I take that back. The three houses on the block each hd a concrete walk from the street to the porch steps. Maybe Jacks were played there on rare occasions.
German Theologian Dorothee Sölle first coined the word Christofascism as well as Christolatry. German Theologian Dorothee Sölle first coined the word Christofascism as well as Christolatry.
Great article at Wikipedia “In Beyond Mere Obedience: Reflections on a Christian Ethic for the Future she coined the term Christofascist to describe fundamentalists.” (Referring to right wing extremist fundamentalists, not honourable evangelicals)
I have her excellent book: The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance
I looked her up on Wikipedia; interesting, but extraordinarily complicated. I am reminded of my philosophy professor's definition of mysticism: the proposition that it is possible to have full, direct, understanding of the truth. -----Alan
John Avlon: “Running for a seat in New York’s first district, I found that what I learned by listening to voters did not track with the subjects that preoccupy most horse-race political coverage. Instead, people out on Eastern Long Island were focused on issues like the price of food and affordability (from inflation to housing and insurance costs)…”
“But the biggest driver of voter frustration was the middle-class squeeze that has been going on for decades and is getting worse. Voters sense that families and small businesses that work hard and play by the rules can no longer get ahead in a system that seems rigged to benefit billionaires and big corporations. This doesn’t translate to flashy TV packages or clickbait headlines, but it is the grinding fact of most folks’ daily lives.”
This tracks well with my longstanding opinion of where the agenda of the “New Democrats” was likely to lead.
This actually goes back to Reagan and his "trickle down" theory. A newly affluent working class bought into the notion that they had interests in common with the very wealthy. IMHO, the New Democrats of the 1990s were a reasonable reaction to this political climate. But the 1990s are past and the political climate has changed. I don't see many New Democrats any more, and that's a good thing.
After every US election, whether we win or lose, we the diverse progressive majority get lectured on how we must be nicer to the other side, in a way that suggests that if we were nicer to Nazis they wouldn't be Nazis--as if antifascists MADE them go fascist and have the power to make them go...kitten? I mean, they're threatening the very survival of a lot of us, and it's supposed to be uncouth of us to mention that in mixed company.
Strong echoes of the ancient "she made him do it" theory of allocating blame, and yes this is very gendered and as I keep mentioning the Democrats are coded wife and the Republicans husband in a very traditional marriage in which she must placate and he may abuse. In 2020, of course, the Democrats won, and we heard the same old blame song, and I wrote this, parts of which seems timely again:
The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that.
Paul Waldman wrote a valuable column in the Washington Post a few years ago, in which he pointed out that this discord is valuable fuel to right-wing operatives: “The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive.” He notes that the sense of being disrespected “doesn’t come from the policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn’t come from the things Democratic politicians say. Where does it come from? An entire industry that’s devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them. The right has a gigantic media apparatus that is devoted to convincing people that liberals disrespect them, plus a political party whose leaders all understand that that idea is key to their political project and so join in the chorus at every opportunity.”
There’s also often a devil’s bargain buried in all this, that you flatter and, yeah, respect these white people who think this country is theirs by throwing other people under the bus—by disrespecting immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views. And you reinforce that constituency’s sense that they matter more than other people when you pander like this, and pretty much all the problems we’ve faced over the past four years, to say nothing of the last five hundred, come from this sense of white people being more important than nonwhites, Christians than non-Christians, native-born than immigrant, male than female, straight than queer, cis-gender than trans.
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
I can comprehend, and do, that lots of people don’t believe climate change is real, but is there some great benefit in me listening, again, to those who refuse to listen to the global community of scientists and see the evidence before our eyes? A lot of why the right doesn’t “understand” climate change is that climate change tells us everything is connected, everything we do has far-reaching repercussions, and we’re responsible for the whole, a message at odds with their idealization of a version of freedom that smells a lot like disconnection and irresponsibility.
But also climate denial is the result of fossil fuel companies and the politicians they bought spreading propaganda and lies for profit, and I understand that better than the people who believe it. If half of us believe the earth is flat, we do not make peace by settling on it being halfway between round and flat. Those of us who know it’s round will not recruit them through compromise. We all know that you do better bringing people out of delusion by being kind and inviting than by mocking them, but that’s inviting them to come over, which is not the same thing as heading in their direction.
Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to. If Nazis wanted to reach out and find common ground and understand us, they probably would not have had that tiki-torch parade full of white men bellowing “Jews will not replace us” and, also, they would not be Nazis. Being Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes is all part of a project of refusing to understand as part of refusing to respect.
”A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” [Click] Gloria Steinem approved it, but didn't coin it.
ReplyDelete——Alan
Imagine I am clicking the "HaHa" emoticon. :) I remember the *existence* of jacks, but I am not sure if I actually ever played with them.
ReplyDeleteI did, albeit not often
Delete----Alan
Unless you somehow play indoors, jacks require a smooth concrete surface. Which didn't exist on my block.
DeleteI take that back. The three houses on the block each hd a concrete walk from the street to the porch steps. Maybe Jacks were played there on rare occasions.
DeleteMy older brother had jacks. I stepped on them, so I remember.
DeleteTime Ghost History: A Bankrupt Germany Didn't Create the Nazis - Weimar's Golden Era | Between 2 Wars [Click]
ReplyDelete——Alan
Video: The World’s First Money? [Click]
ReplyDelete—Alan
German Theologian Dorothee Sölle first coined the word Christofascism as well as Christolatry.
ReplyDeleteGerman Theologian Dorothee Sölle first coined the word Christofascism as well as Christolatry.
Matthew Fox writing about Dorothy Soelle
Great article at Wikipedia
“In Beyond Mere Obedience: Reflections on a Christian Ethic for the Future she coined the term Christofascist to describe fundamentalists.” (Referring to right wing extremist fundamentalists, not honourable evangelicals)
I have her excellent book: The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance
I looked her up on Wikipedia; interesting, but extraordinarily complicated. I am reminded of my philosophy professor's definition of mysticism: the proposition that it is possible to have full, direct, understanding of the truth.
Delete-----Alan
Inflation rate 2.6% in October, Federal Reserve may cut interest rates. [Click] About the same as 2020, way down from 2022-2023 [Click]
ReplyDeleteTrump’s economic agenda for his second term is already causing mortgage rates to rise. [Click]
-----Alan
What I Saw on the Campaign Trail [Click]
ReplyDeleteNovember 13th, By Taegan Goddard
John Avlon: “Running for a seat in New York’s first district, I found that what I learned by listening to voters did not track with the subjects that preoccupy most horse-race political coverage. Instead, people out on Eastern Long Island were focused on issues like the price of food and affordability (from inflation to housing and insurance costs)…”
“But the biggest driver of voter frustration was the middle-class squeeze that has been going on for decades and is getting worse. Voters sense that families and small businesses that work hard and play by the rules can no longer get ahead in a system that seems rigged to benefit billionaires and big corporations. This doesn’t translate to flashy TV packages or clickbait headlines, but it is the grinding fact of most folks’ daily lives.”
This tracks well with my longstanding opinion of where the agenda of the “New Democrats” was likely to lead.
——Alan
This actually goes back to Reagan and his "trickle down" theory. A newly affluent working class bought into the notion that they had interests in common with the very wealthy. IMHO, the New Democrats of the 1990s were a reasonable reaction to this political climate. But the 1990s are past and the political climate has changed. I don't see many New Democrats any more, and that's a good thing.
DeleteGaetz resigns from Congress after AG nod
ReplyDeleteAn interesting read. The R's aren't so in lockstep as DT might like.
The History Guy video: The "Great Blue Norther" of 11/11/11 [Click]
ReplyDelete——Alan
Evidence Of Celtic Origins, NOT Roman | The Celtic Dodecahedron [Click] Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
ReplyDelete——Alan
Much food for thought...!
ReplyDeleteRebecca Solnit writes:
After every US election, whether we win or lose, we the diverse progressive majority get lectured on how we must be nicer to the other side, in a way that suggests that if we were nicer to Nazis they wouldn't be Nazis--as if antifascists MADE them go fascist and have the power to make them go...kitten? I mean, they're threatening the very survival of a lot of us, and it's supposed to be uncouth of us to mention that in mixed company.
Strong echoes of the ancient "she made him do it" theory of allocating blame, and yes this is very gendered and as I keep mentioning the Democrats are coded wife and the Republicans husband in a very traditional marriage in which she must placate and he may abuse. In 2020, of course, the Democrats won, and we heard the same old blame song, and I wrote this, parts of which seems timely again:
The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that.
Paul Waldman wrote a valuable column in the Washington Post a few years ago, in which he pointed out that this discord is valuable fuel to right-wing operatives: “The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive.” He notes that the sense of being disrespected “doesn’t come from the policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn’t come from the things Democratic politicians say. Where does it come from? An entire industry that’s devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them. The right has a gigantic media apparatus that is devoted to convincing people that liberals disrespect them, plus a political party whose leaders all understand that that idea is key to their political project and so join in the chorus at every opportunity.”
There’s also often a devil’s bargain buried in all this, that you flatter and, yeah, respect these white people who think this country is theirs by throwing other people under the bus—by disrespecting immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views. And you reinforce that constituency’s sense that they matter more than other people when you pander like this, and pretty much all the problems we’ve faced over the past four years, to say nothing of the last five hundred, come from this sense of white people being more important than nonwhites, Christians than non-Christians, native-born than immigrant, male than female, straight than queer, cis-gender than trans.
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
She continues:
DeleteI can comprehend, and do, that lots of people don’t believe climate change is real, but is there some great benefit in me listening, again, to those who refuse to listen to the global community of scientists and see the evidence before our eyes? A lot of why the right doesn’t “understand” climate change is that climate change tells us everything is connected, everything we do has far-reaching repercussions, and we’re responsible for the whole, a message at odds with their idealization of a version of freedom that smells a lot like disconnection and irresponsibility.
But also climate denial is the result of fossil fuel companies and the politicians they bought spreading propaganda and lies for profit, and I understand that better than the people who believe it. If half of us believe the earth is flat, we do not make peace by settling on it being halfway between round and flat. Those of us who know it’s round will not recruit them through compromise. We all know that you do better bringing people out of delusion by being kind and inviting than by mocking them, but that’s inviting them to come over, which is not the same thing as heading in their direction.
Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to. If Nazis wanted to reach out and find common ground and understand us, they probably would not have had that tiki-torch parade full of white men bellowing “Jews will not replace us” and, also, they would not be Nazis. Being Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes is all part of a project of refusing to understand as part of refusing to respect.