GOOD MORNING!
1 O.J. was guilty??? I’m shocked! I was going to run a quiz about whether Fox broadcasting the 12-year-old O.J. Simpson interview in which he “hypothesizes” about what really happened—when Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman ended up with the lives stabbed out of them and a trail of O.J.’s blood leading from the scene to his home—was unethical or just icky, as in “revolting taste.”
Never mind: I’m willing to say it was unethical. Fox was aiding and abetting a murderer’s efforts to cash in on his crimes. Yes, yes, I know: in the eyes of the law, Simpson is innocent. But Fox, and you, and I, and O.J.’s lawyers and certainly O.J. all know beyond a shadow of doubt that he did it, and Simpson deserves a full shunning from the culture in every respect.
Fox, many forget, produced this interview as part of the promotion for O.J.’s book, “If I Did It,” written by a ghostwriter after interviews with Simpson. Simpson got $600,000 in the deal, denying later that he had anything to do with the project, and saying, “Hey, they offered me $600,000 not to dispute that I [wrote] the book…Everybody thinks I’m a murderer anyway. They’re not going to change their mind just because of a book.”
The consensus is that the Simpson’s statements in the Fox interview amount to a confession to double murder. I saw the key portion in a promotion,, where O.J. says that he remembers being at Nicole’s home, grabbing a knife, then seeing lots of blood…but not remembering what happened in between. But Simpson is a liar and a sociopath, and because of double-jeopardy, he can say that he watched Nicole and Ron get attacked by an army of zombies he recruited and it wouldn’t make any difference.
The degree to which Fox debased itself by running this offal cannot be exaggerated, and anyone who watched it without being paid to do so is an accessory after the fact to the unjust enrichment of O.J. Simpson.
2. Bonus O.J, ugliness: Read this hateful, racist, biased and legally ignorant essay by Michael Herriot at “The Root.” Herriot is another of many contributors to CNN whose anti-white racism is palpable, but deemed acceptable mainstream punditry. How deep and widespread is this kind of blind, unreasoning hatred of white Americans in the black community? How can anyone read something like this and wonder where the upsurge in white nationalism comes from?
3. And speaking of CNN’s race-baiters…Here is Van Jones on his newly minted CNN show, whining and grovelling to Oprah Winfrey:
“It meant so much to us, and, you know, I have to let you know how it is for us now. We had you. We had the Obamas in the White House. Even on a bad day, you had a north star. You had some hope. And then it was like the universe looked just said, psych! And threw us in the toilet and closed the lid and now we’re just stuck in this crazy situation, swirling…Help us, though, help us though!…I go out there and I try to tell people, let’s not become what we are fighting. Let’s not be what we’re fighting. They tell me, shut up, Van, because we got bigots out here, we got Nazis out here, we’re getting bullied, we are tired of going high. We want to go low and kick them in the private parts!”
There is disturbing evidence that “the resistance” and the anti-Trump mob, including the news media, is heading into a new and even more deranged stage, which is scary, since the previous stage has been putting unprecented stress on the nation’s mental and political health. We saw this deterioration with Jill Abramson’s open admission that she keeps a totem of Barack Obama in her purse to stave off despair. We are seeing more and more alternate-reality rants, like this one by David Remnick in “The New Yorker.”
The rhetoric is getting more shrill and hyperbolic every day, even when the news is good. At least Paul Krugman is consistent: his rhetoric about Trump has been shrill and hyperbolic from the start. Here he is this morning:
“Now, it’s a commonplace, but also a euphemism, to say that Trump has authoritarian instincts. A more accurate statement would be that he expects the kind of treatment tin-pot dictators demand, free from any criticism inside or outside his government and greeted with constant hosannas of praise. And everyone who isn’t willing to play the full game, who has tried to play by something resembling normal democratic rules, seems to be fleeing the administration. Soon only the shameless sycophants will be left. This will not end well.”
Sigh. All of America’s strong Presidents have had autocratic instincts, with the arguable exception of George Washington. Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, Cleveland, Teddy, Wilson, FDR, Truman, Ike, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton. Obama did as well, though he wasn’t a strong President. It’s just that people like Krugman are so offended by Trump being President that when he behaves essentially like the rest, they think it’s sinister. The complaining about this President surrounding himself with yes-men is especially hypocritical, since there were few complaints from the same critics about President Obama’s dangerously deferential inner circle, bolstered by a worshipful rather than properly objective press.
Krugman’s title is “Springtime for Sycophants.” Trump is Hitler, get it?
4. Hillary’s place in history and ethics. I think Hillary Clinton is ensuring that she will be cited for decades, if not centuries, as the perfect example of a graceless, bitter loser, and as the antithesis of good sportsmanship and accountability. (No, I do not think that will be good for women.) If this were ancient Greece, she might be transformed post-mortem into Hillary, Goddess of Gracelessness. What she’s said and written already was enough, but Hillary is determined to keep running up her bitterness score, fanning the flames of division in the nation while doing so. Here is her quote, being eagerly seized upon by the GOP publicity folks, from an appearance in India:
“I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product… So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards. You know: ‘You didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs, you don’t want to, you know, see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are, whatever your problem is, I’m going to solve it.'”
Yeah, that’s a fair description of what Americans who didn’t vote for Clinton don’t like. Somebody explain to me again that Clinton didn’t mean to suggest during the campaign that Republicans and conservatives are “deplorables.”
5. Objective coverage test! President Trump announced this morning that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was leaving his post and will be replaced with Mike Pompeo, now the CIA chief, and Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman ever to hold the position.
It was clear, and has been for some time, that Tillerson was contemptuous, often openly, of the President and his international policies. That kind of relationship between a Secretary of State and POTUS is untenable; Trump should have done this a while ago. No watch Tillerson become, retroactively, a diplomatic genius in the news media. Wait and see if the President gets any accolades from women’s groups and leftward pundits for breaking the glass ceiling for women in one of the government’s most male-dominated agencies, but I advise against holding your breath.
A related note: CNN established a “Trump Jobs Tracker” to keep its online audience updated on whether President Trump could keep his promise to preside over booming employment after eight years of anemic growth under Obama. On January 5, the economy had only added 1,839,000 jobs since Trump took office, and CNN pointed out that Trump was “off track” to fulfill his promise that he’d help create “25 million jobs in 10 years, or 208,333 jobs per month.” Then employers added 200,000 jobs in January and another 313,000 in February, more than enough to be on a healthy pace to average 208,333 jobs per month in 2018.
So CNN stopped updating the “tracker”!
6. The downside of chaos. As I wrote earlier this week, Trump is a chaos manager, and constant churning among managers and staff is part of the modus operandi of such leaders. Tillerson was a dubious appointment in the first place, the only Secretary of State in U.S. history without any government experience—not exactly the steady hand required by the only President without either military or government credentials. Even if the latest shake-up is a good one, the accumulated stress and disruption is exhausting, not just for those in the Administration, but for the public. Managed chaos is difficult, but can be effective. Constant chaos is irresponsible, and incompetent.
If some basic stability doesn’t become apparent soon, “this will not end well.”
Ethics Alarms 
2 & 3: ”How deep and widespread is this kind of blind, unreasoning hatred of white Americans in the black community?”
Is ”blind, unreasoning hatred” mutually excluded from “racism?”
Because there are plenty of folks (including the talented FGCU Professor Ted Thornhill) that claim there’s no such thing as “Black Racism.”
“I chose to title my course ‘White Racism’ because I thought it was scholarly and succinct, precise and powerful.”
http://theconversation.com/why-i-teach-a-course-called-white-racism-90093
4: HRC is the gift that keeps on giving, and apparently she’s the only one that doesn’t know it.
6. Jack, how would you describe “apparent baseline stability?”
I am missing something: why are you asking? I never use that phrase.
I’m talking about the last line of your #6. Did I mis-read it?
“If some baseline stability doesn’t become apparent soon, ‘this will not end well.’”
That was supposed to be “basic stability.” I fixed it. I define that as “not a crisis or upheaval every damn day.”
If Trump thrives on chaos, doesn’t he need a crisis or upheaval nearly every day?
Much like William Jefferson Clinton, non? Child of an alcoholic or two who was only comfortable when things were flying around the room. Lamps. Shoes. Of course, he was a Dem, so that was very endearing. Trump’s not a Dem so chaos is an impeachable offense.
He might, but we don’t.
Apparent baseline stability:
When a defender cheats over to double-team the inbounder (on the baseline under the defense’s basket) seemingly leaving his man unguarded, only to jump the passing lane for the steal and breakaway Phi Slamma Jamma.
That what you meant…?
I can always count on you, Paul, to bring me to chuckles and well beyond. Your definition is Authentic Frontier Gibberish-FREE, plausibly deniable (and deniably plausible), presumptively rebuttable (and rebuttably presumptive), advanced and seasoned March Madness bracketology!
An alternative definition of “apparent baseline stability” might be:
A basketball team with sufficient depth of power forwards to sustain competitive, even winning-record level, performance, despite injuries; illnesses; absences for “personal matters;” in-game disciplinary actions (e.g., double technical fouls); suspensions; arrests and detentions; “family emergencies,” and player walkouts to protest gun violence, income inequality, microaggressions, hate speech, mansplaining, and Donald Trump.
Paul, I presume that, upon your having read my attempted alternative definition above, you will understand why I have entered ONLY ONE definition in the Urban Dictionary – over ten years ago – and I hereby deed all rights to entering “bansplaining” in said dictionary to either you or Zoltar, whichever one of you might covet owning the entry the most.
Back to my Spring Break – GAD, can’t EVERYONE see that I NEED it?! When a guy whose place in infamy is due to talking too much recognizes, without assistance, that he talks too much, it’s time for him to BE QUIET for awhile!
I, not Paul, am overdue for being quiet for awhile…
”I, not Paul, am overdue for being quiet for awhile…”
Whew!!! So long as that’s not submitted to a vote; up my way I can’t seem to separate myself from the shit end of the stick.
But before you go dark:
Do supposed family members involved in the ”family emergencies” need to be verified as such, or might they be allowed to so identify as expedient?
HA! The latter, of course (identify as expedient).
2. I had the misfortune of reading Michael Herriot’s little snit fit. Then I made an error in judgement: I read the comments. One (ONE!) comment made the point that hatred has to stop somewhere… and the answers were ‘not until we get reparations for being slaves!’
Reparations punish the uninvolved. They are unworkable. They cannot be fairly administered. They can be used in the future to punish the paid off.
This makes them unethical and stupid to boot.
Race relations were much better before Obama. Progressives own the problems they have instigated, as much as they own the reactionary ‘white nationalist’ movement. Keep pushing at someone for something they cannot control, be it body type, skin color, or gender, and there will eventually be a reaction in kind. Human nature does not change. Content of character is openly mocked by progressives today.
No wonder those being told to die are fighting back.
I know that my level of cruel irony will be little appreciated, but…
If a value can be attached to having rendered service as a slave on the plantations of the South, and if such a payment is due to those descended from slaves, it would be just as possible to hand those descendents an historical bill and demand payment. For what? you ask, incredulous.
By virtue of having been boarded on the shifts and brought to the New World where an entire new phase of life was begun. To have been exposed to Occidental civilization and then to have been allowed to incorporate into it. To have been offered, free of charge in a manner of speaking (but with an initial down-payment) an entirely different and demonstrably better new road of life: civilization, science, education, religion. In the old days, under a different anthropological regime, there was nothing enviable about primitive African existence.
It was then seen as a confinement, as an aspect of banishment (a further ramification of the Fall…) from which liberation is needed. It is still the same today, more or less. Occidental civilization and its fruits have become the cherished and desired ends of most of the Earth’s peoples.
To have been brought out of that confinement and literally brought into a whole new world (a Brave New World if you wish) and also to have been brought into the possibility of civilized life with the promise of Salvation: this was how the olden anthropology actually did see things.
How curious it is that the freed slave-class, after just a few generations, has become a sort of guerrilla activist army within the Republic that enslaved them but also freed them. There is a horrifying duality there. On one hand a debt that must be recognized but which cannot be recognized because of the horror of having been forced into it (of having no agency at all, of having agency taken absolutely away), but then at the same time to be seething with resentment and hostility at ‘white culture’ and indeed at Occidental civilization: both liberator and oppressor.
What is so curious to me is that what I have expressed here really does have a ‘certain logic’. It is cruel and absurd of course and yet … there is a certain truth in it. But the truth (or the various truths) are horrifying and unsettling. If I have understood correctly the ‘repatriation’ argument is a Marxist argument. It arises out of Marxian economic theory. And Marxism is a materialistic economic science. But the counter-argument to the Marxist materialist is not an economic or materialist argument but rather one that deals in intangibles: ideas essentially.
I think it would be really interesteting to hold a sort of absurd congress where the Marxian-materialist arguments were contered by the sort of argument I propose. And along with that counter-argument a note of warning: accept what happened and make a choice, and very quickly, to make the most of it, or resolve yourself to getting your own country. But the tactic of Marxist guerrilla undermining, and Marxist psychological warfare: this must stop.
No one has such will and authority of course. Can you imagine if people nowadays could respond in such a way? Instead they cower under the weight of an accusatory voice, afraid to say anything or even raise their heads.
An interesting side-note that was brought to my attention. Europe was conquered by Rome through a terrifying and brutal conquest. The levels of Roman violence is of the sort that when Carthage was recognized as a rival and enemy that it was razed to the ground, its population removed or dispersed, and its fields salted. Carthage did not rise again. Pure and absolute violence with no need to make excuses (and no one to make excuses to!). That is how Europe was conquered.
So, European civilization is the outcome of a conquest. And a great deal of what we are, have, think and do comes as a result of it. I suggest that we (if we are Europeans or European-descended) also demonstrate that we have an axe of resentment to grind against our own origins. ‘What has been done to us by society’, by the West, by the ‘Catholic Church et cetera. So, in our way, some of us have also felt the need to get even… with all the horrifying things that had been done to us.
I get it.
A like proposition, if you will:
Many liberal and progressive have threatened to leave the USA if ‘such and such’ happens (like Trump getting elected.) Yet they have not left.
Many liberals and progressives have (in my lifetime) praised the virtues of communist/socialist nations, yet persist in living in the USA.
They know they are lying when that say such things. Their actions speak louder than their words.
”A like proposition, if you will:”
What’s the proposal?
Definition of proposition: “a statement or assertion that expresses a judgment or opinion.
synonym:s : theory, hypothesis, thesis, argument, premise, principle, theorem, concept, idea, statement”
Do you like premise better? 🙂 Hypothesis?
I misunderstood. Shucks, after your referencing Lefties like that, I was hoping for a “round ’em up” and buy ’em tickets to Venezuela, NoKo, et al, kinda thingey…
SHHHHhhh… the alt right is listening…
No, I was looking for a similar situation like the one Alizia was discussing
This is rather wicked — well in keeping with my own wicked self —- and I don’t mean to get ‘post-colonial’ on you — but a quote from Caliban is in order:
You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse.
funny
”There is disturbing evidence that “the resistance” and the anti-Trump mob, including the news media, is heading into a new and even more deranged stage, which is scary, since the previous stage has been putting unprecented stress on the nation’s mental and political health. ”
In that ‘rehearsal’ with Van Jones (a performance-interview, impossible to categorize I suppose), she said
“OPRAH WINFREY: We have each other. We have each other. This is the thing, I have to just say everybody is feeding yourself on the hysteria and negativity. You got to stay in the light. One of the reasons why I was so excited is about a Wrinkle in Time because the message is that the darkness is spreading so fast these days. You must become a warrior of the light. The reason that’s so meaningful to me because that’s how I led my whole life, and every moment in that film, I thought, like, I’m just saying what I normally say.”
Because I am interested in how people orient themselves in reality, and how they describe reality (this is metaphysics of course), I am always interested when people offer a description of how they see themselves and orient themselves.
Here, OW is making a clear statement and what I call a ‘declaration’: revealing her metaphysical underpinnings; situating herself within her (sense of her) reality. She is a ‘warrior of the light’ and allies with certain others in the same path or quest.
Though many won’t be too interested Harold Bloom wrote a book on ‘post-Christian America’ (‘The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation’) which is worthwhile in many ways to understand the present chaos that is America.
As an example, Bloom writes in Chap. 12 ‘Baptists: From Roger Williams to E.Y. Mullins’:
“A nation as religiously fragmented as the United States will not yeild very readily to any predicitions (however informed) as to its denominational future. Our vastly increasing Hispanic population, now divided between a waning Roman Catholicism and a ferociously vigorous Pentecostalism, doubtless will become more diverse in spiiritual orientation as it gains economic and political power. Our crucial Asian-American communities, who will provide much if not most of the next generation of advanced intellectuals and leaders in the professions, are all but impossible to foretell, in the area of religious concern. What seems certain, to me, is that my two principal paradigms of the American Relgion — the Southern Baptists and the Mormons — will be at the center of what is to come, since more than any other groups they are imbued with the ambivalent vitalism of our national faith”.
I suggest there is a connection between an internal, even if unrecognized, religious motive that operates in many people but of which they are unaware, and their ‘activism’ in life. Though it is ‘post-Christian’ and in many senses removed from a defined religious practice, I observe that it promotes moods and moody-attitudes more emotionally-inclined than intellectually-inclined.
What seems to underpin or underlie the conversation/interview is a religious sensibility and one where these two persons, and the people they represent, or those who think like them, see themselves as such ‘warriors of light’. Thus, they know who they oppose, and who opposes them, and can point them out and name them. It is very hard to get a grip on what is really being offered here but it seems to have something in common with TV evangelism. A post-Christian, semi-New-Age political fantasy spirituality …
More when I know more …
Ms. Ty…I mean Alizia, have I stumbled upon your inspiration, your mentor…or you…?
Pat Condell: “Welcome to the Progressive Utopia”
Good detectives work. But that’s my grandson, bobito.
The fact that Pat Condell can freely spout this outrageous rabble rousing script constitutes ample rebuttal of his main themes. If society was as he claims, he’d be behind bars.
If he is English (his accent sounds like it) he may be speaking to things of which you are unaware. If you are American — and, say, ‘typically so’ — you have no good reason to be informed of the European climate regarding the lack of free speech, the jailing and fining of historical revisionists, white nationalist activists and related things. In order to get such a sense of what is going on behind the scenes you have to deliberately look for the information as it is not published in the MSM.
Just a few days ago Britteny Pettibone (American) and Martin Sellner (Austrian) were detained for 3 days by British authorities and then banned from Britain. They intended to go speak at Speaker’s Corner. Martin Sellner is an activist for Identitare Bewegung Osterreich. Pettibone is an American activist for identitarian concerns and, I gather, she and Sellner are a couple.
[https://youtu.be/4glysfmgOC0]
Lauren Southern is a Canadian journalist who has recently completed a journalism project in South Africa on the conditions of the white minority there. She is a young conservative but is not really an activist in any particular political area. She was also detained, questioned under a terrorism act provision, turned away and banned from the UK.
If you pay attention to what is going on toward the fringes and in those area non-reported by the MSM you will find dozens of cases, and numerous dozens of idea-activists, historicans, contrarians, who have been fined, jailed and banned from various European countries for their written work, their opinions, and their communication of their ideas.
Over the last year, more or less, some of the larger New Right websites have been cyberattacked and taken down. There has also been a wave of YouTube bannings of commentators and their material, as well as bannings from Twitter. PayPal has banned certain people and organizations from using its services and many people have been hurt by this. There is a long list of platforms that deny service for political reasons. These are private corporations and they are said to be able to retract their service when they want, but Jared Taylor (totally benign in all senses) was banned from Twitter and has now brought out a suit that may challenge the right of these corporations to exclude opinion and ideas that they simply do not like, under the argument that the communication takes place in a public sphere or is an extension of the public sphere.
There is definitely a climate in the US which would theoretically deny the right to speak if it could. But because the rules are strict and defined what the Left and the Progressives do is resort to ‘moral shaming’ of a shrill variety. They are active through the SPLC and other such investigative organizations, and these organizations have links to government and government agencies and, one presumes, to the intelligence communities. Just as in Europe now, in the US I would assume there is grave concern over the popular reaction to certain governmental polcies and to a certain ‘regime’ of thought operating in the present.
Right now, to all appearances, in the larger meta-political realm, the powers-that-be are directing animus toward ‘Russia’ and attempting to provoke a general reaction against ‘all that Russia is doing to undermine our democracies’. The climate is hysterical and it seems to be getting ramped-up each passing day.
It does not take the proverbial ‘brain surgeon’ to speculate, with some well founded reasons, where things are going. Though one cannot, not really, know ‘what is going on’ because what goes on occurs in shadows of uncertainty, one can and one should, at least, keep one’s eyes open.
Short description of the Jared Taylor American Renaissance suit against Twitter:
[https://youtu.be/CUg5TrWzjzY]
“If society was as he claims, he’d be behind bars.”
Were society as #BlackLivesMatter claims, and their solutions implemented, communities would be their own Gendarmerie and the Police would be behind bars.
Andrew, this is a follow-up:
I’m not sure how showing the interview enriches O.J. Simpson. I don’t think he gets paid for news interviews, and even if the interview spurs people to buy If I Did It, the rights to the book are owned by the Goldman family these days. With only a few exceptions (such as his pension), most of any income he makes goes to satisfy his debt to the Goldman family.
I very much doubt that OJ wasn’t paid to do those present day promotions for the interview. There is no book to promote. And as with the book, completing the illicit transaction emphasizes it. The publicity also benefits OJ, who has no shame and is looking for more ways to cash in. If you are a professional celebrity, ALL publicity is a benefit, no?
Who are we to judge O.J. Simpson?
Maybe it’s just the accountant in me, but “any income he makes goes to satisfy his debt to the Goldman family”–a decrease in liabilities is just as enriching as an increase in assets.
And what is wrong with that?
That’s a good point.
Nancy Pelosi Statement on Appointing Rex Tillerson (2.13.16)
Nancy Pelosi Statement on Dismissing Rex Tillerson (3.13.18 )
– Nancy Pelosi, United States Representative from California, 12th District
Res ipsa loquitur
Does anyone sane believe Nancy Pelosi is?
It’s cringeworthy, but SanFranNan is losing it in real time.
Once you stop expecting it to make sense, it will make perfect sense!
Tillerton went too far, criticising Putin for merely conducting a nerve gas attack on a NATO ally. He was supposed to be an unconditional ally of Trump’s associate, who would turn a blind eye to such minor issues as the use of WMD on allies.
His replacement will do such ocular gymnastics though, based on his frequent past meetings with Russian generals. A favourite of the FRC, so we’ll see what happens regarding the reinstatement of bans on homosexuals entering the US, and the overturning of Obama regulations allowing Trans and Intersex people to get accurate passports.
Having a Secretary of State who believes it’s his Christian Duty to hasten Armageddon and the coming of Our Lord and Saviour doesn’t give me warm fuzzies. He did do the job of CIA director without committing too much canine intercourse though.
The new CIA director is old school, facing indictments and requests for extradition for her overseeing of torture programs. Obama issued a blanket pardon for all those involved, so there’s little danger of her being tried in the US for the crimes she’s already confessed to. Under Obama, many were forced out, the careers of the rest stalled. The psychologists involved were castigated by their professional association. Now’s full steam ahead.
“By My word and for the good of the state, The bearer has done what has been done”
Of course all this assumes Congress will allow such appointments through.
What?
Authentic Frontier Gibberish
Oh. I don’t usually see that from Sue. Trump Derangement appears to be eating away at her speech center…
I understood it just fine.
Doesn’t anyone remember the “Reagan Index” created by Dan Rather’s CBS Evening News? They added inflation and unemployment into one index of misery allegedly caused by Reagan’s policies. As soon as the tax cuts took effect, unemployment fell and interest rates began to fall. Zing, no Reagan Index. What a surprise!
These people have been at this a very long time. They are loathsome little Alinskyites.
A full shunning?
What would the Bible say about that?
Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven:- Luke 6:37
But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.- Matthew 6:15
It seems shunning is very judgmental and not forgiving at all.
What happens to those whom our Lord God HaShem does not forgive?
The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever. Revelations 14:10-11
It appears, from these verses, that the price of shunning O.J. Simpson is eternal damnation. What possible benefit from shunning O.J. Simpson could compensate for eternal damnation?
I explain the common misconception of “judge not” in the Rationalizations list under Biblical rationalizations. We are obligated to judge to maintain societal standards…indeed, this is the foundational concept this blog is built on. Society can and must refuse to engae with cold-blooded killers who lie about their crime and model an alternate culture in which murder pays. Thus we must shun OJ. Who are we? People who don’t kill our wives and their friends.
Now us let us examine the price of ” refus[ing] to engae with cold-blooded killers who lie about their crime and model an alternate culture in which murder pays”.
The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever. Revelations 14:10-11
“Forgiving not” O.J. Simpson of his trespasses means that the Father in Heaven will not forgive you of your trespasses.
It appears to me that O.J. Simpson has never hurt you personally, did you now wrong, never violated any concrete, particularized interests that you have.
Why risk your soul?
Why risk your soul in shunning someone who never did you wrong?
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?- Mark 8:36
There is no profit in shunning O.J.. Simpson.
The Word of HaShem clearly tells us what the price is.
Simple answer: they are wrong, I’m right. A double killer is a greater risk to kill again. A society that doesn’t judge and shun such a person is irresponsible, incompetent and dangerous. Morality is abstract. Ethics involve reality. I choose ethics every time.
And what of the issue of eternal damnation?
Mike, have you suddenly been born again? There is no, and I repeat NO empirical evidence indicating there is either salvation or eternal damnation. Thus, there is no issue of “eternal damnation”.
Allowing only for that which is proven by empirical evidence, you’d have to assume that neither any of us, nor the universe actually exists. So there’s that.
Dangerously close to solipsism. I had read that someone actually came up with a proof that we (and the universe) actually do exist. Haven’t and won’t looked for it so I can’t tell you how it runs, but I’m told it’s better than “I think. Therefore, I am.”
I see no issue. My job is here.
It is quite bold of you to write that the Word of HaShem is wrong.
What is interesting about this present discussion, which of course cannot be pursued here for obvious (good) reasons: this is not a blog devoted to Christian theology but one devoted strictly to ethics in an American context. But still what is interesting is only that one can *note* certain things and file them away. One important thing to mention is that any idea about ‘judgment’ and ‘judging’, if looked at through a Christian lens, originates in the idea of God’s judgment of the men and the world. That involves a range of different views on that topic which are in no sense uniform. The Augistinian view is the most interesting (to me): that our judgment begins in this life, now, and that we are living within a spiritual process that will, though we have no idea how, be continued in some other plane of existence. If one believes in ‘the soul’, and knows that this soul is eternal (or has even limited longevity that extends beyond the short confines of this manifest life), a great many further things must be supposed. If one does not believe in such a soul, one has no metaphysics to support anything except complete expiration with the death of the body.
And still, even today, a great deal hinges on what one believes.
This is an interesting paragraph from ‘The Oxford Companion To Christian Thought’ on the idea of God’s judgment. It has to do with the Enlightenment and the post-Enlightenment: and we are very much still in this phase of a developing and continuing Enlightenment while, strangely and simultaneously, faith is expanding (for example with the explosive rise of the Pentacostal churches and also Islam world-wide):
“Any reassessment of the understanding of God’s judgment today will have to take into account that the Enlightenment ousted Christ from the judgment-seat, replacing him with human reason. This is particularly evident in the question of theodicy, where God is put on trial for the suffering and evil of the world, which seem incompatable with either divine goodness or divine omnipotence or both. Theodicies attempt to justify God in the court of reason. But when the idea of God as judge of the world is lost and the state of things in the world does not even provoke the question of theodicy, human judgment becomes the final court of justice. The need for human beings to justify themselves takes the place of God’s judgment and justification. Theodicy is replaced by what has been called ‘anthropodicy’, the constant need for human self-justification’.
I think it is fairly clear that we exist, largely, within a post-Enlightenment situation. I cannot see how it could be otherwise quite frankly. Our courts of law are not theological tribunals and there is no way they could be! And it is Enlightenment concepts that dominate culture.
But in relation to the specific issue, and seen from a Christian perspective, I would speculate that it is more sinful to accomodate OJ Simpson and to be at all forgiving of him then it is to judge him harshly for what he did, but which culpability he successfully avoided, for all the known reasons. The law of the land has already let him off the hook. He is a free man. That is all that the law as law is entitled to do. It cannot either condemn him or justify him on any other level.
It is really quite suspect that ‘the people’ generally do not show firmness toward him. Stupid and I think ignorant people crowd around him for photos. Do they even care if he is guilty or not? I don’t know. There is a fascination with the man who outsmarted justice I suppose.
It should not surprise us at all.
O.J.. Simpson never did anything to hurt them personally, so it would be so totally pointless for them to shun him, for them to hold a grudge against him. And since most of them are Christians, they are aware of the consequences of not forgiving him.
Mike,
You are using the words, but twisting the meaning. What does the Bible say about that?
God intends for us to have a civil society, meaning punishment for wrongdoing here on earth.
By your logic all of our laws will earn everyone eternal damnation, and that ain’t so.
Let us again go back to the Word of HaShem.
https://ethicsalarms.com/2016/07/16/from-an-ethics-dunce-playmate-of-the-year-a-full-pazuzu/comment-page-1/#comment-397884
” For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou
then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have
praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.”- Romans 13:3-4
Our rulers, via the courts, have not decreed that our culture should shun O.J. Simpson. Our rulers, who are ministers of God to us for good, are the only ones who may bear the sword, and who may execute wrath on those that do evil. They have decided; we must abide.
I’m not so sure that there even is a rising tide of white-supremacy. I haven’t been able to find any good objective proof of it. Neo-nazis and KKK members continue to be an extremely tiny subculture, so much so that even when they summon their sympathizers from all over the country they can’t muster up more than 100 or so dorks with tiki torches for a rally.
That tiny racist fringe probably feels more validated than ever that its conspiracies about white genocide are true, thanks to the increasingly rabid Left’s racist rhetoric. And maybe we will see an actual backlash to that; maybe it’s already happening. As it stands I can’t tell if there really are more racists around or just more that they’re getting more press from progressives fantasizing 70 years too late about fighting Nazis.
You have spoken well: there is no ‘rising tide of white supremacy’ because the term ‘white supremicist’ is one invented by Lefties, Progressives, Marxists and biased journalists to describe, unfairly, white identitarian ideation and activism. If you really want to get a clear picture of the whole span of such activism you’d have to make a focused effort to do so. If you relied on the biased media and anyone with good reasons to distort their description of what they describe, you would quickly lose the track. You could start with a work of journalism and academic research, published by a upstanding univerity press such as ‘Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism’ by George Hawley (2016, University Press of Kansas) which describes most of these groups and their origin. It also describes ‘the great purge’ from American Conservatism in which, some say, the American Conservative became a Cuckservative: sold out to the Progressive Left more-or-less.
Neo-Nazis and the KKK are not openly shunned and hated by *us*, as you for example have been conditioned and trained to hate them and, as in 1984, cross your wrists in horror when you see the image of Goldstein flashing before the screen — the one you watch your propoganda on and then also the one in your own mind. It is actually your centrist position, which is still yet one designed through propaganda, that we resist. Not though because we love or even admire Nazis nor wish to have anything to do with them nor model anything on them. We dismantle a whole ‘construct’ that has been put in motion in the postwar and that supports a corrupt ‘liberalism’. (‘Communism rots the body by liberalism rots the soul’).
They and *we* have made a conscious choice in this and that choice has to do with turning against the entire edifice of propaganda that informs your (plural) and our perspectives on reality. This has to do with ‘interpretation’ and is literally hermeneutical. Because *you* are so much a product, ideologically, of this system, what I am saying to you can only offend. It must sound like the most outrageous lie imaginable! But I have no interest or intention of offending, rather my interest is to ‘get to the truth about things’: to describe accurately the world I live in. I start from a premise: it is nearly impossible to achieve clear-seeing without a significant purification-of-vision effort. This is spiritual work overall. It is intellectual work. It is difficult personal and interior work because of the levels of complicity that attach us through our views to larger, functioning systems. It involves an examination of our own mind and the systems and powers that inform our minds.
I also start from the premise that ‘You will not help me to gain either clarity, understanding or truth’ but that you will inhibit me from this. When I say *you* I mean much more than the mere you, yet you are included, until you deomonstrate fierceness in regard to clarifying ideas in the light of truth.
As I have said about a thousand times, and will repeat a thousand more times, in order to understand social and political conflicts of our present one has to back-track into the ideas and the reaction of the Interwar period (1920-1930s). And one has to understand, and in a sense master, the artificial polarization that developed in propaganda planning offices in the US, in the UK, in Soviet Russia. You have to understand how these ‘narratives’ were spun and then set into motion. They have to be (excuse the term) ‘deconstructed’ though I prefer the word ‘dismantled’ since it avoids that silly French Structuralist term.
Once you have begun to dismantle the imposed structure which has been forced on you, then and only then might you be said to be approaching ‘free thought’ and truth-telling. You are not free, and you are not a free-thinker. You are a determined thinker who ‘spouts opinion’. You and millions just like you: university educated, arrogant and assuming, but highly conformist when an analysis of your opinions is made. What I am saying comes from meta-political analysis.
We desire to change this. We desire to revise our view of history and to ‘correct’ it. We are doing this. And our ideas have power.
You have nicely performed an act of conformist thinking with your prefab speculations that asserts that the reactionary right has come about because of the ‘Left’s racist rhetoric’. You do this in order to place a truer conservative perspective into a bad light so that you can reflexively condem it. You will condemn it and at the same time dismiss it,and this is how this particular polar idea-trap is designed to function. You do not really know much of anything at all about the ur-conservative ideas, nor about Traditionalism, nor all that informs the original conservative position. But you also don’t know anything at all, or anything substantial, about the political ideas of the Left. You are not therefor really located in history and in this sense in reality. You are located within what I call ‘an imposition’. A buffer-zone. You will not ever know the thinking of important thinkers because you have never read them! That’s how this *trap* worlk, and that is how determined and controlled (coerced) political ideas work. They limit ideation. I was amazed that Spartan said ‘I don’t have to read Chomsky to know that sh*t stinks’. Essentially this is what *you* do. You make declarations about things you have no knowledge of. This is intellectually disgraceful. And destructive. But you would have to do intellectual worlk to discover why desructive.
We desire to open up ideation and to resist those, like you, who do all in their power to limit and control it. Doing ths will result in a renaissance of idea and a breakdown of conformism.
The movement that has recognized and defined the importance of ‘defending Europe’ and also that which defined ‘defending Occidental civilization’ is one that is based in solid and valuable ideas. The movement that has begun to recognize that there is a threat and to define what that threat is and how to confront it, is ouside and beyond your view because you choose not to lift up your eyes, because you choose to accept the prefabricated definitions that have been designed for your consumption. If you really had any genuine concern for such issues, you’d have made or would be interested in making an investigation, with an open mind, of what they are saying and why they say it. But the *trap* I refer to keeps you tightly bound up in a little box: unfree, fettered, rhetorical, boring, dead.
We desire to forge ahead, and after confronting *you* and people who think like you — substantial blocks on our road — we certainly will.
OK, now I will prepare a second cup of coffee! 😉
There’s not a rising tide of white supremacy. There’s a rising tide of the media giving vastly disproportionate attention to tiny little fringe groups who have been around for decades being safely ignored completely by 99.99% of the population.
I wonder why the media attention on those nithings.
No, you don’t wonder why.
4- Longtime HRC aide & campaign maven Patty Solis Doyle: “This…this was bad!”
The WaPo: ”Democrats distance themselves from Hillarity Clinton’s ‘backward’ claim”
And a consensus on “The View?”
Fuggeddaboudit!!
Because I have resolved to try to get all that I can out of my participation on this blog, and because the times that we are living in is so dynamic, strange and dangerous, and because one ethical and moral issue or question will inevitably link to other such questions and issues, I am compelled to continue to comment on Michael Ejercito’s ideas on judgment and forgiveness (I always think of Michael’s Armies of angelical beings when I read his name! (Ejercito = army). It doesn’t seem that it should be worth such an effort (I mean the ethical dimension here) but it is when it is examined.
“O.J.. Simpson never did anything to hurt them personally, so it would be so totally pointless for them to shun him, for them to hold a grudge against him. And since most of them are Christians, they are aware of the consequences of not forgiving him.”.
In order to talk about OJ’s situation in an ethical and moral sense, it is important that one be able to *see* it. Especially in this case, and cases similar to it, there are issues about *seeing*. This illustrates one of my main points about ‘our present’: we are inhibited and blocked from really seeing if seeing is taken to mean understanding at a profound level, fundamentally. It is through the world of the spectacle, which is a world mediated by media, that primarily distorts *seeing* for most of us. And to understand why it distorts, and the interests in operation that intentionally distort, is a great part of arriving at an understanding of our present.
But ‘the media’ is not the only issue here, the other dimension, equally large, is how people perceive. How they have been trained to see, or not to see as the case may be. Meaning the degree that their apriorisms, their desires, their bias, determine what they *see* and how they interpret everything about life and existence, and then of course all the smaller issues. This has to do with paideia.
But the facts about OJ Simpson’s case seem to be these:
He committed the crime and all the evidence is there to prove it. But there were racially biased and corrupt police who were involved in the initial investigation. There was also a great deal of social and racial tension in the LA community. The situation was such that through hiring a powerful group of lawyers the prosecution was outsmarted but also that the political climate determined, in a sense, that OJ had to be acquitted as a form of atonement for the corrupt activities of police. In this sense justice was not served in this case. But some other kind of ‘justice’ was served and this justice was more in the vein of ‘social catharsis’, primarily I have gathered for the POC community. And in this situation OJ Simpsom succeeded in avoiding justice and, obviously, avoiding punishment.
All that the State can do is a) find a person guilty and punish that person, or b) find that person not guilty and let them go. The State cannot (as far as I am aware) offer an official opinion, say for example that ‘justice has not been served’. Even if the prosecution’s lawyers may have made such statements, they do not speak for the State. The State is not a vehicle for application of moral punishment, or moral condemnation, and the State cannot ‘forgive’ either. It can only find a person guilty or not guilty. If the State continued, for example, to harrass and trouble OJ Simpsom after he was declared not guilty, the State would be acting illegally.
So, it is obvious that OJ got off and most people who did manage to see through the various levels of distortion about his guilt or innocence, about tampering with evidence, about racist police, et cetera, came to *see* his situation accurately. He got off on the legal charges but in no sense did this exonerate him from the moral responsibility for his actions. It would be the same for you and for me in any similar situation, even if it were to have avoided paying a parking ticket through a succesful lie. We still have ‘civic guilt’ though what that is is hard to define. There still exists a moral dimension to his actions. But what exactly is that moral dimsnion and where is it? This is where things get complex and contentious.
Dragin_Dragon wrote that “there is no empirical evidence for salvation or damnation”. This has to be translated, or translated-expanded. What this means is there is no empirical evidence for the existence of a ‘soul’ which would suffer either reward or punishment in any dimension after the death of the organism.
But what this statement further means is that an entire dimension of faith and entire concepts of morality and also ethics have been superceded by different, and modern, views. And these views are now common — more common in any case — and they begin to assert themselves more and more (by more and more I mean over a 3-400 year period but with increasing strength in our present).
How these ‘modern ideas’ and how this ‘modern metaphysics’ affects how people view the world, this realm of existence, existence, being, morals and ethics, is a very large question! But let us merely say that, for us today, speaking culturally and socially, there is a lack of belief in or understanding about a ‘divine authority’ that could or will ‘punish’. And as I noted above we live in a post-Enlightenment situation where the divine judge has been unseated and it is man, and man alone, that can ‘judge’. We cannot, obviously, conceive of a Providence that would follow OJ, and if we imagined something like The Furies that haunted and tortured Orestes in Agamemnon’s play, we would only see them as psychological forces arising out of the guilt of the haunted one. Nothing more.
Providence implies a God that enters into our world and our being. And we no longer organize our perception along those lines. Or to put it differently, we live in a ‘divided world of perception’ where, on one hand we might, interiorly, believe in Providence (as divine justice) but not be able to express it in a positive sense in our statements and actions. It is a very curious situation when you begin to look into it.
OJ Simpon did indeed ‘do something to harm them personally’ if one sees his actions in a larger social, cultural and civilizational context. But the same is true when any one of us commits a crime or a misdead. But we are encumbered in how we view even these sorts of things. There is confusion and uncertainty. And the reason is because, conceptually, we do not see things in a wide moral dimension. We do not see things ‘metaphysically’ nor ‘supernaturally’. We say it is fine for people to commit questionable moral or ethical acts if they are alone, let us say, and there is no obvious and tangible link between what they do and the surrounding world. We no longer see, for example, the moral dimension in an act of desacration because, obviously, we cannot *see* anything as being ‘sacred’. A sacred thing requires a special dimension of vision which is, to put it in one way, projected onto the object or scene. But that is a superficial explanation. In fact, we can no longer recognize nor grasp, metaphysically, the presence of the divine in any area and certainly not as a sacramentalizing agent. So, no soul, no providence, no sacred, no divine intervention in reality — it just goes on and on from that point. And all of this new perception, this should be obvious, affects how we view what once at another time was viewed sacramentally. Our virtue for example. Or ‘motherhood’. Or ‘holiness’ and ‘piety’. The list of what is not longer seen through sacramental lenses is extensive indeed.
We live in an age in with ‘value’ and its relationship to what is ‘sacred’ has been substantially and amazingly, and also profoundly, undermined. The ramifications of this, oddly enough, can only really be *seen* by the one who is still capable of ‘metaphysical vision’. The one who no longer has such metaphysical vision becomes, if you will permit me the cruel comparison, like a dog in a temple. Dogs accompany us everywhere, yet they really do not understand anything except what is most immediate. I make such a bold reference not to insult but to illustrate something very fundamental about our present and our civilization.
Zoltar speaks (in tones of prophetic doom!) of the ‘dumbing down of America’. But I have not ever got the sense (excuse me Zoltar) that there was much understanding of why this is, and how it has come about. That is why I say: we can examine symptoms all the day through, but it is only when we manage to ‘turn our heads around’ (in the Cave of existence and perception) to see what is behind us — causation — that we can ever take a step toward rectification or arresting of the deterioration of…?
Of what? The mind? The perception? The imagination? It actually goes far beyond any smallish label. We have lost our ‘interdimensionality’, a material-spiritual amphibiousness. I suggest that the loss of this ‘domain’ and the capacity to *see* broadly and intuitively, is far more serious than many seems to be aware. We are actually on the verge of losing what is truly human, and certainly what in the Occident has made the human a human. The ‘dumbing down’ is a reduction of Man to the level of not just a stupid animal, but to that of a beast, nay: to a machine.
Now, connect that ‘machine’ which has lost or had taken away from it the ‘soul’s sovereignty’ and a great deal of the ‘interdimensionality’ which makes Vision possible, and combine this with an evermore powerful mechanized State, with media systems stretching tentacles into the mind and perceptual realm, and you wind up with a rather diabolical description. Is this ‘dark fantasy? Imposition of a ‘false narrative’? It all really depends on the one who *sees* and therefor it all turns back on the individual and his and her description of ‘the world’. And right now, I assert this must be seen with clarity, there are enormous battles going on to determine who and what controls what is *seen* and through what lenses. It is, ultimately, an issue of power.
Very complex material here. But infinitely important.
OJ Simpson committed a serious crime (that is, if I have organized my understanding correctly), and yet did not pay the cost of it. He avoided paying that cost. The State has acquitted him. That is all the State can do.
But where OJ Simpson stands on a moral and ethical level —- I mean here metaphysically and supernaturally — depends on one hand on who is *seeing*. Much more hinges on this than meets the eye (and the eye is everything!) Today, and again ‘in our present’, people desire to assume the role of Divine Justice. It is human reason which judges and the criminal cannot, it seems, be left to ‘providence’, which means the supernatural, to receive punishment. This creates a bizarre circumstance of no ability Or willingness to forgive. If one commits a crime, one is not really ever forgiven even when, or especially when, one has admitted one’s crime, paid the penalty, and asked to be forgiven. Once branded, forever branded. Strangely, guiltiness is extended infinitely in the absense of a Divine Justice. If you are not going to be punished metaphysically and in some future, well, you will be punished to no end here! When man becomes the sole punisher, and punishment is left to the appetite of the masses, punishment is eternal as far as terrestrial existence goes. There is no other realm where punishment would be carried out, best to maximize it here!
Because OJ Simpsom did not ever admit to guilt, he cannot be ‘forgiven in any Christian sense. I mean in any Christian sense. Whether Catholic, pre-Vatican ll or post-Vatican ll, in a Protestant sense, in a Non-Denominational sense, nor in a Jewish sense (Michael used ‘HaShem’ which is not and cannot be a Christian reference because, in Christianity, God is named! and Ha Shem means ‘the Name’ which cannot be vocalized in traditoonal Judaism).
Therefor, the whole question of ‘forgiveness’ does not enter in in any sense. One can only forgive someone when a) they are seen as responsible agents, and b) when they have chosen to assume responsibility for their misdeed. You can fogive a child, a pet, a mental retard, or the criminally insane, but you cannot forgive a responsible moral agent and citizen until they have confessed.
A Christian can certainly not assume God’s role and ‘forgive’ OJ or anyother crime-doer who has not made the effort to confess and rectify. A Christian can go to a neutral position, I suppose, where he or she has ‘turned it over to God’ knowing — sincerely and truly believing — that at one time or another, in one way or another, all actions by man must be accounted for. He or she can resist the temptation to overstep a bounds. But in no sense (that I can see) could this ever, ethically or morally, include seeing OJ Simpson as not-guilty nor as ‘forgiven’ or worthy of forgiveness. This is really quite intuitively obvious.
__________________________
I think I deserve at the very least — the very least! — an B+ for this present effort. I do not have a Facebook account but please, if you appreciated what I have written here, ‘like’ me on a metaphysical level. Or at the least do not ‘hate’ me and hold me in contempt.
And please remember the very interesting words of Blake, an unusual seer:
This life’s dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, they eye.