Friday, September 6, 2024
1941 All Jews over age 6 in German territories were ordered to wear a star
1997 Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales was held at Westminster Abbey in London
2022 A fire in a karaoke bar near Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam killed at least 32
In bed at 8:45, up and about at 4:45!?!, from a dream of hosting TSJ's nephews and brother-in-law around the Knickerbocker neighborhood churches, chatting through his window with the Catholic archbishop. A strange reminder of how little control we have over our thoughts generated by currents in our brains subject to unknown laws, or mere chaos?
Prednisone, day 116, 10 mg., day 22. Prednisone and diclofenac at 5 a.m. Morning meds at 8 a.m. Trullicity at 10:15. New continuous glucose sensor installed at 10:30.
The Matrix, the Pelicot case in Avignon, a pedophile priest in the Pacific islands, and defining Kamala Harris. These three articles in this morning's NYTimes caught my eye; I thought they were interrelated. The first is about the 'big films' of 1999, of which the biggest was said to be The Matrix, about simulated realities created by machines ("AI"), and red pill/blue pill choices in life. ("You take the blue pill... the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill... you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.") The second is about the trial in Avignon, France, of Dominique Pelicot who has pleaded guilty to drugging his wife Gisèle, and inviting many men to rape her while she was unconscious. ("There are so many men on trial that the court had to build a second glass box in the courtroom for those in custody. They include firemen, soldiers, truck drivers, and an IT expert. They range in age from 26 to 74. Many are in stable relationships and have children.") The third is about Catholic priests who moved to the Pacific islands after being accused of child sexual abuse. ("In the Pacific, a ‘Dumping Ground’ for Priests Accused or Convicted of Abuse; Over a decades-long period, more than 30 Catholic priests and missionaries moved to remote island nations after they had allegedly abused children in the West, or had been found to do so.") The latter stories made me think of the former, specifically about living in "blue pill" worlds.
Ms. Pelicot was drugged and raped, by her husband and dozens of others over many years, all the while thinking that her husband of many decades was a loving spouse, "the love of her life." She was living in a blue pill world created by her husband. Her red pill world was an unthinkable horror show, but it was real.
The story about the abusive priests relates that a great majority of Pacific Islanders are Christian. Pope Francis is currently on a tour of the region. "In Papua New Guinea and East Timor, Francis is visiting two overwhelmingly Christian countries. Catholicism is the biggest denomination in Papua New Guinea and accounts for over a quarter of the population. The faith is followed by 98 percent of the people in East Timor. Christianity spread in the Pacific Islands during the 18th and 19th centuries through a strong partnership between missionaries and local leaders. Today, many countries in the region have intensely religious cultures where more than 95 percent of people identify as Christian." Are not these Christians also living in a blue pill world, one created by the Church through its missionaries promising life after death, priestly power to forgive sins and to transubstantiate bread and wine into the body and blood of a man who lived two millennia ago, and redemption and salvation from an All-Loving, All-Powerful, All-Knowing God? Karl Marx said that religion was 'the opium of the masses.' To Sigmund Freud, religion is the unconscious mind's need for wish fulfillment. Freud believed that people choose to believe in God, who represents a powerful father figure because they need to feel secure and absolve themselves of guilt,
How much of our world is a Matrix, an artificial or simulated reality created by others? Another article in this morning's Times is "How the Fight to Define Kamala Harris Will Shape Next Week’s Debate: The battle over who Ms. Harris is — and what she stands for — will take center stage on Tuesday when she and Donald Trump debate for the first time."
The race to define Ms. Harris has emerged as a central political battleground of the 2024 contest since her surprise entry replacing President Biden in July.
The fight over who Ms. Harris is — and what she stands for — has already been dominating the airwaves in the key swing states. Of the roughly 325,000 airings of television ads that Mr. Trump, Ms. Harris and their leading super PAC allies have paid for since she entered the race, about 95 percent of them have focused on her, . .
Mr. Trump’s campaign has sought to label Ms. Harris with a three-pronged attack of “failed, weak, dangerously liberal” and to tie the vice president to the more unpopular parts of the Biden-Harris record, especially on immigration and the economy. Ms. Harris’s campaign has cast her as a tough-on-the-border former prosecutor who understands the needs of the middle class and who would offer the nation a fresh start even if her party already holds the White House.
It's all a massive, coordinated, targeted effort to create simplistic, black-and-white (or Black and White) impressions in our minds so those impressions shape attitudes and those attitudes shape voting behavior. But all of it is Big Brother stuff, manipulative, simplistic, half-truths, blue pill realities that are accepted by True Believers as Gospel Truth.
Michelle Goldberg's column today, Tucker Carlson and the Heterodoxy-to-Holocaust Denial Pipeline, also has a reference to The Matrix and red pill-blue pill thinking:
[A]bhorrence of Nazism has helped structure Western societies. If we could agree on nothing else, we could agree that part of the job of liberal democracy was to erect bulwarks against the emergence of Hitler-like figures.
For parts of the contemporary right, however, the social consensuses undergirding liberalism are artificial and even tyrannical. After all, the “Matrix”-derived metaphor of being “red-pilled” implies a realization that all you’ve been told about the nature of reality is a lie, and thus everything is up for grabs. And once you discard all epistemological and moral guardrails, it’s easy to descend into barbarous nonsense. (mine)
One week away from cable and network news. A week without endless, meaningless, repetitive news of presidential politics: Who said what where, and to how many people. Who raised how much money. Who must do what in the upcoming debate? How close is the race? When will Trump be sentenced by Judge Marchan and what impact, if any, will the sentencing have on the electoral contest. What the polls say. What the pundits say about what the polls say. What we should have learned about the polls from the 2016 presidential election. (not).
From NYTimes Magazine, There Are Only TwoShakers Left. They’ve Still Got Utopia in Their Sights, Sept. 5, 2024:
There are a lot of people around Sabbathday Lake striving to labor in the eye of eternity these days. Maybe a new Shaker will come this year; maybe not. But in the Meeting House this summer, people are singing. Lavender is drying from the eaves of the old sisters’ shop; future harvests will hang in the new herb house. A concept of survival and flourishing that isn’t primarily concerned with linear time or material gains may be the most radical thing about this historically radical American religion, and the one most resonant with a world that is experiencing, constantly, its own existential threats and calamities. It is obvious by now that everyone and everything is dying and living all at the same time, that failure and hope are all mixed up, and still the sheep are lambing and the roof has sprung a leak again and you’ve been snappish and petty even though you swore you’d be better and someone has to make breakfast and even breakfast can be a gesture of belief in the world as it could and should be. (mine)
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