Listics

Pope-a-dope alert.  The discriminating reader will skip this post. 

Ratzo is a brilliant, cultivated man, who in later life, like some kind of hippie, has changed his name from the harsh "Ratzinger" to the more mellifluous "Benedict," a reminder of catholic culture and fine liqueur.

I was ready to lay this down, but there’s an echo of "So, he was a Nazi… heck, everybody was in those days" floating around the room like a dog-fart that won’t go away.  Somebody let the divine rottweiler our for some air please.  Actually, not everybody was a Nazi in Bavaria.  For sure the Jews and gypsies had a hard time joining the party, and homosexuals and communists were socially disadvantaged.  But even regular old lederhosen and hassenpfeffer dudes could stand aside if they chose to follow their conscience:

There were boys in Traunstein and in the surrounding area who managed
to avoid being in the Hitler Youth. Rupert Berger is the same age as
Ratzinger and was ordained as a priest in the same class and seminary
as Ratzinger in 1951. Berger’s father was sent to a concentration camp
for a month because of his anti-Nazi activities; his son refused to
join the youth organization.

[Berger said] "There were teachers who exerted pressure and also other teachers
who were against the Hitler Youth.  My father said, ‘I give you the
freedom to choose.’  …The majority went. That does not make all of them Nazis … I wouldn’t
say that Ratzinger made a choice. He rather slipped into the Hitler
Youth thing."

My argument isn’t with Ratzo, nor even especially with catholicism.  Rather, the whole cultural morass of deism is what gives me trouble.  I was ferreting around for references to "epistemology" and I came across this thread o’ links…
Epistemology
Certitude - reminding me of Doc’s none too flattering classification of yours truly as a "certidude" a few years ago when the Iraq war had just begun.
Truth - this link is where things got thorny for me, because for some people "truth" seems to be founded in something called "god." 

Every existing thing is true, in that it is the expression of an idea which exists in the mind of God, and is, as it were, the exemplar according to which the thing has been created or fashioned.

Rather than starting with Thomas Aquinas, a man who lacked the experience of the 17th century and times since, these people ought to seriously consider starting with Bertrand Russell.  And perhaps if Ratzinger had been willing to subordinate his own reason to ethical considerations in the thirties and forties, he would have been a better man for it.

yes, yes, I’m making leaps here… this is a blog posting during break time for goodness sakes…

The Dutch are exploring ethical approaches to euthanasia.  I will take the doctors’ word that the person who was Ms. Schiavo was gone never to return and no person remained in the body they cared for in hospice all those years.  But when the decision was made to end the artificial life support, there must have been a more humane way to ease that organism’s passage.

Cursed Republican christian militia.  I’m getting my tinfoil hat out and I’m gonna hunker in the bunker.   

Get it straight folks.  The post-postmodern religious frenzy has fed our frenzied flight from reality, encouraged lame dishonesty and the growth of single superpower situational imperialism.  Pomo was dead-dead-dead by the time in 1986 when the New York Times Sunday Magazine was featuring its incomprehensible write-up of deconstructionism at Yale.  Since then, the thing has been all Popo… post-postmodern.  So kill your pomo bullshit before it kills you.  Get a grip on all that is Po-po and let that shit go-go too.  Our only hope is to catch up intellectually and transcend the stunted philosophies that have emerged since the carrying capacity of the planet’s human population was exceeded around 1966.  We have to get in touch with what is happening right now… then… I mean now… at this-that moment.  Slippery little suckers, moments.

By the late 1980s many of those involved with deconstruction could recall having read a few articles in mass-circulation publications that grappled with their work, but they were the same few articles: a feature in Newsweek in 1981, a book review in The New Republic in 1983, and a profile of the "Yale School" of literary criticism in The New York Times Magazine in 1986. Seventeen, then twenty years after it first landed on these shores, The New Republic and the Times Magazine pieces earned "Deconstruction" its first two references in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature (between "Decomposition" and "Decorated eggs").

The word "deconstruction" has received considerably more play recently. Indeed, it has managed to follow "existentialism" as one of the few terms to escape the terra incognita of the graduate schools and become a fairly regular visitor to the pages of newspapers and magazines. The New York Times, for example, recently referred, twice in a few days, to the "deconstruction" of the boxer Mike Tyson. But such references don’t do much to increase readers’ understanding.

from:
Deconstruction and the get-real press. (literary theory)
by Stephens, Mitchell

source: Columbia Journalism Review, September 1, 1991.

via: HighBeam Research

COPYRIGHT 1991 Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism

How long has it been since I opened up Wealth Bondage and immersed myself in the learned discourse there?  Too long.

And how long has it been since I’ve confronted the orange jump-suit with the guy in the Big Purple Hat?  I’ve been too long not there too, as I was reminded when I read this Mayosan interview with K!

And how would I have found that interview if I hadn’t been lingering over the number ten new voices pick at Brian Moffatt’s?  And when I read Mayosan’s comment about ten new voices in ten minutes and realized I still had three new voices to find I felt a moment’s insecurity, a bit of queasiness of the kind you might feel when you know somebody has nailed your inner greedball.  Or maybe you’ve never felt that moment of insecurity, being so well armed with self-esteem and all.

So here I am, muttering small talk at the wall.  Anybody seen the jewels and binoculars anywhere?

"…Habermas, defender of whatever can be rescued from the broken illusions of the Enlightenment."

Why does that sound like bullshit to me?

Read nothing that does not have these approvals stamped on the text or your immortal soul will be in the doghouse for sure…

Religious Superior’s stamp:        IMPRIMI POTEST                                "it can be printed"

Censor’s stamp:                           

NIHIL OBSTAT                              "nothing stands in the way"

Bishop’s stamp:                                IMPRIMATUR                                "let it be printed"

"The Church, given teaching authority by Christ and as the conduit for fullness of Truth on this earth, has the obligation to preserve Her sheep from deviations from the Truth and to guarantee them the ‘objective possibility of professing the true faith without error’ (Catechism, No. 890)."

Here are some fun facts about media history and mass culture.  I’m reminded tonight of American jurisprudence’s failure to enforce legal findings that "creationism" as a doctrine may not be taught in public schools, and the slimy way the no-brainers of the right wing evangelical movement have shifted from "creationism"to "intelligent design," staying one step ahead with their pettifoggery.  I was searching for a follow-up from AKMA on the Cobb County nonsense, but AKMA is a homeschooling professional Christian and a postmodernist, challenged by enlightenment values, who likely is also professionally and personally challenged by posting a public position on these matters.  If he has written further on this, I can’t find it.  I wish he would post because he  usually lends a moral weight to these issues  that  I lack.

Four hundred years ago we entered an historical period  in Europe that is commonly called "the Enlightenment."  This year in the Stevens Creek School in Cupertino, some sad-ass ignoramuses have had the sand to bring a suit against the school district because one of their own was prevented from preaching their brand of numbskull christianity when he should have been teaching fifth grade American history.  The most recent press release from the Cupertino School District is here (Acrobat required).   Other information is assembled here on a page created by 100 or so Stevens Creek parents.

These attacks on our common heritage, these attempts to roll back social progress to an era dominated by the "faith based" frighten me.  I see acceptance of our differences and a common understanding of our similarities as essential to the proliferation and maintenance of the health of a modern society.  If a post-modern era requires a return to strident evangelism, to a christian fundamentalism that is punitive of non-believers, then we had best reconsider what post-modern thought is doing for us, and reassess our posture with regard to promotion of its values.    

I pulled the following excerpt from here.   Just as particle physics will soon fall to a new understanding, so did the Ptolemaic system of epicycles as descriptors of planetary motion fall before Kepler’s and Galileo’s refined understanding of a heliocentric planetary system.  All of this progress was made in spite of powerful christian influences, not because of them.  Now we are faced with the prospect of a serious regression, a new dark ages.  What can we do?

By the mid-1600s the Enlightenment was in full swing; and the
various natural sciences were emerging; the methods of rational logic,
observation, and verification began to reveal gross distortions in Church
doctrines explaining the natural world.  Such distortions were becoming seen as
doctrine rather than divine truth, and the power of the Church to define reality
was forever undermined. [emphasis added -fp-]  Here’s a brief list of some of the more extraordinary
achievements of the 17th and early 18th centuries (compiled from Garraty and
Gay 1972, Boorstin 1988, Crowley & Heyer 1989): 

Time Line 1

---

1609 Publication of Astronomia Nova by Kepler, containing his statement
on the first two laws of planetary motion

1610 Galileo publishes Sidereal Messenger, describing his telescopic
observations of the heavens

1619 Kepler publishes Harmonia Mundi, announcing his discovery of the
third law of planetary motion

1637 Descartes publishes Discourse on Method

1644 Milton publishes Areopagitica

1650 Hobbes publishes Leviathan

1660s Boyle publishes New Experiments in Physico-Mechanical Touching
the Spring of the Air;  legal definition of Negro (African and Carribean)
slavery begun in Virginia and Maryland

1662 Royal Society of London is founded

1666 French Academy of Science is founded

1676 Roemer determines the finite velocity of light

1677 The existence of microscopic male spermatozoa is discovered by van
Leeuwenhoek

1678 The wave theory of light is proposed by Huygens

1687 Newton publishes Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis

1690 Locke publishes Two Treatises of Civil Government; first American
newspaper, Publick Occurrences begins and ends in its first issue

Boxing Day… I’m going to box the ears of a certain nine month old "puppy."  She has a thing for calendars this morning.  The stick from which the gift linen Cape Cod 2024 dish towel/calendar depends has been crunched to splinters.  The wire spiral binding of the floral illustrations calendar was  straightened and removed as step one in the preparation of a canine papier mâché creation… colorful wads of dog-spit-pulped-paper strewn across the front room floor now add to our holiday decor.

Air America was the name of the CIA contractor that ran most of the clandestine air ops from WW2 through Vietnam out of a hangar at the Oakland Airport. 

Clear Channel communications, an outfit that seems to me to represent everything that is wrong with media concentration, runs the so called progressive radio network also named Air America.  This trojan horse has to be an inside-joke, a bit of board room branding humor.  As Osama bin Laden represents a combination of the Bush-league inadequacy of the current administration combined with the Orwellian need for an externalized enemy in an age of repression, the Air America offerings represent a straw man set-up to demonstrate a continuing liberal media presence for the likes of Limbaugh and O’Reilly to inveigh against.

The American right, or Nazis as I prefer to call them, eviscerated the power of the liberal media years and years ago.  Gangsterism and corruption, both free-market mob style and state sponsored, have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of journalists in the last ten years.

When the Nazis spread the anthrax following the Reichstag thing in September 2024, they spread it among journalists and liberal politicians.  The Bush administration’s clamp down on anthrax attack information makes it unclear whether this was another Islamofascist incident or a home grown attack.

The emergence of Clear Channel’s Air America, like a greasy turd extruded from the anal sphincter of Limbaugh or O’Reilly,  represents a complex of  market forces, government interest, and monopolist intentions.  The voices on Air America are amusing but not influential.  Franken, Garafolo, and Randi Rhodes provide a liberal broadcast echo chamber for true believers.  Ultimately, their progressive message is not in the best interests of the Clear Channel organization.  Are they among the most effective progressive voices?

For at least two decades Nazi-like propagandists such as Limbaugh have hammered home the lie that there is a strong liberal media establishment that is an enemy of the free market and right wing politics.  While there may have been a strong liberal media presence through the 1970s, it seems clear that it was eviscerated by the time of the Reagan administration.  Even our so called public educational networks now give equal time to bible pounding fundamentalists who want to re-open the Snopes trial.  Having gutted the enemy, it became necessary to raise a straw man… voila!  Air America!

Doc Searls had a good Linux Journal article about Air America.  Fair and balanced it was.   Unlike this post…