I frequently rail on about how much tripe gets passed off as some kind of reality when it comes to economics.  Every one has an opinion and I’m not always sure where it comes from albeit I do have some suspicions.  I just found some one in the science discipline who complains about the same thing.  You might want to read this column at Scientific America by Lawrence M. Krauss. It’s aptly titled Peace = War.

Many folks these days have cultivated urban myths into widely held and immutable opinions. An example of one that bugs me is the complete misunderstanding of a scientific theory.  Every person that  I hear that confuses hypothesis with theory gets an earful from me.  Seriously, it’s like some one wants to debate the truth of the multiplication tables. It’s like saying that the result of 1 x 10 is just a few mathematician’s opinions and then offering up the suggestion that there are alternatives. Oh, these alternatives usually can also NEVER be really observed or studied, but hey, they’re just as valid or so they say.

How do people become so misinformed?  Schools? Television? Friends, relations and religious leaders?  Check out the article and despair all ye who seek rational discourse and outcomes and policies based on knowledge and not ill-conceived perception or blind faith. Some of us think the situation is getting worse.

When I saw the statement repeated online that theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge would be dead by now if he lived in the U.K. and had to depend on the National Health Service (he, of course, is alive and working in the U.K., where he always has), I reflected on something I had written a dozen years ago, in one of my first published commentaries:

“The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

As I listen to the manifest nonsense that has been promulgated by the likes of right-wing fanatic radio hosts and moronic ex-governors in response to the effort to bring the U.S. into alignment with other industrial countries in providing reasonable and affordable health care for all its citizens, it seems that things have only gotten worse in the years since I first wrote those words.

Wow, and I thought I turned a fancy phrase when calling people morons.  This guy is clearly a professional.  (Actually, he’s a theoretical physicist which is not above my pay grade, unfortunately, but way above my math and science skills.)

I’ve noticed in my university classroom that more and more students have the nerve to say that what I teach from textbooks is just one person’s opinion and what Glenn Beck said on the radio contradicts it so I must be some kind of liberal with an agenda.  There is this general feeling that all of us out here in academia are just teaching some kind of ideological agenda reflected in our textbooks and that there are great thinkers out there on TV, radio, and the NY times based sellers list that far exceed the reaches of our grasp of theory (which of course, is merely opinion). Generally, these so-called authorities have never actually gotten through one degree program let alone achieved multiple degrees but hey, every one has the right to opinion or so they say.  This gives every one the right to rank their opinion as worthwhile and not questionable.

Grab the basic economics textbooks by Mankiw, Bernanke, and Krugman and you’ll find it’s the same theory and content.  Really.  I kid you not.  Every one may have a right to an opinion, but not every opinion comes from well grounded and proven theory so some opinions do not have a correct basis.  All opinions are not equal. Also, having an opinion about what color is the most pleasing on a living room wall is not in the same class as having an opinion on stem cell research.  Excuse me if I ask to see your medical degree or science credentials before I consider what you’re saying on the latter.  At the very least, I want to see the credentials of your sources.

My last argument with a student was over the federal deficit .  I had to disabuse my students of the notion that having the national debt “hang over our heads”–as my student put it— is not the same as having gone off and bought something really frivolous with your MasterCard.   A government and a multi trillion dollar economy is not the same thing as a person. It’s not even the same thing as a multi-billion dollar business.  Businesses and people can’t tax anything, can’t print money, can’t enforce laws to make folks do things, and certainly don’t exist in perpetuity.  However, I can’t seem to rid people of the notion that federal debt = the U.S. American express card.  Again, read Mankiw, Bernanke, and Krugman and they’ll all say the same thing despite their diverse political natures.  Peace does not equal War for any of them no matter what their voter registration card reads.  The political nuances come out in the application  and the efficacy of the theories in the realm of real life, not the theory itself.

Here’s a good article by an economist that repeats some of the things I posted earlier this week when discussing economist’s Martin Wolf’s column in FT on the Federal Debt.  Some how none of these sources get any credence when confronting an opinion.  All the good stuff is out there in the world where nothing is peer-reviewed, subject to the scientific method, based on data and methodology and is likely to be the product of a drunken Bacchanalia of group brain farts.  There is nothing worse than trying to have a debate with some one who only has opinions but can’t point to several quality sources to back them up but then gets all testy when you tell them in a mild mannered way they are full of shit.

Krauss’s list of blame is a lot shorter than mine.  I still want to blame what I see is the glorification of Forrest Gump and the like.  Yes, he’s a really good guy but remember the cautionary tale about Chauncey the gardener?  I believe the glorification of the simpleton resulted in Dubya as our president and it came from  the worst patriarchal pushers in the world–old men in politics and business and old men in religious institutions. They like to keep people stupid.  They can take advantage of them that way.  So why not set up an entire cultural phenomenon around athletes, pop singers, and movie stars?  Why not just degrade your researchers? It’s just the American Empire’s version of bread and circuses.

They’ve created a culture where there is a contempt for established knowledge and an appreciation of whatever you can pull out of your ass these days. It makes every one’s opinion equal and they are NOT equal. No sireee.

Krauss blames the “ubiquitous internet” along with our news channels that will do and say anything to get an audience.

The rise of a ubiquitous Internet, along with 24-hour news channels has, in some sense, had the opposite effect from what many might have hoped such free and open access to information would have had. It has instead provided free and open access, without the traditional media filters, to a barrage of disinformation. Nonsense claims had more difficulty gaining traction in the days when print journalism held sway and newspaper editors had the final word on what made its way into homes and when television news consisted of a half-hour summary of what a trained producer thought were the most essential stories of the day.

Now fabrications about “death panels” and oxymoronic claims that ”government needs to keep its hands off of Medicare” flow freely on the Internet, driving thousands of zombielike protesters to Washington to argue that access to health care will undermine their fundamental freedom to have their insurance canceled if they get sick. And 24-hour news channels, desperate to provide ”breaking” coverage at all hours, end up serving as public relations vehicles for any celebrity who happens to make an outrageous claim or, worse, decide that the competition for ratings requires them to be anything but ”fair and balanced” in their reporting.

“Fair and balanced,” however, doesn’t mean putting all viewpoints, regardless of their underlying logic or validity, on an equal footing. Discerning the merits of competing claims is where the empirical basis of science should play a role. I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false. What fails the test of empirical reality, as determined by observation and experiment, gets thrown out like yesterday’s newspaper. One doesn’t need to debate about whether the earth is flat or 6,000 years old. These claims can safely be discarded, and have been, by the scientific method.

I highlighted the part that really strikes me as good sense.  We frequently get people here screaming to high heaven that every one’s opinions should be treated as equal.  The deal is that many of these opinions do “fail the test of empirical reality, as determined by observation and experiment”.   What researchers do is to try to separate hypotheses that shouldn’t enter the lexicon of theory.  Opinions based on unsubstantiated best guesses are not equal to those backed up by evidence sorted through by hundreds of people who study the area under discussion.

What makes people so susceptible to nonsense in public discourse? Is it because we do such a miserable job in schools teaching what science is all about—that it is not a collection of facts or stories but a process for weeding out nonsense to get closer to the underlying beautiful reality of nature? Perhaps not. But I worry for the future of our democracy if a combination of a free press and democratically elected leaders cannot together somehow more effectively defend empirical reality against the onslaught of ideology and fanaticism.

I worry about the same when it comes to things upon which we base public policy and spend public treasury.  We see stuff daily in political discussions that is just not grounded in the empirical evidence. (Think abstinence education.)  I see that in my field of expertise all the time. Another good example is the reams of moral superiority folks feel about the poor.  Let’s remember, each one of us is one insurance industry opinion away from bankruptcy.  We could be one ill-conceived mortgage contract away from homelessness.  We might also be just one paycheck away from needing a food bank.  That doesn’t even count the discussion on poverty we had a few days ago about being born into the screaming room. Poverty is not about moral deficiency. It’s much more complex than that.

I think Krauss’ concern is a good one that I share.  However, the responsibility to be informed and search out good information is really one that we all should claim.  You can Google your way to a discussion on race relations and wind up on a KKK site or you can find one that has some sincere people and a lot of good information that isn’t all anecdotal and based on perception and bias. Maybe, we all need to go out of our way a bit more often to actually find out about a subject rather than just blurting out what we heard on the last installment of the guy/gal on TV with whom we generally agree.

One of the first exercises I do with some of my students is to beat up a lot of the media-based myths many of them hold.  I like to show them that it wasn’t until 1957 that “In God We Trust” was put onto our currency.  Our earliest colonial dollars held the motto “Mind your business” and they were printed on paper and made of pewter not gold. Gold certificates were first issued in 1863. Another one I like to disabuse folks of is the ‘we send a huge amount of our money overseas to help other nations”. Well, unless you count the war spending, it is actually less than 1/2 percent of our total budget and other countries send a much bigger part of their resources abroad than we do.  One example is Sweden. Another is Japan. Also, Japan’s federal deficit as a percentage of their GDP is much larger than ours.  Do you ever hear any discussions on that?

I can also show them that we started our nation out very much in debt to the Dutch and we’ve had, as a percentage of output, way more federal debt than we have now. We ran up an amazing amount of federal debt during World War 2 and managed to pay it off through economic growth in the following decades. I find that I have to make more effort every year, just to chop through this kind of stuff and I can’t help but wonder why.  The one I have to stomp on now is that foreign governments own huge amounts of our deficit (not true, it stays around 20%) and that the main and biggest one that we owe money to is China.  Again, the U.K. is the country with the largest amount of U.S. debt.  China is now two, but just barely passed Japan.  All of this information is available right here at the Treasury. In fact, you can find all of this kind of information from the FED too who publishes all of their operating data and eventually the data upon which they based both  monetary and fiscal policy.  It just doesn’t cross the congress’ desk on the day it happens. Is it just easier to get the misinformation about stuff from Congressman on talk shows than actually finding out the real numbers or what?

So here’s my point. This kind of misinformation makes it very difficult for me to do my job.  I can’t imagine what it must like to be a policy maker and face this stuff day in and day out when you meet the press.   It’s like I have to de-educate them first or get the propaganda out of their heads first.   I always tell my students  that I really don’t care WHAT they believe as much as I want them to have opinions based in some kind of evidence.  I care about the process by which they get their beliefs.  It shouldn’t be knee jerk.  It should be studied, reflective, and based as much as possible on evidence.

So, is Krauss on to something here?  I think we’ve gone passed just normal disinformation to the point where some folks actually pass off malinformation.  I liken it to a form of malware for the mind and the health debate is one place where it’s infected every one. What can we do about it?

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I stole this video from Lenore Skenazy at Freerangekids.  HER focus was on the fact that two month old twins were allowed to nap in the sunshine. Outside.  Unattended.  And no one called the cops on the parents for child endangerment or neglect.  It turns out the entire country is *full* of parents who leave their adorable blonde babies on the street in their prams for some crazy nut job to snatch away.  And I guess that there are so many of them hanging around that there’s not much temptation anymore.  Most kids do not get stolen.

But I digress.

The real story is that these incredibly beautiful, simplicity loving, high tax paying, Ikea addicts are the happiest people in the world.  They say they are Democrats but Oprah says they’re socialists.  Au Contraire, says the swimsuit model (presumably with a PhD in architecture).  They are merely civilized.  It is civilized to take care of the poor and the old.  It is civilized to spend time with your family and friends.  It is civilized to have fewer things so that you can have more freedom.  What a concept!

Too bad Oprah didn’t do this last year instead of helping to force that Republican lite, corporate loving, uber shmoozer on us for president. I guess it’s possible for even Oprah to get rolled every now and then.

Is she trying to atone or is she trying to get us accustomed to wanting a lot less, now that her White House friend has bungled the recovery?  Who knows?  I wouldn’t mind living a Danish life and I suspect there are a lot of Americans who when faced with another $4000/month mortgage payment on the McMansion while they wait on pins and needles to see if they still have a job, would find a small flat and a resilient social safety net in Copenhagen just charming.  I just hope it isn’t too late for America to get the message.

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{The first essay in this series introduced a model I created to explain the cycle of corruption that plagues US politics. This essay looks into the roots of this corruption. It takes a long time to get to the payoff. Further, the conclusion is somewhat ex nihilo if you have not read the first essay. This said, for those who dare, I hope you find it worth the read.}

Polyphemos the cyclops would have eaten Odysseus, if his survival was dependent on the moral virtues of Silenus’s satyrs. Fortunately for Odysseus, and Silenus and his lot, Odysseus could depend on his fellow citizens. If Polyphemos had the majority of America’s elected representatives depending on him for their survival in his cave, the way that they are presently beholden to lobbyists’ money for their electoral survival, he could have had a ready supply of citizens for his daily meals.

Cyclopean virtues regularly triumph over the virtues of democratic citizenship in the political landscape of the United States. Given that the Declaration of Independence embodies the spirit and principles that ground the virtues of democratic citizenship, why is it that cyclopes, who eat humans, win the day in America? Answering this question requires that we journey back to Attic Greece and her proto-democratic foundations.

Euripides: “The Cyclops” and its Relation to Civic Virtue

The notion of cyclopean virtues comes to us through satyr plays, which are a type of comedic morality play, which were performed with the tragedies and comedies of the Greek dramatic festivals. The play that I shall draw upon is Euripides “Cyclops.” It is worth noting that it is the only surviving satyr play and much of what we know about them, we know from this play.

Satyr plays have three main types of characters, which are satyrs, the citizens of the polis, and monsters, such as cyclopes. Each of these groups personifies, by their acts and deeds, a different weighting of human virtues, which results in significantly different world views.

Satyrs

Satyrs, like Pan, are goat-man hybrids. They worship Dionysos and they love wine. They are social beings, but they are subject to the excesses of their instincts. As a consequence, they lack the self-control/moral foundation that is needed to make the self-sacrifices that are required to create and maintain more than rudimentary degrees of social cooperation. In some instances, they appear by their foibles to be no more than lovable scalliwags. This is somewhat misleading because their actions, besotted or not, often put others in serious jeopardy. Satyrs stand as metaphors for humans who have not yet fully escaped the bonds of nature.

Citizens of the Polis

The citizens of the polis represent civilized humanity: they prefer to live together despite its disadvantages. To be civilized, in this sense, means that citizens control their instincts through reason by adopting a code that more or less embodies The Golden Rule. Effectively, the citizens of the polis recognize that by sharing a system of responsibilities to each other, they gain the benefits of social specialization, which tend to be significant improvements in the quality and productivity of the society in its respective enterprises. For contrast sake, a society without a division of labor is a society of jacks of all trades who are particularly unskilled because there are no trades to be jacks of.

One outcome of being a citizen of the polis is the development of an appreciation for the polis because of the good it brings. Remembering that these ideas are the product of small city states should help to foster the idea that a feeling of shared kinship to one’s community is commonplace among almost all societies, regardless of size, even when the community does not appear to be deserving of that appreciation. It is also common for members of communities to be willing to sacrifice themselves for the community or its values, even when upholding the values mean sacrificing the community.

Cyclopes

The cyclopes are relatively lawless, violent, powerful, solitary giants, who tend to limit their mutual interaction to shared defense. They appear to acknowledge each others territorial boundaries. They readily seize what they want from all other creatures, be it their possessions, their freedom, or their lives. They worship riches and they sacrifice to their appetites.

Cyclops: To Odysseus
Ey, little man! Wise men believe in one god and one god only: Wealth! Everything else is just words; fat words, lovely words but that’s all. All these shrines and temples of my father, built on every shore in Greece mean nothing to me. What’s the point of telling me all about them?

As for Earth, whether she wants to or not, she’ll still bring up the grass which will feed all my animals which I, in turn, will feed to the most important divinity in the world, my own belly. No sacrifices, nothing for anyone else, just my own lovely guts! Yum, yum!

Living in a quasi-asocial state, their very loose knit community lacks the benefits of shared enterprises. It was not always this way. Their ancestors were legendary tradespeople. The cyclopes lost these skills as they devolved into an athemistic society.

The cyclopes stand for humans who see citizenship, social interrelations, and laws as impediments to their liberty by nature and where they do acquiesce to such impartments, they do with the idea that it is a necessary evil. Accordingly, their political focus is upon limiting the scope of citizenship, social interrelations, and laws, especially with respect to any of these that compromise their lust for riches. Cyclopes do not have a sense of working together for mutual advancement, beyond that of mutual protection. Those who exist outside their community are prey, such as Silenus and his satyrs and Odysseus and his compatriots.

It is likely, though I am unaware as to whether or not it has been hypothesized, that the Greeks knew full well that the loss, or coverage, of an eye causes one’s perspective to lack depth. In Greek, and kin societies, to be described as a cyclops was an insult of some force. Antigonus, one of the Macedonian Diadochi who succeeded Alexander, slew a man for calling him a cyclopes.

Other Monsters

How does one speak to a void, such as our lack of knowledge about the other types of monsters that inhabited satyr plays? I am too unversed in this area of study to hypothesize about which imbalances of character other creatures would likely represent.

Cyclops: The Tale

“Cyclops” itself involves Odysseus taking a small party ashore the Isle of the Cyclopes in an attempt to get some provisions. He encounters Silenus and his satyrs, who have been captured by Polyphemos, who has made them into his slaves. The satyrs are miserable and “dry,” because there is no wine on the island because wine is a fruit of a socially organized society.

Silenus is introduced to Odysseus’s “bottomless” wineskin, which is literally a godsend to a satyr. Silenus, emboldened and stupefied by his increasing drunkenness, offers Odysseus more and more some of Polyphemos’s goods, which brings them to his cave, and their subsequent capture by Polyphemos.

In the short time of capture, Silenus lies and betrays Odysseus to get out of trouble and Polyphemos eats 6 of Odysseus’s men. Odysseus hatches a plan. He uses the wineskin to get Polyphemos debilitatingly drunk, which is not difficult because he is not used to drink, which is a social product. Once he’s passed out, Odysseus and his soldiers use Polyphemos’ sharpened staff as a spear and blind him. Importantly, the satyrs do not involve themselves in this enterprise, even though their freedom is at stake, due to cowardice and a lack of the notion of shared sacrifice.

The moral of the story is that a group of people who work together and use their reason can overcome a malevolent, overpowering force. What does this moral, story, and its characters have to do with politics in the USA?

The Vision of the Declaration of Independence: Citizens of the Polis

Earlier, I noted that the Declaration of Independence embodies the spirit and principles that ground the virtues of democratic citizenship. It is a statement of a code of conduct to regulate exchanges in the moral marketplace of the state.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In, “The Dignity of No”, I demonstrated that the principle of Creator endowed, unalienable Rights is a statement of the duty that each citizen owes to each other to balance their claims of rights standing with how those claims impact the rights standing of others. In other words, the Declaration of Independence demands that YOU care as much for the rights of others as you do for your own.

Anthropophagy: The Love of Money is the Route of all Meals

Fundamentally, the cyclopean vision is founded on a will to power with an avaristic bent. Equal others are looked to for mutual security, so their property rights are recognized, but everyone else is a potential source of riches or food. Their interests are only relevant to the extent they enable the interests of the cyclopes.

John Adams was aware of the cyclopean vision in America, though he did not name it as such, and the potential problems it could cause the republic. He stated:

“Public Virtue cannot exist without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.” Adams insisted, “There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superior to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society.”

Adams worried that a businessman might have financial interests that conflicted with republican duty; indeed, he was especially suspicious of banks. He decided that history taught that “the Spirit of Commerce . . . is incompatible with that purity of Heart, and Greatness of soul which is necessary for a happy Republic.” But so much of that spirit of commerce had infected America. In New England, Adams noted, “even the Farmers and Tradesmen are addicted to Commerce.” As a result, there was “a great Danger that a Republican Government would be very factious and turbulent there.”

It is worth noting that Adams identifies the problem as an “addiction” to commerce. Much the same as the root of all evil is the love of money, not money itself, it is the addiction to commerce that is the problem, not commerce. When one is beholden of either of these, their duties to the others that make it possible for them to pursue their life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, disappear from the field of their vision.

The Rise of the Cyclopean Vision in the US

The institutions of the land were intended to be places where budding monarchs were nipped. Why is it that the institutions that were intended to practise republican banzai are engaged in greenhousing oligarchs, plutocrats, their minions, and their progeny? How did it come to happen that the citizens of the polis are being prepared as meals for the cyclopes by the satyrs?

Cyclopeans undermined the values of the Declaration of Independence by playing upon the ironies of liberty and regulatory malfeasence. The first play involved denuding Liberty of its societal context. The second play involved acting upon a justified fear that cyclopean interests could gain influence over the government and steal liberty.

The Irony of Liberty

The irony of liberty is that, in practical terms, one has to sacrifice liberty to gain liberty. The irony of liberty is not a contradiction, however. It merely is a statement about how within a limited marketplace of liberty exchange, cooperative action can create positive synergies wherein one gets more liberty back than one invests. One need only think about the liberty to pursue one’s happiness that is gained by accepting a set of laws that uphold personal and property rights as compared to the liberties one enjoys when no such laws whatsoever are not employed, as an example of the value of the liberty exchange.

Denuding liberty from its social context involved getting people to “forget” that the freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness is something no individual can guarantee or is guaranteed by virtue of being an individual. It is something that can only be realized by the sacrifices of others (of their liberty) to make it so.

To undermine the social context of liberty, the cyclopeans had to undermine the system of government that was created to defend and develop the citizen’s independence from the cyclopean vision. Cyclopeans needed to get the citizens to distrust their means of guaranteeing their independence. To do this they played upon the Irony of Regulatory Malfeasance.

The Irony of Regulatory Malfeasance

The irony of regulatory malfeasance is that the very mechanism that is used to prevent malfeasance is prone to being manipulated to promote malfeasance. The irony of regulatory malfeasance is not a contradiction. The irony plays out when people mistake the cause of the malfeasance to be regulations themselves, and not the people who manipulate the system.

This is an easy mistake to make, both, because it contains a kernel of logic and because humans, as a practical matter, are prone to manipulation. The logic has a number of trails, some of which are follows:

Regulations are prone to manipulation.

The more regulations that exist, the greater the likelihood that regulations will be manipulated.

Economies of scale are emergent.

The more regulations that are manipulated, the greater the likelihood of synergies of manipulation.

If the regulations don’t exist, then they can’t be manipulated.

If one wants to avoid regulatory malfeasance, avoid regulating.

Cyclopeans have been very successful in cultivating a deep distrust in government and regulations. This is not difficult in a land where so many of the populace have migrated from countries where cyclopeans use government as a means of repression, rather than emancipation. It is fascinating to observe how people who espouse limited government have set themselves up as the default option, when the government makes mistakes, even if that mistake is a failure to regulate.

Those who share the cyclopean perspective on limited governance, which does not mean they ascribe to its’ other aspects nor its reasons, incorrectly identify problems caused by a lack of governance to be problems caused by too much governance.

The problem with this view of government, as noted above, is that regulations are at the heart of the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Regulations make rights happen. Accordingly, it is right to be concerned about the negative effects of too much governance, but one must also be aware that too little governance also undermines a society. Finding the right ratio between freedom and constraint is key to good regulation “Ratio” is the root of rationality, so the notion of finding the right ratio is a good place to conclude.

The cyclopean perspective lacks depth, which is why it lacks balance, which is why it was perceived by the Greeks to be less than fully rational. Those aspects of the current economic problems that are tied to the imbalance of influence between citizens, corporate interests, and elected representatives are the product of a well-entrenched cyclopean culture preying upon a reasonable apprehension citizens hold about government overreach. By not effectively regulating the relationship between corporate interests and elected representatives, corporate interests have overreached into the lives of the citizens. It is not rational to maintain this structure, if the aim of the society is to promote the values of the Declaration of Independence. This being so, citizens must end the practise where cyclopean corporate interests provide wineskins to the satyric elected representatives as trade bait to allow the cyclopeans to pillage the nation in the name of Polyphemos’ god, “Wealth”, and the filling of their bellies.

America isn’t easy

Building and sustaining a diverse community is not easy.

What should we celebrate?

Celebrate: to perform (a sacrament or ceremony) publicly and with appropriate rites; to honor by solemn ceremonies and refraining from ordinary business; to hold up or play for public notice.

What should we tolerate?

Tolerate: to endure or resist the action of without grave or lasting injury; to suffer to be or to be done without prohibition, hindrance, or contradiction.

What should we not tolerate?

Freedom of Speech: speech as a celebratory, tolerable, or non-tolerable moral action

The right to free speech celebrates the toleration of alternative views and the expression of those views.

“Monsieur l’abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write” – Voltaire (potential misattribution)

The right to free speech, however, does not create an obvious corresponding duty – at least, linguistically it does not. American free speech law creates no duty to listen, no duty to repeat, no duty to comprehend; it only creates a duty not to silence a speaker in the majority of situations. But the “duty” not to silence is cumbersome, and it is much clearer to legislate a right to free expression for the speaker rather than finding a way to create a duty not to silence others

.

The benefit of celebrating toleration is educationally obvious.

A liberal education depends upon—presupposes—unfettered thought, inquiry, and expression.1 This is necessary not only for the production of knowledge but also for the preparation of citizens in a diverse democracy. A vital campus is one where ideas meet, mix, conflict, engage, and emerge changed by the interaction. But genuine dialogue is a difficult, even fragile, human endeavor. It entails both speaking and listening, articulating one’s views and earnestly considering those of others. Campus communities need both to protect the rights of all members to think and speak freely and to foster the conditions that make dialogue possible

.

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
Proverbs 27:17

What is not obvious, however, is the place in the grey area where either that which should not be tolerated enters or where that which should be tolerated is barred from entry.

Further, the difficulty of seeking balance necessarily places those who are generally in close alignment, at stark departure points on drivingly emotive questions concerning what conduct transcends the bounds where tolerance should be upheld. In other words, small differences of opinion are dramatically magnified when they sit on either side of the fulcrum of a significant moral issue.

Such situations are inflamed even more when the discussion involves competing primary moral claims concerning intolerable conduct by more than one party in a multiparty situation? For example, imagine that the perpetrator of a heinous crime might have been denied a fair trial by agents of the state. To what extent is someone who defends the perpetrator’s right to a fair trial guilty of supporting committing crimes against the victim or potential victims and to what extent are those who support the victim’s right to justice guilty of supporting misconduct by agents of the state that deny the perpetrator’s right to a fair trial and the right to a fair trial in general?

Given such cases where justice and injustice have more than one face, what duties to listen and understand do we owe each other and where is the point where the duty to understand is superseded by the duty to reject what should not be tolerated?

Balance in the Blogosphere

Blogs are not nations and do not have a responsibility to cater to competing worldviews to the extent that they do not adopt the mantle of doing so. Blogs are free to practise worldview exclusivity.

Exclusivity, however, tends to require adherence to a code of conduct among the included. Questions of conduct, specifically those that relate to what should be celebrated, tolerated, and not tolerated, appear to be the driving forces behind the siginficant fluctuations in readership, contributorship, and authorship that are occurring throughout the blogosphere as blogs decline, ascend, emerge and submerge.

Given this state of flux in the blogosphere, what duties to listen and understand do the included owe to each other and where is the point where the duty to understand is superseded by the duty to banish what and who should not be tolerated?

What do you think?

This is an open thread for civil tongues,

which means he is banished!

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Gay-Lussac

The pressure of a fixed mass and fixed volume of a gas is directly proportional to the gas’s temperature.

This relationship is known as the Gay-Lussac’s Law and a pressure cooker is an example of the law in practice. Cooking under pressure creates the possibility of cooking with high temperature liquids because the boiling point of a liquid increases as its pressure increases. High pressure and high heat can result in delectable dishes.

Cooking under pressure can be also dangerous because as liquids change phase into gases their volume expands greatly. For example, at atmospheric pressure the volume of steam is about 1700 times greater than the volume of water. To prevent pressure cookers from becoming bombs, relief devices (pop safety valves) are employed that are capable of relieving all of the steam the vessel is capable of producing.

America the Beautiful Pressure Cooker

The political pressure cooker is beginning to heat up. The power brokers and institutions that drive the nation have arrived unannounced on the doorsteps of America like a gaggle of unwanted, high maintenance relatives that demand hospitality for an unforeseeable time and that won’t take no for answer. Furthermore, they’ve announced that more relatives are on the way. Whatever plans America’s householders had, they’ve just gone out the window, with their household budgie and the relatives’ cat in hot pursuit.

People are justifiably angry with this incursion. Their budgie might not have been much, but it was “their budgie”, nurtured from birth into what it had become. Justifiably angry householders are trying to work out why the relatives arrived on their doorsteps and why they brought their fucking cat.

Common Sense

Common sense, in everyday use, is thought of as something that everyone ought to know. Will Rogers notes the problem with this view.

I dont know why they call it common sense. If it was so common more people would have it. (h/t Tom in Paine)

Rogers knew, like most of us, that common sense notions have to be learned and, often, taught. For example, that most flames burn we can learn by experiencing being burnt. We learn morals by having our families and communities teach us, by calibration, how we ought to act.

Sometimes we encounter others that do not share our moral view. How ought we to treat those who do not share our common sense?

The sensus communis

Acknowledging that there are different ways of seeing a thing, broadly conceived, is a first step in allowing that some of those other ways of seeing might have legitimacy. This acknowledgment is embodied in the Roman notion of the sensus communis (there is more than one notion). In the Roman notion, common sense is seen as the sense of the commons, which means that the sensus communis encorporates every view on every thing that each member of the community holds. It is like the opposite of how we use common sense because our use means there is only one right way to view a thing. Their view is like a warehouse or a purse, where everyview is stored because it might become useful some day.

This Roman notion is conservative in bold letters. It is practical because it recognizes that the vast majority of us can see something the same way and be wrong. If everyone held only one view, then what options would we have if we find we’ve got it wrong? (Nature abhors monocultures, for the most part.) By conserving alternate views we have a ready set of options to try, if our accepted wisdom turns out to be unwise.

The sensus communis and the pressure cooker

How does this relate to the pressure cooker? Somehow the power brokers and institutions that drive the nation, through their understanding and manipulation of the relatives/variables in the formulae by which they mathematically model the world, got some things wrong. They sent these relatives to the nation’s doorsteps. The relatives are eating the householders out of the hold they have on the house. The householders want the power brokers and institutions to do their jobs and send the relatives on their way.

Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done because it’s difficult to sort out all of the causes of the problems and the likely solutions. It’s made worse by those who are trying to cover the tracks of the relatives on their way to the households. It’s made even worse by those who are trying to say that it’s the neighbors who are the problem, not the relatives.

All in all, there is a nation full of justifiably angry householders using their received wisdom to make sense of the information they are given, contrary interpretations abound, and the temperature and pressure are building as the opposing views run into each other at ever increasing pace while the larders getting smaller, and so on. What can be done to turn down the heat before the pop safety valve is tested and/or fails?

Pop Safety Quiz

Ralph B might say something like we ought to be ready to do more listening and less talking at. He’s right. Myiq might say we ought not to suffer fools lightly. He’s right. SoD might say we ought to stop mooning idiots. She’s right. Dakinikat, in her role as the Cajun Quincy of finance, will do the economic forensic work and reveal the culprits, and then say we ought to challenge our assumptions about what’s right. She’s right. Riverdaughter might say it’s time to unwind and tend to soothing thyself for a while. She’s right.

I think we are all right. Booman’s right. Cannon’s right. Lambert’s right. Jeralyn’s right. kevin k is r.. r.. right. Murphy is right. Paul Lukasiak is right. Lawnguylander is wrong.

We are also wrong because our remedies are unlikely to be suitable for each and every situation. That’s not a matter of fault; it’s simply a matter of fact because none of us has a God’s eye view. In other words, our degree of rightness and wrongness depends on the fit of our imperfect knowledge to the situation at hand.

That we are fallible should make us act with more humility, however, in the real world humility tends to suffer under power. This is one of the reasons I like to humble power. It’s why I’m often humbled. This said, it’s easy to misidentify the problem or choose the wrong solution. It is the human condition.

What should we do if the heat is too high and we’re overcooking the dish?

What ought we to do to lower the pressure? If you think lowering the pressure is what we ought to do, and you are not sure of how to act, then I recommend searching the sensus communis for whatever answers you think best explain the situation, especially those that appear to offer effective prescriptions. This said, to make a tasty dish out of the “goods” we’ve been given is going to take some heat and some pressure. If we can get the temperature and pressure right, hopefully we can create a dish that is suited for most diets and palates.

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O’Keefe and Giles, in their portrayal of pimp and prostitute, reek of puerile classism. Were it not for the overwhelmingly noxious fumes emanating from the handful of ACORN employees who were apparently willing to enable a child prostitution ring exploiting illegal immigrants, the stink of the ill-informed moral superiority of O’Keefe and Giles would drive evolutionarily advanced members of our species to avoid contact.

Let’s cut to the chase. The child prostitution enablement shown in the videos is beyond the pale. It is wholly unacceptable. Giles and O’Keefe deserve credit for exposing this potential for promoting abuse with ACORN’s structure.

For ACORN to continue doing the good they do for the community, they must clean their house. This said, many houses and streets in the U.S. are in need of a good cleaning.

Credit granted where it is due, I am discomforted by the prurient form of Puritanism implicit in the method O’Keefe and Giles chose to expose ACORN’s illness. Their sting starts with a young female sex worker trying to buy a home, before it lures the ACORN workers into the ugliness of underage sexual exploitation. My issue with O’Keefe and Giles is that they appear to believe that people engaged in the sex trade should not be able to have normal life dreams.

Life in the Sex Trade

Life circumstances lead some people to prostitution. In our culture, it is rarely a profession of choice. This is something our political class should be well aware of, given the large number of personally undertaken, hobby social science, in-depth probes they have engaged in over the years.

There are volumes of research on the various factors and dynamics that create the participants in the world’s oldest profession. In our culture, an experience of sexual abuse and economic vulnerability are common themes in the dynamic of becoming a prostitute.

Should being a sex worker be a barrier to living as other citizens live?

If a sex worker wants to buy a home, and she meets all of the relevant requirements for obtaining a mortgage, other than that she cannot state her profession on the mortgage application because her form of employ is illegal, what is she to do, other than lie? If that sex worker wants to do the proper thing as a citizen and pay her taxes as a self-employed person, what is she to do, other than lie?

The simple answer is that citizens who want to pay taxes and buy homes should not choose to live the lifestyle of a prostitute. This is the type of answer one expects from those who are ignorant of the dynamics that create prostitution, especially in the underage realm. For example, leaving is often not merely a personal decision and few pimps are as non-threatening as the one portrayed by James O’Keefe. Accordingly, it fits that such an answer would come from those who choose to disregard how the practice of their political philosophy enhances the conditions that create the sex trade.

In this regard, Ms. Giles words to Sean Hannity on how she conceived the project:

It’s amazing what girls think about when they are jogging. And that was just something that popped into my head. I had never seen an ACORN office, I really didn’t even know that they existed and I jogged into the wrong part of town, saw some homeless people and street ladies and I put two and two together when I turned around to get back into a safe neighborhood. And it’s like — what if these people went into ACORN — a prostitute and what would come from that? No bills, no nothing — would they get a house? Could they start a business? So we put it to the test.

It is telling that Giles was interested in whether or not ACORN would help a street lady buy a home and, apparently, not so interested in what caused the women to become street ladies. Then again, perhaps that’s simply a feature of rarely running into the “wrong part of town?” Regardless, Giles began her project with two targets, ACORN and street ladies who wanted to buy a home.

For O’Keefe and Giles, having to live with the danger, and adopt the stigma, attached to selling sexual services does not seem to be enough punishment. They appear to think there is something improper about a prostitute wanting to own a home, which, if she worked there, would also be a brothel. They seem unable to see that owning a home might serve as a base upon which to leave the sex trade. Thankfully, many ACORN employees are not afflicted by the anti-New Testament immorality that informs that type of thinking.

ACORN: The Bad and the Good

ACORN has problems at a variety of levels. It is reasonable to call for a proper audit of the organization, given their government funding. A good time for the audit might be immediately after a full accounting of every dollar of TARP funding is released to the public.

Notwithstanding ACORN’s many problems, it provides valuable community services. ACORN employees work to bring a better life to many citizens and many of these citizens reside in the underclass. Working with people in the underclass requires empathy for their circumstance and a pragmatic attitude that involves working with limited resources to bring about optimal results, which will necessarily be modest at best. To me, it is entirely appropriate for an ACORN accountant to bend a category to find a way for a sex worker to pay her taxes so she can buy a home. (Perhaps the idea of a citizen wanting to pay taxes is outside the worldview of the young Republican film makers?)

O’Keefe and Giles have done a community service by exposing rot in the structure of ACORN. Unfortunately, their methodology lacks the discipline of the precautionary principle. As a tool for the healing of the body politic, therefore, the methodology of O’Keefe and Giles is flawed, because they are willing to worsen the lives of sex workers to achieve their aim of disarming ACORN. Accordingly, the methodology of O’Keefe and Giles is unethical because it causes a wholly unnecessary amputation, where a good anti-biotic would have done the job. For this reason, I reject the pseudo-Puritanism implicit in their methodology for its lack of empathy and wisdom.

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(With apologies to Taylor Swift)

Kanye West may save Obama’s presidency. When President Obama said “He’s a jackass.”, the President confirmed a simple truth about civic virtue that transcended most political boundaries.

Importantly, he did so authentically. His statement was not the product of intense focus group distillation.

The comment leaked (hmm) and it met with significant approval. Unsurprisingly, given President Obama’s historic fall from favorability grace, the video was “released” by CNN.

In the video, the President is charming just being himself. His charm is but a bonus, however, because the People’s approval was based on his bare words.

Mr. West’s act could save Obama’s presidency, if “President Obama” recognizes the simple truth of why his comment worked. The people who voted for him did so because he promised to speak the truth and he promised to act on the truth. His statement both spoke and performatively acted on the truth of Mr. West’s behavior.  The People approved.

It’s remarkable that Obama has not realized the power of being honest, given that the promise of honesty carried him to power. Heck, he even disarmed the faux race angle of the incident, which delivers on the post-racial promise (that others made for him).

So, if President Obama realizes that being honest and keeping his promises (general as they were) will give him the best chance of having a second term, then perhaps he’ll adopt doing so as an election strategy. If he does, then his presidency will be historically important because he will be an example of how people benefit by doing the right thing.

UPDATE: Many of you think my modest proposal is not too swift. That is not a bad outcome.

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Is it beyond our ken to maintain a noble purpose as we guide our battered ships of state through the dark shadows of this mild squall of an economic crisis? Whom of us will risk life and limb to keep the ships afloat? Who will cast away possessions for the same purpose? Who will act to subvert these sacrifices? How will the storm weather us, as we weather the storm?

I ask these question because these darkling foreshadows are pallid compared to those that will attend the forthcoming Category Six typhoon of environmental collapse. How will that storm weather us, if we weather the storm? Given the tendency of people to adopt default positions in crisis situations, how we perform now, should give us some indication of how we’ll perform in much more dire circumstances.

Curiously, given the introduction, the point of this post is not to delve into the ugliness which portends. The point of this post is to ask the question, “How should we behave when faced with the absurdity that the cultural virtues that we cherish undermine the existential preconditions of our culture?” In other words, what does a wine-inspired poet do, when he finds that greater amounts of drink are fueling his muse, but not curing his cirrhosis and, in fact, killing him?

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When I fall into the trap of thinking we must’ve learned something from our past, even our recent past, I get blindsided one more time by some vile person twisting patriotism to one’s country into a jingoistic witch hint.  I’ve been appalled at the comments we’ve seen these past few days.  It makes me believe that we’ve just seen the return of the black list and Van Jones went straight to its top.  You certainly must know that I am not referring to his race by using the word black, but I can’t imagine, with all these rants I’m seeing about the Black Panthers on threads with no evidence Jones ever associated with them, that race isn’t a part of this.  The most remote link I can find is that he didn’t support the death penalty for one former member and as a practicing Buddhist, you can put me in that number too and yet  I can tell you with certainty that I’ve never been a Black Panther.

Race and certainly class are part of this hateful conversation.  Screaming “Cultural Elites” is equivalent to screaming “Bitter Knitters” whether you want to admit it or not.  The ugly conversations held on several threads this weekend just about made me toss out my keyboard.  You see, as a nonconformist, you probably want me on that list now too.

Are any of you heralding in the new age of McCarthyism?   Of course,  I’m referring to that disturbing period of American History where Americans that ventured into unpopular philosophies or behaviors found themselves unable to make a living or find a platform for their talents.  Many even found themselves in jail.  Who among you that grew up in that period or have read about it, really wants to return to that oppressive and paranoid place? Or  perhaps have you decided that you’re so pristine that you’d like to join in the book burning or testify to the  new House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC).  Perhaps, you could be persuaded to turn your neighbors or family into the purity police?

If hysteria and misunderstanding around the nature of left wing activists is part of  our heritage and now, part of our future, I want to sign on right now to condemn it. I’m not going to wait until some one like Glenn Beck finds a seat in Congress and we bring back the Committees on UnAmerican Behavior to speak out.   The last few threads that we’ve had here on this blog defending the right of one citizen–even one serving in the government–to hold beliefs and past activism that some find offensive is bringing out nastiness that I’ve mostly read in books and seen in movies up to now.   I, for one, do not want to go into yet another period of puritanical purity purges based on some one’s idea of what it means to be American.

If you want to see what it means to be American pick up the constitution and read it. Put down the damn remote.

I hit Wikipedia for some of these pictures and few of McCarthyism’s Greatest Hits.  I found the speeches and actions of people that stood up before it was too late as well as many creative folks who went down in smoke and ash because no one stood up for them.  I pulled this section up that even sounds vaguely familiar to the stuff coming out of town halls by teabaggers.

One focus of popular McCarthyism concerned the provision of public health services, particularly vaccination, mental health care services and fluoridation, all of which were deemed by some to be communist plots to poison or brainwash the American people. This viewpoint led to major collisions between McCarthyite radicals and supporters of public health programs, most notably in the case of the Alaska Mental Health Bill controversy of 1956.

Every time I’m forced to sign a loyalty oath or repeat the pledge of Allegiance, I’m reminded that it’s the public display of patriotism, not the private act of wishing the best for your community and neighbors that’s frequently valued.  Social activism–using your beliefs and consciousness–is an act of patriotism because it’s your idea of what’s best for your country.  As long as you’re not advocating violent overthrown of the government or planting bombs, it’s protected by the Constitution.  It’s an American value.  Well, hell, let me let a Republican Senator speechify on that subject.

On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine Republican, delivered a speech to the Senate she called a “Declaration of Conscience“. In a clear attack upon McCarthyism, she called for an end to “character assassinations” and named “some of the basic principles of Americanism: The right to criticize; The right to hold unpopular beliefs; The right to protest; The right of independent thought.” She said “freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” and decried “cancerous tentacles of ‘know nothing, suspect everything’ attitudes.” Six other Republican Senators—Wayne Morse, Irving M. Ives, Charles W. Tobey, Edward John Thye, George Aiken, and Robert C. Hendrickson—joined Smith in condemning the tactics of McCarthyism.

I was not alive when that Declaration of Conscience was stated, but I’ll sign it today.  Here, I’ll even send you over to the Democratic Socialist Party of the USA to let you read their tenants.  Here’s their ‘radical’ agenda.

Democratic socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically—to meet public needs, not to make profits for a few. To achieve a more just society, many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed through greater economic and social democracy so that ordinary Americans can participate in the many decisions that affect our lives.

If I belong to any ideological group it’s one made up of pragmatists.  I don’t care where it comes from, I just want it to work cheap and well.  I don’t seek to topple people with different ideals than me as long as they’re based in some semblance of reality rather than spewed from emotional bile.  I learn from all sides and I take away what is appealing and drop what is appalling.   I’m appalled–completely and absolutely–by this blanket  hatred of some one because their past includes social activism and dabbling in socialism or communism.  Is this the start of a new black list?

Here are some folks that went on the 1950s Blacklist.

Orson Welles,

Leonard Bernstein, Artie Shaw,

Burgess Meredith, Arthur Miller,Gypsy Rose Lee,

Langston Hughes, Charlie Chaplin, Aaron Copeland, Lee Grant,

Zero Mostel, Linus Pauling, Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger,

Paul Sweezy, Tsien Hsue-Shen,Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker…

William O. Douglas wrote chapter called “Judicial Treatment of Nonconformists” in his autobiography.  Hailing from Minnesota, Douglas was considered “brilliant,eccentric, and independent” while still holding the record as the longest serving Supreme Court Justice (36 years and 7 months).  What follows is an excerpt.

The radical has never fared well in American life, whether he was dubbed anarchist, socialist, Bolshevik or Communist. Public passions have always run high against him; and that feeling has radiated from judges as well as from newspapers and the people on Main Street. The result was manifest not only in cases like In re Debs (158 U.S. 564) but whenever the bench felt the “tremor of socialism” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had referred to. The seeds of Communist thought which were spread throughout the world following 1917 fell, therefore, on inhospitable soil. America has long been and remains a very conservative nation. In the 1950s, when the Cold War flourished, the resulting climate of opinion made the dispensation of justice very unlikely when one was merely charged with being a Communist, let alone a person who was, in fact, a hard-core member. Juries were almost bound to reflect the dark suspicions which most Americans harbored about dispensers of a foreign ideology. Judges were not much more independent; it often seemed that they were being whipsawed by public passions and transformed into agents of intolerance. State judges, elected to office, were often mere mouthpieces of the most intolerant members of the community. Michael A. Musmanno of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was a notorious example of this kind of official, but even federal judges, named for life, were affected, as is illustrated by the long series of sad episodes which resulted in federal prosecutions. The break with tradition in my time came with Dennis v. United States (341 U.S. 494), decided in 1951. The indictment charged a “conspiracy” under the Smith Act (18 U.S.C 371) to teach Marxist thought and Marxist doctrine. (Using this rationale, any faculty of a school or college which undertook to offer such courses could also be categorized as taking part in a “conspiracy.”) The only difference in Dennis was that the defendants were in fact Communists. Instruction in Communist ideology by Communists must therefore, it was said, be “advocacy”; and advocacy was taken to mean the hope that the doctrine would become acceptable and put into operation. [See also, the McCarran Act of 1950; and see selections from the Dennis trial transcript.]

In my dissent in Dennis, I said:

Communism in … the world scene is no bogeyman; but Communism as a political faction or party in this country plainly is. Communism has been so thoroughly exposed in this country that it has been crippled as a political force.   Free speech has destroyed it as an effective political  party…. In days of trouble and confusion, when bread lines were long, when the unemployed walked the streets, when people were starving, the advocates of a short-cut by revolution might have a chance to gain adherents.  But today there are no such conditions.  The country is not in despair; the people know Soviet Communism; the doctrine of Soviet revolution is exposed in all of its ugliness and the American people want none of it. (341  U.S.  588)

Take a deep breath and read that last line that I bolded.  I used to have to pull this line out for my students during the height of the Reagan years.  I also reminded them that the USSR hadn’t reached 100 years yet and we had a civil war by then that nearly brought us down. I told them that I didn’t expect the USSR to see its 100th birthday and damn, was I right!  The one thing, however, I never expected was that what has followed has yet to give its people as high of a standard of living.  Think on that awhile then think of  Sweden and Israel which are socialist countries.

Our country may be in despair today instead of malaise and Soviet Communism may now be on the ash heap of history, but that last bit is as true today as it was when Douglas wrote it.  The American people want none of it and so it will not happen.  Liberalization has been the recent history of the People’s Republic, all the former Soviet Countries, and even the European ones that nationalized many industries during the 1960s.  Every one is mucking about in the great middle of a mixed economy and most of us are fortunate enough to have some form of democracy to support our choice of economic system.

The U.S. will never going to go over the edge to socialism.  If any excess exists, it has historically been towards the right.  We didn’t topple during the first Red Scare of the 1920s when Emma Goldman and Eugene Debs were alive.  We didn’t collapse during the second Red Scare of the 1950s.  The old Hayek tale of Creeping Socialism is just that, an old tale. Look at the world!  They’ve all come back towards us with their choice of modified market structures.  Some of their government choices are lacking in democracy, but most are mixed market economies.  We’re all just mucking about the middle trying to find what works.  At least I am.  If you want to blacklist me for that and my tolerance of extreme left views, then go ahead, because I’m sitting here trying to find a similar place in my heart that’s tolerant of extreme right views at the moment.  It’s damned harder too because we’ve been here twice before and both times it became an unpleasant situation.

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Ted Kennedy has just died after a long battle with brain cancer at the age of 77.

From CNN:

“We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever,” a family statement said. “We thank everyone who gave him care and support over this last year, and everyone who stood with him for so many years in his tireless march for progress toward justice.”

Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family. May he rest in Peace.

This is an open thread.

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