[Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?
E. Wayne Johnson
ewj at pigs.ag
Mon Aug 24 13:02:09 CDT 2009
Abortion is murder, and in some ways perhaps worse than Obama's
remote-controlled roasting of innocents in the name of the evil empire.
Abortion is also Eugenics-based Genocide, eradication of "human weeds",
as Margaret Sanger boasted. It is never ceases to amaze me that
the so-called (& self-styled) "compassionate liberals are so racist.
Even Urbana City Government takes our tax money and gives it to the
abortionists.
I refer you to the City of Urbana web site and the posted budget and
expenditures.
Neither your lack of familiarity with the message nor the fact of many
abuses negates its truth.
The message is perfect, but man has made many inventions.
I even agree that we should have some government, but I really do
perceive the established government as being
quite "destructive to those ends" for which the people established it in
the first place, that is to secure
the blessings of liberty to the people.
On 8/24/2009 12:35 PM, Ricky Baldwin wrote:
> Wayne, I believe you are well-intentioned, but your black hats need a
> bit of white for authenticity and vice versa.
>
> The coercive government you can't conceive as doing any good saves
> lives by the millions, not just through funding local rescue
> operations and so on, but by funding programs that feed and house
> people, give college assistance to a person who missed all of high
> school due to drug problems but is now clean and can pass the GED and
> get a nursing degree and hold down a job and raise a family as a
> single mom, etc. (No, this is not a hypothetical example.) OSHA
> alone has saved tens of thousands of lives, comparing rates of workers
> killed on the job before (under less regulated capitalism) and after.
> And so on.
>
> I know it's hard for you to see it this way, but abortion is also a
> great benefit to many poor families. I agree with Carl that given the
> socioeconomic pressures surrounding the issue, this does not make
> these decisions stone free (hardly any decision is under our system),
> but cutting off options for poor people whose options are already
> limited hardly does them a favor. But if you think our government,
> whatever else we say about it, is really funding abortions all over
> the place, think again.
>
> Now, to the other issue, your faith is yours and your right to have.
> But let's not mince words. The message you mention is open to some
> interpretation, and the list of things that have been done to preserve
> it in one form or another is long and egregious, as with other sorts
> of faiths, including so-called "Marxist" ones. Certainly this history
> should not impugn others who share certain beliefs and reject others,
> but I think the value you ascribe to this "covenant" doesn't
> generalize quite so broadly.
>
> You are free, of course, to write off my opinion as that of a
> Non-Believer. The orthodox Marxists can do the same. But as human
> beings I think we can all acknowledge that none of us has perfect and
> pure answers, and we can be always be wrong - the implication being
> that any belief system or institution, whatever the truth of its core,
> has the potential to go off-course and we must always be there to
> correct it as best we can, and organize others to help if we can.
>
> Ricky
>
> "Speak your mind even if your voice shakes." - Maggie Kuhn
>
> --- On *Mon, 8/24/09, E. Wayne Johnson /<ewj at pigs.ag>/* wrote:
>
>
> From: E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag>
> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?
> To: "John W." <jbw292002 at gmail.com>
> Cc: "Peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
> Date: Monday, August 24, 2009, 11:52 AM
>
> It's pretty hard to imagine that one ought to
> trust the beneficent benevolent care of the poor
> to a coercive government that promotes and funds abortion,
> imperialism, endless war, corporate malfeasance, and financial fraud.
>
> The new covenant message is that people would be internally motivated
> to care for one another. It's been effective where people dare to
> apply it.
>
> On 8/23/2009 8:52 PM, John W. wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 12:31 PM, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag
>> </mc/compose?to=ewj at pigs.ag>> wrote:
>>
>> The Philadelphia Liberty Bell bears a peculiar inscription:
>>
>> /Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the
>> inhabitants thereof Lev XXV, v. X
>>
>> /It should be noted that this is a fragment of "Leviticus
>> 25.10", not the entire "verse".
>> Although it is a complete thought and the use of this verse
>> fragment by the Quakers who commissioned the
>> Liberty Bell is appropriate and legitimate, it is useful to
>> consider the whole verse in the context
>> of that American Republic which venerates the fractured
>> toquassen and shuns its message.
>>
>> Leviticus 25. 10: "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year,
>> and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the
>> inhabitants thereof:
>> it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every
>> man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto
>> his family.
>>
>> Leviticus 25.10 is part of a larger section (Lev. 23 through
>> Lev. 25) which deals with rules of economics, production,
>> distribution of property and wealth,
>> finance, and ethics, and it is punctuated with strong
>> admonitions about the divine inspiration and the practical
>> spiritual implications.
>>
>> Implicit is Leviticus 23-25 is the importance of social and
>> economic equality, and the recognition that left to itself,
>> the game of economics and the outrageous fortunes of the
>> business cycle proceed to a endpoint of masters and slaves.
>> This section of the Levitical law creates an enforced
>> resetting of property, slavery, and debt to the original
>> default state
>> every 50 years, it forbids usury and exploitation, and it
>> blows against the creation of empires, economic classes and
>> cumulative inequality of opportunity.
>>
>> The underlying spiritual concepts of Lev 23-25 are
>> demonstrated under the new covenant, every man in the Kingdom
>> of God acting as led by the Spirit (Jer 31.33),
>> those with two coats willingly giving to those with only one
>> (Lu 3:11), willingly trusting in Providence for their needs
>> (Lu 9.3), sharing freely all things
>> in common (Acts 2.44, Acts 4.32), and egalitarianism without
>> coercion or taking by force (2 Cor 8.1-15).
>>
>>
>> I was loving your discussion of Leviticus and the year of
>> Jubilee, Wayne, until I got to the paragraph above. The Israel
>> of the Old Testament was a theocracy, essentially, so the
>> provisions of Leviticus had the force of law. All of those
>> economic things you enumerate were mandated by law, and they took
>> place, I presume, every 50 years as mandated.
>>
>> Now suddenly in the New Testament it's all voluntary. And this
>> is precisely the argument that libertarians of today use AGAINST
>> any sort of governmental redistribution of wealth, similar to the
>> Jubilee. "I'm damned if I'm gonna let the 'nanny state' tell ME
>> what to do with MY money," they whine. "If I wanna help the poor
>> I'll help 'em, but it has to be voluntary!" The trouble is that
>> libertarians generally don't KNOW any poor people, so to the
>> extent that they help anyone they end up just helping each
>> other. Plus the problems of the poor and disenfranchised are too
>> vast and institutionalized to lend themselves to scattered
>> individual acts of 'charity' here and there. What we discuss on
>> this list, ad infinitum, is the role that GOVERNMENT should play
>> in the economic realm.
>>
>> I'd like to see a national year of Jubilee about every 20 years.
>> Fifty years is too long. But it doesn't really matter, does it?
>> It's never gonna happen.
>>
>> John Wason
>>
>>
>> But what we have is the stupid and immoral party (the Dems)
>> versus the self-righteous and evil party both making
>> merchandise of us all and perverting progress to petty
>> contentions. It's easy to see that both sides
>> are wrong.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 8/22/2009 10:21 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>> John W. wrote:
>>>> ...The two truly lasting contributions made by the Sixties
>>>> were the Civil
>>>> Rights Movement and the Women's Movement. Where those
>>>> class struggles? Only
>>>> in part, I submit.
>>>
>>> You omit the major movement that unites the two you mention,
>>> the anti-war movement.
>>>
>>> Class struggle is rarely perspicuous -- i.e., it's usually
>>> expressed through other conflicts. But it perhaps emerges
>>> more clearly over time:
>>>
>>> "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
>>> profaned, and people are at last compelled to face with
>>> sober senses, their real conditions of life, and their
>>> relations with their kind" (from the aforementioned tract).
>>>
>>> Slavoj Zizek notes "a fundamental difference between the
>>> goals of feminist, anti-racist, anti-sexist struggles on the
>>> one hand, and class struggle on the other. In the first
>>> case, the goal is to translate antagonism into difference
>>> (the peaceful coexistence of sexes, religions, ethnic
>>> groups), but the goal of class struggle is precisely the
>>> opposite: to aggravate class difference into class
>>> antagonism. To set up a series of equivalences between race,
>>> gender and class is to obscure the peculiar logic of class
>>> struggle, which aims at overcoming, subduing, even
>>> annihilating the other – if not its physical being, then at
>>> least its socio-political role and function. In the one
>>> case, we have a horizontal logic involving mutual
>>> recognition among different identities; in the other, we
>>> have the logic of struggle with an antagonist." ("Over the
>>> Rainbow" <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21/zize01_.html> -- the
>>> article repays the difficult of getting through it...)
>>>
>>> The goal is reconciliation on the basis of justice for
>>> races, genders, etc. But reconciliation is impossible
>>> between exploiter and exploited without their giving up
>>> their roles. --CGE
>>>
>>>
>>> John W. wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 3:15 PM, C. G. Estabrook
>>>> <galliher at illinois.edu
>>>> </mc/compose?to=galliher at illinois.edu>
>>>> <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>
>>>> </mc/compose?to=galliher at illinois.edu>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I'd say corporate capitalism managed to co-opt the
>>>> counter-culture over the course of a generation, roughly
>>>> the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, with the crucial change
>>>> coming about half-way through, with the rise of
>>>> neo-liberalism. (David Harvey's book with that title is the
>>>> best general account I know.)
>>>>
>>>> Serious discussion of revolution as an historical
>>>> phenomenon rather quickly became ads for "Revolutionary
>>>> Jeans!," etc.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes. And the factory workers, after calling hippies
>>>> "faggots" in the 1960s for their long hair, started wearing
>>>> their hair long themselves sometime in the 1970s. And
>>>> watched passively, dumbly, as private sector union membership
>>>> declined, factories were shuttered, and their jobs moved
>>>> offshore.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> But it's certainly true that the uncomfortable questions
>>>> and challenges to the assumptions of American society that
>>>> go under the collective name of "the
>>>> sixties" had an unsettling effect. That's why the sixties
>>>> and its
>>>> "excesses" are generally excoriated by bien-pensant
>>>> liberals and
>>>> conservatives alike. (For a not unimportant example, see
>>>> the condemnation of
>>>> the sixties in "The Audacity of Hope.")
>>>>
>>>> American society suppressed but didn't answer the sixties'
>>>> questions, because
>>>> they were questions about human flourishing, which is
>>>> necessarily retarded
>>>> to a greater or lesser degree by the exploitation necessary
>>>> to capitalism.
>>>>
>>>> Nevertheless American society is a good bit more civilized
>>>> today than it was in the 1960s, largely as a result of
>>>> those questions. (As an example of the poets' -- in this
>>>> case TV writers -- getting there first, see these questions
>>>> posed however obscurely in the current series "Mad Men.")
>>>>
>>>> I think you could argue that all real revolutionary
>>>> movements need to invent new media of communication, from
>>>> the early Christian movement's invention of the codex on.
>>>>
>>>> The new media of the 1960s were the underground newspaper
>>>> and alternative radio, now both sadly in almost complete
>>>> decay.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Let us not forget Robert Crumb and Zap Comix. :-)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> They've gone the way of an independent labor press (and
>>>> radio) of an earlier American generation. They've been
>>>> supplanted by this box I'm typing on; it and parallel IT
>>>> will probably soon destroy hard-copy newspapers, no bad thing.
>>>>
>>>> But where's the social revolution that should go with new
>>>> media? Maybe we'll be surprised.
>>>>
>>>> You agree with the Old Man who wrote (when he was a young
>>>> man), "The history of all hitherto existing society is the
>>>> history of class struggles."
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes and no. The two truly lasting contributions made by
>>>> the Sixties were the
>>>> Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Movement. Where
>>>> those class
>>>> struggles? Only in part, I submit.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> (His tract etc. are worth re-reading.) When you comin'
>>>> back, red writer? --CGE
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> John W. wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 5:15 PM, C. G. Estabrook
>>>> <galliher at illinois.edu
>>>> </mc/compose?to=galliher at illinois.edu>
>>>> <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>
>>>> </mc/compose?to=galliher at illinois.edu>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> "... the Counter-Culture hung up the Out of Business sign
>>>> sometime in the Nineties, finished off by identity politics
>>>> and general self-satisfaction..."
>>>> --<http://www.counterpunch.org/>
>>>>
>>>> Commenting weekly in those days on "the news of the week
>>>> and its coverage by
>>>> the media" on News from Neptune as I was, I'd say that
>>>> Alex Cockburn has
>>>> this about right.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I haven't read Cockburn's article; his essays are
>>>> invariably too long for my
>>>> limited attention span. But I submit that in the so-called
>>>> "counter-culture" essentially BECAME the culture. In some
>>>> ways our
>>>> generation, that of the 60s, was absorbed into the existing
>>>> culture; in
>>>> certain ways it profoundly changed the culture; and in yet
>>>> other ways the
>>>> culture recoiled in horror and moved in the opposite
>>>> direction. But isn't
>>>> that simply the way of the world? Thesis ---> antithesis
>>>> ---> synthesis , for
>>>> good or ill?
>>>>
>>>> What we need now, I guess, is a NEW counter-culture. The
>>>> closest thing I've
>>>> seen to that in this country is the development of the
>>>> independent media movement starting in the late 1990s.
>>>> Last I looked, the U-C Independent Media Center was still
>>>> very much alive and well. But of course the new
>>>> counter-culture needs to affect more than just the media,
>>>> important as that is.
>>>>
>>>> I further submit, though, that as long as human beings
>>>> populate the planet and compete for finite resources, there
>>>> will ALWAYS be war. I dare to imagine that American
>>>> culture could change to allow for universal health care
>>>> if the political and public will was there. We could
>>>> inject a bit of "socialism" into our "free-market
>>>> capitalism" without demonstrable ill effects. But human
>>>> nature does not change, and war will be with us always.
>>
>>
>
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