The contents are not actually a secret. You can read a good quick summary here, provided by NPR.
You can read the whole thing here. There's a handy dandy outline so you can see a headline for each and every provision. For example, here are the provisions that came out of the Committee on Agriculture:
In contrast to what we have been used to seeing, much of this benefits people who tend to vote for the other party. What a concept!
This is a summary of the report of the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era. You can read the entire report for free but you have to register. The Lancet is one of the two or three foremost medical journals in the world. The authors are some two dozen prominent medical and public health researchers and analysts. I have nothing to add.
This report by the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era assesses the repercussions of President Donald Trump's health-related policies and examines the failures and social schisms that enabled his election. Trump exploited low and middle-income white people's anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilise racial animus and xenophobia and enlist their support for policies that benefit high-income people and corporations and threaten health. His signature legislative achievement, a trillion-dollar tax cut for corporations and high-income individuals, opened a budget hole that he used to justify cutting food subsidies and health care. His appeals to racism, nativism, and religious bigotry have emboldened white nationalists and vigilantes, and encouraged police violence and, at the end of his term in office, insurrection. He chose judges for US courts who are dismissive of affirmative action and reproductive, labour, civil, and voting rights; ordered the mass detention of immigrants in hazardous conditions; and promulgated regulations that reduce access to abortion and contraception in the USA and globally. Although his effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed, he weakened its coverage and increased the number of uninsured people by 2·3 million, even before the mass dislocation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has accelerated the privatisation of government health programmes. Trump's hostility to environmental regulations has already worsened pollution—resulting in more than 22 000 extra deaths in 2019 alone—hastened global warming, and despoiled national monuments and lands sacred to Native people. Disdain for science and cuts to global health programmes and public health agencies have impeded the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and imperil advances against HIV and other diseases. And Trump's bellicose trade, defence, and foreign policies have led to economic disruption and threaten an upswing in armed conflict.
I will add, although it should hardly be necessary to point this out, that public policies have an impact on public health. Public health researchers study these impacts, and offer their findings and expertise to the public. They don't decide what happens, unless they happen to hold government office, but they have every right, indeed a responsibility, to speak out publicly. One of the most grotesque developments on the right in past decades is the denigration and rejection of science and expertise. There are people who know more than you do about most subjects. You should listen to them.
Also, The Lancet is a British Journal but the authors of this report are Americans.
One important reason I wanted to discuss Agre's essay is because, while it was written a decade and a half ago, the issues it raises have become particularly salient since then. He noticed phenomena that were not as obvious then as they are now. Today I note the following excerpt:
Conservatism promotes (and so does liberalism, misguidedly) the idea that liberalism is about activist government where conservatism is not. This is absurd. It is unrelated to the history of conservative government. Conservatism promotes activist government that acts in the interests of the aristocracy. This has been true for thousands of years. What is distinctive about liberalism is not that it promotes activist government but that it promotes government that acts in the interests of the majority. Democratic government, however, is not simply majoritarian. It is, rather, one institutional expression of a democratic type of culture that is still very much in the process of being invented.
The final observation is tossed off more or less as an aside. (Actually I think the essay was intended as a sketch for a longer, better documented piece, or even a book.) But this is an extremely important aspect of our current condition. If the past five years or so have taught us anything, it is that formal institutions alone cannot protect democracy or guarantee that government will act in the general interest.
One complication that Agre does not really address, because it wasn't as obvious at the time he wrote, is that the formal institutions of government in the U.S. are not in fact structured as an institutional expression of democratic culture. They were originally designed for rule by white men of property, and to give disproportionate power to slave states. Although the franchise has formally expanded, it is still limited by white-dominated governments in the former slave states who design electoral systems to suppress non-white vote. Furthermore, the Senate strongly over-represents small, predominantly white and rural states; and the concentration of non-white voters in urban areas causes them to be underrepresented in the House. Finally, the electoral college also causes overrepresentation of small, rural, predominantly white states. The 50 Democratic senators represent more than 40 million more people than do the 50 Republican senators.
But that isn't really Agre's point here. Those structural imbalances wouldn't matter so much if we had a truly democratic culture. White privilege wouldn't matter to most white voters. On the contrary they would see why it is harmful to them in the long run. They would have an understanding of their own interests based on an egalitarian ethos. The structural advantages of the overtly more conservative party are amplified by the failure of the more inclusive, ostensibly egalitarian party to truly understand and respond to the condition of many people who have become Republican voters. This happened because we don't have the sort of democratic culture that would make the Democratic party truly democratic. It is a coalition of somewhat disparate interests including a donor class that has veto power over any truly radical economic reforms -- at least until now.
The failure of the democratic party to reflect a truly democratic culture opened the door to a far more radically undemocratic movement. The formal structures that are supposed to protect democracy utterly failed against an autocratic regime that simply chose to ignore them. It got away with it because of the norms of the corporate media and class of professional political analysts that simply could not see it and name it for what it was. It got away with it because of its structural advantages and because of the false consciousness of most of its supporters, who were more concerned about keeping "other" people down than about their own true interests. It got away with it because a substantial segment of the corporate media is an unabashed propaganda machine for the ruling class of plutocrats.
Structural reforms are important, even necessary. But they won't be enough until we succeed in inventing a truly democratic culture.
Oh for Chrissake: Every publisher has a back catalogue, most of which is out of print. The owners of the Dr. Seusse ouvre - a private, family owned company, a capitalist corporation -- decided to stop publishing six books that have not stood the test of time. This was not a political action, Joe Biden and the Democrats did not make them do it or even suggest it. A private corporation exercised its liberty or freedom or whatever you want to call it to make a business decision. The books are not censored -- they are still in libraries and you can buy them second hand. My grandfather's books are also out of print which is too bad but that isn't censorship.
Similarly Hasbro, also a capitalist corporation which has stock that you can buy, decided to rebrand the toy called Mr. Potatohead and justcall it Potatohead. There are still male and female characters, the product has not changed. The new name makes sense because Mrs. Potatohead, or Ms. Potatohead whichever you prefer, is also in the box. Neither Mr. nor Ms. has been canceled. If either of these events is going to affect who you vote for, you are an idiot.
Which is exactly the point. This is bullshit intended to deceive people and distract them from issues that actually matter. Which is the essence of conservative messaging, just as Agre says. He's right and you just proved it.
And if you think that whether the box says "Potatohead" or "Mr. Potatohead" is what "actually matters," as opposed to, I don't know, for example 600,000 dead people, there's no point in communicating with you.
"Philip E. Agre is obviously not a conservative, therefore any critique he makes of conservatism is invalid."
"I don't understand something that Philip E. Agre wrote, therefore he must be stupid."
"Somebody else wrote a description of conservatism that doesn't accord with that of Philip E. Agre, although I can't be bothered to actually read it and tell you what it says."
That is not engaging with the conversation. It is moronic. You are permanently banned, because you are incapable of making a constructive contribution. Get an education.
Continuing my occasional series on constructive discourse and logical fallacies, consider the word "opinion." As I noted last time, words generally have a range of meanings. In scientific writing, a word may be given a very specific, narrow definition, but if the same word also exists in the vernacular, it may be commonly used more broadly. That isn't a mistake, it's just that the meaning of a word can be dependent on context, and on the style of writing or discourse. It is a mistake if the broader, common meaning is used to read back the scientific discourse, or if the narrow technical meaning is used to criticize non-technical writing. In other words, you have to know where you are and which meaning is intended.
"Opinion" is a word that shows up in the scientific or at least semi-scientific context of polling and survey research, but survey researchers, as far as I know, seldom bother to define it or even query what they mean by it. It's however people answer a question of whatever sort. But in fact the word does have multiple meanings and this often leads to confusion and people talking at cross purposes.
One meaning of the word is purely personal preference, a stance that does not at its base depend on any specific facts beyond what Jack and Jill like and enjoy. In Herman's opinion, Bobby Flay's fish tacos are better than Alex Guarnaschelli's. Melba prefers Carol King to Carly Simon. That sort of thing. You can't argue with it. You can't tell Herman or Melba that they're wrong and Herman and Melba can't tell anybody else to agree with them, although food and music critics will try to do exactly that. But you're still gonna like what you like.
Then there are moral judgments or values. These are trickier because people often do claim they should be imposed on others, and we apply the same terms - right and wrong - to moral judgments as we do to facts. I can say you are wrong to believe that bats are birds, and I can also say that you are wrong to believe that abortion is murder, but these are entirely different sorts of claims. Without trying to summarize 3,000 years of moral philosophy, I will just make a couple of key points. First, people do have some built-in moral instincts, and there are some principles that are pretty much cultural universals. These basic rights of personhood, however, may extend only to a certain group designated to have the rights of persons. As we have seen in our reading of the Torah, unprovoked assault and rape are not allowed against fellow Israelites, but they are allowed against conquered people. Nowadays, most nations accept laws of war that says that's not okay, but it still happens. In the United States, it was once okay to enslave Africans but not Europeans. (I won't get into the continuing distinction in the moral categories of people of African and European descent because it would be a distraction here, but I will likely discuss that eventually.)
Apart from whatever moral instincts people have -- and I'm sure you've been reading about the trolley problems and that sort of thing -- there are arguments from utility or pragmatism for certain moral positions. Much -- though not all -- of the criminal law is intended to protect people's safety, or to defend the economic system (for better or for worse from any individual's standpoint). Of course where lines should be drawn and what the penalties should be for transgression are always debatable.
Then there is the argument from religion: God said so. Obviously I don't have to believe in your God or that God made any specific moral pronouncement. Curiously, by the way, the God of the Bible did not say that abortion is murder, or even that is the tiniest bit wrong. So that must come from someplace else.
Now we come to the third broad meaning of "opinion," and that has to do with various categories of uncertainty. There's uncertainty about the future: who will win the election, or the world series? Are Herman and Melba ever going to tie the knot? What horse will win the third race at Aqueduct? Predictions are therefore a kind of opinion.
Then there are present or past factual matters that are in doubt. You might have an opinion about the true story of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. You might have an opinion about the nature of the Dark Matter -- Massive Compact Halo Objects or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or something else. There is a truth out there somewhere, but it's in dispute. But that's actually a matter of degree. Some people will insist that the true story of the King assassination is not in doubt at all and you're a dupe not to believe it.
And here it does get more complicated. Some conclusions are the product of deep study requiring special expertise, such as the age of the universe or the nature of conservatism. But these two examples are of a different kind. Some people do not believe the conclusion of cosmologists about the age of the universe, but cosmologists make the good faith claim that their evidence is incontrovertible, and if you undertook a course of study leading to a Ph.D. in the proper subject matter you would be convinced; and you might be even if you undertook a less rigorous inquiry.
In the social sciences, however, matters are seldom so clear-cut. People who study history, society and politics marshal facts and process them logically to come to conclusions, but the questions are less sharply defined, isolating values from facts is often very difficult, and evidence may be of uncertain accuracy or conflicting. This means that scholars can come to different conclusions about a question, although we often do see convergence over time. So, Philip Agre's conclusions about conservatism are not mere "opinion" in the same sense that your favorite flavor of ice cream is an opinion. They are based on knowledge of history and current events, on a review of social structures and associated rhetoric over thousands of years.
You may disagree with his conclusions, but to talk about them constructively you must engage with his arguments. Just claiming that you and others disagree is not helpful, especially since part of his argument is precisely that conservative rhetoric is intended to deceive and often does so successfully. You would need to show why it is not deceptive after all, and present fact based, logical arguments for your own, different conclusion. If you can do that, you can join a conversation. Otherwise, you're just wasting people's time.
Deuteronomy 32 is the song we were promised in the previous chapter. It isn't clear if he actually sings it or if this is more a poetry slam performance. Anyway it once again summarizes the basic theological points: Yahweh chose Israel, he is specifically the God of Israel, not the God of humanity; he will reward the Israelites if they worship him properly and obey his laws, including by helping them massacre other people; when (not if, it's a prediction) they cease to obey him, he will torture them horribly and see to it they are murdered en masse in turn. That's the essential message of the Torah. I've inserted a few comments.
32 “Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak;
and let the earth hear the words of my mouth.
2 May my teaching drop as the rain,
my speech distil as the dew,
as the gentle rain upon the tender grass,
and as the showers upon the herb.
3 For I will proclaim the name of the Lord.
Ascribe greatness to our God!4 “The Rock, his work is perfect;
for all his ways are justice.
This metaphor of God as a rock is common in Christian imagery.
A God of faithfulness and without iniquity,
just and right is he.
5 They have dealt corruptly with him,
they are no longer his children because of their blemish;
they are a perverse and crooked generation.
6 Do you thus requite the Lord,
you foolish and senseless people?
Is not he your father, who created you,
who made you and established you?
It isn't entirely clear why this is here. At present, the God continues to favor the Israelites. This seems to be intended as describing a hypothetical future.
7 Remember the days of old,
consider the years of many generations;
ask your father, and he will show you;
your elders, and they will tell you.
8 When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he separated the sons of men,
he fixed the bounds of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.[a]
This does not appear to be a reference to the beings mentioned in Genesis who interbred with humans. It seems to refer to the patriarchs of various peoples, one of whom, Jacob, gets chosen.
9 For the Lord’s portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.10 “He found him in a desert land,
and in the howling waste of the wilderness;
he encircled him, he cared for him,
he kept him as the apple of his eye.
11 Like an eagle that stirs up its nest,
that flutters over its young,
spreading out its wings, catching them,
bearing them on its pinions,
Actually, eagles don't do this.
12 the Lord alone did lead him,
and there was no foreign god with him.
13 He made him ride on the high places of the earth,
and he ate the produce of the field;
and he made him suck honey out of the rock,
and oil out of the flinty rock.
There has been no previous reference to any event of this kind.
14 Curds from the herd, and milk from the flock,
with fat of lambs and rams,
herds of Bashan and goats,
Bashan is apparently a breed of sheep.
with the finest of the wheat—
and of the blood of the grape you drank wine.15 “But Jesh′urun waxed fat, and kicked;
you waxed fat, you grew thick, you became sleek;
Jesh'urun is a poetic name for the Israelites, of uncertain etymology.
then he forsook God who made him,
and scoffed at the Rock of his salvation.
16 They stirred him to jealousy with strange gods;
with abominable practices they provoked him to anger.
17 They sacrificed to demons which were no gods,
to gods they had never known,
to new gods that had come in of late,
whom your fathers had never dreaded.
18 You were unmindful of the Rock that begot[b] you,
and you forgot the God who gave you birth.
Again, although this and what follows are in past tense, this appears to be looking back from some distant future.
19 “The Lord saw it, and spurned them,
because of the provocation of his sons and his daughters.
20 And he said, ‘I will hide my face from them,
I will see what their end will be,
For they are a perverse generation,
children in whom is no faithfulness.
21 They have stirred me to jealousy with what is no god;
they have provoked me with their idols.
So I will stir them to jealousy with those who are no people;
I will provoke them with a foolish nation.
22 For a fire is kindled by my anger,
and it burns to the depths of Sheol,
devours the earth and its increase,
and sets on fire the foundations of the mountains.23 “‘And I will heap evils upon them;
I will spend my arrows upon them;
24 they shall be wasted with hunger,
and devoured with burning heat
and poisonous pestilence;
and I will send the teeth of beasts against them,
with venom of crawling things of the dust.
25 In the open the sword shall bereave,
and in the chambers shall be terror,
destroying both young man and virgin,
the sucking child with the man of gray hairs.
26 I would have said, “I will scatter them afar,
I will make the remembrance of them cease from among men,”
27 had I not feared provocation by the enemy,
lest their adversaries should judge amiss,
lest they should say, “Our hand is triumphant,
the Lord has not wrought all this.”’28 “For they are a nation void of counsel,
and there is no understanding in them.
29 If they were wise, they would understand this,
they would discern their latter end!
30 How should one chase a thousand,
and two put ten thousand to flight,
unless their Rock had sold them,
and the Lord had given them up?
31 For their rock is not as our Rock,
even our enemies themselves being judges.
32 For their vine comes from the vine of Sodom,
and from the fields of Gomor′rah;
their grapes are grapes of poison,
their clusters are bitter;
33 their wine is the poison of serpents,
and the cruel venom of asps.34 “Is not this laid up in store with me,
sealed up in my treasuries?
35 Vengeance is mine, and recompense,
for the time when their foot shall slip;
for the day of their calamity is at hand,
and their doom comes swiftly.
36 For the Lord will vindicate his people
and have compassion on his servants,
when he sees that their power is gone,
and there is none remaining, bond or free.
37 Then he will say, ‘Where are their gods,
the rock in which they took refuge,
38 who ate the fat of their sacrifices,
and drank the wine of their drink offering?
Let them rise up and help you,
let them be your protection!39 “‘See now that I, even I, am he,
and there is no god beside me;
I kill and I make alive;
I wound and I heal;
and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.
40 For I lift up my hand to heaven,
and swear, As I live for ever,
41 if I whet my glittering sword,[c]
and my hand takes hold on judgment,
I will take vengeance on my adversaries,
and will requite those who hate me.
42 I will make my arrows drunk with blood,
and my sword shall devour flesh—
with the blood of the slain and the captives,
from the long-haired heads of the enemy.’43 “Praise his people, O you nations;
for he avenges the blood of his servants,
and takes vengeance on his adversaries,
and makes expiation for the land of his people.”[d]44 Moses came and recited all the words of this song in the hearing of the people, he and Joshua[e] the son of Nun. 45 And when Moses had finished speaking all these words to all Israel, 46 he said to them, “Lay to heart all the words which I enjoin upon you this day, that you may command them to your children, that they may be careful to do all the words of this law. 47 For it is no trifle for you, but it is your life, and thereby you shall live long in the land which you are going over the Jordan to possess.”
Moses’ Death Foretold
48 And the Lord said to Moses that very day, 49 “Ascend this mountain of the Ab′arim, Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab, opposite Jericho; and view the land of Canaan, which I give to the people of Israel for a possession; 50 and die on the mountain which you ascend, and be gathered to your people, as Aaron your brother died in Mount Hor and was gathered to his people; 51 because you broke faith with me in the midst of the people of Israel at the waters of Mer′i-bath-ka′desh, in the wilderness of Zin; because you did not revere me as holy in the midst of the people of Israel. 52
Specifically, he struck the rock with his staff instead of just speaking to it. Seems rather trifling.
For you shall see the land before you; but you shall not go there, into the land which I give to the people of Israel.”
Footnotes
- Deuteronomy 32:8 Compare Gk: Heb Israel
- Deuteronomy 32:18 Or bore
- Deuteronomy 32:41 Heb the lightning of my sword
- Deuteronomy 32:43 Gk Vg: Heb his land his people
- Deuteronomy 32:44 Gk Syr Vg: Heb Hoshea
I'd like to digress for a few minutes to consider the mind boggling revolution in physics and cosmology of the 20th Century. Copernicus and Galileo established that the earth and planets revolve around the sun in the 17th Century. This overturned established doctrine, but did not in itself pose a major challenge to the human centered philosophy of the Abrahamic religions, in which we are the principal preoccupation of the all powerful creator God.
However, as astronomers continued to look through telescopes and discovered the vast number and great distance of the stars of our galaxy, that belief became less tenable. Then, in 1924, Edwin Hubble discovered the universe. With the newly available 100 inch Hooker telescope at Mt. Wilson, he found that the so-called nebulae, cloudy appearing objects, were in fact galaxies beyond our own. Then, in 1929, he found that the universe was expanding -- that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it appears to be receding from us. Combining this observation with Einstein's revolutionary understanding of space-time, cosmologists were able to run the movie backwards, as it were, and determine that the universe originated as an incalculably small, dense singularity which, about 13 1/2 billion years ago, began to expand. (The current best estimate is actually 13.8 billion years ago.) The quantum theory, also first developed in the 1920s, enabled physicists to model what the early universe must have been like and how it evolved into the universe of galaxies, stars and planets we live in today. The discovery of the cosmic background radiation in 1965 confirmed predictions of this theory.
The Hubble deep field photograph, made by the space telescope named for the aforementioned Edwin Hubble in 1995, found 3,000 galaxies in one 24-millionth of the sky.
Astronomers estimate there may be something like 100 billion galaxies in the visible universe, each of them containing an average of 100 billion or more stars. (Everything you see above is a galaxy.)
Meanwhile, we've figured out that the earth is about 4 1/2 billion years old, give or take -- exactly when it became enough like the planet we know to be called "the earth" is a little fuzzy -- and that life on earth began at least 3 1/2 billion years ago, maybe more. Homo sapiens is at most 400,000 years old. Unfortunately, although these assertions are in the realm of fact, not opinion, not everyone believes them. They are fundamentally incompatible with religion. If God actually caused all this to happen, he couldn't possibly give a shit about us. You would think this discovery would have had a major impact on our culture, and our self concept. But for most people, it really hasn't. Maybe it just hasn't sunk in yet.
I've said it before but I need to keep saying it. The majority -- probably a large majority -- of drugs that appear promising in animal models, Phase 1 or observational studies turn out not to be effective when subjected to larger scale, more rigorous trials. Ivermectin is ineffective against mild Covid-19, which means it's probably not effective against more severe disease. We'll know that soon enough.
That's nothing new, health services researchers have long known it. But we've gotten into a weird place where it's a marker of right wing politics to believe that unproven drugs must work. How this is a political issue eludes me.
I sometimes post updates in response to comments which I choose not to publish. I do this because the comments do not contribute to constructive discourse, but I want to illustrate a point about critical thinking. Here are some common categories of comments which I find not to be constructive.
1) Vocabulary quibbles. I once knew a guy who thought he was really smart, who thought he had a killer point: the concept of organic food is meaningless because "organic" means carbon compounds, and all food consists of carbon compounds. All words have a range of meanings. Purporting to refute an argument by insisting that some word has to be used with a particular meaning, and I used it the wrong way, is really, really stupid.
2) Arguments from popularity. Just because a lot of people believe something does not make it correct, and just because a lot of people voted for some candidate does not necessarily make that candidate worthy of office. In fact, most voters are not well informed about public policy or social problems, and a lot of them have biases, including being racist. Some of them even believe crazy shit about Satan-worshiping pedophile cannibals, or lizard people.
3) Argument by assertion. In general, people who write thoughtfully about politics and public affairs, or any subject really, marshal arguments that come to some conclusion. Just saying, "That's Fred's opinion, but I don't agree with it," is not worthy of being published. You have to point to a flaw in logic, or an error in fact, or a specific difference in values, in order to rebut an argument.
There are more categories of unpublishable comment, but those are a few I've particularly noticed lately. Please do not waste my time with dreck.
In Deuteronomy 31, the passing of leadership from Moses to Joshua begins. There's a lot of repetition of the prophecy of the conquest of the promised land, followed by apostasy and Yahweh temporarily abandoning the people. Then there's a lot of business about writing down the law -- again, not clear if it's the whole of the law as given in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, or some excerpt. Finally, God has Moses write a song, but we don't get to read the lyrics until the next chapter. Unfortunately, the music is not supplied, and we don't know much about the music of that culture. According to Wikipedia:
The earliest synagogal music of which we have any account was based on the system used in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Mishnah gives several accounts of Temple music.[2] According to the Mishnah, the regular Temple orchestra consisted of twelve instruments, and a choir of twelve male singers.[3] The instruments included the kinnor (lyre), nevel (harp), shofar (ram's horn), ḥatzotzᵊrot (trumpet) and three varieties of pipe, the chalil, alamoth and the uggav.[4] The Temple orchestra also included a cymbal (tziltzal) made of copper.[5] The Talmud also mentions use in the Temple of a pipe organ (magrepha), and states that the water organ was not used in the Temple as its sounds were too distracting.[6] No provable examples of the music played at the Temple have survived.[7] However, there is an oral tradition that the tune used for Kol Nidrei was sung in the temple.[8]
Anyway, here is chapter 31. The actual song lyrics will follow next time.
31 So Moses continued to speak these words to all Israel. 2 And he said to them, “I am a hundred and twenty years old this day; I am no longer able to go out and come in. The Lord has said to me, ‘You shall not go over this Jordan.’ 3 The Lord your God himself will go over before you; he will destroy these nations before you, so that you shall dispossess them; and Joshua will go over at your head, as the Lord has spoken. 4 And the Lord will do to them as he did to Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites, and to their land, when he destroyed them. 5 And the Lord will give them over to you, and you shall do to them according to all the commandment which I have commanded you. 6 Be strong and of good courage, do not fear or be in dread of them: for it is the Lord your God who goes with you; he will not fail you or forsake you.”
7 Then Moses summoned Joshua, and said to him in the sight of all Israel, “Be strong and of good courage; for you shall go with this people into the land which the Lord has sworn to their fathers to give them; and you shall put them in possession of it. 8 It is the Lord who goes before you; he will be with you, he will not fail you or forsake you; do not fear or be dismayed.”
The Law to Be Read Every Seventh Year
9 And Moses wrote this law, and gave it to the priests the sons of Levi, who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and to all the elders of Israel. 10 And Moses commanded them, “At the end of every seven years, at the set time of the year of release, at the feast of booths, 11 when all Israel comes to appear before the Lord your God at the place which he will choose, you shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing. 12 Assemble the people, men, women, and little ones, and the sojourner within your towns, that they may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God, and be careful to do all the words of this law, 13 and that their children, who have not known it, may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God, as long as you live in the land which you are going over the Jordan to possess.”
Moses and Joshua Receive God’s Charge
14 And the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, the days approach when you must die; call Joshua, and present yourselves in the tent of meeting, that I may commission him.” And Moses and Joshua went and presented themselves in the tent of meeting. 15 And the Lord appeared in the tent in a pillar of cloud; and the pillar of cloud stood by the door of the tent.
16 And the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, you are about to sleep with your fathers; then this people will rise and play the harlot after the strange gods of the land, where they go to be among them, and they will forsake me and break my covenant which I have made with them. 17 Then my anger will be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them and hide my face from them, and they will be devoured; and many evils and troubles will come upon them, so that they will say in that day, ‘Have not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us?’ 18 And I will surely hide my face in that day on account of all the evil which they have done, because they have turned to other gods. 19 Now therefore write this song, and teach it to the people of Israel; put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the people of Israel. 20 For when I have brought them into the land flowing with milk and honey, which I swore to give to their fathers, and they have eaten and are full and grown fat, they will turn to other gods and serve them, and despise me and break my covenant. 21 And when many evils and troubles have come upon them, this song shall confront them as a witness (for it will live unforgotten in the mouths of their descendants); for I know the purposes which they are already forming, before I have brought them into the land that I swore to give.” 22 So Moses wrote this song the same day, and taught it to the people of Israel.
23 And the Lord commissioned Joshua the son of Nun and said, “Be strong and of good courage; for you shall bring the children of Israel into the land which I swore to give them: I will be with you.”
24 When Moses had finished writing the words of this law in a book, to the very end, 25 Moses commanded the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, 26 “Take this book of the law, and put it by the side of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there for a witness against you. 27 For I know how rebellious and stubborn you are; behold, while I am yet alive with you, today you have been rebellious against the Lord; how much more after my death! 28 Assemble to me all the elders of your tribes, and your officers, that I may speak these words in their ears and call heaven and earth to witness against them. 29 For I know that after my death you will surely act corruptly, and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you; and in the days to come evil will befall you, because you will do what is evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger through the work of your hands.”
The Song of Moses
30 Then Moses spoke the words of this song until they were finished, in the ears of all the assembly of Israel:
Specifically, I got the first shot of the Pfizer/Biontech mRNA vaccine yesterday. The needle was so thin I didn't even feel it. (Bill Gates must have made those microchips incredibly small. It's actually somewhat comforting to know he's tracking me.)
Anyway, I had no side effects at all, not even the dread pain at the injection site. So when you get the chance, go for it. I know people are having to wait until their age category becomes eligible and even then it's hard to get an appointment, but it will open up. Keep trying. We need everybody to do this, for the sake of everyone else.
Before we can proceed with our discussion of Philip Agre's essay on conservatism, I need to say a bit about liberalism. The meaning of the word has changed somewhat since it first developed in the 19th Century. John Stewart Mill was not far removed from feudalism and monarchical rule, while industrial capitalism was just recently in the ascendant. Modern mass communication and public relations did not yet exist, while British (and American) democracy was pretty much exclusive to men of property.
Therefore, in thinking about how liberty could be maximized, Mill and classic liberals were most concerned about the prospect of a tyrannical state, and also tended to think of the individuals whose enjoyment of liberty was the highest value as being much like themselves, that is having a relative position of privilege within society. It was possible to be, like Jefferson and other founders of the American state, both a liberal and a slaveholder. Indeed, slave owners argued that abolishing slavery would infringe on their liberty -- to own slaves. The idea of the freedom for women hadn't even occurred to most of them. That people who depended on wage labor could be oppressed by capitalists also had not really occurred to them.
Consequently, classical liberalism argued for laissez faire -- that is, that economic transactions between private parties should not be constrained by any sort of intervention from the state. But as Karl Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation:
[T]he idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.
In the midst of the Great Depression, even some enlightened capitalists recognized that the protection of liberty required government intervention. As Roosevelt put it, freedom required freedom of speech and freedom of worship, as Mill had argued; but it also required freedom from want and freedom from fear. The greatest danger to freedom for the masses was no longer tyrannical government, but rather overweening and conscienceless private interests. Hence the reforms of the New Deal and later, in the 1960s, the Great Society. And so liberalism became associated with activist government. (So-called neoliberalism of the 1980s et seq really should have been called paleoliberalism.) So Agre writes:
Conservatism promotes (and so does liberalism, misguidedly) the idea that liberalism is about activist government where conservatism is not. This is absurd. It is unrelated to the history of conservative government. Conservatism promotes activist government that acts in the interests of the aristocracy. This has been true for thousands of years. What is distinctive about liberalism is not that it promotes activist government but that it promotes government that acts in the interests of the majority. Democratic government, however, is not simply majoritarian. It is, rather, one institutional expression of a democratic type of culture that is still very much in the process of being invented.
The idea of freedom is not simple, and it is not a force of nature that can somehow be restrained only by government. Liberty requires institutions to defend it. That is one basic premise of liberalism. Conservatism, on the other hand, values freedom only for a few.
Update: We can't have a conversation about Agre's essay unless the interlocutors actually read it. If you are too lazy to read it thoughtfully, then any comment you make about it will be spam. Agre discusses at length how the specific content of convervatism has changed over time. He also discusses what has remained the same. That is his point. Second, if you think there is a big difference between liberty and freedom, which is in fact a semantic quibble, you can't have liberty if you don't have freedom from fear and want. That seems pretty obvious to me.
