[Quincy Lehr]

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

[Gregory Palmerino]

Originally Posted by Quincy Lehr

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

[Roger Slater]

Originally Posted by Quincy Lehr

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

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.

[William A. Baurle]

Originally Posted by Nigel Mace

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. — [emphasis mine.]

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!

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

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.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

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.)

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

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.

[William A. Baurle]

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. - Andrew M

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.

[Nigel Mace]

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.

[William A. Baurle]

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