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The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-79
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Julian Assange:
Syria/OPCW:
Covid-19:
The pandemic can be described in percolation theory terms. Low incidence in a population keeps the growth rate low (currently in Germany). But after a critical incidence rate is passed (due to super-spreading events) the growth rate suddenly jumps upwards (currently in Spain, UK and elsewhere). Speaking colloquially: When there is sufficient shit flying around some of it will eventual hit the fan.
Leading the world:
Use as open thread …
@ Posted by: circumspect | Oct 4 2020 17:02 utc | 19
She is replacing a religious fruitcake. Ginsburg was a Kabbalist Jew
Gimme the Kabalist over the speaker-in-tongues. Having lived in a part of the country dominated by Pentecostals, Southern Baptists, and other “charismatics,” they’re comparable to Salafists in their refusal to recognize a separation of the secular and sacred:
God is really interested not just in men’s souls but also in their whole life, work and enterprise. He wants all of it transformed into his kingdom. This means that what we often see as secular or worldly — jobs, career, economic programs, public and private education, health services, criminal justice and the courts, local, national, international politics and economics, questions of war, peace and justice, radio, TV, music and art — all are meant to be transformed into the Kingdom of God in the Earth.
They want to impose their religion onto us heathens, the “Kingdom of God on Earth” talk is not just metaphorical. These kinds of Christians should be kept far away from power. I know that she is a Catholic officially, but she has also embraced the Protestant heresies aforementioned through “Charismatic Renewal.”
Abortion is a dog whistle for the left
I don’t think dog whistle means what you think it means. A dog whistle is when Joe Biden says “school busing” or when Clinton talks about “welfare queens.” Abortion is a serious issue, as it effects the bodies of ~52% of the population and the right to reproductive self-control. The opposition to abortion in this country is driven by maniacs who believe that God talks to them and has a personal relationship with them (we really do have a mental health crisis in the country). Barrett, if she does not go as far as to believe that states should be able to make abortion illegal (which, despite her protests, she would not get in the way of this), will at least be a force that allows a further chipping away of abortion access.
Take June Medical Services, LLC v. Russo, for example, which happened this year. This was a challenge to a Louisiana law which would have shut down the only abortion provider left in the state. It was a 5-4 ruling which struck down the law. Ginsberg’s vote was deciding. Barrett would have almost certainly voted in a way that would have closed down the facility and effectively ended abortion access in the state of Louisiana. Importantly, the law would have shut down the facility by mandating that abortion clinics have hospital-admission requirements, not by making abortion illegal outright. It would have been a de facto abolition of abortion in Louisiana, because it would have imposed a constraint on the only operating clinic that it couldn’t meet. This clinic doesn’t only provide abortion to Louisiana residents, it also provides them to people in East Texas, South Arkansas, and other neighboring regions, so this would have been catastrophic for reproductive autonomy in the region.
This is not even getting too into the other issues with her politically, such as her brain dead commitment to Republican “free market” (read: anti-labor, pro-capital) shibboleths, or her record in opposing the Affordable Care Act, which is presently the only thing keeping people 18-26 on their parents’ healthcare, and thus the only thing presently keeping the vast majority of that demographic with health insurance at all. This is the Trump administration at its most obviously dangerous, in its total capitulation to the same conservative ideology that Mitt Romney, John McCain, Bush I & II, and all the other ghouls not worthy of naming were the foremost proponents of prior to 2016. I know sometimes we have to pretend that the liberals are scared for nothing, but there are good reasons to see a Barrett nomination to the Supreme Court as a disaster for those of us who want to live in a free society.
Posted by: fnord | Oct 4 2020 18:01 utc | 21
@ suzan | Oct 5 2020 0:48 utc | 79 with the link to the latest encyclical by the Catholic pope
I skimmed the link to the pope’s latest and the following are a few quoted paragraphs from the more than 287 in the whole thing.
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15. The best way to dominate and gain control over people is to spread despair and discouragement, even under the guise of defending certain values. Today, in many countries, hyperbole, extremism and polarization have become political tools. Employing a strategy of ridicule, suspicion and relentless criticism, in a variety of ways one denies the right of others to exist or to have an opinion. Their share of the truth and their values are rejected and, as a result, the life of society is impoverished and subjected to the hubris of the powerful. Political life no longer has to do with healthy debates about long-term plans to improve people’s lives and to advance the common good, but only with slick marketing techniques primarily aimed at discrediting others. In this craven exchange of charges and counter-charges, debate degenerates into a permanent state of disagreement and confrontation.
16. Amid the fray of conflicting interests, where victory consists in eliminating one’s opponents, how is it possible to raise our sights to recognize our neighbours or to help those who have fallen along the way? A plan that would set great goals for the development of our entire human family nowadays sounds like madness. We are growing ever more distant from one another, while the slow and demanding march towards an increasingly united and just world is suffering a new and dramatic setback.
25. War, terrorist attacks, racial or religious persecution, and many other affronts to human dignity are judged differently, depending on how convenient it proves for certain, primarily economic, interests. What is true as long as it is convenient for someone in power stops being true once it becomes inconvenient. These situations of violence, sad to say, “have become so common as to constitute a real ‘third world war’ fought piecemeal”.
28. The loneliness, fear and insecurity experienced by those who feel abandoned by the system creates a fertile terrain for various “mafias”. These flourish because they claim to be defenders of the forgotten, often by providing various forms of assistance even as they pursue their criminal interests. There also exists a typically “mafioso” pedagogy that, by appealing to a false communitarian mystique, creates bonds of dependency and fealty from which it is very difficult to break free.
44. Even as individuals maintain their comfortable consumerist isolation, they can choose a form of constant and febrile bonding that encourages remarkable hostility, insults, abuse, defamation and verbal violence destructive of others, and this with a lack of restraint that could not exist in physical contact without tearing us all apart. Social aggression has found unparalleled room for expansion through computers and mobile devices.
45. This has now given free rein to ideologies. Things that until a few years ago could not be said by anyone without risking the loss of universal respect can now be said with impunity, and in the crudest of terms, even by some political figures. Nor should we forget that “there are huge economic interests operating in the digital world, capable of exercising forms of control as subtle as they are invasive, creating mechanisms for the manipulation of consciences and of the democratic process. The way many platforms work often ends up favouring encounter between persons who think alike, shielding them from debate. These closed circuits facilitate the spread of fake news and false information, fomenting prejudice and hate”.[47]
46. We should also recognize that destructive forms of fanaticism are at times found among religious believers, including Christians; they too “can be caught up in networks of verbal violence through the internet and the various forums of digital communication. Even in Catholic media, limits can be overstepped, defamation and slander can become commonplace, and all ethical standards and respect for the good name of others can be abandoned”.[48] How can this contribute to the fraternity that our common Father asks of us?
170. I would once more observe that “the financial crisis of 2007-08 provided an opportunity to develop a new economy, more attentive to ethical principles, and new ways of regulating speculative financial practices and virtual wealth. But the response to the crisis did not include rethinking the outdated criteria which continue to rule the world”.[147] Indeed, it appears that the actual strategies developed worldwide in the wake of the crisis fostered greater individualism, less integration and increased freedom for the truly powerful, who always find a way to escape unscathed.
172. The twenty-first century “is witnessing a weakening of the power of nation states, chiefly because the economic and financial sectors, being transnational, tend to prevail over the political. Given this situation, it is essential to devise stronger and more efficiently organized international institutions, with functionaries who are appointed fairly by agreement among national governments, and empowered to impose sanctions”.[149] When we talk about the possibility of some form of world authority regulated by law,[150] we need not necessarily think of a personal authority. Still, such an authority ought at least to promote more effective world organizations, equipped with the power to provide for the global common good, the elimination of hunger and poverty and the sure defence of fundamental human rights.
173. In this regard, I would also note the need for a reform of “the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth”.[151] Needless to say, this calls for clear legal limits to avoid power being co-opted only by a few countries and to prevent cultural impositions or a restriction of the basic freedoms of weaker nations on the basis of ideological differences. For “the international community is a juridical community founded on the sovereignty of each member state, without bonds of subordination that deny or limit its independence”.[152] At the same time, “the work of the United Nations, according to the principles set forth in the Preamble and the first Articles of its founding Charter, can be seen as the development and promotion of the rule of law, based on the realization that justice is an essential condition for achieving the ideal of universal fraternity… There is a need to ensure the uncontested rule of law and tireless recourse to negotiation, mediation and arbitration, as proposed by the Charter of the United Nations, which constitutes truly a fundamental juridical norm”.[153] There is need to prevent this Organization from being delegitimized, since its problems and shortcomings are capable of being jointly addressed and resolved.
177. Here I would once more observe that “politics must not be subject to the economy, nor should the economy be subject to the dictates of an efficiency-driven paradigm of technocracy”.[158] Although misuse of power, corruption, disregard for law and inefficiency must clearly be rejected, “economics without politics cannot be justified, since this would make it impossible to favour other ways of handling the various aspects of the present crisis”.[159] Instead, “what is needed is a politics which is far-sighted and capable of a new, integral and interdisciplinary approach to handling the different aspects of the crisis”.[160] In other words, a “healthy politics… capable of reforming and coordinating institutions, promoting best practices and overcoming undue pressure and bureaucratic inertia”.[161] We cannot expect economics to do this, nor can we allow economics to take over the real power of the state.
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Nice words but Pope Francis is still pulling punches. He knows exactly how global private finance works because before the Enlightenment the religious folk in the West ran the money system for a while. Pope Francis knows that finance is private in the West but not in China. The problem Pope Francis has with China is that the China government is the religion in China and governance is otherwise totally secular. In the West, monotheistic religions are given lots more than the lip service they are suppose to get in governance…..in the US there is suppose to be separation of church and state, correct? Do the financial holdings of the Catholic church make Pope Francis one of the elite that own global private finance in the West that I keep writing about?…I wouldn’t be surprised
Posted by: psychohistorian | Oct 5 2020 2:19 utc | 81
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