Sunday, November 29, 2020

Articles to read

An assortment of articles spotted online. "To be read."
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Quotes: On reading good books

Christine Weston:

She gazed from the fabulous tides of sunset to the book which she had brought to read on the journey. It still smelled of Dockett’s Book Store. She could see the dusty shelves stretching from floor to ceiling, the long tables stacked with volumes, and the figures which moved like characters in a Kafka novel. That had been in the fall of 1935.
Christine Weston. The Dark Wood. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946. p. 21.

Anne Perry:

A good book changes you, even if it is only to add a little to the furniture of your mind.
Anne Perry, writing on "The Man Who Was Thursday" by G. K. Chesterton. The Book that Changed my Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books that Matter Most to Them. Edited by Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen. New York: Gotham Books, 2007. p. 137.

Virginia Woolf:

Rachel read what she chose, reading with the curious literalness of one to whom written sentences are unfamiliar, and handling words as though they were made of wood, separately of great importance, and possessed of shapes like tables or chairs. In this way she came to conclusions, which had to be remodelled according to the adventures of the day, and were indeed recast as liberally as any one could desire, leaving always a small grain of belief behind them.
Virginia Woolf. The Voyage Out (1915).

Greg Epstein:

Or as the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po said to his friend and colleague Tu Fu, "Thank you for letting me read your new poems. It was like being alive twice."
Greg Epstein. Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe. William Morrow, 2009. p. 189.
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Saturday, November 14, 2020

Quotes: What makes an idea sacred or religious?

Theism? Superstition? Myth? Ritual?

Does it have to teach a fixed dogma, and/or does it have to be undefined and flexible enough to allow for its continuous development and for individuals' ongoing learning?

If it is inherently motivated by politics or if it grows to seek political goals, does it have to contain material that is separate from and more enduring than the political movement?

Michael Ducey in 1977 distinguished “mass ritual” and “interaction ritual” based on whether the audience participates.
(Referenced in William Beers. Women and Sacrifice: Male Narcissism and the Psychology of Religion. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992. p. 164.)

Thought becomes religious when it thinks itself out to the end.
Albert Schweitzer
The psychologist Philip Tetlock(1999, 2003, 2004) identifies values as sacred when they are so important to those who hold them that the very act of considering them is offensive.
Daniel C. Dennett. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Penguin Group, 2006. p. 22.
To the rational mind there can be no offense, no obscenity, no blasphemy, but only information of greater or lesser value.
Jennifer Diane Reitz, www.transsexual.org
Then what is religion? If you have wiped the window cleant — which means that you have actually stopped performing ceremonies, given up all beliefs, ceased to follow any leader or guru — then your mind, like the window, is clean, polished, and you can see out of it very clearly. When the mind is swept clean of image, of ritual, of belief, of symbol, of all words, mantrams and repetitions, and of all fear, then what you see will be the real, the timeless, the everlasting, which may be called God. But this requires enormous insight, understanding, patience, and it is only for those who really inquire into what is religion and pursue it day after day to the end.
* * *
Religion is the feeling of goodness, that love which is like the river, living, moving everlastingly. In that state you will find there comes a moment when there is no longer any search at all; and this ending of search is the beginning of something totally different. The search for God, for truth, the feeling of being completely good — not the cultivation of goodness, of humility, but the seeking out of something beyond the inventions and tricks of the mind, which means having a feeling for that something, living in it, being it — that is true religion.
J. Krishnamurti. Think on These Things. ed. by D. Rajagopal. New York: Perennial, 1964. pp. 43, 157.
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Wednesday, November 11, 2020

'Soft coup' and storytelling: A couple threads on Twitter

Sharing a couple threads I spotted on Twitter.

First, here's Frank Figliuzzi, formerly a top FBI official, now a national security analyst for MSNBC, saying that Trump is behaving like a "barricaded subject" in a hostage negotiation. He says that Biden is handling the situation correctly, staying calm and allowing Trump an opportunity to vent, while letting Trump keep his options open for resolving the standoff "the easy way" rather than "the hard way."

On November 10, the New York Times published a large article explaining that no significant election fraud has been found. This has been the most secure U.S. election ever, according to a November 12 New York Times article.

Yet Trump has been refusing to cooperate with the Biden team (see these articles from CNN and Huffington Post). He's making the moves of a dictator (CNN). To the extent he ever performed normal presidential responsibilities, he has now stopped working altogether. (CNN) To maintain the illusion that his administration expects to continue, issued a directive that "any political appointee searching for a new job should be fired."

On November 11, Jennifer Rubin mentioned in the Washington Post that "six pre-election and seven post-election lawsuits by the Trump camp have all been tossed out" by judges who say that the allegations are not based in fact. "Interestingly," she notes, "Trump’s lawyers refuse to say before a real judge that they have found fraud or other reasons to overturn results." The problem, she says, is:

Trump is receiving support from a range of Republican figures, including Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who says congratulations to Biden are premature; a flock of members of Congress from Georgia, who baselessly attack their state’s Republican secretary of state and inexplicably claim their own election victories valid while Biden’s is fraudulent; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who declares the transition will be to a “second Trump administration”; and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who perpetuates the fiction that the outcome is in dispute. The aim is not to steal an election, but to sow doubt about the legitimacy of our democracy — just as the Russians intend. These Republicans aim to keep their base in a constant state of anger and crazed denial.

On Friday, November 13, "nine cases in key states were denied or dropped in one day," CNN reported. The next day, in the evening, Trump tweeted that he was putting Rudy Giuliani in charge of the Trump campaign's legal fight. Giuliani replaces campaign adviser David Bossie, who, in addition to not being a lawyer, was diagnosed with COVID-19 soon after he was appointed to the role. On Monday, November 16, another four lawsuits were dropped.

On November 11, NBC reported that "there is a growing expectation among President Donald Trump’s advisers that he will never concede that he lost re-election, even after votes are certified in battleground states over the coming weeks," while other advisers believe that "the president is coming around to the fact that the election result won’t be reversed." Regarding Trump's lawsuits over the election, a White House official said, “It’s not wrong for the Biden team to call it theater.” A November 12 article from CNN found sources close to Trump who believe that Trump will indeed give up eventually.

Republican leaders are starting to give up on Trump's narrative and his false expectations for a win, according to a November 12 New York Times article.

On November 16, White House national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien said that Biden appears to have won.

Also on November 16, attorneys quit the Trump lawsuit in Pennsylvania. Trump then hired Marc Scaringi to represent him there. But this attorney doesn't seem to believe in the cause. Scaringi, a radio show host, had told his listeners on November 7: “In my opinion there really are no bombshells that are about to drop that will derail a Biden presidency including these lawsuits." Scaringi had also previously blogged that Biden was “president-elect” and “the 46th president," though he subsequently deleted the post.

By November 18, General Services Administrator Emily Murphy was still refusing to release transition funds. She says there is precedent to wait for some formal "ascertainment" of the election results; she also says she has received death threats. No legal process seems likely to change the election results at this point. "It's not clear what specific actions Murphy is waiting on before granting ascertainment," CNN reported, as "Murphy has not publicly said what the definitive line will be."

On November 19, state judges in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia threw out more of Trump's lawsuits.

Natasha Turak's CNBC article on Nov. 12, "What if Trump never concedes? The Constitution will end his term, conservative lawyer John Yoo says": Yoo says it is unlikely that his lawsuits will succeed in changing the vote count. First, Trump has no proof of systematic fraud. Secondly, while recounts can boost public confidence in the vote accuracy, they will not bridge the size of the gap between Biden and Trump, so Yoo recommends that Trump "start allowing the transition to occur." On January 20, constitutionally, "all of the allegiance of the government, of the military, of the civil service" will belong to Biden.

This thread:

Also, this one:

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Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Quotes on simplicity

Kierkegaard — according to Merold Westphal — "published a long review of a Danish novel [Two Ages] which appeared just as he was concluding his own book [Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing] and which fascinated him by providing an occasion for dealing with some of the same themes in a different setting." In the review, he "introduces inertia as a physical metaphor for the spiritual resistance to that dying to immediacy that the sacred seems to demand of us."
Quoting: Merold Westphal. God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion. (1984) Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987. p. 52.

"Love is greater than anything — love and Lady Poverty. Poverty is like a gift and a dependence. Everything for God and others. That’s above institutions, above permissions, above constitutions, and we need a taste of it; somewhere, somehow, we have to feel the ardor of it again."
The character of a priest in Michael Novak's novel The Tiber Was Silver, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co, 1961. p. 85.

"Complexity is just simplicity which refuses to be anything else."
poet Nayyirah Waheed, quoted in "Time and Time Again: An interview with Farah Salem," Sixty Inches From Center, April 2022

“The trouble about man is twofold: He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.”
Rebecca West, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, quoted in The Week, Sept. 27, 2013. p. 17.

"...[on Shabbat] I do not use money, do not spend time on any tasks related to my work as editor of Tikkun, and do not engage in any activity that would exert dominion or control over nature. This practice helps me foster and strengthen my understanding of the abundance that already is there."
Michael Lerner. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. p. 316.

“The silence grew, becoming a kind of presence in the room.”
James Carroll. The Cloister. Nan A. Talese, March 6, 2018.

"The substance of a work is the impossible — what we have not been able to attain, what could not be given to us: the sum of all the things which were refused us."
E. M. Cioran. The Trouble With Being Born. (1973)(Trans. by Richard Howard.) New York: Arcade, 2012.

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Monday, November 2, 2020

Several resources on how to stop a potential U.S. coup

No analysis here. Just a couple resources for immediate use.



"10 things you need to know to stop a coup" (WagingNonviolence.org)

"6 Things We Must Do Right Now To Save America From A Constitutional Crisis" (WBUR.org)

Choose Democracy is advising and training people on what they can do in the case of a coup.

Have money to donate? Organizations that aim to protect election results:

Protect the Results (and its allied organizations)
ACLU
Common Cause
The Brennan Center for Justice Movement
Voter Project

Also, a 7-part series on the 2020 election, updated October 17 on Medium:
Part 1: Trump’s Motivations to Stay in Office
Part 2: Who’s Helping Trump to Remain in Office?
Part 3: How Will Americans Vote?
Part 4: Cheating to Win the Election
Part 5: What to Expect on Election Day and in the Transition Period
Part 6: The Chaos We Expect After the 2020 Election
Part 7: Fascism, and a Small Thing You Can Do Right Now

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