pejorative.):

"What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today. The grouping we need is a grouping of voices resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally. When a Spanish bishop blesses political executions, he ceases to be a bishop or a Christian or even a man; he is a dog just like one who, backed by an ideology, orders that execution without doing the dirty work himself. We are still waiting, and I am waiting, for a grouping of all those who refuse to be dogs and are resolved to pay the price that must be paid so that man can be something more than a dog."

And he finishes

That, I believe, is all I had to say. We are faced with evil. And, as for me, I feel rather as Augustine did before becoming a Christian when he said: “I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere.” But it is also true that I, and a few others, know what must be done, if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it. Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

Between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great unequal battle has begun. I have nothing but reasonable illusions as to the outcome of that battle. But I believe it must be fought, and I know that certain men at least have resolved to do so. I merely fear that they will occasionally feel somewhat alone, that they are in fact alone, and that after an interval of two thousand years we may see a sacrifice of Socrates repeated several times. The program for the future is either a permanent dialogue or the solemn and significant putting to death of any who have experienced dialogue. After having contributed my reply, the question that I ask Christians is this: “Will Socrates still be alone and is there nothing in him and in your doctrine that urges you to join us?”

"It may be, I am well aware, that Christianity will answer negatively. Oh, not by your mouths, I am convinced. But it may be, and this is even more probable, that Christianity will insist on maintaining a compromise or else on giving its condemnations the obscure form of the encyclical. Possibly it will insist on losing once and for all the virtue of revolt and indignation that belonged to it long ago. In that case Christians will live and Christianity will die. In that case the others will in fact pay for the sacrifice. In any case such a future is not within my province to decide, despite all the hope and anguish it awakens in me. And what I know – which sometimes creates a deep longing in me – is that if Christians made up their minds to it, millions of voices – millions, I say – throughout the world would be added to the appeal of a handful of isolated individuals who, without any sort of affiliation, today intercede almost everywhere and ceaselessly for children and for all peoples".

I stopped right here. Stupid jackboots? Never heard 'jackboots' before. You're so good with this kind of lingo.

I'll come back and read the whole post after a break from this, and respond.

I need a break.

In case no-one notices, I deleted everyone from my friends list here at the Sphere. No offense intended to anyone. It's just that I finally realize how pointless that feature is. I love all of ya.

Will return. I have a headache and eye-strain.

Should anyone think jackboot (from post 296 which I hope folks will read to the end) is hyperbole, listen to the latest sniveling bluster-lackey Trump pulled in from the Raiders of the Lost Ark Cast a Nazi for the Cameras Collection:


Morning Joe segment, whatever a morning Joe is...

The way the news people feel they need to restrain their obvious intuitive identification of a young fascist-spawn is amusing. There are write ups about this joker by his former teachers that are disturbing.

Thanks for the Miller video, Andrew. The distortion of simple facts, double-speak, undermining the free press, trashing the independence of the judiciary, racial profiling, etc. etc., no doubt about it, this is autocracy in embryo. Here’s something on Miller, from his Wiki page, which includes one of the comments from a former teacher. And the association with Spencer is interesting (though he does seem to distance himself from Herr Heil Hitler).

etc. etc. The white supremicist theme is pretty consistent, and it makes sense he’s the guy in the video charged by the Administration (and later praised by Trump himself) to say what he says.

Camus is an Idiot with a capital I. His writing is of a supremacy all its own and bigoted to the point of making me puke.

Christians in America, millions of the those ****st Evangelical Believers like myself, give billions of dollars to Missionaries all across the planet. We drill wells in Africa, help with water in India, teach cultures everywhere how to grow food to sustain themselves. We have ALWAYS done that. We build hospitals, provide modern prosthetics to the people who get their arms chopped off, provide for sanctuaries and yes, immigration for the persecuted regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, gender or anything else at great risk to those Missionaries and their own families. You people are beyond the pale with your communist socialist bullshit utopianism.

We do these things in spite of government, not because of government. You talk about what you know nothing of.

Of course we wish to convert men's souls to Christ. That's our commandment. That's our commandment from OUR Lord. Who is your lord? I know. I see him in everything you write.

At the end of the day, you can twist and shout all you want and you will still be morally bankrupt.

Yeah, the thread is about Trump. I don't know what the man believes. I sure as hell know what the last one believed. His policy was F the Christians wanting to come here to escape the holocaust from the Muslim Jihadis. You hypocrites. Screw Camus and all his ilk.