Related to Why Noam Chomsky was “Not a Postmodernist”

 Brian Barbour:“This decline has gone hand-in-glove with the rise of, first, Theory, and then, slightly later, various types of politicized approaches that together define the way literature is studied in graduate school and taught to undergraduates. This “turn to Theory” has had ruinous consequences. Each of these approaches is anti-humanist (and proudly so) and none has any patience with the imaginative exploration of the individual moral life that great literature provides. This is not the place to rehearse the sad story of the displacement of a sense of wonder by a hermeneutics of suspicion, but at bottom all the regnant approaches graduate students are permitted are both ahistorical and broadly Cartesian (in that they start with ideas) and then either force the literature to fit the ideas or use the literature to exemplify some favored social pathology.”

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2023/12/reaching-silence-brian-barbour.html

‘Spooky action at a distance’ may be an underlying mathematical reality enforcing its rules.

 On what Einstein called “spooky” (spukhaft) action at a distance:

I read an article(1) which, if I understood it, said it was just about mathematics. If x1 plus x2 = 0, then if x1 is1, then x2 would have to be -1. And vice versa.

If the relationship between two particles is that one must have positive spin and one must have negative spin, then changing one from positive spin to negative spin requires that the other particle have positive spin.

It’s not spukhaft “action”. No information has been transmitted. It is solely that the underlying mathematical order of the universe has been preserved.

This does suggest that the implicate order is prior to the observed order. What we call distance is an emergent effect of an underlying reality, not something having reality in it itself.

And since distance is a primary factor in the speed-of-light limitation, a greater understanding of reality’s underlying mathematical essence might eliminate the FTL barrier. - /* 2/17/2023 */

/* Addition 2/19/2023 */

(1) From https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-entanglement-isnt-all-that-spooky-after-all1/

Chris Ferrie: “Intuiting the solution requires some familiarity with linear algebra, so I won’t detail it here. But it is a fact that the quantum information they share requires correlations, which means it is entangled. This appears spooky to the investigators because they only reason with classical information. But it’s not spooky. In any theory of information, correlations are ubiquitous. Through the lens of quantum information, then, entanglement is not strange or rare, but rather expected. The information perspective beautifully illustrates the core problem with demanding a classical description of quantum phenomena: it’s the wrong language.”

Harper’s “A letter on justice and open debate” is criticized by some of the narrow-minded ideologues targeted

The Objective criticizes Harper’s “letter”:

1. Harper’s is “a prominent magazine that’s infamous.” “The signatories [include those who are] white, wealthy, and endowed with massive platforms … even as they speak from one of the most prestigious magazines in the country.”

2. “Nowhere in it do the signatories mention how marginalized voices have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing.”

3. “The content of the letter also does not deal with the problem of power: who has it and who does not.”

4. The authors avoid “The ongoing debate about who gets to have a platform.”

5. “‘Professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class.’”  “Laurie Sheck, who said the N-word when referencing a James Baldwin piece in class.” The Objective implies she wasn’t punished, therefore this is a bogus issue. In fact, it was made an issue;(1) and though she wasn’t fired, many others have been fired on the same grounds.

6. “The heads of organizations are ousted for what are just clumsy mistakes?” John McWhorter cites many such instances in Woke Racism, for example, the person who strongly supports Black Lives Matter, but made the mistake of noting the universal liberal principle that all lives matter as well, in passing.

What’s wrong with this stuff? First, it’s an example of the people being rightly criticized objecting to their critics for not writing about their issues. It’s like criticizing an article objecting to high taxes for not writing about how the government needs to spend more. Wokeness is a current ideology - a set of dogmas which seeks to dictate what everyone else should believe and say and do. That’s not compatible with “open debate,” so they fault a critique for 1. having massive “platforms”; 2. not addressing marginalization; 3. not addressing “the problem of power”; 4. not addressing “who gets to have a platform”.

5. and 6. They dismiss the problem of Woke taboos’ hampering open debate.

I call ideology “the restriction of thought, language, and truth in the service of power.” Usually the power of a self-aggrandizing group or faction. As such, ideology is a mere belief system (“thank you for speaking ‘our’ truth”), and a much better option is an information system, such as liberalism throughout the ages.

/******/

(1)“The Idea That Whites Can’t Refer to the N-Word”

Linguist John McWhorter rightly names this: It’s a taboo. I cite his article because of Orwell’s warning about the deadly effects of taboos, below. “Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind.”

McWhorter: “Laurie Sheck is a professor of creative writing at the New School in New York, a decades-long veteran of the classroom, a widely published novelist and essayist, and a Pulitzer nominee. She’s also spent the summer in trouble with her bosses for possibly being a racist.”

“Early last spring semester, Sheck, who is white, was teaching a graduate seminar on [James] Baldwin, and one of the questions she posed for discussion was why the documentary title had substituted “Negro” for [the n-word.]”

“A white student in the class objected to Sheck’s having uttered the word. And administrators were apparently dissatisfied with Sheck’s attempt to defend herself, because the school put her under investigation, while directing her to reacquaint herself with the school’s rules about discrimination. This month the school determined that Sheck had committed no offense. But the fact that smart, busy people felt it necessary to investigate Sheck for mouthing the word when referring to it—not using it independently, much less directing it at someone—suggests a preoccupation less with matters of morality than with matters of taboo.”

Internet sources: The claims of trans activists have no basis in reality. You’d never know this from the news.

The below is one of my work files assembled from internet accusations of  “transphobia.” Notable:

1. Harry Potter author Rowling is being condemned, even in the mainstream media, as bigoted (“transphobic”) for the equivalent of saying she believes in evolution. It is not bigotry to support known science. Sullivan’s example is “A natal man who is a transwoman, for example, cannot have a vagina exactly as a natal woman does.”
2. The flaws of the discussion are the flaws of neo-Marxist left ideology. (“Ideology is the deformation of thought, language, and truth in the service of power.”) Ideology is a belief system. As such it is post-truth: “We cannot debate a subject because debating itself is a form of hate,” as Sullivan writes.
3. The “transphobia” ideology requires the citizen of a free democracy to be, as Sullivan says, “unequivocally on the side of anything the trans activists want.” In contrast, democracy provides that citizens be able to change bad policies. In order to do this, free people must be able to discuss what the trans activists want, and to disagree based on evidence and reason, without foregone conclusions of bigotry.
4. Sullivan bells the cat: “The mainstream media is, at this point, completely unreliable as a source of balance or information. They openly advocate the most extreme critical theory arguments about sex and gender as if they were uncontested facts and as if the debate can be explained entirely as a function of bigotry vs love.”
5. “Check out this video from the Washington Post. It doesn’t even gesture at fairness: no presentation of counter-argument; instant attribution of bigotry for anyone deemed in disagreement.” (See previous post on The Newsroom)
6. “That the author of the Harry Potter books, a bone fide liberal, a passionate feminist and a strong supporter of gay equality can be casually described, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp did yesterday, as “one of the most visible anti-trans figures in our culture” … is, in fact, bonkers. Rowling has absolutely no issue with the existence, dignity and equality of transgender people.” - Again, Andrew Sullivan, one of the leading gay intellectuals of our society.
7. My working assumption: Democracy, justice, science, and scholarly endeavor are liberal. Sullivan suggests that trans activist rhetoric outlines a decline in scholarly endeavor: “…if we cannot state an objective fact without being deemed a bigot, and if we cannot debate a subject because debating itself is a form of hate, then…

   Then we have arrived at much of the academic world at present. The outlawing of objective facts is exactly why the woke are so partial to postmodernist jargon; and the outlawing of debate is precisely what they mean when using the term “hate speech”.

   We can lay all this at the feet of the academics who, a generation ago, allowed the growth of whole departments based on and spewing out the New Obscurantism. Ideas have consequences, but bullshit does too.”

Andrew Sullivan on J. K. Rowling & Transphobia From Weekly Dish / substack July. 24 2020

04/13/22 (corrections 04/16): “Sullivan, who is of course gay, has an eloquent defense of Rowling, and here’s some of it:

[Rowling] became interested in the question after a consultant, Maya Forsteter, lost a contract in the UK for believing and saying that sex is a biological reality. When Forsteter took her case to an employment tribunal, the judge ruled against her, arguing that such a view was a form of bigotry, in so far as it seemed to deny the gender of trans people (which, of course, it doesn’t). Rowling was perturbed by this. And I can see why: in order either to defend or oppose transgender rights, you need to be able to discuss what being transgender means. That will necessarily require an understanding of the human mind and body, the architectonic role of biology in the creation of two sexes, and the nature of the small minority whose genital and biological sex differs from the sex of their brain.

This is not an easy question. It requires some thinking through. And in a liberal democracy, we should be able to debate the subject freely and openly. I’ve done my best to do that in this column, and have come to many of the conclusions Rowling has. She does not question the existence of trans people, or the imperative to respect their dignity and equality as fully-formed human beings. She believes they should be protected from discrimination in every field, and given the same opportunities as anyone else. She would address any trans person as the gender they present, as would I. Of course. That those of us who hold these views are now deemed bigots is, quite simply, preposterous.

Where Rowling and I draw the line is saying that a trans woman is in every single respect indistinguishable from a natal woman. We believe that a natal man who is a transwoman, for example, cannot have a vagina exactly as a natal woman does. That’s all. And that is objectively true. Note also that this has no impact whatever on how someone should be treated by society or under the law. A transwoman can and should be treated exactly as a woman, even if she isn’t in every single respect a woman.”

/******/

Sullivan: “…if we cannot state an objective fact without being deemed a bigot, and if we cannot debate a subject because debating itself is a form of hate, then…”

Then we have arrived at much of the academic world at present. The outlawing of objective facts is exactly why the woke are so partial to postmodernist jargon; and the outlawing of debate is precisely what they mean when using the term “hate speech”.

We can lay all this at the feet of the academics who, a generation ago, allowed the growth of whole departments based on and spewing out the New Obscurantism. Ideas have consequences, but bullshit does too.”

“My favorite part of the kerfuffle is parents who insist that their children no longer enjoy the Harry Potter books because Rowling believes that the biology of sexual dimorphism is a real thing.”

“I just saw this tweet by Sullivan vis a vis Rowling and her thinking of trans controversy:

[https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1287015159907655681]”

Sullivan: “We’re used to public apologies by now, but this one is a little different. It comes from a magazine for schoolchildren in England, called “The Day”. It reads: 

“We accept that our article implied that … J K Rowling … had attacked and harmed trans people. The article was critical of JK Rowling personally and suggested that our readers should boycott her work and shame her into changing her behaviour … We did not intend to suggest that JK Rowling was transphobic or that she should be boycotted.”

“I have to say it’s good to see this apology in print. It remains simply amazing to me that the author of the Harry Potter books, a bone fide liberal, a passionate feminist and a strong supporter of gay equality can be casually described, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp did yesterday, as “one of the most visible anti-trans figures in our culture.” It is, in fact, bonkers. Rowling has absolutely no issue with the existence, dignity and equality of transgender people. Her now infamous letter is elegant, calm, reasonable and open-hearted. Among other things, Rowling wrote: “I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection.””

[https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/andrew-sullivan-when-the-ideologues-come-for-the-kids.html]

Sullivan: “She does not question the existence of trans people, or the imperative to respect their dignity and equality as fully-formed human beings. She believes they should be protected from discrimination in every field, and given the same opportunities as anyone else. She would address any trans person as the gender they present, as would I. Of course. That those of us who hold these views are now deemed bigots is, quite simply, preposterous. 

Where Rowling and I draw the line is saying that a trans woman is in every single respect indistinguishable from a natal woman. We believe that a natal man who is a transwoman, for example, cannot have a vagina exactly as a natal woman does. That’s all. And that is objectively true. Note also that this has no impact whatever on how someone should be treated by society or under the law. A transwoman can and should be treated exactly as a woman, even if she isn’t in every single respect a woman.”

Sullivan: “But if we cannot state an objective fact without being deemed a bigot, and if we cannot debate a subject because debating itself is a form of hate, we have all but abandoned any pretense of liberal democracy. And if a woman as sophisticated and eloquent and humane as J K Rowling is now deemed a foul bigot for having a different opinion, then the word bigotry has ceased to have any meaning at all.”

/******/

[https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/a-truce-proposal-in-the-trans-wars-c49] Not paywalled

“The mainstream media is, at this point, completely unreliable as a source of balance or information. They openly advocate the most extreme critical theory arguments about sex and gender as if they were uncontested facts and as if the debate can be explained entirely as a function of bigotry vs love.”

“If we were going to construct a test-case for how dysfunctional our politics have become, it would be hard to beat the transgender issue. It profoundly affects a relatively minuscule number of people in the grand scheme of things, and yet galvanizes countless more for culture war purposes. It has become a litmus test for social justice campaigners, who regard anyone proposing even the slightest qualifications on the question as indistinguishable from a Klan member. It has seized the attention of some of the most extreme elements among radical feminists, who in turn regard any smidgen of a compromise on the rights of women as a grotesque enforcement of patriarchy. 

Worse, it has now excited the Christianist right, who see the recognition of trans rights as an effort to destroy the sexual binary that is at the core of almost all orthodox faith. And it has become a Twitter phenomenon, where all reasonable arguments go to die. If you are an opinion writer, you really do have to be a masochist to even want to dabble in the debate. And the mainstream media is, at this point, completely unreliable as a source of balance or information. They openly advocate the most extreme critical theory arguments about sex and gender as if they were uncontested facts and as if the debate can be explained entirely as a function of bigotry vs love. (A recent exception to this, though tilted clearly from the start in one direction, is this explainer from the NYT last night.)

Big global stories — for example, a high court case in Britain that found that minors under 16 are not developmentally capable of making the decision to take puberty blockers — are routinely ignored. Check out this video from the Washington Post. It doesn’t even gesture at fairness: no presentation of counter-argument; instant attribution of bigotry for anyone deemed in disagreement.

And the issue has recently become, even more emotively, about children — how they are treated, how the medical world deals with them, amid complicated arguments about specific treatments, their long-term effects, and genuine scientific disputes. And all of this is taking place with far too few reliable, controlled studies on transgender individuals, as children and adults, or on medical interventions. A lot of the time, we’re flying blind.

I’ve been trying to think these things through for the past few years. I used to think trans rights were a no-brainer. Of course I supported them. And I still do. I believe trans people when they tell the stories of their lives; I empathize because I’m human, and the pain and struggle of so many trans people is so real; and perhaps also because being gay helps you see how a subjective feeling can be so deep as to be an integral part (but never the whole) of your identity. 

Equally, however, I have some reservations. I trust biology on the core binary sexual reproductive strategy of our species, without which we would not exist, and which does not cease to exist because of a few variations on the theme (I’m one of those variations myself). I do not believe that a trans woman or a trans man is in every way indistinguishable from a woman or a man. If there were no differences, trans women and trans men would not exist as a separate category. I do not buy the idea that biological sex is socially constructed, or a function of “white supremacist” thought, for Pete’s sake. I further believe that no-one should be excluded from this or any debate; and that “lived experience” cannot replace “objective reality”, …”

“The woke establishment — all major corporations, the federal government, the universities, all cultural institutions, the mainstream media and now the medical authorities — are unequivocally on the side of anything the trans activists want.”

The problem of the dishonest, anti intellectual intellectual

If democracy, justice, science, and scholarly endeavor are liberal then such intellectual-seeming constructs as Critical Race Theory, Whiteness Studies, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Postmodernism, Existentialism, Marxism, and Platonism are not, when examined by “the known rules of ancient liberty,” intellectual. They fail Immanuel Kant’s test, that the one indispensable intellectual attribute is “a good will,” because all the other intellectual attributes can be subverted to anti intellectual purposes.

The first volume of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies states, some forty pages in, that Plato’s philosophy is essentially totalitarian, a position the modern university has answered by treating Popper as an outlier.

American thought, as evidenced in its Constitution, has such liberal intellectual sources as John Locke, David Hume, Montesquieu, Aristotle, William Blackstone’s Commentary on the Laws of England, and Abraham Lincoln’s Selected Speeches, but Critical Race Theory, Kendi’s Antiracism, and the New York Times’ 1619 Project tend to skip over the Founding principles and to base their critique on the fact that slavery, which as Lincoln noted, “already existed,” was not abolished until the Civil War.

Although Lincoln noted that the Constitution could not have been ratified if the initial version had abolished slavery, critics such as Ta-Nehisi Coates argue America’s origin in sin is what Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude calls its “ugly truth,” inescapably leading to what Coates calls “the certain sins of the future.”

Currently, such products of higher education in our democracy as Critical Race Theory, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, which pretend to advance the public good, have quite a different purpose: To document that white supremacist sinfulness is so pervasive and so monstrous that public policy must focus on improving the lot of those who denounce the country they live in. Never was Kant’s warning about the intellectual who does not have “a good will” more timely.

“How thoroughly campus cultural Marxism has come to be tolerated in mainstream society”

[From a July 2019 Facebook post] - I was once a fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates. He is a writer with phenomenal natural talents. Then he took a part-time teaching position at MIT, and he began saying things like, “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house.” (As Doris Lessing wrote, “There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence.”)

Ta-Nehisi adopted a social-justice warrior stance which made him the idol of a surprisingly large number of progressive journalists, despite positions which were often rather strange, as you will see in the following instances.

Carlos Lozada, at the end of this post (“Radical Chic”), describes an adulation which made me realize how thoroughly campus cultural Marxism has come to be tolerated in mainstream society:

For instance, Ta-Nehisi said that the deaths of those who tried to save people on 911 left him “cold”:

“He writes of the police and firefighters who died running into the burning buildings [the twin towers on 911] in a forlorn effort to save all the people whose bodies were about to be obliterated into dust, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.””

Ta-Nehisi would apparently let _all_ criminals out of prison:

“[Jeffrey] Goldberg asked what [Ta-Nehisi Coates] would do if he were in [Mitch] Landrieu’s position — surely there was something, “I don’t know what I’d do if I were mayor, but I could tell you what I’d do if I was king.” [Ta-Nehisi Coates would] let criminals out of prison, he said. “And, by the way, I include violent criminals in that.” Goldberg asked what he meant by “violent.” “Gun crime, too,” Coates said.”

He is unconcerned with the civil rights of any group but his own:

“Everywhere he goes, Coates hears versions of the same plea: What about my group? What about Native Americans? What about Latino immigrants? What about me?

“You get here and people say, ‘Why can’t you do that for our community?’ ” Coates says one morning at a Capitol Hill coffee shop. He calls the reaction “disrespectful” ... Disrespectful because he believes the experience of blacks in America deserves its own, focused examination.”

Ta-Nehisi said that reparations would end “white guilt.”

-*—

In The Radical Chic of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Carlos Lozada writes:

“In an America consumed by debates over racism, police violence and domestic terror, it is Coates to whom so many of us turn to affirm, challenge or, more often, to mold our views from the clay. Among public intellectuals in the U.S., writes media critic Jay Rosen, he’s the man now. When the Confederate battle flag on the statehouse grounds in Columbia, S.C., seemed the only thing the news media could discuss, my Washington Post colleague Ishaan Tharoor put it simply: Just shut up and read @tanehisicoates. These days, you hear many variations on that advice.

Coates is more than the writer whose thinking and focus best match the moment. With his 2014 Atlantic cover essay on The Case for Reparations, which explores the brutal U.S. history of redlining and housing discrimination, and now with the critical rapture surrounding his new book, Between the World and Me, he has become liberal America’s conscience on race. Did you read the latest Ta-Nehisi Coates piece? is shorthand for Have you absorbed and shared the latest and best and correct thinking on racism, white privilege, institutional violence and structural inequality? If you don’t have the time or inclination or experience to figure it out yourself, you outsource it to Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/07/16/the-radical-chic-of-ta-nehisi-coates/]

Matthew Yglesias on “Critical Race Theory and Actual Education”

 Matthew Yglesias, of slowboring dot com, quotes a bad educational idea associated with the antiliberal left.

“Valuing “written communication over other forms,” [Glenn Singleton] told me, is “a hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. Another “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.””

/******/

1. Implying that something would be wrong with “blackness” would be racist. Singleton’s suggestion that “whiteness” is bad reveals a common double standard of those with his political outlook.

2. Opposing “written communication” is anti-intellectual.

3. The reason skyscrapers don’t fall down; and the wings didn’t break off your airliner during turbulence, is that those who designed them engaged in “linear thinking.” (Anyway, science is much more than linear thinking: It’s Discovery and Demonstration. Newton’s apple: Discovery. Newton’s phenomenal conceptual analysis, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica: Demonstration via linear thinking.) I was pissed off when the hippies whined about linear thinking, and am flat out offended that Singleton carries their stupidity into the 21st century.

A hallmark of those who, unlike Singleton, are not delusional, is that they get “cause and effect.”

/******/

Yglesias concludes: “If we stigmatize tests because they tell us bad news about racial gaps in academic achievement and then flood the zone with questionable initiatives whose efficacy we refuse to even try to measure, bad things are going to happen to the country.”

On growing up in a parsonage and coming to think that all the theologies seem to be stuck in the Bronze Age

Before modern democratic societies, rulership was the model of a head of state, and this influenced the concept of God:

“Truth stands independently of social opinion.” - Robert Pirsig

The person who realizes this will march to the sound of a different drummer.

In Matthew 19, Mark 10, and also in Luke, the rich young ruler appears, wanting to join Jesus’ movement: “And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good Master, what shall I do … ?” The young ruler says he has kept the commandments: “All these I have kept from my youth up.”

“Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me. And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very rich.”

This should be understood in context. This is not against wealth as such. But for the “very rich” man, more than keeping the commandments, more than assuring agreement with “the community,” was needed. He had to give up what mattered so much that it got in the way.

And he couldn’t. The man got personally tailored advice from Jesus of Nazareth himself, and rejected it, because he valued something else more.

/******/

Rulership was considered legitimate in the time of Jesus of Nazareth, but not in ours:

I’m a PK. Church twice on Sunday and once in the middle of the week. Wonderful KJV quotes pop up as I go about life.

Bill Gates lives in my area. Pursuing his interest in software development, he became a multimillionaire in his twenties. ”I have essentially infinite money,” he marveled.

In the first three, “synoptic,” gospels there is a man Protestants call the rich young ruler, a person of lands and estates and many servants. The rich young ruler shows up when he comes to barefoot Jesus of Nazareth and says he wants to join the movement.

But it struck me, Bill Gates, the equivalent in our society, would not be called a rich young ruler.

We don’t do that.

The mayor is not our ruler, the county executive is not our ruler, the governor is not our ruler, the president is not our ruler.

When the flying saucer lands, the creature inside doesn’t say, Take me to your ruler. It says, Take me to your leader.

Something became apparent that I’ve never seen written down: Rulership is illegitimate in our society. In a democracy, no one is subject to the will of another. We are governed, not ruled.

/******/

The founder of Christianity used “father” to refer to God in the way the scriptures he read did not, except in the Psalms:

Quoting from memory, “If an earthly father’s child asks for bread, will he give him a stone? How much more will your Heavenly Father reward you?”

I once asked a religious person why so many worshippers are attracted to the idea of a Jealous God, a God of Wrath. They answered that God is so great he gets to do whatever he wants to do.

But Jesus, above, implied that divine greatness required greater kindness. I, Preacher’s Kid that I am, hold that the Father God of Jesus, above, is kind, generous, loving, and good.

After all, a father is a parent, just as many of us are parents. We know that normally parents don’t want their children to worship them; so God, being ego-secure, does not want to be worshipped (although what he stands for should be worshipped). We know that when parents rule their children or impose their will on them they are using them; much less will God’s greatness, or his love, allow him to do this.

But, you say, Jealous God and God of Wrath are scriptural. So are the passages in early Leviticus which say how to treat women when they are unclean, or which say the Israelites may enslave Philistines but not each other. “Rightly dividing the word of truth” (Second Timothy 2:15) tells us that the scriptures were a work in progress: “Whatsoever things are true … honest … just … if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” (Philippians 4:6-9)

The truest passages of scripture are those which celebrate lovingkindness. Which constitute the preamble to democratic society.

/******/

These out of date theologies lead worshippers astray:

At a national faith gathering, the last leader of this nation, following a prayer for love, kindness, and turning the other cheek, said he didn’t particularly go along with that. That was acceptable to many millions of people of faith who, under the Bronze Age theologies of rulership, do not remotely follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

We live in a democracy which, as I understand it, grew out of Jesus of Nazareth’s teaching of love, cooperation, and altruism. The world cries out for the theologies to come into the age of Jesus’ Peaceable Kingdom.

The conservative justices’ incessant drive to radically enhance the court’s power

 Simon Lazarus, Robert Litan: As the first term of the Mitch McConnell–engineered 6–3 right-wing Supreme Court supermajority drew to a close last week, most liberal observers expressed qualified relief. With some exceptions—in particular, the last day’s evisceration of Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and simultaneous invalidation of California’s donor-disclosure mandate for charities operating in the state—the assessment was that the decisions were, overall, less “conservative” than had been anticipated. The Economist summarized the state of play by announcing (albeit before the last day’s bombshell decisions) that this is a 3–3–3 court now, with an emerging middle consensus centered around Chief Justice John Roberts. This take is oversimplified and much too rosy.

The problem is that these observers have focused on particular substantive issues at stake in the highest-profile cases: the Affordable Care Act was saved, 7–2; religious claims were held not to automatically or presumptively trump laws barring anti-LBGTQ discrimination, again, 7–2; the National Collegiate Athletic Association was subjected to surprisingly strict Sherman Act strictures against price-fixing, applicable to all other “industries,” this time unanimously. Indeed, such results were positive and should be welcomed. But there is an underlying agenda embedded in the fine print of some of the court’s hot-button cases, as well as, more often, in less noted decisions, that’s been overlooked.

What these critics have missed is the conservative justices’ incessant drive to radically enhance the court’s power—power in opposition to Congresses past, present, and future; as well as against the federal executive branch and state and local governments. This historic trend, steadily gaining momentum over the 16-year span of John Roberts’s tenure as chief justice, escalated sharply in several end-of-term decisions. In these, the court’s dominant bloc—which President Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, Charles Fried, labeled “reactionaries,” not conservatives—asserted for this court power on a level and scale unprecedented in the nation’s history: power de jure as well as de facto.

“We All Live on Campus Now” when “liberal” journalists write of “Conservative Panic about Critical Race Theory”

The news is routinely treating critique of Critical Race Theory as partisan racist bias, oversimplifying free democratic discussion of doctrines which have major flaws. “Critical race theorists attack the very foundations of the liberal legal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law".” … “There is a difference between criticizing an unfair system and criticizing individuals who perform well inside that system.”(1)

Wikipedia contains substantive criticism of CRT as seen below. In addition, CRT fosters:

1. A society enviously suspicious of achievement, ability, and success, which it denounces as “privilege”
2. Criticism of “privilege” implicitly praises mediocrity
3. In a truly Orwellian phrase, insinuates that accomplished Asian Americans are tainted by “white adjacency”

Wikipedia - Academic criticism:

“Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry argue that critical race theory lacks supporting evidence, relies on an implausible belief that reality is socially constructed, rejects evidence in favor of storytelling, rejects truth and merit as expressions of political dominance, and rejects the rule of law.

Additionally, they posit that the anti-meritocratic tenets in critical race theory, critical feminism, and critical legal studies may unintentionally lead to antisemitic and anti-Asian implications. In particular, they suggest that the success of Jews and Asians within what critical race theorists argue is a structurally unfair system may lend itself to allegations of cheating, advantage-taking, or other such claims. A series of responses to Farber and Sherry was published in the Harvard Law Review. These responses argue that there is a difference between criticizing an unfair system and criticizing individuals who perform well inside that system. In the Boston College Law Review, Jeffrey Pyle argues that critical race theory undermines confidence in the rule of law, saying that "critical race theorists attack the very foundations of the liberal legal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law".”

Criticism by jurists:

“Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals argued in 1997 that critical race theory "turns its back on the Western tradition of rational inquiry, forswearing analysis for narrative", and that "by repudiating reasoned argumentation, [critical race theorists] reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites." Former Judge Alex Kozinski, who served on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, criticized critical race theorists in 1997 for raising "insuperable barriers to mutual understanding" and thus eliminating opportunities for "meaningful dialogue".”

Other criticism:

“Political commentators including George Will see resonances between critical race theory's use of storytelling and insistence that race poses challenges to objective judgments in the U.S.” …

“We All Live on Campus Now” by Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine

Conservative fear of CRT in Washington Post

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(1) This doctrine’s jaundiced view of “individuals who perform well inside that system” tends to produce a society enviously suspicious of achievement, ability, and success. Its implied commitment to mediocrity accuses its own mainstream of “white privilege,” and in a truly Orwellian phrase, insinuates that accomplished Asian Americans are tainted by “white adjacency.” “May unintentionally lead to … anti-Asian implications.”

On publicly funded NPR, writer says it’s not enough to oppose racism. One is required to be an “antiracist” activist

On NPR, Eric Deggans wrote: “Opinion: Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It's Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist.” - June 14, 2021

Opinion: publicly funded NPR should not be promoting antiliberal left ideology (or any ideology). Our founding documents wisely emphasized that in a free country busybodies like Deggans(1) don’t get to tell you what to do. All people are created equal, proclaims the Declaration, meaning that a politics of identity, in which some identities are better than others, does not comport with liberty; and one of the inalienable rights is “the pursuit of happiness,” meaning that no one can assign you a cause to support. If they could, you wouldn’t be a free citizen. You’d be living in a regimented society rather than a liberal society.

Science writer Neil deGrasse Tyson relates, in a podcast, that when he was young another talented African American said the needs of their community were such that black people couldn't afford to have him devoting his skills to science rather than the battle against racism. I don’t remember what Tyson said, but the aim of a society free of racism is that a young black person can choose whatever vocation they wish.

V. S. Naipaul on “Our Universal Civilization”

Excerpt: “A later realization—I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk—has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

/*** Update June 18, 2021 ***/

Tim Graham on NewsBusters: NPR's Ritual Shaming of Tom Hanks: “On July 13, NPR television critic Eric Deggans penned a piece for their website titled “Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It's Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist.” Deggans proclaimed that he liked Hanks and his work … but as a subhead warned, “He's built a career playing righteous white men.”

Deggans wrote “I know the toughest thing for some white Americans — especially those who consider themselves advocates against racism — is to admit how they were personally and specifically connected to the elevation of white culture over other cultures.” He complained Hanks has “built a sizable part of his career on stories about American white men ‘doing the right thing.’”

Somehow making movies like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Apollo 13” and “Forrest Gump” is aggressively defined as a malignant whiteness-elevating conspiracy: “Baby boomer filmmakers have made fortunes amplifying ideas of white American exceptionalism and heroism.” Now Hanks needs to make amends and be an “anti-racist” and acknowledge Hollywood’s responsibility “now lies with helping dismantle and broaden the ideas they helped cement in the American mind.””

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(1) Deggans wrote: “For those of us who speak often on these issues, one of the toughest things to do is to go to a white person who is trying hard to be an ally and tell them they need to do more. And I'm sure there are plenty of Hanks fans out there of every stripe who will say I am expecting too much, being ungrateful toward a big star who said more than he had to.

And understand: I'm not saying Hanks, Howard or Spielberg are racist. I'm not even saying that Hanks should have made or supported a film specifically about the Tulsa Race Massacre long before now (though I am astonished that a guy who has been making film and TV projects rooted in American history for at least 25 years didn't find out about Tulsa until 2020.)

But over this summer, in the wake of George Floyd's murder by a white police officer, I spent a lot of time investigating the difference between being non-racist and being anti-racist. Anti-racism implies action – looking around your universe and taking specific steps to dismantle systemic racism.

So I am saying it is time for folks like Hanks to be anti-racist.

What he (and Hollywood) should do next

If he really wants to make a difference, Hanks and other stars need to talk specifically about how their work has contributed to these problems and how they will change. They need to make specific commitments to changing the conversation in story subjects, casting and execution. That is the truly hard work of building change.

Rather than talk about what "historically based fiction entertainment" must do, why not talk about what Tom Hanks, longtime scripted and documentary executive producer, will do? As a star who can get a movie made just by agreeing to appear in it, what will Tom Hanks, movie star, actually do?

People often say columns such as the one by Hanks are published to start a conversation. Well, here is my suggestion: Let's make part of that conversation how baby boomer filmmakers have made fortunes amplifying ideas of white American exceptionalism and heroism.

And how their responsibility now lies with helping dismantle and broaden the ideas they helped cement in the American mind.”

This is what The 1619 Project denies and distorts

Akhil Reed Amar: “[The] constitutions that sprang to life in 1776 [had] certain overarching elements that are now so commonplace that we forget how truly revolutionary they were back then: writtenness, concision, replicability, rights declaration, democratic pedigree, republican structure, and amendability. Never before in history had this particular combination of features come together. After 1776, this cluster would sweep across the continent and, eventually, across much of the modern world.”

“The history of the world before 1776 was a history of “accident and force.” Most people in most places were ruled by brute power or by old customs that the populace had never formally consented to in any self-conscious moment of collective choice. Very few advanced societies in or before 1776 could be described as self-governing. The history of the world was a history of emperors, kings, princes, dukes, czars, sultans, mogul lords, tribal chieftains, and the like.”

The spirit of 1776 updated politics, despite the essentially Marxist spirit of The 1619 Project.

Tragically, Organized Religion has not been updated. It still reverts to sultan language Jesus transcended: God of Wrath, Jealous God, not compatible with Loving Father. In the KJV version of Matthew’s Gospel, the Lord’s Prayer ends, “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever.”(1) Not only did Jesus never say that, it contradicts his teaching that God is kind, generous, loving and good. If Jesus had seen the “Christian” religion continuing the language of “emperors, kings, princes, dukes, czars, sultans, mogul lords, tribal chieftains, and the like,” he would have been as angry as he was at the money changers in the Temple.(2)

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(1)The translators of the 1611 King James Bible assumed that a Greek manuscript they possessed was ancient and therefore adopted the phrase "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever" into the Lord's Prayer of Matthew's Gospel. - Wikipedia

(2) “It is written, 'My house shall be called the house of prayer,' but ye have made it a den of thieves.” - Matthew 21:13