POLITICAL COMMENTARY: “UCLA Shooter Killed Wife Before Attack” / The Young Turks / Cenk Uygur ☮
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Category Archives: Metaphysics
CORPORATE MEDIA: “MSNBC Brags: We’re Becoming More Conservative!” / Secular Talk / Kyle Kulinski ☮
GNOSTICISM: “The Battle About God: The Gnostic Perspective on Modern Atheism” / The Modern Hermeticist / Stephan A. Hoeller ☮
Stephan A. Hoeller, scholar of gnosticism, lectures on Atheism as perceived from a Gnostic point of view.
POLITICAL COMMENTARY: “Top U.S. and World Headlines — June 2, 2016” / Democracy Now! / Amy Goodman ☮
POLITICAL COMMENTARY: “California Governor Endorses Hillary Over Bernie (With Bad Arguments)” / Secular Talk / Kyle Kulinski ☮
CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION COMPLEX: “Righteous Defiance in Mississippi” / VICE News ☮
A Mississippi law that protects individuals, businesses, and even government employees who refuse to provide services for gay weddings will go into effect July 1.
The controversial legislation is one example of a spate of so-called “Religious Freedom” laws that carve out legal protections for people who object to gay marriage on religious grounds. The Mississippi law covers a range of professions who don’t want to provide their services to members of the LGBT community, from therapists, to adoption services, and wedding DJs.
Critics of the law say it discriminates against an LGBT minority in an overwhelmingly Christian state. But supporters argue the law is necessary to protect Christians from a rising tide of anti-Christian discrimination and a growing cultural hostility across the United States to personal religious beliefs.
POLITICAL COMMENTARY: “Top U.S. and World Headlines — June 1, 2016” / Democracy Now! / Amy Goodman ☮
CORPORATE OPPRESSION: “Lock Up the Men, Evict the Women and Children” / Chris Hedges ☮
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Being poor in America is one long emergency. You teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, homelessness and hunger. You endure cataclysmic levels of stress, harassment and anxiety and long bouts of depression. Rent strips you of half your income—one in four families spend 70 percent of their income on rent—until you and your children are evicted, often into homeless shelters or abandoned buildings, when you fall behind on payments. A financial crisis—a medical emergency, a reduction in hours at work or the loss of a job, funeral expenses or car repairs—can lead inexorably to an eviction. Creditors, payday lenders and collection agencies hound you. You are often forced to declare bankruptcy. You cope with endemic violence, gangs, drugs and a judicial system that permits brutal police abuse and ships you to jail, or slaps you with huge fines, for minor offenses. You live for weeks or months with no heat, water or electricity because you cannot pay the utility bills, especially since fuel and utility rates have risen by more than 50 percent since 2000. Single mothers and their children usually endure this hell alone, because the men in these communities are locked up. Millions of families are tossed into the street every year.
We have 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its prison population. More than 60 percent of the 2.2 million incarcerated are people of color. If these poor people were not locked in cages for decades, if they were not given probationary status once they were freed, if they had stable communities, there would be massive unrest in the streets. Mass incarceration, along with debt peonage, evictions, police violence and a judicial system that holds up property rights, rather than justice, as the highest good and that denies nearly all of the poor a trial, forcing them to accept plea bargains, is one of the many tools of corporate oppression.
POLITICAL COMMENTARY: “How to Turn Trump Fans? Show Them a Greek Tragedy” ☮
Times are hard for democracy. Trump wants a wall. Senators refuse to question judicial nominees. And anti-Hillary liberals seriously contend that she is “as bad as” the opposing party’s presumptive nominee, vowing not to vote if she wins the nomination.
But when were they ever other than hard? Democracy has always been vulnerable to extreme opinions and dogmatic certainties. Sometimes the price of free speech is listening to things you don’t want to hear.
Theater holds a possible remedy, though, to some of our worst tendencies. It’s pretty simple. We need more tragedy.
Of course, tragedy might seem remote and irrelevant. To many it is dimly remembered as something to do with hubris, catharsis and tragic flaws. We hear the word tragedy in the news mainly when it’s misapplied to some disaster — natural or otherwise. But it needn’t be either irrelevant or misappropriated. Tragedy is not just the stuff of English tests. It has a long and illustrious history as a salve for self-government. It’s no coincidence that democracy and tragedy arose around the same time in ancient Athens.
While scholars disagree about exactly how tragedy arose, we are certain that it evolved alongside Athenian democracy. Athenians understood that what they saw onstage taught them truths and ways of thinking vital for their roles as citizens. Like the law courts, tragedy was a civic institution. Funded by the state, it was perhaps the greatest citizenship class ever.
RELATIONSHIPS: “How Romanticism Ruined Love” / The School of Life / Alain de Botton ☮
The set of ideas we can call Romanticism is responsible for making our relationships extremely difficult. We shouldn’t give up on love; we should just recognise that it’s a skill, not an emotion.
Always Question Authority 