For those unafflicted by the dreaded TLDR-syndrome 😎, the full 22 part post can be found in my tabs 'Exiting the Wizard's Circle of Economics', or you can go to a particular section within it, from the table below - and hello to those arriving here from Correspondence Theory!
For everyone else who prefers more bite sized chunks of Blogodidact, I'll be posting the 22 individual chapters as posts on the main page here, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
I'm thankful that Americans have chosen to buy America some additional time & breathing room with their votes in the 2024 elections... what's the best way for us to use this temporary reprieve? Count on our politicians to fix America? I'm... leaning towards a NO on that. Call me crazy. But no, IMHO, the only way we are going to make America great again, is by Americans making themselves American, again.
How Americans lost hold of their understanding of America and Common Sense, was through their subjecting themselves for over a century to what passes for 'Education', 'Economics', and 'Law', today, which pragmatically separated us from our understanding of What is (Metaphysics), how we you know it (through an epistemology of Causality and Logic), and our concern for what is appropriate (Ethics), without which Common Sense cannot be exercised.
With that in mind, I think that understanding the concepts and history covered in this post, will provide a necessary, if not fully sufficient, step towards restoring an understanding of America, and Common Sense, to Americans (and their friends).
Economic Labels kill off meaningful Questions - Step out of the Wizard's Circle of 'Common Good'
Contents: A pathway towards identifying Classic American Liberalism
Though I quibble with its emphasis, this is an otherwise spot on response against the latest Woke fad of expressing concern for 'anti-Asian violence':
"...You use our victimhood, turning it into your political gains—whether to infringe on the 2A or keep portraying Trump as that boogeyman. You sided with the rich NBA players over the freedom fighters of Hong Kong. You sided with Disney and NIKE over the lives and the dignity of the Uighurs in western China. You praised Antifa while they harassed and doxxed a gay Asian journalist. You sided with the rioters and looters that stole, robbed, and burned down our shops and businesses all last summer.
Yesterday, we found out the killer in the Georgia shooting rampage is a disturbed young man who is an Asian fetishist. Not exactly the perp that my brother’s friend wished for. I find it twisted and sick that there are a lot of white folks who get a ‘hard on’ for minorities’ victimhood. It’s as reprehensible as someone who has an Asian sexual fetish. Which is confusing—because one moment we are categorized with the ‘Whites’ when we are applying for colleges and universities and we don’t get the same affirmative action benefits of other POC when applying for a job— yet we are marginalized victims again, to serve your political purpose.
So we are just pawns.
My brother told his ‘friend,’ or his ‘ally,’ to snap out of trying to be the white savior...."
And while understandable, and quite accurate from a numerical point of view, allowing the focus to be put on those 'trying to be the white savior', misses the more important mark: that every race, creed, gender, ethnicity, or sub-groupings of those by personal proclivity, are all well represented in the would-be savior game today - it is, after all, a numbers game. The best way to end that game, is to put the focus on what best identifies, unites and empowers it, and that is the Pro-Regressive 'progressive' ideology itself. Also, don't be misled into thinking of 'progressives' as being only on the Left - yes the Pro-Regressive Left has larger numbers, but never forget that the Pro-Regressive Right is still trying as hard to pump up their rookie numbers to compete as well.
And also of course, Pro-Regressives do care about Asians, as they once cared about preventing Asians from coming to America, and later cared about rounding Asians up and putting them in internment camps, just as they now care about protecting them from 'Asian hate'. Pro-Regressives also care about Blacks, as they once cared about keeping them enslaved, and when that became too problematic, they cared about keeping them separated at the bottom of society with Jim Crow, and just as they now care about protecting them from 'white supremacy'. Pro-Regressives do care about homosexuals as well, just as they once cared about sterilizing and imprisoning them, and now care about being their 'allies'. And of course Pro-Regressives care about White Christians just as they once cared about protecting their racial purity & social status by utilizing eugenics measures against all other races & creeds, and by employing economic means (such as minimum wage laws), in order to save them from competition from all minorities, just as they now care about denouncing White Christians as a central platform in the Pro-Regressive's efforts to show how much they care about every other race, creed, gender, ethnicity, or personal proclivity thereof.
Do not lose sight of the fact that Pro-Regressives - without regard for race, creed, gender, ethnicity, or personal proclivities - will be extremely pleased to put anyone up on a pedestal, and once having put them up there, they'll be equally delighted to praise them, or chain them, or whip them, or engage in any other action, that best serves their purposes in securing more political power by appealing to those other races, creeds, genders, ethnicities, or personal proclivities, whose numbers have the potential of making it worth their while to 'help' them in the very same way.
Who it is that the Pro-Regressives of the Left and Right do not care about, is the individual - no matter their race, ethnicity, creed, gender, or personal proclivities - they despise the individual, because the Pro-Regressive's power depends upon groups, upon collectives, and whatever collective of race, ethnicity, creed, gender, or personal proclivities which they've identified as having the potential to secure them more power over individuals, they will curry favor from them as best as they are able to. What the Pro-Regressive hates most, is truth and justice, and it hates them because those serve the individual, and so serves to weaken the Pro-Regressive's power over them.
Pro-Regressives care about every possible grouping of humanity in exactly that degree to which they are useful in preserving and increasing their power. Wokeism is nothing more than the latest evolution of their algorithm for calculating which segments of race, creed, gender, ethnicity, or personal proclivities, are most useful to be curried to, or condemned, in order to secure more power for the Pro-Regressives to rule over individuals with.
Alert readers may have noticed that every race, creed, gender, ethnicity, or personal proclivity are so as individuals first, and if you let Pro-Regressives help you to forget that, then you will become just another useful number in their algorithms. And if you are foolish enough to want to play in their Woke games, you are exactly the fool that they are looking for.
K. Lee is refusing to play a part in the algorithm's Woke power-play. Be like K. Lee.
A friend & I who most often come to similar conclusions, differ on whether the Senate's trial against Donald Trump...is constitutional, or not. Though Morgan thinks that what the Leftists' are doing is "...stupid and dishonest...", he does think it is constitutional, and I most definitely do not think the Senate trial is constitutional - does he have a point? Well... let's have a look at the Impeachment Clauses themselves:
"Article 1, Section 2, Clause 5
The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.
Article 1, Section 3, Clauses 6 and 7
The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried the Chief Justice shall preside; And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.
Judgement in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgement and Punishment, according to Law."
So where does the disagreement come from? I think it has to do with where he and many others are beginning from - the Impeachment Clauses themselves. Why? Because, IMHO, they aren't the proper place to start such reasoning from, they're the last part of the process, and with a false start, you're as likely to make a false conclusion as a 'correct' one. Keep in mind here, that I'm looking only at how people can have an honest disagreement over the matter, as distinct from the dishonest and corrupt efforts of the Pro-Regressives (Left & Right) in the media and Democrat & Republican parties (if youcan square their words & actions with law and justice... please, show me how), and they have no relation to those who, like Morgan, are honestly looking at the matter, and trying to determine what is, and is not, constitutional (and BTW, Morgan's got some questions that I'd love to see being taken up in the 'trial' this week).
So with that in mind, and attempting to use the impeachment clauses as our starting point, lets see if we can see what the veritable parser of clauses might see.
If you start with the impeachment clauses themselves, what do you have to go on? Article 1, Section 2, Clause 5, is pretty straight forward, and though historically every other congress has had the good sense of responsibility to at least pretend to intend to have honest hearings, and to bring reasonable charges, the Constitution doesn't say a word about their having to do that. Pelosi got the House of Representatives to impeach the then currently sitting president, again, and that's that. We can argue over whether it was wise to do so, but there's no real argument over whether it was constitutional of the House to do so. It was. It was also stupid and corrupt... but... that doesn't make it unconstitutional, it only shows what kind of thinking is representative of all too sizable a segment of the people living in America, today.
So then what? Article 1, Section 3, Clause 6, says that only the Senate has the power of trying impeachments, and that 'when the President of the United States is tried the Chief Justice shall preside' - do you think that that presents a problem to the earnest clause parser? No, I think, not really, as that too could easily go either way. For instance, if Parser #1 thought that such a line did actually settle matters, then Parser #2 could easily point out that that which refers to the current President, is just as simple a matter of pointing out that since the former president is no longer the current president, then the Chief Justice needn't preside. Sure, Parser #2 would then call out 'next!' and move on, as his fellow Parser's head explodes on the spot. If Parser #1 balks at that, Parser #2 might point to the last portion of the clause which says, that: "...no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.", and point out that it says 'person', and notPresident, right?! Balk & balk, and on they go. We'll leave them there, for now, and move on.
And so what about Clause 7? Here especially, from what I've seen of people honestly trying to parse this out, there seems to be an almost even-odds chance of them coming out one way, or the other. Clause Parser #1 will point out that "Judgement in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, AND disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States", and conclude that 'You can't remove someone who's not in office, amiright?' Right you are, Parser #1... but... then... Parser #2 will point out that 'disqualifications' from holding office, is still on the table. "No it's not!" Parser #1 will reply, 'didn't you see the 'AND'? They can only be disqualified after being removed from office!'. But, as Parser #2 will then point out, that 'and' is preceded by a comma, which makes it less a logically binding of 'This AND that', than an optional listing of 'You can choose from this, and this, and this, and this', indicating that those are options are all available, but optional.' and so forth, and so on the balking heads go.
See what I mean? Beginning from the Impeachment Clauses themselves, will lead honest people into balking heads, balking at this point, and that, and they can go no further - seriously, how could either hope to go any further than endlessly 'Yes!/No!'ing each another from there?
Now, as I said, I do not think that the senate can properly put former president Trump on trial before the senate, but I also do not think that that point can be made and understood, simply on the basis of a common sense reading and parsing of the clauses alone, because 'answers', one way or the other, are only too easy to find, and only too easy to feel satisfied with. And that's pretty much where my back & forth with Morgan was stuck at, as he was looking at the clauses themselves, and found no way to look beyond them when any of the above points were pointed out, such as the point that Trump was no longer in office, Morgan simply replied:
"... But, Trump *was* in office when he was impeached.
The question thereby becomes relevant: Is he so unsuitable for that office that he should never enter it again? I maintain this question is predicated on premises that are not only false, but laughable. But that doesn't make it unconstitutional. The Senate has a valid impeachment article. As I said in my blog post, if they vote to acquit and the House says "Hold up, we just thought of something else we're going to impeach him again"...that's a different conversation. That's a bill of attainder. Congress authorizes the House to act upon the office, not the person; and it authorizes the Senate to act upon the *article*. Both are expressly prohibited from acting upon the person.
And neither one is. The President Pro Tem is presiding over the trial, just as he would preside over the trial of any article impeaching someone other than the sitting President of the US..."
We went back & forth through several feet worth of comments, and not surprisingly, we got no further, as most of the honest arguments that I've seen over the matter, end up in irresolvable 'Yes!/No!'s, and no one can decisively say otherwise. Even Wapo (who I in no way consider to be an honest actor in this) admits: Can a former president be subject to an impeachment trial? The Constitution is murky. The experts (establishment) are split (Libertarianish), and not surprisingly, as more legal experts - the vast majority of whom have learned the law through only the modern positivist parsing of it - side with the Pro-Regressive (Left & Right)'s point of view.
IMHO, the honest differences involved stem from a different approach being taken to not just the law, but to thinking itself, which might be summed up as a tendency to go straight to analysis, in order to arrive at their interested ends, vs performing analysis only after having engaged in synthesis. Think... the modernist 'Critical Thinking' (which Morgan has a favorable view of) approach of looking at what's presented and immediately performing a logical analysis of it, vs the more traditionally reasoned approach, which I favor, of first seeking to understand what it is that's being discussed, checking and verifying the premises of the argument being presented, it's then and only then, if they check out, moving on to perform those logical comparisons needed to test the validity of the argument being presented.
So if we want to get beyond the endless 'Yes!/No!' of balking heads, we've got to begin by starting where we should have focused upon, at the beginning, rather than the end. And the first step of entering deeper into that argument, begins with the immediate surface level definition of the word, Impeachment, which is defined as:
'1.(especially in the US) a charge of misconduct made against the holder of a public office.'
, where the 'holder' is '2. a person who holds something'. That alone will get us no further and deeper in the matter than it did above... unless we begin looking beyond the text of the clauses themselves and into their meaning, do that, and, then we might begin to take notice of what's in the parenthesis at the start of #1:
"(especially in the US)..."
The alert reader will notice that that is an indication that a different approach to impeachment may exist elsewhere. Does that matter to us in the US? Well, No, and Yes, meaning that it doesn't matter what Canada, or Mexico may or may not define or use the word for today, but it does matter how it was elsewhere defined in what formed the basis of our Founder's understanding of Law, even and especially where they disagreed with that. To that end, I'd urge you to read through the links at the bottom of the page that I linked those clauses from, and especially to the last two, both of which came from early and distinguished commentators on our Constitution, the first from from William Rawls, which gives a fine overview of the thinking prevalent in our Founder's time, and the second and far more extensive and comprehensive link, is to former Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story, whose commentaries on the Constitution formed the basis for Constitutional Law for nearly a century, until that point where our Law schools began to actively distance themselves from the thinking of our Founding Fathers, in the 1930's.
Why those apply especially to this part, 'especially in the US', is that they give more than a little history on how and why impeachment developed under the English Crown, and how they deliberately differed from that, and how, and more significantly, why, our Founders defined the process as differently from the English as they did, strictly confining charges of impeachment to 'civil officers' of the United States, including the president and vice-president, who could then be put on 'Political Trial' for, and have judgement rendered against them for 'Political Crimes'. And yes, there's an important reason for why I'm italicizing and underlining those terms, as they indicate an important and very clear distinction between private and civil life, and between both political and criminal charges.
First, there's the difference between Civil & Private life, that needs to be taken into account, as Justice Story puts it,
"... we speak of civil life, civil society, civil government, and civil liberty; in which it is nearly equivalent in meaning to political. It is sometimes used in contradistinction to criminal, to indicate the private rights and remedies of men, as members of the community, in contrast to those, which are public, and relate to the government...."
That distinction was an issue, under that English law which our Founders were deliberately seeking to improve upon. There, impeachment could be applied to a wide variety of person's, and our Founders had that very much in mind when writing the impeachment clauses as they did, as Joseph Story further notes,
"...In this respect, it differs materially from the law and practice of Great-Britain. In that kingdom, all the king's subjects, whether peers or commoners, are impeachable in parliament; though it is asserted, that commoners cannot now be impeached for capital offences, but for misdemeanours only. Such kind of misdeeds, however, as peculiarly injure the commonwealth by the abuse of high offices of trust, are the most proper, and have been the most usual grounds for this kind of prosecution in parliament. There seems a peculiar propriety, in a republican government at least, in confining the impeaching power to persons holding office. In such a government all the citizens are equal, and ought to have the same security of a trial by jury for all crimes and offences laid to their charge, when not holding any official character. To subject them to impeachment would not only be extremely oppressive and expensive, but would endanger their lives and liberties, by exposing them against their wills to persecution for their conduct in exercising their political rights and privileges. ..."[emphasis mine]
, and from that understanding of confining the impeaching power to persons holding office, goes to what the nature of Impeachment was understood by our Founders to mean, and to what they intended it to be used for, and to why it is that Impeachment is defined as: '1.(especially in the US) a charge of misconduct made against the holder of a public office'. Which is why I emphasize, that the impeachment clauses referred to some one person, who presently holds office.
Whatever we might say about the shoddy and rushed nature of the charges of impeachment that the House brought against President Trump, his term in office had not yet expired, and as the Constitution doesn't define the process any further, the charges of impeachment brought by the House are constitutional. But that's only the first step, and the second step comes as those charges are then taken up in a trial in the Senate (and what kind of trial is... and can... that be?), which is what we're going to be subjected to this week, which is occurring weeks after the expiration of the then president's term in office - which means that our Senate, in the name of We The People, will be subjecting a private person to a political trial, on charges of political crimes, and that, IMHO, is not at all acceptable, and is more in line with the practices of the British Crown, which is what our Founders were clearly seeking to distance us from, and for very good reasons, which we should respect and demand be upheld.
Some of the reasons for that,:
"...§ 783. As the offences, to which the remedy of impeachment has been, and will continue to be principally applied, are of a political nature, it is natural to suppose, that they will be often exaggerated by party spirit, and the prosecutions be sometimes dictated by party resentments, as well as by a sense of the public good. There is danger, therefore, that in cases of conviction the punishment may be wholly out of proportion to the offence, and pressed as much by popular odium, as by aggravated crime. ..."
, and,
"...§ 784. There is wisdom, and sound policy, and intrinsic justice in this separation of the offence, at least so far, as the jurisdiction and trial are concerned, into its proper elements, bringing the political part under the power of the political department of the government, and retaining the civil part for presentment and trial in the ordinary forum..."
The President of the United States - and not a private citizen who at one time may have held the office of the President of the United States, but the current office holder of that office - may be subjected to a political trial for political crimes, but a private citizen may not be subjected to political charges, over political crimes, in a political trial.
This is not and should not be, about Donald J. Trump - who is no longer our president and so cannot be removed from office - but about the dangerous notion of using the Constitution's Impeachment Clauses, to subject a private citizen to political crimes and punishments - not only do those charges no longer apply to him, but more importantly they do not under any circumstances, apply to any private citizens, and so the senate should not, must not, and cannot, constitutionally, try a private citizen on charges of impeachment. Those charges were constitutionally brought by the House, upon the public official who was then serving in office at that time, but who no longer is the President of the United States of America. Those are not charges that are suitable for being brought against American citizens, on charges which 'shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor'.
This does not mean that if a former president were suspected of having committed criminal acts while in office, that he would somehow be free from the long arm of the law. Take note of the last line of Clause 7, that "... the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgement and Punishment, according to Law.", IOW if the person in question is believed to have committed criminal acts, they most definitely can still be charged with them after leaving public office, just as any private citizen might be, and if those charges are found to have merit, then that person can be tried, and if found guilty, they can be convicted, and can be sentenced for those crimes - but that can happen only because they are criminal crimes, in criminal court, and not political crimes, being tried in a political court.
As Justice Story pointed out, there is a clear distinction between private affairs and civil duties, and there is also a distinction between what the private citizen can count on when charged in a court of law, and what they might be made to face up to in a political process. A private citizen in a criminal trial enjoys the 'due process of law' and conviction by 'unanimous agreement' of a jury of their peers who believe them to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt - that's not the case in an impeachment trial before the Senate, where it requires only that a 2/3 majority of sitting senators, who can hardly be seen as 'the peers', of that private citizen. The United States Senate, although constrained by laws, is not a court of law, and an impeachment trial is a political process applied only to members (present tense) of our government. The Senate has no power to try private individuals, and what they are now pursuing has far more in common with a British form of impeachment, or bill of attainder, or with a legislature singling out individuals for 'trial' and conviction... than it does our Founders political form of impeachment, and which would be a major constitutional no-no.
For those reasons, what the nature of Impeachment is (as applies to an office holder), for 'political' and not criminal charges, there is a distinction between an Office Holder, and what all office holders immediately revert to on leaving office, the resuming of their fully private status as private citizens, who are due the “privileges” and “immunities” as were later re-asserted in the 14th Amendment. The former 45th president is now a private citizen, and we should not, for any reason, be seeking to bring that private citizen, or any other, up on political charges. Period. If you have reason to believe that he's guilty of a crime, then charge him, try him, and even convict him, but that must be done as with a private citizen being brought up on criminal charges. In no way, shape or form, should a private citizen, be brought up on political charges, and tried in a political court. Ever.
NO.
A thought might have occurred to you here, as it did to Rawls, and to Story, and most others, which are longstanding questions which have not been resolved, such as:
'What happens if the president resigns as the trial begins, what happens? Can the impeachment trial continue?'
Would that be an escape? My answer to that, is no; if the person that is serving the political office of president, is in office when a trial is begun, then his resignation would amount to an evasion of lawful charges, and should be brushed aside - if President Ford hadn't pardoned Nixon after he resigned, he could have been tried in the senate on the charges that the House was presumably about to bring against him, as the prerequisites for the trial were met in that he was in office, and his term would've been active at the time of a Senate trial, and his resignation would have amounted to an attempt to evade trial, and so would have been in that context, invalid. But if the person proposed to be tried for 'political crimes', is not in political office at the start of the trial, because his elected term of office had concluded, then the conditions for a political trial are not met, and that trial is not appropriate.
Yes, the points that Morgan and others are making, do have a point - but only if you go on nothing more than the text of the Constitution alone. Yes, anyone who is capable of reading and using logic, can make the point that the constitution doesn't explicitly say that the President has to be in office, but such a 'logical' and legalistic parsing as that is, IMHO, an extraordinarily dangerous road to stroll down. In issues of power, if the rules defining it are unclear, then the ability to wield that power should default to the usage that is more restrictive towards governmental powers, than to those of private citizens. If you're not sure why, maybe you should think about the differing interpretations of the Commerce Clause, and of all of the enumerated powers of our Constitution's Article 1, Section 8, where similar Clause Parsers of the past and still in the painfully ever present moment, have enabled our government to insert itself into every aspect of our lives. Think of that same murkiness of interpretation being applied when it comes to the action of trying private citizens for political crimes, and by political rules.
For these 'clausal parsing's' and for many other reasons, I am most definitely not a 'Textualist', or of a 'Original Intent' school of thought, because by their similar natures, they also soon stray into equally stunted views of the law, leaving and exposing easy loopholes, which soon lead to evading the deeper meaning that the Constitution was written to express, and to secure; and while it is true that logic is a necessary component of constitutional thought, it is not a sufficient one. Logical comparisons are not a valid starting point, IMHO, as was widely understood up until the last century; instead, the proper starting point had been understood to begin with first asking whether the premises which those logical comparisons are to be performed upon, are true, or not. If not, there are no parsings to apply or logical comparisons to perform, and so no logical conclusion to be pretended to be arrived at, as the journey was cancelled when its premises were found to be untrue. Only after a successful step is completed, should we proceed on to the next step, and properly analyzing the issue requires beginning by looking at what the matter itself is, and then at what the processes, plural, involved are, and only after the matter is found to apply, and each successive step is properly completed, should we come to the part where judgements might be rendered, if found guilty.
Our Constitution was developed not out of ideological schools of 'law', but as the concept and purpose of Law naturally developed into (pre-American) constitutional structures through the concepts of natural law that it was later derived from, and major decisions cannot be made upon the basis of particular clauses without reference to the whole, but only with the full meaning of the law in mind which that clause expresses a portion of. In this particular case of impeachment, that process begins with the concept and history of impeachment itself, whose purpose is to remove an unfit person from political office, and as it was developed in America, to apply to political actors in political office. To accept that it is ok to impeach a private citizen, to try them, and to assign judgement upon them, for the purpose of preventing them from seeking political office in the future, is not only a case of the ends justifying the means, but is a matter of our government using our political processes to limit the available political actions and thoughts of American citizens. Such an action is not, and must not, be tolerated to be, in any sense, justified.
If the term of the person serving in the political office of president, has not expired when a trial is begun, then the prerequisites for the trial are met, and any political penalties are appropriate to be applied to them, if they are found guilty. But if the political term of a person proposed to be tried for 'political crimes', has expired, and they are not in political office at the time of the start of the trial, then the conditions for holding a political trial are not met, and that trial is not, in any way, appropriate, allowable, justifiable, or constitutional.
The 45th president was impeached twice, and was tried in the senate for it once, and as his term in office has expired, he can no longer be constitutionally be tried for impeachment as an office holder. If someone wants to bring criminal charges, and can produce just cause for them, they may do so, but in no way do any aspects of impeachment apply to the former President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump.
I'll leave you with Joseph Story's summary, his opinion, and his realization that the Constitution itself doesn't settle the matter conclusively, that, sadly, is up to us... and judging from our current state of affairs, I think that We The People are the very last ones who should be trusted with the matter.
§ 801. As it is declared in one clause of the constitution, that "judgment, in cases of impeachment, shall not extend further, than a removal from office, and disqualification to hold any office of honour, trust, or profit, under the United States;" and in another clause, that "the president, vice president, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanours;" it would seem to follow, that the senate, on the conviction, were bound, in all cases, to enter a judgment of removal from office, though it has a discretion, as to inflicting the punishment of disqualification. If, then, there must be a judgment of removal from office, it would seem to follow, that the constitution contemplated, that the party was still in office at the time of the impeachment. If he was not, his offence was still liable to be tried and punished in the ordinary tribunals of justice. And it might be argued with some force, that it would be a vain exercise of authority to try a delinquent for an impeachable offence, when the most important object, for which the remedy was given, was no longer necessary, or attainable. And although a judgment of disqualification might still be pronounced, the language of the constitution may create some doubt, whether it can be pronounced without being coupled with a removal from office. There is also much force in the remark, that an impeachment is a proceeding purely of a political nature. It is not so much designed to punish an offender, as to secure the state against gross official misdemeanors. It touches neither his person, nor his property; but simply divests him of his political capacity.
...§ 803. It is not intended to express any opinion in these commentaries, as to which is the true exposition of the constitution on the points above stated. They are brought before the learned reader, as matters still sub judice, the final decision of which may be reasonably left to the high tribunal, constituting the court of impeachment, when the occasion shall arise....
The situation of 'when the occasion shall arise', has indeed arisen, and I'm very skeptical about whether We The People are going to rise to the occasion of it. We'll see.
The President of the United States of America is elected to a term of four years, and during any day, hour, or minute of his term, he has the power to nominate a new Justice to the Supreme Court, with zero restrictions on that nomination as relates to the age, gender, race, political leanings or dying wishes, in who he chooses to nominate.
The nomination of a justice to the Supreme Court of the United States of America, by the President, obligates the Senate to give 'advice & consent' to that nomination.
Was it - technically speaking - giving 'advice & consent' to President Obama's nomination of Garland, for Senator Majority Leader McConnell to say that the senate would decline to approve any nominations made during that year? Sure. But it was a cowardly evasion of responsibility for the Senate to consent in doing so.
As Sen. McConnell obviously had the votes to decline to take up the nomination, he also had - if either he or his fellow senators took their responsibilities seriously - the votes necessary to properly examine the nomination of Merrick Garland, and if they had done so, they would easily and rapidly have found abundant evidence (some of which I pointed out in this post) that Merrick Garland, due to egregious and deliberate misinterpretations of our constitution, and an appalling lack of respect for the individual rights of the citizens of the United States of America, was manifestly unfit to sit upon the Supreme Court. Not only did they have the votes to do that, they also had the rare opportunity to demonstrate and teach the American people, and the anti-American contingent amongst us, exactly why nominees such as Garland were unfit for office on the SCOTUS, or in any branch or agency of our nation's government.
But the GOP led Senate punted instead. Opting for the juvenile (and soon to be empowering) 'no nomination will be considered', option.
The fruit of that pathetic 'easy out' have been on abundant display in the media, such as when former Clinton campaign chairman and chief of staff George Stephanopoulos, now charting unbiased news (*cough*cough* B.S fake news*cough*cough*) on Sunday mornings for ABC, to ask Sen. Cruz:
"Do you have the votes ... to confirm before the election?"
“We’ve got the votes to confirm Justice Ginsburg’s replacement before the election,”
to push through Trump’s Supreme Court nominee before the election, based upon counting political noses alone, without any regard for the qualifications of the Justice being nominated to the court, which is unavoidable, as that potential justice HAS NOT EVEN BEEN NAMED YET.
Additionally, past performance being a definite influencer of future action, it also helped shape the appalling spectacle of the President of the United States of America, being heckled while paying his respects to the deceased Justice Ginsberg at the Supreme Court's building, to the despicably barbaric caterwauling of those who've been been burning up our cities, tearing down our statues, and spitting upon the United States of America in general and directly and indirectly heaping vitriol upon the Constitution by which We The People formed our nation through.
There is, and necessarily always has been, a political component to nominating and voting upon justices for the Supreme Court - and there should be, that represents our, you know, We The People's, voice. But where it should be an aspect of the process, it has now, through a long, long, string of events across decades, it has now become the primary step in all such nominations, and Justice, and We The People, can only be the poorer for it.
President Trump has the absolute constitutional power to name a new justice to the Supreme Court of the United States of America, yesterday, today, and every day until the end of his term. I just wish that through the costs of all of the lost opportunities, I could see equally clear evidence that We The People are deserving and worthy of it.
A veritable thirst for kneeling to narratives fills the air, a demand that we show our support for some lives mattering, demanding that we all echo that 'Silence is Violence!' and 'Check Your Privilege!', even the heinous notion that 'It's only property!'. These demands for compliance come from kids, neighbors, friends, even former Tea Partiers, and though many I'm sure are innocently urging the narratives along as if it really is a matter of Justice, there are still some of them who should absolutely know that real Justice is not, and cannot, be served by such narratives as those. And yet all around me I see people thirsting for this faux 'justice!', and what comes to my mind is "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink", and I wonder how many of them understand that some waters are not fit to drink?
Do you understand that? And if so... then what?
"But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."
Imagine if someone were actually dying of thirst, would you want to deny them the water they're reaching for? Of course no decent human being would want to do that. But would you deny them that water, if their health and even their life depended upon it? If you knew that the water they were reaching for was poisoned with a carcinogen that guaranteed they'd soon develop a fatal cancer, would you stop them, or maybe, seeing how desperate they were, would you step aside to allow them to satisfy their thirst? I hope you wouldn't step aside... but I'm far from convinced.
Why? Well, tell me, how would you explain refusing that water to the person dying of thirst? After all, the poison isn't obvious, you can't see, smell or taste it, it requires close examination to identify it, and as no one's dropping dead on the spot from drinking it... do you really think they'd calmly listen to your reasons for denying them the water they're desperately thirsting for? And on a scorching hot day, with the poisoned water tantalizingly sparkling & cool and clear right before their eyes, how likely are they to calmly listen to you telling them they need to climb up a steep hill to drink warm, slightly muddy water that you're telling them is truly good to drink? Would you risk injury to turn the desperately thirsty away from the bad water, to lead them to the water that is truly good to drink? Maybe some of you would do all you could, but... looking both around me, and yes, inwardly too, I feel deluged with many more disturbing questions, than satisfying answers.
For instance - what of yourself? If you were near to death with ravenous thirst, would you resist quenching it with what on the surface appears to be cool, clear, pure water, just because someone cautioned you that it contained a fatal carcinogen? Would you resist taking a cool drink, while crowds of people pushed you aside and gasped about how good it made them feel to drink it? Would you take the time to probe deeper, to examine and test the water you are thirsting to drink to see for yourself if it truly is good to drink? People adrift at sea often become so desperately thirsty that they drink their fill of saltwater, even knowing that they'll sicken and die from it - would you?
Maybe you'd resist. But what would it take to do that? To resist the tempting thirst for the sake of an unanswered question, and then... to prove it to yourself, and stick to that understanding, I suspect that would come down to how much you actually care about what is real and true, and how consistently you connect such matters to what you should do, even in the face of external opposition and internal desire... where would you learn to make such connections and value abiding by them? School?(!) Doubtful. Those sorts of lessons don't come from worksheets and multiple choice questions, now do they? You've been to school, you can answer that question yourself.
Even so, if you somehow are that uncommonly sensible and brave person, what would you do about your fellows who, ignorant of the poisoned water, are innocently and enthusiastically directing the thirsty crowds to drink it?
Worse, what would you do about those who do know that the water's carcinogenic, but, worried about how they'd react to being kept from drinking it, hastily mix it with good water in hopes that will make it safe (Spoiler alert: It won't, but they're ok with the easy ignorance of hoping it might)?
How would we, how should we, respond to that?
And what of those who do know that the water is poisoned, and still direct the thirsty to it, and those who do know that diluting it won't make it good, but they choose to do it so that more and more will drink and eventually sicken and die from it?
And in what might be the worst predicament of all, knowing that those who're consciously corrupt are few & far between, and that those who're innocently ignorant of the dangers are many, and with still more fools mixed in between, we feel the need to act yet have no way of immediately distinguishing which from which - what are we to do?
You can scoff at my questions, but it seems plain to me that this is the very situation we are in, following in the wake of George Floyd's life being ended beneath the knees of four cops in Minneapolis.
Those who truly intend to peacefully protest, and who innocently seek after Justice while chanting and supporting these narratives, are for the most part unaware that they are drinking in the deceptive waters of a socially carcinogenic 'justice!', and yet most are neither willing, nor tolerant of having any discussion of the less appealing, tepid and distant muddy waters of a distant Justice, even though that system is the only one that mankind has ever had any hope of finding any actual Justice through.
And then there are those who do have some knowledge of who BLM & Antifa truly are, what their ideas are founded upon and promote, and yet they still 'bend the knee' by virtuously signaling that 'black lives matter!', and demand we join in on chants of 'silence is violence', 'acknowledge your privilege', 'it's only property!', which are at best, rationalizations for diluting good water with bad, and furthering the poisoning of our society. And there are some among us who know damn well that their message is lethal to America, and deliberately spread it to stir up as many cancerous waves as they can - such as those of Seattle's CHAZ/CHOP Autonomous Zones, violently 'peaceful protests', and Talcom X's iconoclastic calls for statues of Jesus to be thrown down - in hopes that they will grow into a tidal wave that will sweep our land from sea to shining sea.
I know that the majority of my 'fellow Americans' have a thirst for Justice, but in a monumental case of mistaken identity, most are chasing after 'justice!' instead, ignorant of the fundamental injustice that lies just beneath its glistening surface, amounts to vengeance (at best) clothed in finery, which they've been taught to see as 'justice', and even as being something that is admirable to demand.
If you're surprised, maybe you didn't pay attention in school... or to school, but our educational systems have for decades taught that so long as only property is destroyed and people aren't killed, such violent riots are really 'peaceful protests', and with such pernicious lessons they've taught generations of students that the shallow waters of what they learn from textbooks, worksheets and multiple-choice tests, are deep enough for students to swim in and to dive headfirst into adulthood with. Decades of such misguided graduates have taught additional generations of successively more misguided graduates, who's instruction has made them doubly zealous as living examples of the Dunning-Kruger Effect in their calls for this misidentified 'justice!', and they do not see the true nature of the monster that they are staring straight into the face of. They see what they've been taught to see, and want to see, and even what they want to be seen, as seeing - yet most are unwilling to pursue any further questions that might poke beneath the pleasing surface of appearances, unwilling to stick even a toe into the water, let alone examine its depths - and very little of what they've learned has taught them that they should.
"Know Thyself" has been exchanged for "Just do it!" - whatever 'it' might popularly be believed to be at the moment.
That being the root cause, it should come as no surprise that no simple "other" can be neatly blamed for our predicament, the Pro-Regressive Left hasn't been acting alone (if ever) for over a century, and their early 'progress' has ensured that a great many Libertarians, and members of the Right & Conservatives, are involved as well. All have gone through the same educational system, and all have learned "How to Think" through the same lesson templates, which reduce concepts and ideals to the disintegrated pabulum of textbooks, captioned pictures, and worksheet factoids, whose meaningless text all students soon learn to scan for the options framed for them in multiple choice tests to choose their 'answers' from, which involves neither teaching nor learning, in any traditional sense, instead it trains both teachers and students to seek out and further selected narratives.
"... in the absence of thinking, many teachers who engage in indoctrination do so unconsciously. They themselves take what they’re given and pass it along without thinking. Ideologues often intervene at this level by writing the scripts for teachers, which is how LGBT advocacy and anti-Semitic fabrications become included in their lessons.
Thoughtlessness is essential. As the fictional demon Screwtape, from C.S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters,” states in his letters to Wormwood, “It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.” ..."
As most educational theory from John Dewey on down to the present makes quite clear, their lessons have much less to do with the material being taught in them (mere 'rote facts', dontcha know), than with the form of the lessons, which are intended to teach "How to Think".
Even those who might manage to reject the particular conclusions of some lessons, nevertheless have learned how to perceive the world through the limited scope of those same lesson plans, textbook pabulum, captioned pictures, worksheet factoids and multiple choice tests, and so their differences are less often actual disagreements, than a differing matter of preference within the same multiple choices already provided to be 'chosen' from (BTW, the flowcharted 'Critical Thinking' which 'educators' devised in 1946 as an 'alternative' to the system of reasoning developed over 3,000 years of Western Civilization, is but another gimmick for diverting the thoughtful away from deeper reasoning). Few look beyond the 'worksheet lessons' provided, and fewer still see the need to question what they think they know, as a result of them.
And so here we are.
If you say 'Prove it!'... what do you mean by 'prove'?
As most graduates can attest, most of the names and dates meaninglessly drilled into our heads over twelve or more years of schooling - public or private - are gone from our heads soon after graduation, but the methods and patterns we learned to think with, those aren't lost at graduation, that habit of 'learning' to scan for 'answers' from the options presented - that habit stays with us and we don't stop employing it without making a deliberate, sustained and conscious effort to look beyond what's given. If you haven't consciously relearned how to learn, then every lesson learned since school, is likely still leading you to the easiest and shallowest of answers, which was the central lesson that the lesson plans were designed to teach.
If you're laughing, I may be able to turn your mirth into embarrassment, with just a few example narratives that've been so helpfully provided to us by several outlets for Leftists, Libertarians, and various members the Right. Having exchanged our school's textbooks and worksheets, for media's pictures, videos & commentary posted in our news & tweets, it's notable that those narratives, though differing each from the other in some measures, all bear a similarly common shallow signature. But before we take a closer look, let me ask you:
A) Are you the narrator of your own narrative? And B) if so, how well do you know the nature of what it is it that you're narrating? And C) is that narrative something that can or should be thought of as being reasonably human?
My guess is that you're A) not, B) not well, and that C) no it can't. But to prove me wrong, all you've got to do is observe a couple videos, and ask yourself whether or not you are seeing what you expect or wish to see, or what is available to be seen by you.
First, seeing as the racial accelerant that's so inflaming people's passions at the moment, obscures so much of what we see, it'd be best to start with one without that, and believe it or not there is one which fits that bill, the much videoed incident of the elderly man who was hospitalized after clashing with police at a demonstration in Buffalo, New York.
Have you already seen or heard of it? Write you're impressions of the incident down.
Now watch the two videos of the incident while noting your own reactions as well as the action in them, and ask yourself if the reactions you find yourself feeling follow from what you're actually observing, or from what you expected to see in them? Did those come from your own judgment (current or past?), or from a larger narrative that's popular with you & yours? And one more thing which may be the most important of all, as you focus on what you have observed, how intently do you remind yourself that what you are observing isn't all there is to observe, or to know, about the context of the matter you're observing?
Ok, so now let's go through them together. The Libertarian eZine, Reason, gives us the headline: "Buffalo Police Seriously Injure 75-Year-Old Man During Protest", while CNN, emphasizing a more distant camera angle, and with much setting up what they desire you to assume and echo, they caption it (from :34 mark) as "Video captures Buffalo police push elderly man to the ground", and then at the :41 mark: "...officers knocked down elderly protestor Martin Guigino", and which NPR simply captions their video as "Police officers shove man in Niagara Square to the ground"
Now I want to emphasize here, I am neither excusing nor condemning the police (a worthwhile evaluation of their actions can only come from a methodical on-the-spot investigation), I'm simply pointing out how easily popular narratives lead us to see something, that isn't actually there to be seen, and how easily people then agree that they are in fact seeing it.
Watch the videos, and note what you think you saw.
Ok, so here's what I can observe:
The 1st observation is on what's ignored in the reporting on the video, and that is the context that this incident is occurring after days of violently 'peaceful protests' and rioting, in which significant damage and injury and even death, have been inflicted upon the places, persons and police, in that city, and across the land.
The video picks up as police have already given an order to the people gathered there (and almost not shown in the video at all) to disperse, and
they have formed a line for the purpose of pushing back the remaining protesters, and the police are advancing as a line for that purpose.
The elderly man has ignored that order,
at the :02 mark (of the NPR Twitter video) he pokes at the 1st of the two cops involved with his iPhone (?), which is ignored, and then
he pokes the 2nd cop with it, which is again at first ignored,
but then as he pokes again around his weapons (?) belt,
the cop that raises one arm and pushes him backwards. In my evaluation of the movements in that much described shove, I can observe no movement in the push to suggest that it was intended to shove the man down to the ground, in that his push moves up and straight outwards, he is not grabbed ahold of, and the cop's arm doesn't curve downwards during the contact or appear to strain with a downward shove or pull.
The man staggers directly backwards, stumbles a little sideways, and then falls back, and in the long distance video we see his head hit sickeningly hard on the pavement.
The police are still formed up in a line stretching across the street and most of them visibly turn and react as the man hits the ground,
the 1st cop's initial reaction is to attend to the man, but he is motioned back into the front of the crowd control line, as such lines are supposed to be maintained as unbroken as possible, the strategy being that breaking the line reduces its effectiveness and even puts the rest of the police in jeopardy.
Another cop almost immediately makes a call into his radio, motions are made, calls for 'get a medic' are heard and an onlooker is answered that 'we have an EMT'.
At the :19 second mark we see, and loudly hear, one of the protestors swearing, making threats, swinging his sign in the disorderly manner of resistance, which is the reason why the police line was formed to push the remaining protestors back.
Seconds later at the :24 mark uniformed people from the rear are kneeling down to attend to the man.
The NPR reporter is saying "better get an ambulance" and is told that "we have an EMT on the scene".
I'll repeat, I'm not defending the cop's actions, I'm describing what both you and I can see in the videos, all of which should be taken into consideration before making any judgement one way or the other - which you should be noting that the scene was not only not described that way by Reason, CNN or NPR, but instead they deliberately phrased the scene very differently, with essential details omitted from their captions and stories, in order to form the narrative that the two cops involved had deliberately and without provocation shoved an old man to the ground, and coldly stepped past his bleeding body. Worse still, there's a narrative that was popular with fringes of the Right and Libertarians, suggesting - in a very "I'm not saying its aliens, but it's aliens!" kind of way - that wires can be seen coming out of the man's scalp, that the blood was a WWE Wrestling stunt packet of fake blood, and that the fall was staged, which... staggers the mind to grasp how much of what can be seen, not to mention the hospital personal who'd have to be in on it, which must be ignored. Like Descartes, the conspiracist prefers "...that all the things which we very clearly and distinctly conceive are true..." over what their 'their own lyin' eyes' might dare to show them.
Such popular media narratives as those, gain the appearance of substance through repetition, and become in our minds the virtual textbook captions & worksheets which we've all spent 12, 16, 20 years being taught 'how to think!' from, and most people - of all political leanings - dutifully scan them for the multiple choice options to select 'our own' answer from.
Some criticized the official police report for describing the incident as 'a man tripped and fell', calling them out for committing 'lies of omission', saying, as one friend did:
"...They forcibly pushed him down and now he is at a hospital in critical condition. But we should also note that the police report was all a lie and it didn't reflect what was captured on camera..."
, while ignoring the 7 very relevant factors that they themselves omitted, and without noting their own evaluation of the 8th point, which, by the terms of their own criticism, makes their own statements into 'lies of omission', and of a far greater magnitude than what they're criticizing the police for. Perhaps not surprisingly, neither appreciated my pointing that fact out.
Consistently, across political beliefs, most people (Left, Libertarian, Right) either attacked the cops, or (Right & Conservative) attacked the protestor via his reported history of agitation, or even made wild claims of fabricated theatrics, etc, by which those narratives became what they believe they actually saw, instead of what was there to actually be seen. My point being that neither CNN, NPR, Reason, nor the vast majority of those of the Left, Libertarian, Right or Conservative camps, made any sustained attempt to observe first, and judge second, let alone reserve final judgement on what they couldn't know, and shouldn't pretend to know.
That's just one lesson in the lessons of 'how to think!', which we've all learned in pursuit (or avoidance) of A's in school. So again I ask you,
"Are you the narrator of your own narrative? And if so, how well do you know the nature of what it is that you're narrating? And is that narrative something that can or should be thought of as being reasonably human?"
As you've probably guessed, I have my doubts about that. What I don't have many doubts about, is that that is our problem, and all of the causes, politics, ideologies, are but symptomatic diversions for them.
But wait! There's more!
The previous narrative is almost sanitary in comparison to how dirty they become, once the racial accelerant is added in and sends us down into the ideological gutter, at which point the 'thinking' can no longer be considered to be even reasonably human. The bizarre comments below, came at me from a sorta-family member - let's call her 'Karen' - who'd posted a video showing someone dressed in black & breaking windows in one of the 1st Floyd protests, accompanied with the caption "Are White Dudes Sabotaging The George Floyd Uprising".
No one else had yet commented, and after watching the video a couple times, and doing some searching I could see several reports of people inflaming the protests, which some claimed to be 'racist' cops (which the police had immediately investigated and debunked), and other reports of Antifa taking an active part in inflaming the demonstrations, some accompanied with pictures and video of known members. I then made this comment:
Looks a lot like antifa.
'Karen' immediately replied to my comment by posting a still of the four cops kneeling on George Floyd, and:
What does this look like you bozo? Wrong again, Van. I call bullshit on you. Are you a racist? Then defend George Lloyd. Ok?
Leaving aside that my comment was not on the cops ending Floyd's (with an "F" BTW, not an "L") life, but on a masked white vandal breaking store windows, I was being called a racist, for, ironically, not assuming that the vandal was a racist because he was white, and even though I knew nothing more about the unidentified person than that they were clothed and masked in black. Apparently because I didn't 'judge' the vandal on appearances alone, but instead considered their actions in the video, and news reports of similar incidents before suggesting that they might be antifa... I was called a bozo, a racist, and was assumed to be unconcerned about George Floyd's death.
I shrugged and replied,
"Always nice to see your judgment on display 'Karen'"
Which was immediately followed by 'Karen' replying that:
"And yours too. Racism is the provenance of the right. And your worldview. That is why you twist everything up. Hate. You want to come after me, Van? Really? I see you. All of you."
I'd made a statement about what was seen in a video, twisted nothing, expressed no hate, and neither said or did anything that I can imagine being interpreted as threatening to 'come after' her. I called her no names and made no insults, and yet I was immediately barraged by a slew of insults, and those were the more calm & considered comments of the thread, a plateau which she rapidly slipped downhill from. And BTW, for someone to imagine such a common human failing as racism, as being something that is 'the provenance of the [other]', is not only a bigoted statement, but a confession of their own ignorance of human nature, and (reaching into the psycho-babble grab-bag) possibly symptomatic of deep seated tendencies of denial and projection, being used to hide her own guilt of the same, from herself. Eh, [shrugs] beats 'bozo'.
I don't think 'Karen' consciously fabricated these things about me, more like she pre-selected the 'multiple-choice' answer that she knew should be 'true' of anyone questioning her narrative, and then reflexively pasted all of its baggage onto me.
It's worth noting that she is and has worked as a High School guidance counselor, for years. Let that one... sink all the way in.
So no, I don't think that most people are their own narrators. It seems clear that the narratives which most people attend to, are not narrations of what they saw was there to be seen - their narratives and the conclusions they draw from them, are not reasonably human ones - they themselves are human, sure, but they're not reasonable. Where do their narratives come from? It seems that in most cases they are less instrument, than echo, relaying the ideological lessons that they've previously heard or habitually associated with what they 'approve' of.
I think the vast majority of people who saw the George Floyd tape, or heard about it, reacted with horror at seeing a man's life being ended in such a way as few of us can imagine there being any reasonable excuse for. Whether or not such incidents are common or not (and the fact that the narrative is statistically unfounded, matters not), we want such issues to stop. Period. People don't want any people to be mistreated by the very police who are supposed to protect & serve them - the police are supposed to uphold the peace, not violate it - and so, as the narrative goes, they've assembled to protest.
If that were all there was to it, I would be fully behind them. If that were all there was to it, I'd be fully behind the Sheriff who took off his helmet and kneeled with the protestors, and you can see by everyone's reaction, and the way it went viral, that that was greeted like the cool clear water of rationality and justice that everyone so deeply desires it to be.
But. Believing that requires ignoring the entire context of the matter, and nothing reasonable can follow from doing that.
The inescapable fact is that people are not assembling peacefully; even the more orderly ones are assembling enmasse wherever they please. They forcibly obstruct traffic and businesses, they surge onto highways, and most soon after begin damaging property, verbally and often physically abusing dissenters (actual or presumed). By such means their peaceful assemblies are transformed into mobs and riots - those are not peaceful, they are riots, and calling them peaceful changes nothing - a riot by any other name would reek the same, and they cannot be permitted to stand. And yet, that is exactly what organizations such as Antifa & BLM desire, encourage, and instigate.
Similarly, the organization 'Black Lives Matter', claims to care about black lives, but their words are sharply at odds with their actions, and it becomes clear on paying closer attention to both, that like Google's "Don't be Evil" motto, it's only words to them, their corporate logo, their pretext for being - Brandon Morse put it perfectly in the title of his post: "Black Lives Matter” Is Preying on America’s Belief That Black Lives Matter", in order to get what they want.
The 'Black Lives Matter' organization, is not simply designed to end unjustified violence against Blacks, if it was there'd be nothing to push back against, and much to welcome them for and to aid them in. But that isn't their sole motive (if at all), which can be seen in the nature of what they denounce as being 'systemic racism', One obvious problem with the 'systemic' issue, is that our system has no documented system of laws, agreements, rules, etc, to support the claim. South African Apartheid and 'Jim Crow' laws, were examples of 'systemic racism', and we knew them to be, because they were written down in a system of laws for enforcing racism. Those laws are gone now, those laws are now systemically forbidden in our written laws which define such actions as being unlawful. Are there racists who live amongst us? Sure there are, I've seen and dealt with them myself. Are there racists in law enforcement? As policemen are drawn from our population, no doubt there are... and you know what? The written laws that they are sworn to uphold, forbid them to act on their own racist beliefs in violation of those laws, and if they do, if they violate the law, they can and are prosecuted for violating our systemically non-racist laws which forbid that behavior.
If you say that that's not enough... what more do you seek? Is eliminating the Rule of Law, or eliminating the Police, going to eliminate racism? How? Is promoting mob rule more likely to bring Justice to any minority, or is it more likely to result in the majority forming a mob against them?!
Words not only have meaning, they bring about actions - what actions are likely to follow from the meaning of the words you are chanting?!
In regards to 'systemic racism!', the fact is, that nothing of the kind exists.
If you want to shift your goal posts and claim instead that what you mean by 'systemic racism!', is instead some non-written 'systemic racist beliefs' which drive racist behavior, well then there is one systematic fact which you've somehow failed to observe, and which pervades nearly all of the locations that are rife with charges of 'systemic racism!', and that fact is that they are nearly all in Democrat strongholds, where Leftist, 'Progressive' beliefs, have near total political control of the areas that are most troubled by riotous behavior and unrest. As Walter E. Williams pointed out,
"...the most dangerous big cities are: St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, Newark, Buffalo and Philadelphia. The most common characteristic of these cities is that for decades, all of them have been run by liberal Democrats. Some cities — such as Detroit, Buffalo, Newark and Philadelphia — haven’t elected a Republican mayor for more than a half-century. On top of this, in many of these cities, blacks are mayors, often they dominate city councils, and they are chiefs of police and superintendents of schools...."
, to which should also be added the fact that most School District Administrators, Ivory Towers of Academia, Corporate Human Resources Dept's, the Entertainment Industry, and News Media, all are overwhelmingly controlled by not just the Left, but by the radical Left.
If BLM cared about 'systemic racism!' or 'systemic racist beliefs', they'd focus on reforming the Left in general and those Democrat party policies in particular which contain these bastions of 'systemic racist beliefs'. Instead, they consistently $upport the '$ystemic Left', and overwhelmingly align with those policies, and are openly dedicated to advancing still more absurd 'causes', such as America needing "... to dismantle cisgender privilege...", and to "...disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure..." (who in America has had their family structures more disrupted and harmed by the helpful hand of govt, than Black families?) in favor of the highly Marxist notion of "...“villages” that collectively care for one another..." (self avowed 'trained Marxists' don't form organizations to seize political power in order to urge people to behave more neighborly, they do so to impose an even more extreme version of Child Care Services, which will regulate - and enforce - every aspect of any and every family's daily life, to ensure they adhere to the politically correct party-line) and "... freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking...". Such ideas cannot benefit any society, they disrupt, corrode, and collapse them without regard to race or religion (so there's that...).
What is plain to see, is that BLM does not care about 'systemic racism!' as being anything more than a useful means to their ulterior ends. What ulterior ends? Eric D. July reminded people of those ulterior ends once more, when he again pointed out that the founders of the 'Black Lives Matter' organization, are self-described Marxists, as one of its co-founders, Patrisse Cullors says herself (3:08 mark),
"...we do actually have an ideological frame, myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers, we are trained Marxists, we are super versed on ideological theories..."
"...“If this country doesn’t give us what we want then we will burn down the system and replace it,” Newsome replied. “And I could be speaking figuratively, I could be speaking literally. It’s a matter of interpretation.”
Newsome then broke down recent history, claiming that every time a police officer had hurt someone, they had been told to wait for due process.
“But the moment people start destroying property, now cops can be fired automatically,” he continued. “What is this country rewarding? What behavior is it listening to? Obviously not marching, but when people get aggressive and they escalate their protests, cops get fired. Now, you have police officers and Republican politicians talking about police reform. I don’t condone nor do I condemn rioting, but I’m just telling what I observed.”..."
, and finally putting a finer point on the matter, Newsome stated that,
"...I just want black liberation and black sovereignty by any means necessary”
His, and their, ulterior motives, are that they believe that their Marxist ends, justify their bringing them about any means necessary, and when the ends justify the means, the means are determined by power, not justice, and their implementation will be as violent and murderous as their people's lack of decency and regard for individual rights, property and justice, will encourage.
When you reward the violent by giving them what they want, they will want much, much more from you. One thing they will not want, is law & order. It should be surprising to no one that a movement founded upon Marxist ideals is violently advancing ideals which mean and require the elimination of individual rights under a system of Justice rooted in the Rule of Law - even though that system has historically been the only means of having a peaceful society that's able to enjoy justice and liberty. It is not, and should not be surprising, because justice and peace are not their goals, destroying American society is.
The sad fact is that Black Lives don't matter to BLM, except as a propaganda tool, and as a useful pretext to their ends, and if BLM's Marxist ends are ever realized, then, as July noted above, these very same Marxist ends '...has killed millions upon millions of people...' as the means of acheiving their ends. If those goals are ever realized here, it would mean death and destruction on a scale matched only by the USSR & Communist China, and you can be sure that a great many black lives would be consumed in that conflagration as well.
BLM does not seek Justice, they seek to pollute the waters of Justice by poisoning our ideals with irrational hatred and violent injustice, and if you support BLM, if you chant "Black Lives Matter", you are lending your support to promoting a lethal narrative of lies, and the elimination of the possibility of justice for people of all colors, creeds & ethnicities.
For all of these reasons and many more, I cannot, and will not, support BLM or its associated mottos & chants. At All. Ever. Their Narrative is not a reasonable one, and no Justice, and no Peace, can come from promoting either it or them.
Can it be reasonable to promote an unreasonable narrative?
Are the exchanges and narratives above, evidence of any form of higher reasoning? Are those assessments, conclusions and replies reasonable? I don't think so. All living animals, including human beings, think to some degree or another, and all react to what they've 'learned', but only human beings are capable of going above and beyond that - not automatically, but only by deliberate choice and intent - to rise above their default mentally reflexive responses. Deliberately doing so, engages us in a form of higher reasoning, with which we can imaginatively shape and reshape the contents of our minds, in a methodical manner which evaluates, questions & re-questions and verifies its contents, and so becomes what can then be considered to be, and further criticized through, reasonable thought.
Methodical reasoning is not a 'natural' process, it's not the result of a reaction that simply pops into your head, and it's not simply regurgitating ideological positions and counter-positions with emotional vitriol, it's a habit of mind that must be deliberately learned, practiced, refined, and valued, in spite of every natural inclination of yours which urges you to go with the first presumption that does naturally pop into your mind.
Given that, when I see people protesting, and looting, and rioting and claiming to do so for 'justice!', because words have meanings which I pay attention to, I can see no basis for a reasonable connection between these ideas, events and conclusions; I can see no possible, let alone justifiable, cause and effect involved here - the conclusions are non-sequiturs, they 'do not follow' - there is no interest in Justice that can be expressed with "No Justice, No Peace", rather, as a friend noted, such a chant is a declaration of your violent intention to be, and no sense of justice can be associated with, or follow from, that.
People wonder how and why we've wound up where we are, and again, the answer has and should be obvious. We have been schooled in learning lessons that systematize the dropping of context, and learning to ignore our own ignorance through the substitution of a narrative. The difficulty with such faux 'reasoning' being reasonable, becomes clearly visible, when we recall that the first lesson of Logic is to 'first make sure that your premises be true', and after having verified them, then and only then, do you move onto the syllogistic logical method of 'If this, and this, then that'. Skipping that step (and scanning worksheets for keywords that square with multiple questions, systematizes abandoning that dropping of context), unavoidably transforms peaceful reasoning into unreasonable violence.
"...Some Americans might comfort themselves with the notion that this is a passing madness, but it is instead the inescapable consequence of what is being taught from kindergarten through graduate school. A nation that teaches its children to hate their country cannot endure. A nation that pays out $700 billion a year, and trillions in taxpayer-financed student loans, to train future citizens to see their country as hopelessly and irreparably racist cannot continue.
If the justice at the heart of the American project is no longer taught in the education system, there will be no peace."
Through decades and decades of teaching an approach to thinking that leads to missing what matters, even in that which they are consciously examining and attempting to correct, their accepting untested and false premises, furthers and deepens the existing errors.
If you fail to see the truth of that, even as we've gotten to the point of teachers toppling statues, you are not simply missing it, you are refusing to see it.
You can also see these lessons learned narratives of unexamined premises continue to apply in action, in this popular meme on property and lives. On the surface it appears to be sensible, until you question its premises, where their deep flaws become incredibly dangerous to the very sense of justice it is purportedly intended to promote:
You keep saying "It's horrible that an innocent black man was killed, but destroying property has to stop"
Try saying"It's horrible that property is being destroyed, but killing innocent black men has to stop"
You're prioritizing the wrong part."
, which, seems sensible only if you are ignorant of the fact that Property doesn't mean simply possessing 'material objects', and so are ignorant of the role that the concept of Property plays in upholding and defending all of our lives and individual rights. By missing that once 'self evident fact', we miss out on what we should conclude from such a meme as that, which is that:
Becausewe tolerate property being destroyed, innocent men are and will continue to be, killed.
This is more than a failure to prioritize, but a failure to see what made America exceptional in the first place, and if you don't understand that, then you do not understand what is central to the historic exception which made America so historically exceptional!
If you too have been educated into an inability to translate the phrase "It's only property!" into its actual meaning, allow me to point you to a couple of helpful hints from three very different Founding Fathers, of two very different systems, John Adams, James Madison & Karl Marx:
"Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist." John Adams, 'Discourses on Davila', following his 'A Defense of the Constitutions of the Governments of the United States of America'
"...Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own...." James Madison, 'Property', 29 Mar. 1792
"In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."
Karl Marx, 'Communist Manifesto'
In case you missed it, this is one thought that Founders of both America and modern Communism understood and agreed upon; that private property was indispensable to securing your individual rights under a government of limited powers, and that when private property is abolished, the doors to a government of total and unlimited power over its people, are thrown wide open.
Ben Franklin expressed that understanding in 1772, in one of his 'Silence Dogood' essays,, and America could not have been born if there hadn't been a sizable number of people who understood this as well,
‘Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know.
‘This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together; and in those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own.”
In that brief passage, Franklin expressed a conceptual integration of the ideas of freedom of speech, with wisdom and liberty, and of Property as being infinitely more than merely a claim to material possessions - "...where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own..." which is a marvelous illustration of having Property IN speech (read Madison's essay!), and in the very spirit of his very life.
And for those who might want to dismiss those founding principles, and the right to self defense protected by the 2nd Amendment, as 'theories,' a couple here in St. Louis, just discovered what these 'theories' mean in practice, when a mob forced their way into their neighborhood and threatened them in their homes:
"... as soon as I said this is private property, those words enraged the crowd. Horde, absolute horde came through the now smashed down gates coming right at the house. My house, my east patio was 40 feet from Portland Place Drive. And these people were right up in my face, scared to death. And then, I stood out there. The only thing we said is this is private property. Go back. Private property. Leave now. At that point, everybody got enraged. There were people wearing body armor. One person pulled out some loaded pistol magazine and clicked them together and said that you were next. We were threatened with our lives, threatened with a house being burned down, my office building being burned down, even our dog's life being threatened..."
What masked mobs promote in chants of 'silence is violence', 'punch a nazi', 'it's only property!' and firing people for daring to have a different opinion, are ideas which are fundamentally anti-American and pro-Tyranny, and an America filled with Americans who have little or no understanding of the nature of their mutually shared and assured individual rights and systems of justice, is an America that is not sustainable. I've referred to such people as those being Pro-Regressives (and they are found not just on the Left, but on the Right as well), because they actively seek to regress us to a time before ideas as fundamentally American as these were ever heard of. If we allow this regression, we cannot hope to escape from those realities which our Founder's ideas had eventually managed to displace: Slavery, Tyranny, and the form of 'justice!' which has always been preferred by those in power, wherein those who they've accused are assumed to be 'Guilty, unless (somehow) proven innocent'.
Justice and Lies serve very different ends
The idea of ending slavery in the world came about only as the Judeo-Christian religious views met and were married with ideas of Greco-Roman philosophy and law, and even then it only began to become a reality through the predominantly English recognition of the significance of Property ("Every man's home is his castle") and it's vital connection to Individual Rights under a Rule of Law (James Madison summed that up brilliantly in his brief essay on Property - read it!).
Fixing America, making its millions of isolated residents into being our "Fellow Americans", requires understanding that individual rights are inherent in our nature as human beings, it requires understanding that property is our means of securing the individual rights of us all, through the Rule of Law, and it also means understanding that giving favoritism to some, means having already eliminated those rights of all, and replacing them with petty privileges bestowed upon some, by those in power, to those who are useful to them - at the moment.
Seeking after such favoritism and 'justice!' is the equivalent of being adrift in the lifeboat and drinking the saltwater, or even the cool clear carcinogenic water, in order to quench your thirst, even though it will soon bring you a slow and miserably painful death. While it may not be as plentiful or attractive as its doppelgangers, true Justice can only work if it is widely understood that in order for anyone to be secure in their rights and property, all people must be be secure in their rights and property, and that everyone must be treated equally before the law - do that and you transform the power of the state into the personal army of every one of its citizens.
It took centuries for these ideals to culminate in the founding of America. Today, we've not only willfully forgotten those ideas, but we actively teach our students that they are not true (see the '1619 Project'), and we teach them in a way that the lessons learned cannot be used to discover the errors that they hide. How long will it take to 'fix' things? I don't know... does it take more time to learn something is true, or to unlearn something that's false, so that you can relearn something that's true? The Confucian image of the monk overfilling the students tea cup comes to mind.
If you don't start with the understanding that you could be wrong, then the errors that you don't know that you have, have no way to be identified, no way to be removed, and so they'll continue to permeate all of your other beliefs - your 'tea cup' cannot be emptied - and you cannot be filled up with what is true. You must consciously insist to yourself that not only can you not know all of the context involved, but that because of that, what you are able to observe, may be more appearance than substance. Repeat to yourself that, in the words of a forgotten quipster: "To inform is to influence", both by what is said, and by what is not said.
For a society to be 'inclusive', it's people must be reasonable, and the baseline for being reasonable (not to mention for enjoying Justice), is realizing that you may be wrong, and that other's may come to different conclusions, and insisting on toleration for those you disagree with. So long as they are peaceful in their actions, society must tolerate its discontents and give them reasonable consideration, even while disagreeing with them. It also requires understanding that the primary way for discovering your own errors, is through having reasonable, methodical, discussions with people who don't fully (or at all) agree with your assessments & opinions. If you yourself exclude others from discussion because they disagree with you, you've eliminated a fundamental and essential component in your ability to discover your own errors, without which you are unlikely to grasp or understand what is true. Read the quote above from Ben Franklin, once again.
Liberty and Justice require that true form of actual inclusiveness of context, which includes the ongoing commitment to that maxim of Western Law: 'hear the other side', both are required to be reasonable, and being reasonable requires having such a respect for Truth, that you are willing and able to realize that you may have missed it.
People who are not taught to be reasonable - and once again, no, the checklist flowcharts of 'Critical Thinking' is not equivalent to being reasonable (that's what it was designed in 1945 to replace) - people who are taught that their own presumptions are unquestionable, cannot reasonably be expected to be 'allies' of Justice.
The kind of approach that assumes the worst of your own presumptions to be true, and rejects out of hand any and all who disagree with you, is an Ideological position, and not a reasonable understanding.
What is… reasonable? What do we mean by that? Do you question and verify your premises, before reasoning with them? If not, then no, you are not being reasonable.
As I said in the previous post, the default presumption that what I see on social media is not enough to form a solid judgement from, but that if the police - in this or any other matter - are found by appropriate review (made public at least immediately after the fact, if not during), or in court of law, to be in the wrong, I'm fully for bringing down the maximum force of law upon their heads, as it's a far worse thing for those charged with upholding the law, to abuse or violate it, than for others to do the same. That is, IMHO, a reasonable approach, and while it may not be the naturally human response to make, it is, IMHO, if Justice is what you seek, the only reasonable one to use.
"Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink"
So back to my original question: Will you try to stop those around you from drinking the poisoned water of 'justice!', even while reasonably suspecting that they'd attack you for it? If you doubt that is a problem, you are probably missing out on the News of school principal's being fired for not praising BLM, and even of teachers being let go for daring to express a very reasonable idea - not to mention the only one that Justice can be found within - that:
“Each of us here believes in the unparalleled force for good that is Western Civilization, that is our heritage, whether we were born here or not,”
, but the fact is that the positions promoted by the 'Black Lives Matter' and Antifa organizations, and the sentiments expressed in 'silence is violence', 'punch a nazi', 'it's only property!', are not compatible with either Western Civilization or America. To think that they are, neglects not only the News, but the 'olds' as well. The 'Olds', being what history once was used to teach us, was what was wise to know of ourselves today, through lessons from the past. Lessons such as what Thucydides spoke of, where in the final disastrous battle of the doomed Sicilian campaign, the Athenian's were desperately fleeing in thirst for water, even though they saw the enemy laying in wait for them, even as they had missiles showered down upon them, and even as the Spartans were wading through the muck and butchering them as they fell and drank, the Athenians still trampled their fellows to get to that water,
"... The Peloponnesians also came down and butchered them, especially those in the water, which was thus immediately spoiled, but which they went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, most even fighting to have it..."
When people have a thirst, they aren't easily reasoned away from satisfying it, and when those whose thoughts are satisfied with skating along upon surface appearances, are not inclined to be reasonable... you've got a problem.
America, we've got a problem, and 'racism!' is too often used as only a pretext and distracting symptom to obscure the deeper issues which cause it. The 'culture' that we've been educated into, has infused us with a thirst for a false and unjust 'justice!', a thirst which cannot be satisfied without destroying ourselves, and as history shows to those willing to look at themselves in the mirror, we are calling upon ourselves to do just that. If we - all of us - don't consciously begin transforming ourselves into Americans, based not upon meaningless matters of place and circumstances of birth, but through the ideas that this nation was founded upon, then all of the actions we might take to 'fix things', will only make all of our lives much, much, worse. Thinking that racism is about skin color or ancestry, rather than a usefully shallow way of thinking, for manipulators to influence others to act unwisely and unjustly, ensures only that more racism, more violence, and more murder, will be what follows, even as the possibility of true Justice recedes ever further from our grasp.
Simply put, seeking a 'justice!' that is unjust, means seeking our own self destruction. And a great many people today are very much intent upon doing just that.
