The FSM

In September of 1964 I drove from the Palos Verdes peninsula to Berkeley to visit Susan Gilman. She was taking classes at the university, so I ended up killing time near Sather Gate. There, about noon, I saw the campus police arrest a dude named Jack Weinberg, who was definitely guilty of attempting to raise funds for CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. Political fund-raising was forbidden on campus. 

I was present accidentally.

Weinberg went limp in protest, and the constabulary lugged him over to a black and white they had parked in the quad. They put him in the back seat. Jack Weinberg was, by the way, the young man who had invented the slogan about not trusting anyone over thirty. 

THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT

I watched. I didn't know what was happening, but a huge crowd immediately surrounded the police car. Soon a student named Mario Savio was standing on top of the black and white, addressing the other students. That struck me as interesting. What he was demanding was the release of Weinberg and free speech (including political speech) on the campus. Opposing these demands was the president of the University of California system, Clark Kerr, the father of the current Warriors basketball coach. 

Kerr and others met that day with representatives of the students and agreed to change the rules. 

Today, 56 years and many protests later, the American system remains in place. We remain an oligarchy with significant democratic aspects. The rich have gotten richer. We have army bases in fifty countries. But consider some changes since 1964.  

Today people of color vote in the South. There are women in the senate. In California it is no longer illegal for a man in a bar to ask another man out. It is no longer illegal to get an abortion or buy weed. A woman who needs a credit card no longer has to ask a man to sign on as her sponsor. 

Protests often fail. Protests will not topple Wall Street. But direct action helps at times. The system will make modest changes if enough people act. Actions matter.

The Progressive Majority

Social scientists are currently telling us that no progressive majority exists among American voters.  It's just not there. So what should progressives do?   

Among Democratic voters the progressive v. centrist split is about 50-50. 

The Democratic Party is a collection of groups. Some of them are Black Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Amerindians, Moslems and so on. Not one of these named groups supports a full set of progressive values. They support the Democrats for other reasons. 

People vote for Democrats when the party offers them concrete improvements to their lives. That's how FDR did it. That's how Andrew Jackson did it. But even that doesn't always work. Statisticians tell us that majority of Americans today do not trust any government or even their own neighbors. 

The Democrats had better produce some needed changes. To do that they first will have to retrench the filibuster. Or fail. It's a choice. 

Who Lost the Coronavirus Sweepstakes

Who lost big in the coronavirus sweepstakes in Sonoma County? You guessed it. 

Hispanics make up less than 25% of the citizenry but  constitute more than 60% of the people who have fallen ill. 

And if you guessed that one set of Hispanic workers has been vaccinated 95%, those needed in the wine industry, you would be 100% correct.

Would Saint Augustine Consider Trump a Liar?

Many people are asking would Saint Augustine, who seems to have been a Catholic, consider tRump a liar? This is a more difficult question to answer than I first thought. Augustine listed seven categories of liars, but he did not consider people like you and me who tell lies to gain an end to be genuine liars. He reserved "liar" for one who "takes delight in lying, rejoicing in the falsehood itself." In short, pure evil.

tRump, at times, clearly lies to gain an end. His big lie about election cheating was designed--about 2015--to reverse the election results or at least to fog over his shame as a loser. Saint Augustine would not label him a liar for that.

But tRump also pointlessly lies all day long about everything. He does this because he likes it. He's alway been so rich he could make some ordinary people around him eat poop. His life has been a power trip. That's why, according to Saint Augustine, tRump will soon die and go to Hell.

Measuring the Left

Somewhere there is someone who is the farthest to the left of us all. It's hard to measure--we have no units of leftness. How do we define the far left?  

I asked Siri, "What is the farthest left we can go?"  

She responded with a list of sites that discuss the issue. The sites don't agree. Some claim that anything to the left of social democrats (New Dealers) is the far left. Others define the far left as anything left of the Communist party, whatever that means. The Publican party defines centrists as the far left in an attempt to stir up hatred against their political rivals. 

ON BULLSHIT 1

 In Harry Frankfurt's ON BULLSHIT, he wrote that "Wittgenstein once said that the following bit of verse by Longfellow could serve  him as a model."

"In the older days of art/ Builders wrought with greatest care/ Each minute and unseen part,/ For the Gods are everywhere."

In short, even the hidden parts of things they made, which would never be seen, had to be perfect. 

The notes Wittgenstein wrote for himself had to be perfect. He was, after all, a logician. To some extent the philosophy he wrote was an attempt to squeeze the bullshit out of philosophy. Of course, he was disliked. Much of philosophy is an attempt to say more than we can know. 

Death and Reason

By now we've all seen  statistics that show that many old male trumpers reject vaccination against covid-19, even though tRump himself was vaccinated before slinking out of the White House. There are lessons to be learned from this.

The world of science and of good diction is occupied by mostly rational people, both liberals and genuine conservatives (hard to find). What passes for a conservative in America is often a shoeless member of a lynch mob.  

I write "good diction" because rational people understand what the word "fact" means. They can use it correctly.

Humans can believe anything. They can believe that God created light and after that created the Sun.  They can believe that loser Bobby Lee was our greatest general. They can believe that the pandemic is a myth and 500,000  Americans have not died from the coronavirus so far

What people believe may be shaped by a given culture, but the ability to deny reality is active in every human being.

Opposing vaccination can cost some old fart his life. And in the name of what cause is this sacrifice made? Trumpers--mostly white men--weaken themselves as a voting bloc when they die for no good reason.

 

Worse Than Trump

 One thing I like about historians is that no matter how bad things are, they can cite worse events in our past.  For example, there have been mass brawls in the capital building before--only with mobs of representatives, many armed, attacking one another. 

In the election of 1800, fought between Adams and Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton wrote a letter to the governor of New York, John Jay, asking him to help get in place electors who favored Adams.  While Donald Trump tried to pretend that he wasn't asking people to cheat, Hamilton explained in a straightforward way that when faced with a crisis (the possible election of a drooling idiot like Thomas Jefferson), it was your duty to cheat. 

Jay turned down the suggestion. But there followed some flagrant voter suppression. Then, when the election came down to a choice between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, Hamilton eventually backed Jefferson.

I suspect that both Adams and Jefferson ran ugly campaigns, but some of the people in Adams' campaign pushed a Big Lie that even Donald Trump never used. The Adams backers argued that no one should vote for Jefferson because he was dead. 

Eating in Santa Rosa

Locals looking for a place to eat breakfast or lunch in Santa Rosa might consider Grossman's on Railroad Square. The cuisine is Jewish and Israeli, and it is good food and not expensive. No reservations. One of the attractions is the large outdoor dining area. The top is fully covered, and there are many heaters. It's kind of a failsafe pleasant place to go. Today was a bit rainy, so they gave Susan and me each a new light blanket and told us to take the blankets home.

Harry and Meghan and Archie

 The American reaction to Oprah's interview with Harry and Meghan has been interesting.  Many of my Facebook friends (my friends are of the Left) have responded to the interview by announcing that they are too democratic to pay attention to the British Royals. But the core revelation in the interview was that Harry, Meghan and Archie, their baby, were ejected from the palace because Meghan and the baby are biracial. 

That's quite a story. 

My unsubstantiated guess is that my liberal  friends who say they could not care less about Meghan, Harry and Archie are mostly white. I suspect that many people of color have reacted differently. 

Why People Vote

Ezra Klein was talking about a study he'd read on what really motivates voters. What it came down to--I think--is this. Voters are not motivated by loyalty to their own party. Most voters view their own party with suspicion. Voters are mainly influenced by their hatred of the other party. 

That's why professional pols spend their time trying to work up rage against the opposition. Rage brings a big turnout.

Governors as Neanderthals

 Let's be clear. Joe Biden's calling certain Publican governors "Neanderthals" was racist, in the sense that Neanderthals probably were a different race or subspecies of humans. That is not true of people of color, who are us. 

The Neanderthals and modern humans clashed, and the Neanderthals fought us off for more than 100,000 years. 

That may be what offended the governors. The Neanderthals were losers. 

Also Neanderthals were European and Middle-Eastern, and they still constitute about 2% of your genes if you are of European or Middle-Eastern descent. 

Today, of course, the Neanderthals are dead, so we can't hurt their feelings. If they were still alive we could make fun of their jewelry, made from shells. 

The New Jim Crow

 In 1860 history swept away the Old South. In Western nations slavery had been made illegal nearly everywhere. The South fought a civil war in an attempt to block an incoming historic tide that soon drowned the slave-whipping Bobby Lee and his ilk. But, as we know, a form of violent insurgence, voter suppression and big lies called Jim Crow managed to keep power entirely in the hands of white males for most of the next 100 years. 

We have the same problem again. Call it the New Jim Crow, and it has expanded to places like Arizona. Minoritarians, people who believe that white minorities should rule, have again become violent, attacking the nation's capitol on January 6 and passing laws in outhouse states to make it difficult for people of color (and poor people in general) to vote. 

This time the trolls aren't fighting to extend slavery. They fight to extend a culture in which the n-word can be freely shouted by racists in the public arena. They hate education, art and science, and--unmasked--they love death. They yearn to die and take us with them. 

How to learn about music

 So the other day we were going someplace, and Susan, who abhors silence while moving,  had the car radio blasting.  It was great music, a Beethoven symphony, the one that has a section that goes dadada dadada dadada dadada dadada dadada dadada dadada,  up and down. I was trying to think, so I asked her to turn it off. 

I am reminded of a famous appraisal of Austrians, who are so clever they convinced the world that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German. 

Then today I took a nap, and Susan turned on the classical TV station after I fell asleep. About an hour later I was awakened by dadada dadada dadada dadada dadada dadada dadada dadada. I let out a cry that I was being victimized by Beethoven, but Susan pointed out that this symphony was by Ferdinand Ries, the son of Beethoven's music teacher. 

Someone somewhere is cheating.