Andrew,

I wrote: 'Russia, 1918'. There is nothing to assume.

Anyone who hasn't lived under a rock will know exactly what I referred to, to be blunt. That revolution had repercussions that affected the world, and, more heinously, flattened and demoralized the Russian populace.

Statist ideology doesn't have to go bad, it's bad to begin with. When you believe that the state is more important than the individual, and that any number of individuals can and often must be sacrificed to maintain the well-being of something that is not a flesh and blood entity but a nebulous abstraction— and essentially an unattainable dream in the heads of a few privileged intellectuals—then something is terribly wrong.

The October Revolution was not just an ideology gone wrong. It was a bloody massacre of innocents.

And let's not forget the French Revolution. Yet another festival of blood and carnage.

When the Mob rules, all bets are off. The Mob can be right or left, it doesn't matter. A mob will behave the way a mob behaves. And it's never pretty, and it's never good.

William,
I don't think you are understanding my point.
During 1918 in Russia there wasn't just one desire, one vision, or one Left. 1918 was when the Cheka turned on the anarchist who had for the most part already saw that "All Power to the Soviets" was just a short lived joke of the new State. Bakunin called their s*&t decades earlier.
July 1918 was the time of the crushed Third Russian Revolt, thus my Fanya Baron comment, so sorry bud but to me it is way more complicated than that. It appears you can crawl out from one rock and still be under another. As is true of my own post I am sure.

Real threats to the State are always turned on from all sides. Kronstadt always has to be eliminated. Like in Spain. Look at Rojava now. Not without mistakes or violent crimes on every particular but the experiment there is what I think of when I think of comrades. Or Chiapas. Or actually some of ideas in the Permaculture/Resilience hub here to lesser degree of break. I "root" for Sanders/Warren types not because I settle for the silly binary that makes this thread so tedious. I think they are more likely to create an environment less hostile to something genuine. I think the monopolization of the means of violence by the State makes the idea of some violent seizure of power a nonsensical idea so guillotine jokes aside, I don't know what 1789 has to do with anything in my posts or ideas.

I am assuming you are including the State you live beneath in your explanation. The fact that the utopic dream it offers came on a spoon just after birth and that the individuals it sacrifices are often out of sight and sound hardly changes anything.

In Neither Victims Nor Executioners, Camus writing against both these States said something he could have wrote today in defense of all those who say f*&k your binary, a another world is possible and it isn't Capitalist. Marxist or anything that plays nice with the species-ist grind we call civilization. Unfortunately the Plague that trying to get its Juggernaut on in the changing room on the Hill needs seeing to in the immediate.

"To reply once more and finally to the accusation of Utopia: for us, the choice is simple - Utopia or the war now being prepared by antiquated modes of thought.... Skeptical though we are (and as I am), realism forces us to this Utopian alternative. When our Utopia has become part of history, as with many others of like kind, humanity will find themselves unable to conceive reality without it. For History is simply humanity's desperate effort to give body to its most clairvoyant dreams." Camus

Tying in with something Andrew M. said earlier in this thread: "These Conservative Christians Are Opposed to Trump—and Suffering the Consequences.

Thanks Andrew. That is why the fight over Christianities like the fight over Islams is so pivotal. Fundamentalist Christianity has its own dissent and eventual discrediting in its own founding ideas and trajectory.

And it is one particular Christianity that put Trump in. Not the working class as such. IMO.

I have just come across this. An excellent interview/article and a particularly careful and nuanced 'use' of historical experience - an all too rare achievement. It is, I'm afraid, also all too prescient. Find it at...
http://international.sueddeutsche.de...efend-american

Thank God we're only working off opinion here.

You wouldn't know what mainstream Christianity was if you were drowning in it.


La La land is up for an Oscar.

Andrew F. I am shocked you are falling for that crap.

Andrew M. Fundamentalist Christians are a minute part of the body of Christ, but you are free to speculate as much and as often as you want. You gotta blame someone, it might as well be them.


I know all about your utopia. Utopias are always for some but not for all, the reason being that man is a fallen creature and unable to make nice all the time.

Now I get where you're coming from. It is the fringiest of the fringe. I wondered if and when you'd get to it.

I mean this with all due respect; I hope it makes you happy.

Just read the words of Camus's famous essay and shut up, Charlie. There available online in several places. Try to familiarize yourself with some small segment of what you condemn. You keep derailing any conversation on here that return to the stated opening of the thread. It is a Trump watch thread. Start a thread of the virtues of collaboration and the song of the Right. But the sociology lab is overwhelmed with your data at this point.

You don't have a clue about the people you are talking to and how many of us are intimately familiar with the workings of your sect. I was, in my own wrestling way, through kin and fellow travelers, inside the Evangelical church for three decades. Completely immersed in dialogue, children, music, struggles, theologies, all of the salt and blood and shame of it. You have no authority on this with me. The idea that the fool who continues in a broken equation is closer to it than someone trying to question its flaws is interesting nonsense. Yours is just one voice among many Christianities and the sure sign that it may not be a trustworthy one is the claim to dismiss all the others as the voice of orthodoxy.

Life is getting to busy just now for anymore of your barking. I am gonna stay with the parts of this thread that stay on point. Feel free to carry on in my stead. I think I am clear enough to let you fill in the rest of the blanks without me.

Thanks, Nigel!

Nigel,

Thanks for another excellent link. That was a well-articulated interview. I thought this extract was particularly interesting:

"The American Revolution actually preserved ideas from Britain: the rule of law being the most important. The whole justification of the American Revolution was that the British were not living up to their own principles, were not including Americans in their own system. In a broad way that that was also the argument of the civil rights movement: the system fails itself when it does not extend equal rghts to all citizens. So there can be resistance and even revoution which is about meeting standards rather than about simple destruction. What Bannon says correctly about the Bolsheviks was that they aimed to completely destroy an old regime. We can slip from one to the other very easily, from rebelliousness to a complete negation of the system. Most Americans had a rule of law state for most of their lives, African Americans are an exception, and so most Americans think this will be there forever. They don’t get that a “disruption” can actually destroy much of what they take for granted. They have no notion what it means to destroy the state and how their lives would look like if the rule of law would no longer exist. I find it frightening that people who talk about the destruction of the American state are now in charge of the American state."

This is the point I was trying to make in my post #187 about the necrophilous age we live in. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, the psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm describes the necrophilous character as one who has “the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction…. It is the passion ‘to tear apart living structures’” (332). I fear many Trump voters voted for the destruction of something without realizing what destruction begets, that is, death. One of the things that will certainly die is any resemblence of classical conservatism or the Republican Party. I still believe they are selling their souls for something that will eventually condemn them. Unfortunately, it's going to take us all down, I fear.

I remember sitting in a history class as an undergraduate many moons ago where the professor told us about a paper he wrote, which postulated that the Revolutionary War could have been averted if we had just employed the courts on which our common laws were founded. He surmised that the English Empire would have been so powerful, the world could have averted the Civil War, WWI and WWII. He received so many death threats that his wife made him stop talking about his theory in public. I'm not suggesting that I agree with his theory, just that it never surprises me what people are ready to kill for.

I honestly would like to hear the counterargument to that of the Yale professor in Nigel's link. (Other than the counterargument that points out he's a Yale professor, ha!).

Greg

Yes, good article, Nigel. Where he says

a journalist I've been following on Twitter came to mind, Sarah Kendzior, who has studied authoritarian regimes in depth. See Welcome to the Authoritarian Kleptocracy at her website for many interesting links, including video interviews.

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.

Interesting, and not a little sad, that today - Valentine's - and in relation to our politics here in Scotland and yours on the other side of the pond, I am confronted by posters whose reaction to an expression of idealism, not of their own kidney, is to vomit. I believe you can tell a lot from a man's vomit.

In Scotland, the public puking was 'provoked' by a rather splendidly Valentine-type, over-the-top love letter to the EU from Scotland in our one independence supporting newspaper, The National - and the offended wretchers were hard-line right-wing Unionists in uneasy alliance with some radical left, anti-capitalist Trots. Not a pretty sight. Your side, apparently, it is the god-driven Evangelicals who cannot stomach ideas which they apparently do not trouble to read, presumably because their God does not command that they do so.

Loving people for the sake that they are people seems so much to be preferred to all these ideological nostrums and, insofar as we must support systems, bearing witness for those forms of organisation which strive to respect people and maintain polities, national and international, that seem most likely so to do. It's Valentine's Day after all.

Ehhh. The poor lad's sick. Upchucked all over Met, too. That sort of stuff outs itself one way or another.

Thanks for the note and the bit about the article.

Just a thought, folks. Ralph (RCL) started a thread in Drills celebrating Black History Month. Thus far, looks like I'm the only one who noticed it.

Could be people are more interested in mockery and mud-slinging than in celebrating the achievements of an oppressed race of people. Or not. Could be hardly anyone saw it. Lord knows I miss a whole lot. I hadn't seen the other thread over there where a bunch of you have joined in until last night. Looks like a busy thread!

I'll be back later, Andrew, to go into things a bit more with you.

No one that I know of at the sphere has spoken about Langston Hughes. I can't say that I have much to say myself, but like the Wallace Stevens' thread, whenever I read Hughes, I always end up asking myself, why aren't I reading him more. As I said in the Stevens' thread, The problem with death is that it cuts off all that reading. Maybe this article will start an interesting conversation. I like essays like this. Reminds me that my profession is more relevant than ever. Happy reading.

Cheers,
Greg

Cross-posted with Bill. Maybe I posted this in the wrong thread.

PPS I copied and posted this one in the Black History month thread as well.

It is amusing to see the Berkeley stuff come up here. It's really very simple--had Yiannopoulos simply been spewing his usual bigoted bullcrap, a response of vigorous protest and judicious heckling would have been appropriate (protesters have First Amendment rights, too). But on this speaking tour, he'd already outed at least one transgender student, and he'd intimated he'd do the same to undocumented immigrant students. People can get deported and killed over that stuff, which put his speech in "clear and present danger" territory.

I agree. But I also think a university doesn't need a clear and present danger before it's entitled to decide who is invited to speak. No one has a first amendment right to demand to be given any particular podium in any particular auditorium at any particular time. The university was free to cancel him, and if students disagreed with that decision, they were free to protest. Yiannopoulos still has his right to free speech, but he doesn't have the right to be invited anywhere he chooses to exercise it.

Quincy,

all American citizens have First Amendment rights. Of course you know that, but the way you inserted (protesters have First Amendment rights, too) makes me suspect that you may have thought I didn't know it also. Sorry to get defensive, but having political discussions is getting awfully difficult of late, which is why I usually stay the hell out of them!

It's like Andrew telling me that "Freedom of speech is not just about silence William." I spent several minutes trying to figure out what reason he could possibly have for saying that to me after all that I've written in defense of free speech, and after spending all this time exercising my right to free speech! I can only imagine that he was talking about my not wanting to share in public some things Charlie told me in private. I do intend to keep silent on that, as to do anything but that would be a breach of privacy and an insult to a friend.

I don't like hate speech any more than you do, but in this country we are forced to tolerate it. Not tolerate as in having some benign resignation to it, or to wallow in apathy, but as in allow it. Let the loudmouths hang themselves by being given enough rope to do it, and prosecute if they've broken a law. Has Milo broken a law that we know of, for certain? Educate me.

I agree that deliberately trying to get someone killed crosses the line of free speech, and strong protest against that would certainly be in order. But breaking shit and setting fires also crosses the line, and should be protested as well. I'm waiting to see the precedent at Berkeley escalate into more violence, and I won't be surprised if innocent people get in the way, maybe even killed. History is full of this kind of thing happening, when the mob gets whipped into a collective frenzy. I will be celebrating with everyone else if Trump gets impeached (if and when it needs to happen). And I will be terribly happy if no innocents are hurt or killed in the meantime.

**

Andrew,

Back to what I was saying above: I do regret implying that you were telling falsehoods intentionally. I may have been a bit careless. (I'll go back and check my exact wording after I post this, and get back to you.) What I meant to say was that you may be misjudging Charlie, and personally, I think you are. To be wrong about something or someone isn't the same as lying. I can tell falsehoods all day, out of ignorance, and still not be lying. A lie is a deliberate falsehood, and I hereby retract any loose or careless writing that may have implied that you are a liar.

As for Camus, I have read the quotes. Inspiring stuff there, but I stand by my belief that human nature precludes anything like a Utopia. We may have a dystopian future on our hands, depending how the winds of fortune blow, and this dystopia can be brought into being by the loony right or the loony left. Militant police state, radical theocracy, or a land of Stepford Wives and/or brain-engineered sheeple. None of these scenarios are appealing to me, in case that hasn't come across yet. I'd be all for a real Utopia, but odds are my Utopia and your Utopia wouldn't be similar.

Ayn Rand had her Galt's Gulch, which to her was a vision of Utopia. An extremely unlikely and rather silly one, if you ask me. The libertarians love her, but she detested libertarians. The libertarians have their version of Utopia, the anarchists have theirs, the loony Christian Reconstructionists and Identity Christians have theirs, the Muslim theocrats have theirs, the Buddhists and Hindus have theirs, and the Zionists have theirs. And so on.

I think that what is trending now is a strong form of egalitarianism. I have kids and from what I saw of the modern school environment, it's getting tougher and tougher for kids who excel to do it with good conscience. The idea of "teamwork" is rampant. There is no 'I' in team! is the rally cry in school as well as the workplace.

I saw a class of kids giving readings of their Valentine's Day poems at my place of work today. It's an assisted living facility. After they were finished, the teacher gave a speech which was chock full of this modern team spirit. To my mind, teamwork is fine and dandy, but writing a poem is the work of an individual. Certainly, any person writing anything has been influenced by others, and there is almost literally nothing original. We "makers" (poets) only rearrange things. We don't create in any literal sense. Nonetheless, there are good poems and lousy ones. Why put a damper on the kids who wrote better poems than the others? Why coddle mediocrity? It may not happen as a general rule, but I've definitely seen it happening in my town. In some schools, trophies are no longer given out, because the kids who don't get trophies are shamed.

In the film, The Incredibles, the young Super-Hero son is constantly getting in trouble because he can run way faster than the others. In one scene he's talking with his mother and bemoans the fact that his powers have to be kept in check, for fear of making the other kids feel bad. I don't remember the exact dialogue, but it gets around to the boy admitting to feeling ashamed or frustrated because he's "special". His mom tells him, "Everybody's special". He frowns and says, "Which means no-one is."

I am rambling again, but since you brought up Camus and the possibility of Utopia (and what Christians like myself ought to be doing to bring it about), I felt the need to explain myself even further.

I'd like to have a peaceful dialogue, because all of this is fascinating to me, and I realize its importance. But I can't stand ad-homs. Sure, some people might really be idiots. But to call a person an idiot doesn't do much insofar as educating the idiot and carefully trying to help him understand things, so that he doesn't turn his kids into idiots.

***Edited in: I realize Charlie is throwing ad-homs around too, Andrew. I should have said that before.

A lot of what's wrong today comes down to parenting and schooling. If someone is taught bullshit, and has it drummed into them long and hard enough, they will grow up to speak bullshit with a clear conscience and with grave conviction. Who wants that? I'd rather try and get my views across gently, and with as much patience as I can muster, and I believe, like Bishop Spong, in "loving wastefully".

Love is our greatest value. It's infinite, self-replenishing, and inexhaustible. Let's use it, and not violence. There is a time for violent retaliation against tyranny, but we are not at that time yet. Is Trump a budding Hitler? Who knows. But people aren't being corralled, stripped naked, lined up, shot in the back of the head, and kicked into mass graves. Ergo, comparisons to Hitler are, thus far, premature to say the least.

Just my thoughts.

William,

The point on silence had nothing to do with your personal habits of sharing/silence. The point was that lies are not free speech. They are a silencing of the truth. They have no positive content of their own when it comes to the sort of appearance in the polis we ar talking about here. They don't need to be defended and forcefully shutting down a violent weasel isn't a loss of speech. It is, in my opinion, exactly the thing that must be done. You can say "Ahhh but we will all have our villians to shut down. What then? Who is to decide?" All I can say is, well we are of course and it really isn't that mystified. If you are willing to surrender all hope of distinction and discernment between human rights and their attackers then all hope really is lost and this conversation is meaningless. I am not willing to.

Everything you think of as just normal everyday America involves all sorts of utopian thinking. There is no world building that is not Utopian. I think if you read the whole essay by Camus (remembering it has some language of it moment) I think it will be easier to follow what I am saying.

It is at this link, broken down the six or seven short bits as it originally appeared in Combat. It also came around the time of Camus' public debate with Mauriac on the how to deal with the Vichy after the war. It marks a turn on that account.

Feel free to ask for clarification of anything hazy. I work full time demolition and then full time classes at night and family and poetry and all that jazz. I write this stuff quickly and off the hip. It deserves more but its all I got.

Andrew,

I promise I will read Camus. I'll see if I can get something on Kindle.

I shamefully admit I have neglected him in my literary travels. I have a slight resistance to translations, even though some of my favorite books are translated, like Fitzgerald's Homer & Virgil (or is it Vergil? I like the way Virgil looks much better), and William Weaver's tremendous translations of Umberto Eco. If you ever get time to read Foucault's Pendulum, please do so, if you haven't already (I have a feeling you have). It's a great foil for wooers, tinfoil hatters, and conspiracy theorists (in which set I am very prone to fall when I'm feeling on fire, like now).

I don't agree with you about lies. It's perfectly legal to tell lies, and lies are protected under freedom of speech. Slander, however, is a different story. It's all about degrees. Telling a white lie is very often the decent and/or only thing to do, as the Jim Carrey movie Liar, Liar skillfully and hilariously demonstrates. But with other kinds of lies, the liar just digs himself a hole he can't get out of. If you tell one lie, you need another to back it up; then you need another lie to cover those, and pretty soon all you can do is lie.

I wrote a romance novel (insert laughter, but dammit, yes, I did!) about a young lady who is a compulsive liar. All she does is lie, to her fiance, to her mother, to her boss at work. The novel takes N all the way from ridiculous liar to triumphant truth-teller. It happened by accident, as it started out as erotica, several years ago, when my marriage was falling apart. But that's a long story...

Then you go all the way up to slander. You know what that is. God Himself, and Christ, warn very adamantly about bearing false witness. I think greed and bearing false witness are two of the biggest sins going, along with pride, anger, fornication, adultery, and just about every behavior that is otherwise known as: Human.

I've always wrestled with the concept of sin. As I told Charlie in private, sin is nothing other than falling short of perfection. If imperfection is such an offense to God that He can't even LOOK at it, then I have to ask Him, why then, Lord, did you make us this way?

^ That's what I wrestle with every single moment of every single day. One (not necessarily you) might say, "Hey, ditch the sky-daddy altogether! Hitchens was right! Be free! Get rid of that bullshit! It's a bunch of mythology from bronze age sheepherders! Get over it already!"

But...nope.

I constantly remind myself that when I stopped kicking at the pricks and surrendered myself to Christ, I stopped having nightmares, hypnagogia, and sleep paralysis. And a great many other things happened, which it would take me a hundred pages to describe in any way that might be remotely persuasive to anyone who hasn't experienced the things I've experienced.

I know it may be something simply material, and brain-oriented. Maybe my faith has somehow done something to my dream patterns. I have read much on it. I'm no dummy. But I don't believe that's the case. My faith rests on strong and passionate belief, not on certain knowledge. If I have certain knowledge, I don't need faith.

I'll get to what you said about rights and the attackers of rights after a break.

Gerald f**king Ford? Reminds me why I need to let my subscription lapse already.

The op-ed is a cunning call for impeachment, the first of many to come this year. As a country we need to start thinking about a replacement because this administration is not going to last four years. NO way!

Greg

Here's another

He was a very nice guy, and as far as I know he was decent and honest. When he ran against Jimmy Carter, it was perhaps the only election in memory where both candidates were decent human beings, whatever you might say about their views or their abilities.

Nigel, have you never heard of William Lane Craig? Alvin Plantinga? I trust you've some acquaintance with Reformed Theology and its voluminous, erudite, deeply-studied literature? I spent years arguing against Calvinists and various reformed theologists at another website.

I'm still not aligned to protestant or reformed theology. I don't have very kind thoughts sometimes about Martin Luther, or John Calvin. But let's get real. Your powerful intellectual opponents are far from unread, and far from ignorant. Never mind the "unwashed masses", as I've heard many a classist refer to them on another bulletin board.

The bad influences (far right and far left) come from the Ivory Tower and work their way downward, not the other way around. At least that's my opinion. Take it or leave it!

William,
I have already made it clear that I believe in many Christianities. I am familiar with both Craig and Plantinga though it has been years since reading either one. I don't find the God or the philosophy of either to be that interesting or hopeful. Craig I find much harder to take seriously but maybe only because I am more familiar with his arguments. Morally, I don't find their god any less problematic just because they bother to encrust their defenses in the specialized language of philosophy. But I confess I don't see what they bring to the discussion here. The type of Christianity has sided openly with a misogynist, racist, and hyper-Capitalist conman with what appears to be some form of NPD and little ability to tell the truth. If their philosophers do not make their dissent loud and clear they will have to live with that. I think a thinker who unlike the other two is actually read outside of highly intellectualized chat rooms would be a guy like Francis Schaeffer. He is a great example of a misreading of what he would call the writings of the existentialist menace. His encapsulations of thinker after thinker was not meant to stir a dialogue among Christians with perspectives outside their ideology but rather to replace any hope of a self critical hearing with preconceived paraphrases more akin to inoculation than thought. Anyone actually familiar with the complexities of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard finds the simulacrum of each to be almost unrecognizable. His own son, whose own "art" once fueled the political movement that he has now abandoned, has given some very interesting insights into that world which compare closely with what I saw around the same period. Neither Craig nor Plantinga seems to me to have the deep self criticism or the unmitigated love of others that is the chief defense against fascism. Bonhoeffer did. Plenty of other believers did and do. Hitchens is a fundamentalist in his own right and his rather ugly god that he easily de-bowels is simply the god he takes unquestionably from the evangelicals. So I personally would never suggest taking his advice on religious approach.

I gave you the link to Camus' essay. If you read it I will be happy to talk. But you still aren't responding to anything I am actually saying. Speech in the polis must have honesty if it to be truly free. Lies are of the order of necessity. They bind. They are also less about power (an aggregate of individuals) then they are about force ( the use of means to overcome the potentials of power). Power only exists where words are used to reveal the true intent of actions rather than to veil intentions and the realities behind them. I would argue that Trump unlike the previous administrations is less of the order of hypocrisy and half measure and more of the order of force and the lie in a way that is more than just a change of quantity. This is a species change. Which not to defend or exonerate the former, or to deny that speciation is without recognizable ancestry or common traits in the past.

Jaspers about complicity:

There exists among persons, because they are persons, a solidarity through which
each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the
world, and especially for crimes that-are committed in his presence or of which
he cannot be ignorant. If I do not do whatever I can to prevent them, I am an
accomplice in them. If I have not risked my life in order to prevent the murder
of other persons, if I have stood silent, I feel guilty in a sense that cannot in any
adequate fashion be understood juridically, or politically, or morally. . . . That
I am still alive after such things have been done weighs on me as a guilt that
cannot be expiated.

Somewhere in the heart of human relations an absolute command imposes
itself: In case of criminal attack or of living conditions that threaten physical
being, accept life only for all together, otherwise not at all. (Karl Jaspers, La
culpabiiite ailemande, Jeanne Hersch's French translation, pp. 60-61.)

The poet Aime Cesaire (both quoted in the same passage by Fanon):

And then, one lovely day, the middle class is brought up short by a staggering
blow: The Gestapos are busy again, the prisons are filling up, the torturers
are once more inventing, perfecting, consulting over their workbenches.

People are astounded, they are angry. They say: "How strange that is.
But then it is only Nazism, it won't last." And they wait, and they hope; and
they hide the truth from themselves: It is savagery, the supreme savagery,
it crowns, it epitomizes the day-to-day savageries; yes, it is Nazism, but
before they became its victims, they were its accomplices; that Nazism they
tolerated before they succumbed to it, they exonerated it, they closed their
eyes to it, they legitimated it because until then it had been employed only
against non-European peoples; that Nazism they encouraged, they were
responsible for it, and it drips, it seeps, it wells from every crack in western
Christian civilization until it engulfs that civilization in a bloody sea.

It looks like we may be at a stand-still, Andrew. Of course I am responding to what you're saying. Free speech is exactly that: free speech, whether it includes lies or not. Like I said, slander is a different story.

I am not defending lying as being a healthy thing to do, just reminding you that, whether you or I like it or not, lying is perfectly legal.

**
On other stuff:

I watched a long video of Milo Yiannopoulos on Dave Rubin's show. I have not really dug into this Milo guy, but I agree with a good deal of what he said in this interview. What I didn't agree with at all was his assertion that there is no distinction between radical Islam and mainstream Islam. That's simply wrong.

Dave Rubin has some pertinent things to say about what he calls the "regressive left", which I agree with.

Sorry, Bill - as one of the life-long professional members of "the Ivory Tower", a definition I'd reject, though there are many worse places - I'll leave your opinion on this matter aside. My barb was at one of Charlie's particularly preposterous anti-rational and anti-intellectual fulminations and his messianic dismissal of any such intelligent formulations of view under the superior, but irrational and unknowable, claims of a personal mandate from his God.

To mirror your phrase, people may take or leave that statement too, but I am with Thomas Paine. I'm sure you'll recognise the quotation. "To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason .... is like administering medicine to the dead..."

In that "Ivory Tower" of which you are so suspicious, I spent quite a chunk of time, many years back, reading and discussing rather a lot of theology (though it was not my subject) and, to return to the intended matter of this thread, much of those debates has been haunting me now. In the NYT piece Gregory cited in post 310, David Brooks began precisely where that past intellectual experience has been taking me - the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and most particularly the episode in a cafe in Berlin when Hitler and his circle entered. Should he stay sitting or stand as the crowd rose to 'Heil' and applaud? In a tense exchange with his friend Ebehard Bethge, whom I met and was able to quiz on the matter, "Not here, not now" was whispered and they stood. Later in different circumstances and when he believed, rationally as well as theologically, that it finally mattered Bonhoeffer bore a lasting witness. Like Quincy, I don't agree with the NYT article's conclusion, but I do agree that what I think of as Bonhoeffer and Bethge's 'cafe question' is now being asked - and given recent revelations, perhaps even more.

However, it is being asked, I realise, primarily of US citizens - not me. We have our own power-crazed delusionals to worry about, and one of the chief of them has, rather un-Englishly, started to speak of her following her God - so there's plenty to be concerned about here too.

Nigel,

No offense intended with my "Ivory Tower" comment, though my suspicions of it remain intact.

I know of Bonhoeffer only through the film of that name, which is one of my favorite films. That and Sophie Scholl, The Final Days. Bonhoeffer and Sophie (and her brother and friend who were also executed) are true heroes. Paradigms of true courage. And they didn't resort to smashing things and setting fires, like those people who got way too carried away at Berkeley.

**

To all and sundry, this might be of interest to some of you, but no doubt some of you will hate it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq86Beh3T70