Voting?? Only smart people voting? Book review raised a lot of questions for me
BOOKS NONE OF THE ABOVE The case against democracy. BY CALEB CRAIN Roughly a third of American voters think that the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” appears in the Constitution. About as many are incapable of naming even one of the three branches of the United States government. Fewer than a quarter know who their senators are, and only half are aware that their state has two of them. Democracy is other people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled the few, especially the few who consider themselves intellectuals. Plato, one of the earliest to see democracy as a problem, saw its typical citizen as shiftless and flighty: Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times, he’s idle and neglects everything; and sometimes he even occupies himself with what he takes to be philosophy. It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from reading any literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead them to forget themselves. The scheme was so byzantine and cockamamie that many suspect Plato couldn’t have been serious; Hobbes, for one, called the idea “useless.” A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs. (In fact, in Mill’s day, select universities had had their own constituencies for centuries, allowing someone with a degree from, say, Oxford to vote both in his university constituency and wherever he lived. The system wasn’t abolished until 1950.) Mill’s larger project—at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance. In the United States, élites who feared the ignorance of poor immigrants tried to restrict ballots. In 1855, Connecticut introduced the first literacy test for American voters. Although a New York Democrat protested, in 1868, that “if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for his protection all the more,” in the next half century the tests spread to almost all parts of the country. They helped racists in the South circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment and disenfranchise blacks, and even in immigrant-rich New York a 1921 law required new voters to take a test if they couldn’t prove that they had an eighth-grade education. About fifteen per cent flunked. Voter literacy tests weren’t permanently outlawed by Congress until 1975, years after the civil-rights movement had discredited them. Worry about voters’ intelligence lingers, however. Mill’s proposal, in particular, remains “actually fairly formidable,” according to David Estlund, a political philosopher at Brown. His 2008 book, “Democratic Authority,” tried to construct a philosophical justification for democracy, a feat that he thought could be achieved only by balancing two propositions: democratic procedures tend to make correct policy decisions, and democratic procedures are fair in the eyes of reasonable observers. Fairness alone didn’t seem to be enough. If it were, Estlund wrote, “why not flip a coin?” It must be that we value democracy for tending to get things right more often than not, which democracy seems to do by making use of the information in our votes. Indeed, although this year we seem to be living through a rough patch, democracy does have a fairly good track record. The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has made the case that democracies never have famines, and other scholars believe that they almost never go to war with one another, rarely murder their own populations, nearly always have peaceful transitions of government, and respect human rights more consistently than other regimes do. Still, democracy is far from perfect—“the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” as Churchill famously said. So, if we value its power to make good decisions, why not try a system that’s a little less fair but makes good decisions even more often? Jamming the stub of the Greek word for “knowledge” into the Greek word for “rule,” Estlund coined the word “epistocracy,” meaning “government by the knowledgeable.” It’s an idea that “advocates of democracy, and other enemies of despotism, will want to resist,” he wrote, and he counted himself among the resisters. As a purely philosophical matter, however, he saw only three valid objections. First, one could deny that truth was a suitable standard for measuring political judgment. This sounds extreme, but it’s a fairly common move in political philosophy. After all, in debates over contentious issues, such as when human life begins or whether human activity is warming the planet, appeals to the truth tend to be incendiary. Truth “peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate,” Hannah Arendt pointed out in this magazine, in 1967, “and debate constitutes the very essence of political life.” Estlund wasn’t a relativist, however; he agreed that politicians should refrain from appealing to absolute truth, but he didn’t think a political theorist could avoid doing so. The second argument against epistocracy would be to deny that some citizens know more about good government than others. Estlund simply didn’t find this plausible (maybe a political philosopher is professionally disinclined to). The third and final option: deny that knowing more imparts political authority. As Estlund put it, “You might be right, but who made you boss?” It’s a very good question, and Estlund rested his defense of democracy on it, but he felt obliged to look for holes in his argument. He had a sneaking suspicion that a polity ruled by educated voters probably would perform better than a democracy, and he thought that some of the resulting inequities could be remedied. If historically disadvantaged groups, such as African-Americans or women, turned out to be underrepresented in an epistocratic system, those who made the grade could be given additional votes, in compensation. By the end of Estlund’s analysis, there were only two practical arguments against epistocracy left standing. The first was the possibility that an epistocracy’s method of screening voters might be biased in a way that couldn’t readily be identified and therefore couldn’t be corrected for. The second was that universal suffrage is so established in our minds as a default that giving the knowledgeable power over the ignorant will always feel more unjust than giving those in the majority power over those in the minority. As defenses of democracy go, these are even less rousing than Churchill’s shruggie. In a new book, “Against Democracy” (Princeton), Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown, has turned Estlund’s hedging inside out to create an uninhibited argument for epistocracy. Against Estlund’s claim that universal suffrage is the default, Brennan argues that it’s entirely justifiable to limit the political power that the irrational, the ignorant, and the incompetent have over others. To counter Estlund’s concern for fairness, Brennan asserts that the public’s welfare is more important than anyone’s hurt feelings; after all, he writes, few would consider it unfair to disqualify jurors who are morally or cognitively incompetent. As for Estlund’s worry about demographic bias, Brennan waves it off. Empirical research shows that people rarely vote for their narrow self-interest; seniors favor Social Security no more strongly than the young do. Brennan suggests that since voters in an epistocracy would be more enlightened about crime and policing, “excluding the bottom 80 percent of white voters from voting might be just what poor blacks need.” Brennan has a bright, pugilistic style, and he takes a sportsman’s pleasure in upsetting pieties and demolishing weak logic. Voting rights may happen to signify human dignity to us, he writes, but corpse-eating once signified respect for the dead among the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea. To him, our faith in the ennobling power of political debate is no more well grounded than the supposition that college fraternities build character. Brennan draws ample evidence of the average American voter’s cluelessness from the legal scholar Ilya Somin’s “Democracy and Political Ignorance” (2013), which shows that American voters have remained ignorant despite decades of rising education levels. Some economists have argued that ill-informed voters, far from being lazy or self-sabotaging, should be seen as rational actors. If the odds that your vote will be decisive are minuscule—Brennan writes that “you are more likely to win Powerball a few times in a row”—then learning about politics isn’t worth even a few minutes of your time. In “The Myth of the Rational Voter” (2007), the economist Bryan Caplan suggested that ignorance may even be gratifying to voters. “Some beliefs are more emotionally appealing,” Caplan observed, so if your vote isn’t likely to do anything why not indulge yourself in what you want to believe, whether or not it’s true? Caplan argues that it’s only because of the worthlessness of an individual vote that so many voters look beyond their narrow self-interest: in the polling booth, the warm, fuzzy feeling of altruism can be had cheap. Viewed that way, voting might seem like a form of pure self-expression. Not even, says Brennan: it’s multiple choice, so hardly expressive. “If you’re upset, write a poem,” Brennan counselled in an earlier book, “The Ethics of Voting” (2011). He was equally unimpressed by the argument that it’s one’s duty to vote. “It would be bad if no one farmed,” he wrote, “but that does not imply that everyone should farm.” In fact, he suspected, the imperative to vote might be even weaker than the imperative to farm. After all, by not voting you do your neighbor a good turn. “If I do not vote, your vote counts more,” Brennan wrote. “Yours was the blue Prius with the two stoners passed out in back, right?” Brennan calls people who don’t bother to learn about politics hobbits, and he thinks it for the best if they stay home on Election Day. A second group of people enjoy political news as a recreation, following it with the partisan devotion of sports fans, and Brennan calls them hooligans. Third in his bestiary are vulcans, who investigate politics with scientific objectivity, respect opposing points of view, and carefully adjust their opinions to the facts, which they seek out diligently. It’s vulcans, presumably, who Brennan hopes will someday rule over us, but he doesn’t present compelling evidence that they really exist. In fact, one study he cites shows that even people with excellent math skills tend not to draw on them if doing so risks undermining a cherished political belief. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. In recent memory, sophisticated experts have been confident about many proposals that turned out to be disastrous—invading Iraq, having a single European currency, grinding subprime mortgages into the sausage known as collateralized debt obligations, and so on. How would an epistocracy actually work? Brennan is reluctant to get specific, which is understandable. It was the details of utopia that gave Plato so much trouble, and by not going into them Brennan avoids stepping on the rake that thwacked Plato between the eyes. He sketches some options—extra votes for degree holders, a council of epistocrats with veto power, a qualifying exam for voters—but he doesn’t spend much time considering what could go wrong. The idea of a voter exam, for example, was dismissed by Brennan himself in “The Ethics of Voting” as “ripe for abuse and institutional capture.” There’s no mention in his new book of any measures that he would put in place to prevent such dangers. Without more details, it’s difficult to assess Brennan’s proposal. Suppose I claim that pixies always make selfless, enlightened political decisions and that therefore we should entrust our government to pixies. If I can’t really say how we’ll identify the pixies or harness their sagacity, and if I also disclose evidence that pixies may be just as error-prone as hobbits and hooligans, you’d be justified in having doubts. While we’re on the subject of vulcans and pixies, we might as well mention that there’s an elephant in the room. Knowledge about politics, Brennan reports, is higher in people who have more education and higher income, live in the West, belong to the Republican Party, and are middle-aged; it’s lower among blacks and women. “Most poor black women, as of right now at least, would fail even a mild voter qualification exam,” he admits, but he’s undeterred, insisting that their disenfranchisement would be merely incidental to his epistocratic plan—a completely different matter, he maintains, from the literacy tests of America’s past, which were administered with the intention of disenfranchising blacks and ethnic whites. That’s an awfully fine distinction. Bear in mind that, during the current Presidential race, it looks as though the votes of blacks and women will serve as a bulwark against the most reckless demagogue in living memory, whom white men with a college degree have been favoring by a margin of forty-seven per cent to thirty-five per cent. Moreover, though political scientists mostly agree that voters are altruistic, something doesn’t tally: Brennan concedes that historically disadvantaged groups such as blacks and women seem to gain political leverage once they get the franchise. Like many people I know, I’ve spent recent months staying up late, reading polls in terror. The flawed and faulty nature of democracy has become a vivid companion. But is democracy really failing, or is it just trying to say something? Political scientists have long hoped to find an “invisible hand” in politics comparable to the one that Adam Smith described in economics. Voter ignorance wouldn’t matter much if a democracy were able to weave individual votes into collective political wisdom, the way a market weaves the self-interested buy-and-sell decisions of individual actors into a prudent collective allocation of resources. But, as Brennan reports, the mathematical models that have been proposed work only if voter ignorance has no shape of its own—if, for example, voters err on the side of liberalism as often as they err on the side of conservatism, leaving decisions in the hands of a politically knowledgeable minority in the center. Unfortunately, voter ignorance does seem to have a shape. The political scientist Scott Althaus has calculated that a voter with more knowledge of politics will, on balance, be less eager to go to war, less punitive about crime, more tolerant on social issues, less accepting of government control of the economy, and more willing to accept taxes in order to reduce the federal deficit. And Caplan calculates that a voter ignorant of economics will tend to be more pessimistic, more suspicious of market competition and of rises in productivity, and more wary of foreign trade and immigration. It’s possible, though, that democracy works even though political scientists have failed to find a tidy equation to explain it. It could be that voters take a cognitive shortcut, letting broad-brush markers like party affiliation stand in for a close study of candidates’ qualifications and policy stances. Brennan doubts that voters understand party stereotypes well enough to do even this, but surely a shortcut needn’t be perfect to be helpful. Voters may also rely on the simple heuristic of throwing out incumbents who have made them unhappy, a technique that in political science goes by the polite name of “retrospective voting.” Brennan argues that voters don’t know enough to do this, either. To impose full accountability, he writes, voters would need to know “who the incumbent bastards are, what they did, what they could have done, what happened when the bastards did what they did, and whether the challengers are likely to be any better than the incumbent bastards.” Most don’t know all this, of course. Somin points out that voters have punished incumbents for droughts and shark attacks and rewarded them for recent sports victories. Caplan dismisses retrospective voting, quoting a pair of scholars who call it “no more rational than killing the pharaoh when the Nile does not flood.” But even if retrospective voting is sloppy, and works to the chagrin of the occasional pharaoh, that doesn’t necessarily make it valueless. It might, for instance, tend to improve elected officials’ policy decisions. Maybe all it takes is for a politician to worry that she could be the unlucky chump who gets punished for something she actually did. Caplan notes that a politician clever enough to worry about his constituents’ future happiness as well as their present gratification might be motivated to give them better policies than they know to ask for. In such a case, he predicts, voters will feel a perennial dissatisfaction, stemming from the tendency of their canniest and most long-lasting politicians to be cavalier about campaign promises. Sound familiar? When the Founding Fathers designed the federal system, not paying too much attention to voters was a feature, not a bug. “There are particular moments in public affairs,” Madison warned, “when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.” Brennan, for all his cleverness, sometimes seems to be struggling to reinvent the “representative” part of “representative democracy,” writing as if voters need to know enough about policy to be able to make intelligent decisions themselves, when, in most modern democracies, voters usually delegate that task. It’s when they don’t, as in California’s ballot initiatives or the recent British referendum on whether to leave the European Union, that disaster is especially likely to strike. The economist Joseph Schumpeter didn’t think democracy could even function if voters paid too much attention to what their representatives did between elections. “Electorates normally do not control their political leaders in any way except by refusing to reelect them,” he wrote, in “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” (1942). The rest of the time, he thought, they should refrain from “political back-seat driving.” Why do we vote, and is there a reason to do it or a duty to do it well? It’s been said that voting enables one to take an equal part in the building of one’s political habitat. Brennan thinks that such participation is worthless if what you value about participation is the chance to influence an election’s outcome; odds are, you won’t. Yet he has previously written that participation can be meaningful even when its practical effect is nil, as when a parent whose spouse willingly handles all child care still feels compelled to help out. Brennan claims that no comparable duty to take part exists with voting, because other kinds of good actions can take voting’s place. He believes, in other words, that voting is part of a larger market in civic virtue, the way that farming is part of a larger market in food, and he goes so far as to suggest that a businessman who sells food and clothing to Martin Luther King, Jr., is making a genuine contribution to civic virtue, even though he makes it indirectly. This doesn’t seem persuasive, in part because it dilutes the meaning of civic virtue too much, and in part because it implies that a businessman who sells a cheeseburger to J. Edgar Hoover is committing civic evil. More than once, Brennan compares uninformed voting to air pollution. It’s a compelling analogy: in both cases, the conscientiousness of the enlightened few is no match for the negligence of the many, and the cost of shirking duty is spread too widely to keep any one malefactor in line. Your commute by bicycle probably isn’t going to make the city’s air any cleaner, and even if you read up on candidates for civil-court judge on Patch.com, it may still be the crook who gets elected. But though the incentive for duty may be weakened, it’s not clear that the duty itself is lightened. The whole point of democracy is that the number of people who participate in an election is proportional to the number of people who will have to live intimately with an election’s outcome. It’s worth noting, too, that if judicious voting is like clean air then it can’t also be like farming. Clean air is a commons, an instance of market failure, dependent on government protection for its existence; farming is part of a market. But maybe voting is neither commons nor market. Perhaps, instead, it’s combat. Relatively gentle, of course. Rather than rifles and bayonets, essentially there’s just a show of hands. But the nature of the duty may be similar, because what Brennan’s model omits is that sometimes, in an election, democracy itself is in danger. If a soldier were to calculate his personal value to the campaign that his army is engaged in, he could easily conclude that the cost of showing up at the front isn’t worth it, even if he factors in the chance of being caught and punished for desertion. The trouble is that it’s impossible to know in advance of a battle which side will prevail, let alone by how great a margin, especially if morale itself is a variable. The lack of certainty about the future makes a hash of merely prudential calculation. It’s said that most soldiers worry more about letting down the fellow-soldiers in their unit than about allegiance to an entity as abstract as the nation, and maybe voters, too, feel their duty most acutely toward friends and family who share their idea of where the country needs to go. ♦ Jim Wiegel 401 North Beverly Way, Tolleson, Arizona 85353 Tel. 011-623-936-8671 or 011-623-363-3277 jfwiegel@yahoo.com www.partnersinparticipation.com "We are no longer living in an era of change. We are living in a change of era." Francis Upcoming public course opportunities click here http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=10 For online registration go to http://www.top-training.net The AZ ToP® Community of Practice meets the 1st Friday, 1-4 pm, starting again on Sept 5th at ACYR, 648 N. 5th Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85003 AICP Planners: 14.5 CM for all ToP® courses
On Nov 3, 2016, at 19:56, James Wiegel <jfwiegel@yahoo.com> wrote:
Thanks for this, Dharma, it is still too easy for me to focus down . . .
Jim Wiegel “If you want an adventure . . . what a time to be alive!”. Joanna Macy
401 North Beverly Way,Tolleson, Arizona 85353 623-363-3277 jfwiegel@yahoo.com www.partnersinparticipation.com
Upcoming ToP training opportunities in Arizona
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From: Dharmalingam Vinasithamby via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> To: Len Hockley <LCHockley@gmail.com>; "laurelcg@aol.com" <laurelcg@aol.com>; Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net>; Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> Sent: Tuesday, November 1, 2016 6:16 PM Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Clinton's relationship to E.I. - Dear Susan
As an outsider, being in the Order/ICA gave me a close-up view of the US and how its citizens related to it. In all those years, beginning with Nixon all the way up to Obama, I’ve seen it invade and destroy nations around the world, releasing waves of refugees and other miseries. But within the US, people lived in a cocoon that helped them avert their eyes. I remember the Vietnam war protesters and the many young people who fled the US in order not to be driven to kill “gooks” overseas. I noticed that at best, we were silent on this and at worst, disapproving. When I look back, I see that the protesters were the “sensitive and responsive” part that Niebuhr wrote about. I also noticed the hunger among us to cite links to famous figures while pointing out that to live in the “no longer and the not-yet” was to be “nobodies”. Perhaps this was the effect of consuming the stories meant for our framing and fund-raising strategies.
I see that same hunger now reflected in recalling some distant crossing of trails with Hillary Clinton. Americans have been set up by the political elite to adopt positions around two equally ugly candidates put before them for the exercise of their “democratic rights”. For all the emotions the Republican-Democrat tension evokes in our emails, election after election, that rivalry is a sham. This is a nation ruled by a “single party with two factions”. Whichever you praise or denigrate, the real owners of the land always win. And for the rest of us around the world, we can only wait for the light from this “beacon on the hill” to eventually fade. Then, perhaps, the US will take its place as an ordinary member in the community of nations.
Dharma
On Wednesday, 2 November 2016, 7:33, Len Hockley via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
Dido Jon, The Naked Now by Richard Rohr is required reading!
Len Hockley
On 11/1/2016 2:58 PM, via OE wrote: Love this, Jon. Thanks.
Jann
-----Original Message----- From: jonzondo@juno.com via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> To: isobeljimbish <isobeljimbish@optusnet.com.au>; oe <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> Cc: oe <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> Sent: Tue, Nov 1, 2016 1:37 pm Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Clinton's relationship to E.I. - Dear Susan
Dear Group. Jon Elizondo here. Son of Tony and Ellery. Long time "Order kid" and short time Order adult.
This conversation is very important, especially with all the perspectives. I will try to hone in now on one of my key points. The change needed in the system is huge. Our current system is incredible broken in so many ways. We are a first world country "purposefully" going backwards by not investing in our infrastructure nor in our people. In my observation and opinion, much of the national frustration shows itself in the desire to elect Trump, or Bernie, or any alternative. The "Cry" for change is massive, and will not let up.
One of the traps is either/or thinking.
one of the ways forward is both/and/plus-more thinking.
One of the traps is "personal attacks".
one of the ways forward is "come join us at the table".
What I know in my bones is that we are all connected. That mysterious truth, combined with my passion & respect, is my key to intentionally moving forward.
Walk in Beauty, Jon
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Isobel Bishop via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> To: Wilson Priscilla H <pris@teamtechpress.com>, Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Clinton's relationship to E.I. - Dear Susan Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2016 07:23:32 +1100
Thankyou for this conversation, colleagues. I appreciate the Honesty, pain and fear expressed in depth,to give us outsiders some real hope. Thankyou all. In peace and love, Isobel Sent from my iPhone
On 2 Nov 2016, at 7:02 am, Wilson Priscilla H via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
No one has said that better, Randy. You should put that on Facebook…so we can all copy your words. Priscilla Wilson
On Nov 1, 2016, at 2:35 PM, Joyce Sloan via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote: Well said, Randy!!
On Nov 1, 2016 2:20 PM, "Randy Williams via OE" <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote: I keep asking, but still have not seen, one shred of verifiable evidence to substantiate the charge that Hillary has committed a criminal act of any sort. She's made serious mistakes like with the private server, she has not been as transparent as she could and perhaps should have been, she got paid a lot of money for some speeches (but less than some men), she's flip-flopped on some positions she's taken like on TPP, she has a super-healthy ego (an asset for a man but a huge liability for a woman in our culture), she didn't play nice when she was First Lady trying to get health care passed, as Secretary of State she traveled the world and spoke truth to power like the Premier of China, and after much gut-wrenching deliberation and prayer she chose to stay true to her vow to her husband of "for better or worse" through "worse." And to add insult to injury, she decided to run to be the first woman in the Office of President of the United States. How dare she. Despise her for all those things and hate all her positions on the issues, but don't accuse her of being a criminal unless you have some rock solid proof that hours and years and millions of dollars worth of hearings, investigations and witch hunts by scores of government agencies, news media and nondescript malcontents have been unable to produce. I've heard the rumors, innuendos, exaggerations, conjecture, gross distortions and outright lies, everything but verifiable truth. Got any? Then let's have it. But double check your sources before you put it out there because there really are some malingering, deplorable liars afoot in the land and a lot of fools are believing them and then repeating what they heard them say and calling it truth, and it just isn't. Randy
Sent from my iPad
On Nov 1, 2016, at 12:15 PM, Susan Fertig via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
Trump was never my choice, and Hillary is a criminal--her vision for the country is my first nightmare. And Trump is just as flawed. Both of them scare me to death. But neither if the other candidates is really an option either. I fear we're about to see this great American experiment in democracy become something no less evil than the many kleptocracies around the world.
Susan
Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Droid On Nov 1, 2016 11:55 AM, Judi White <sophiacircle@gmail.com> wrote: Well, what you wrote is what Frumper repeats over and over. Mist who parrot him do support him. I Personally prefer to read responses to a candidates vision for this nation. Also I stand firm in ny admiration which never ceases, of this woman who has continued in spite of the unbelievable accusations which are so blown up out of the real world of truth and honesty that it is cause for seriously asking "Why?". Why the hell bent mission to destroy a solid vision for this nation and this planet? There is no other candidate who shines so brightly and qualified to be an example for our children and grandchildren at this time. Rightly so.
On Nov 1, 2016 12:20 PM, "Susan Fertig via OE" <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote: How in the world did you infer that I must be a Trump supporter from my message?
Susan
Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Droid On Nov 1, 2016 7:56 AM, Ken Fisher <kenfisher1942@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Susan,
Writing to you as a Canadian Christian and 16-year Order member, I am awed by your commitment to American Republicanism and conservative Christianity. How in the world did you spend so much time with the EI/OE/ICA community and have your world view remain unaffected?
From the perspective of Canada, we are 87% supporters of HRC and the image of America she represents. Probably Russia is 87% in favour of Donald.
Each and every ‘crime’ that I have read about that is attributed to Hillary has been most grandly committed by Republicans in previous Bush administrations.
Surely you would agree that Donald Trump is an out and out racist, sexist, homophobe, parochial narcissist and most of all a climate change denier? HRC is none of the above. Thankfully, she is responsive to both Bernie and to Elizabeth. We may get out of this mess yet.
Your phrase: "only values I see are abject greed, a pathological allegiance to lies, and arrogant flaunting of her ability to circumvent the law. She has done absolutely nothing to improve the lives of the poor and disadvantaged yet claims she has in the face of all evidence to the contrary.” is really the truth that the world sees about Trump.
I would invite you to see all that as a projection.
Should Trump take ownership of any of the above, that would be a fine moment of grace. Would you not agree?
Margaret Atwood, (a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist) describes America in the midst of a Salem type witch hunt. I agree. It is, at the bottom a war against women.
While there are indeed my contradictions in American society that both the Republican and Democratic administrations must answer for, the attached article came closest - for me - in describing how the Republican voice has committed itself to an ‘end game’ and it would seem that indeed, the GOP will ‘end’.
Love and best wishes to you, Susan and to all Trump supporters who have been left without any vision other than rebellion or depression.
We are all responsible. Everyone.
Ken in Canada.
A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die http://www.vox.com/2016/7/25/1 2256510/republican-party-trump -avik-roy
On Nov 1, 2016, at 12:03 AM, Susan Fertig via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
Values??? The only values I see are abject greed, a pathological allegiance to lies, and arrogant flaunting of her ability to circumvent the law. She has done absolutely nothing to improve the lives of the poor and disadvantaged yet claims she has in the face of all evidence to the contrary. I've heard for years about this possible connection to EI/ICA, and I truly hope it's not true. It would be a horrible embarrassment to the movement.
Susan
Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Droid On Oct 31, 2016 11:22 PM, William Salmon via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote: Colleagues-- So many raise the question concerning Hillary Clinton's relationship to E.I. I decided to cast this bread upon the waters. The first sign is that while I addressed it to Hillary Clinton, an alternate address popped up. Consequently, it may really get to her attention, to that of some aid. May it be a Kool-Aid. Inner Peace, Bill
Mrs. Hillary Clinton: It is my prayer that this reaches you concerning your experience in 5th City, Chicago, or it could have been in Evanston. Your Youth Director, Don Jones, must have been at a training event to become known as RS-I. About the same time, a large number of us dedicated ourselves to this renewal movement that grew from our experience in Chicago Ghetto to literally embrace the world. It makes me wonder if your experience under his leadership influenced the values you hold dear, and now wish to step onto the platform of the Presidency to do for our United States and for the world what was embraced by the courageous citizens in 5th City. You carry my prayers during this last turbulent week. You have my vote. Grace and Peace, Pastor William E. Salmon 744 So. 10th Salina, KS 67401 wsalmon@cox.net
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I did not realize how deeply ingrained is the assumption that if one is economically impoverished then that one is probably not intelligent enough to participate in the political process. The opposite assumption is also wrong, that if one has money then he/she is probably intellectually astute enough to vote. All this is, I believe, at the root of the moves to suppress the vote. Special interests plague democracy all the way from the voting booth to the state house to the halls of congress. If we ever get clear about our networked, interdependent world, we may also see, as did MLK, that "what affects one directly affects all indirectly." That kind of takes "special interests" off the table and makes democracy more viable. Randy Sent from my iPad
On Nov 5, 2016, at 8:28 AM, James Wiegel via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
BOOKS NONE OF THE ABOVE The case against democracy. BY CALEB CRAIN
Roughly a third of American voters think that the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” appears in the Constitution. About as many are incapable of naming even one of the three branches of the United States government. Fewer than a quarter know who their senators are, and only half are aware that their state has two of them. Democracy is other people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled the few, especially the few who consider themselves intellectuals. Plato, one of the earliest to see democracy as a problem, saw its typical citizen as shiftless and flighty: Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times, he’s idle and neglects everything; and sometimes he even occupies himself with what he takes to be philosophy. It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from reading any literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead them to forget themselves. The scheme was so byzantine and cockamamie that many suspect Plato couldn’t have been serious; Hobbes, for one, called the idea “useless.” A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs. (In fact, in Mill’s day, select universities had had their own constituencies for centuries, allowing someone with a degree from, say, Oxford to vote both in his university constituency and wherever he lived. The system wasn’t abolished until 1950.) Mill’s larger project—at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance. In the United States, élites who feared the ignorance of poor immigrants tried to restrict ballots. In 1855, Connecticut introduced the first literacy test for American voters. Although a New York Democrat protested, in 1868, that “if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for his protection all the more,” in the next half century the tests spread to almost all parts of the country. They helped racists in the South circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment and disenfranchise blacks, and even in immigrant-rich New York a 1921 law required new voters to take a test if they couldn’t prove that they had an eighth-grade education. About fifteen per cent flunked. Voter literacy tests weren’t permanently outlawed by Congress until 1975, years after the civil-rights movement had discredited them. Worry about voters’ intelligence lingers, however. Mill’s proposal, in particular, remains “actually fairly formidable,” according to David Estlund, a political philosopher at Brown. His 2008 book, “Democratic Authority,” tried to construct a philosophical justification for democracy, a feat that he thought could be achieved only by balancing two propositions: democratic procedures tend to make correct policy decisions, and democratic procedures are fair in the eyes of reasonable observers. Fairness alone didn’t seem to be enough. If it were, Estlund wrote, “why not flip a coin?” It must be that we value democracy for tending to get things right more often than not, which democracy seems to do by making use of the information in our votes. Indeed, although this year we seem to be living through a rough patch, democracy does have a fairly good track record. The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has made the case that democracies never have famines, and other scholars believe that they almost never go to war with one another, rarely murder their own populations, nearly always have peaceful transitions of government, and respect human rights more consistently than other regimes do. Still, democracy is far from perfect—“the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” as Churchill famously said. So, if we value its power to make good decisions, why not try a system that’s a little less fair but makes good decisions even more often? Jamming the stub of the Greek word for “knowledge” into the Greek word for “rule,” Estlund coined the word “epistocracy,” meaning “government by the knowledgeable.” It’s an idea that “advocates of democracy, and other enemies of despotism, will want to resist,” he wrote, and he counted himself among the resisters. As a purely philosophical matter, however, he saw only three valid objections.
First, one could deny that truth was a suitable standard for measuring political judgment. This sounds extreme, but it’s a fairly common move in political philosophy. After all, in debates over contentious issues, such as when human life begins or whether human activity is warming the planet, appeals to the truth tend to be incendiary. Truth “peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate,” Hannah Arendt pointed out in this magazine, in 1967, “and debate constitutes the very essence of political life.” Estlund wasn’t a relativist, however; he agreed that politicians should refrain from appealing to absolute truth, but he didn’t think a political theorist could avoid doing so. The second argument against epistocracy would be to deny that some citizens know more about good government than others. Estlund simply didn’t find this plausible (maybe a political philosopher is professionally disinclined to). The third and final option: deny that knowing more imparts political authority. As Estlund put it, “You might be right, but who made you boss?” It’s a very good question, and Estlund rested his defense of democracy on it, but he felt obliged to look for holes in his argument. He had a sneaking suspicion that a polity ruled by educated voters probably would perform better than a democracy, and he thought that some of the resulting inequities could be remedied. If historically disadvantaged groups, such as African-Americans or women, turned out to be underrepresented in an epistocratic system, those who made the grade could be given additional votes, in compensation. By the end of Estlund’s analysis, there were only two practical arguments against epistocracy left standing. The first was the possibility that an epistocracy’s method of screening voters might be biased in a way that couldn’t readily be identified and therefore couldn’t be corrected for. The second was that universal suffrage is so established in our minds as a default that giving the knowledgeable power over the ignorant will always feel more unjust than giving those in the majority power over those in the minority. As defenses of democracy go, these are even less rousing than Churchill’s shruggie. In a new book, “Against Democracy” (Princeton), Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown, has turned Estlund’s hedging inside out to create an uninhibited argument for epistocracy. Against Estlund’s claim that universal suffrage is the default, Brennan argues that it’s entirely justifiable to limit the political power that the irrational, the ignorant, and the incompetent have over others. To counter Estlund’s concern for fairness, Brennan asserts that the public’s welfare is more important than anyone’s hurt feelings; after all, he writes, few would consider it unfair to disqualify jurors who are morally or cognitively incompetent. As for Estlund’s worry about demographic bias, Brennan waves it off. Empirical research shows that people rarely vote for their narrow self-interest; seniors favor Social Security no more strongly than the young do. Brennan suggests that since voters in an epistocracy would be more enlightened about crime and policing, “excluding the bottom 80 percent of white voters from voting might be just what poor blacks need.” Brennan has a bright, pugilistic style, and he takes a sportsman’s pleasure in upsetting pieties and demolishing weak logic. Voting rights may happen to signify human dignity to us, he writes, but corpse-eating once signified respect for the dead among the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea. To him, our faith in the ennobling power of political debate is no more well grounded than the supposition that college fraternities build character. Brennan draws ample evidence of the average American voter’s cluelessness from the legal scholar Ilya Somin’s “Democracy and Political Ignorance” (2013), which shows that American voters have remained ignorant despite decades of rising education levels. Some economists have argued that ill-informed voters, far from being lazy or self-sabotaging, should be seen as rational actors. If the odds that your vote will be decisive are minuscule—Brennan writes that “you are more likely to win Powerball a few times in a row”—then learning about politics isn’t worth even a few minutes of your time. In “The Myth of the Rational Voter” (2007), the economist Bryan Caplan suggested that ignorance may even be gratifying to voters. “Some beliefs are more emotionally appealing,” Caplan observed, so if your vote isn’t likely to do anything why not indulge yourself in what you want to believe, whether or not it’s true? Caplan argues that it’s only because of the worthlessness of an individual vote that so many voters look beyond their narrow self-interest: in the polling booth, the warm, fuzzy feeling of altruism can be had cheap. Viewed that way, voting might seem like a form of pure self-expression. Not even, says Brennan: it’s multiple choice, so hardly expressive. “If you’re upset, write a poem,” Brennan counselled in an earlier book, “The Ethics of Voting” (2011). He was equally unimpressed by the argument that it’s one’s duty to vote. “It would be bad if no one farmed,” he wrote, “but that does not imply that everyone should farm.” In fact, he suspected, the imperative to vote might be even weaker than the imperative to farm. After all, by not voting you do your neighbor a good turn. “If I do not vote, your vote counts more,” Brennan wrote.
“Yours was the blue Prius with the two stoners passed out in back, right?” Brennan calls people who don’t bother to learn about politics hobbits, and he thinks it for the best if they stay home on Election Day. A second group of people enjoy political news as a recreation, following it with the partisan devotion of sports fans, and Brennan calls them hooligans. Third in his bestiary are vulcans, who investigate politics with scientific objectivity, respect opposing points of view, and carefully adjust their opinions to the facts, which they seek out diligently. It’s vulcans, presumably, who Brennan hopes will someday rule over us, but he doesn’t present compelling evidence that they really exist. In fact, one study he cites shows that even people with excellent math skills tend not to draw on them if doing so risks undermining a cherished political belief. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. In recent memory, sophisticated experts have been confident about many proposals that turned out to be disastrous—invading Iraq, having a single European currency, grinding subprime mortgages into the sausage known as collateralized debt obligations, and so on. How would an epistocracy actually work? Brennan is reluctant to get specific, which is understandable. It was the details of utopia that gave Plato so much trouble, and by not going into them Brennan avoids stepping on the rake that thwacked Plato between the eyes. He sketches some options—extra votes for degree holders, a council of epistocrats with veto power, a qualifying exam for voters—but he doesn’t spend much time considering what could go wrong. The idea of a voter exam, for example, was dismissed by Brennan himself in “The Ethics of Voting” as “ripe for abuse and institutional capture.” There’s no mention in his new book of any measures that he would put in place to prevent such dangers. Without more details, it’s difficult to assess Brennan’s proposal. Suppose I claim that pixies always make selfless, enlightened political decisions and that therefore we should entrust our government to pixies. If I can’t really say how we’ll identify the pixies or harness their sagacity, and if I also disclose evidence that pixies may be just as error-prone as hobbits and hooligans, you’d be justified in having doubts. While we’re on the subject of vulcans and pixies, we might as well mention that there’s an elephant in the room. Knowledge about politics, Brennan reports, is higher in people who have more education and higher income, live in the West, belong to the Republican Party, and are middle-aged; it’s lower among blacks and women. “Most poor black women, as of right now at least, would fail even a mild voter qualification exam,” he admits, but he’s undeterred, insisting that their disenfranchisement would be merely incidental to his epistocratic plan—a completely different matter, he maintains, from the literacy tests of America’s past, which were administered with the intention of disenfranchising blacks and ethnic whites. That’s an awfully fine distinction. Bear in mind that, during the current Presidential race, it looks as though the votes of blacks and women will serve as a bulwark against the most reckless demagogue in living memory, whom white men with a college degree have been favoring by a margin of forty-seven per cent to thirty-five per cent. Moreover, though political scientists mostly agree that voters are altruistic, something doesn’t tally: Brennan concedes that historically disadvantaged groups such as blacks and women seem to gain political leverage once they get the franchise. Like many people I know, I’ve spent recent months staying up late, reading polls in terror. The flawed and faulty nature of democracy has become a vivid companion. But is democracy really failing, or is it just trying to say something? Political scientists have long hoped to find an “invisible hand” in politics comparable to the one that Adam Smith described in economics. Voter ignorance wouldn’t matter much if a democracy were able to weave individual votes into collective political wisdom, the way a market weaves the self-interested buy-and-sell decisions of individual actors into a prudent collective allocation of resources. But, as Brennan reports, the mathematical models that have been proposed work only if voter ignorance has no shape of its own—if, for example, voters err on the side of liberalism as often as they err on the side of conservatism, leaving decisions in the hands of a politically knowledgeable minority in the center. Unfortunately, voter ignorance does seem to have a shape. The political scientist Scott Althaus has calculated that a voter with more knowledge of politics will, on balance, be less eager to go to war, less punitive about crime, more tolerant on social issues, less accepting of government control of the economy, and more willing to accept taxes in order to reduce the federal deficit. And Caplan calculates that a voter ignorant of economics will tend to be more pessimistic, more suspicious of market competition and of rises in productivity, and more wary of foreign trade and immigration.
It’s possible, though, that democracy works even though political scientists have failed to find a tidy equation to explain it. It could be that voters take a cognitive shortcut, letting broad-brush markers like party affiliation stand in for a close study of candidates’ qualifications and policy stances. Brennan doubts that voters understand party stereotypes well enough to do even this, but surely a shortcut needn’t be perfect to be helpful. Voters may also rely on the simple heuristic of throwing out incumbents who have made them unhappy, a technique that in political science goes by the polite name of “retrospective voting.” Brennan argues that voters don’t know enough to do this, either. To impose full accountability, he writes, voters would need to know “who the incumbent bastards are, what they did, what they could have done, what happened when the bastards did what they did, and whether the challengers are likely to be any better than the incumbent bastards.” Most don’t know all this, of course. Somin points out that voters have punished incumbents for droughts and shark attacks and rewarded them for recent sports victories. Caplan dismisses retrospective voting, quoting a pair of scholars who call it “no more rational than killing the pharaoh when the Nile does not flood.” But even if retrospective voting is sloppy, and works to the chagrin of the occasional pharaoh, that doesn’t necessarily make it valueless. It might, for instance, tend to improve elected officials’ policy decisions. Maybe all it takes is for a politician to worry that she could be the unlucky chump who gets punished for something she actually did. Caplan notes that a politician clever enough to worry about his constituents’ future happiness as well as their present gratification might be motivated to give them better policies than they know to ask for. In such a case, he predicts, voters will feel a perennial dissatisfaction, stemming from the tendency of their canniest and most long-lasting politicians to be cavalier about campaign promises. Sound familiar? When the Founding Fathers designed the federal system, not paying too much attention to voters was a feature, not a bug. “There are particular moments in public affairs,” Madison warned, “when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.” Brennan, for all his cleverness, sometimes seems to be struggling to reinvent the “representative” part of “representative democracy,” writing as if voters need to know enough about policy to be able to make intelligent decisions themselves, when, in most modern democracies, voters usually delegate that task. It’s when they don’t, as in California’s ballot initiatives or the recent British referendum on whether to leave the European Union, that disaster is especially likely to strike. The economist Joseph Schumpeter didn’t think democracy could even function if voters paid too much attention to what their representatives did between elections. “Electorates normally do not control their political leaders in any way except by refusing to reelect them,” he wrote, in “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” (1942). The rest of the time, he thought, they should refrain from “political back-seat driving.” Why do we vote, and is there a reason to do it or a duty to do it well? It’s been said that voting enables one to take an equal part in the building of one’s political habitat. Brennan thinks that such participation is worthless if what you value about participation is the chance to influence an election’s outcome; odds are, you won’t. Yet he has previously written that participation can be meaningful even when its practical effect is nil, as when a parent whose spouse willingly handles all child care still feels compelled to help out. Brennan claims that no comparable duty to take part exists with voting, because other kinds of good actions can take voting’s place. He believes, in other words, that voting is part of a larger market in civic virtue, the way that farming is part of a larger market in food, and he goes so far as to suggest that a businessman who sells food and clothing to Martin Luther King, Jr., is making a genuine contribution to civic virtue, even though he makes it indirectly. This doesn’t seem persuasive, in part because it dilutes the meaning of civic virtue too much, and in part because it implies that a businessman who sells a cheeseburger to J. Edgar Hoover is committing civic evil. More than once, Brennan compares uninformed voting to air pollution. It’s a compelling analogy: in both cases, the conscientiousness of the enlightened few is no match for the negligence of the many, and the cost of shirking duty is spread too widely to keep any one malefactor in line. Your commute by bicycle probably isn’t going to make the city’s air any cleaner, and even if you read up on candidates for civil-court judge on Patch.com, it may still be the crook who gets elected. But though the incentive for duty may be weakened, it’s not clear that the duty itself is lightened. The whole point of democracy is that the number of people who participate in an election is proportional to the number of people who will have to live intimately with an election’s outcome. It’s worth noting, too, that if judicious voting is like clean air then it can’t also be like farming. Clean air is a commons, an instance of market failure, dependent on government protection for its existence; farming is part of a market. But maybe voting is neither commons nor market. Perhaps, instead, it’s combat. Relatively gentle, of course. Rather than rifles and bayonets, essentially there’s just a show of hands. But the nature of the duty may be similar, because what Brennan’s model omits is that sometimes, in an election, democracy itself is in danger. If a soldier were to calculate his personal value to the campaign that his army is engaged in, he could easily conclude that the cost of showing up at the front isn’t worth it, even if he factors in the chance of being caught and punished for desertion. The trouble is that it’s impossible to know in advance of a battle which side will prevail, let alone by how great a margin, especially if morale itself is a variable. The lack of certainty about the future makes a hash of merely prudential calculation. It’s said that most soldiers worry more about letting down the fellow-soldiers in their unit than about allegiance to an entity as abstract as the nation, and maybe voters, too, feel their duty most acutely toward friends and family who share their idea of where the country needs to go. ♦
Jim Wiegel 401 North Beverly Way, Tolleson, Arizona 85353 Tel. 011-623-936-8671 or 011-623-363-3277 jfwiegel@yahoo.com www.partnersinparticipation.com
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On Nov 3, 2016, at 19:56, James Wiegel <jfwiegel@yahoo.com> wrote:
Thanks for this, Dharma, it is still too easy for me to focus down . . .
Jim Wiegel “If you want an adventure . . . what a time to be alive!”. Joanna Macy
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From: Dharmalingam Vinasithamby via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> To: Len Hockley <LCHockley@gmail.com>; "laurelcg@aol.com" <laurelcg@aol.com>; Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net>; Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> Sent: Tuesday, November 1, 2016 6:16 PM Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Clinton's relationship to E.I. - Dear Susan
As an outsider, being in the Order/ICA gave me a close-up view of the US and how its citizens related to it. In all those years, beginning with Nixon all the way up to Obama, I’ve seen it invade and destroy nations around the world, releasing waves of refugees and other miseries. But within the US, people lived in a cocoon that helped them avert their eyes. I remember the Vietnam war protesters and the many young people who fled the US in order not to be driven to kill “gooks” overseas. I noticed that at best, we were silent on this and at worst, disapproving. When I look back, I see that the protesters were the “sensitive and responsive” part that Niebuhr wrote about. I also noticed the hunger among us to cite links to famous figures while pointing out that to live in the “no longer and the not-yet” was to be “nobodies”. Perhaps this was the effect of consuming the stories meant for our framing and fund-raising strategies.
I see that same hunger now reflected in recalling some distant crossing of trails with Hillary Clinton. Americans have been set up by the political elite to adopt positions around two equally ugly candidates put before them for the exercise of their “democratic rights”. For all the emotions the Republican-Democrat tension evokes in our emails, election after election, that rivalry is a sham. This is a nation ruled by a “single party with two factions”. Whichever you praise or denigrate, the real owners of the land always win. And for the rest of us around the world, we can only wait for the light from this “beacon on the hill” to eventually fade. Then, perhaps, the US will take its place as an ordinary member in the community of nations.
Dharma
On Wednesday, 2 November 2016, 7:33, Len Hockley via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
Dido Jon, The Naked Now by Richard Rohr is required reading!
Len Hockley
On 11/1/2016 2:58 PM, via OE wrote: Love this, Jon. Thanks.
Jann
-----Original Message----- From: jonzondo@juno.com via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> To: isobeljimbish <isobeljimbish@optusnet.com.au>; oe <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> Cc: oe <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> Sent: Tue, Nov 1, 2016 1:37 pm Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Clinton's relationship to E.I. - Dear Susan
Dear Group. Jon Elizondo here. Son of Tony and Ellery. Long time "Order kid" and short time Order adult.
This conversation is very important, especially with all the perspectives. I will try to hone in now on one of my key points. The change needed in the system is huge. Our current system is incredible broken in so many ways. We are a first world country "purposefully" going backwards by not investing in our infrastructure nor in our people. In my observation and opinion, much of the national frustration shows itself in the desire to elect Trump, or Bernie, or any alternative. The "Cry" for change is massive, and will not let up.
One of the traps is either/or thinking.
one of the ways forward is both/and/plus-more thinking.
One of the traps is "personal attacks".
one of the ways forward is "come join us at the table".
What I know in my bones is that we are all connected. That mysterious truth, combined with my passion & respect, is my key to intentionally moving forward.
Walk in Beauty, Jon
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Isobel Bishop via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> To: Wilson Priscilla H <pris@teamtechpress.com>, Order Ecumenical Community <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Clinton's relationship to E.I. - Dear Susan Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2016 07:23:32 +1100
Thankyou for this conversation, colleagues. I appreciate the Honesty, pain and fear expressed in depth,to give us outsiders some real hope. Thankyou all. In peace and love, Isobel Sent from my iPhone
On 2 Nov 2016, at 7:02 am, Wilson Priscilla H via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
No one has said that better, Randy. You should put that on Facebook…so we can all copy your words. Priscilla Wilson
On Nov 1, 2016, at 2:35 PM, Joyce Sloan via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote: Well said, Randy!!
On Nov 1, 2016 2:20 PM, "Randy Williams via OE" <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote: I keep asking, but still have not seen, one shred of verifiable evidence to substantiate the charge that Hillary has committed a criminal act of any sort. She's made serious mistakes like with the private server, she has not been as transparent as she could and perhaps should have been, she got paid a lot of money for some speeches (but less than some men), she's flip-flopped on some positions she's taken like on TPP, she has a super-healthy ego (an asset for a man but a huge liability for a woman in our culture), she didn't play nice when she was First Lady trying to get health care passed, as Secretary of State she traveled the world and spoke truth to power like the Premier of China, and after much gut-wrenching deliberation and prayer she chose to stay true to her vow to her husband of "for better or worse" through "worse." And to add insult to injury, she decided to run to be the first woman in the Office of President of the United States. How dare she. Despise her for all those things and hate all her positions on the issues, but don't accuse her of being a criminal unless you have some rock solid proof that hours and years and millions of dollars worth of hearings, investigations and witch hunts by scores of government agencies, news media and nondescript malcontents have been unable to produce. I've heard the rumors, innuendos, exaggerations, conjecture, gross distortions and outright lies, everything but verifiable truth. Got any? Then let's have it. But double check your sources before you put it out there because there really are some malingering, deplorable liars afoot in the land and a lot of fools are believing them and then repeating what they heard them say and calling it truth, and it just isn't. Randy
Sent from my iPad
On Nov 1, 2016, at 12:15 PM, Susan Fertig via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
Trump was never my choice, and Hillary is a criminal--her vision for the country is my first nightmare. And Trump is just as flawed. Both of them scare me to death. But neither if the other candidates is really an option either. I fear we're about to see this great American experiment in democracy become something no less evil than the many kleptocracies around the world.
Susan
Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Droid On Nov 1, 2016 11:55 AM, Judi White <sophiacircle@gmail.com> wrote: Well, what you wrote is what Frumper repeats over and over. Mist who parrot him do support him. I Personally prefer to read responses to a candidates vision for this nation. Also I stand firm in ny admiration which never ceases, of this woman who has continued in spite of the unbelievable accusations which are so blown up out of the real world of truth and honesty that it is cause for seriously asking "Why?". Why the hell bent mission to destroy a solid vision for this nation and this planet? There is no other candidate who shines so brightly and qualified to be an example for our children and grandchildren at this time. Rightly so.
On Nov 1, 2016 12:20 PM, "Susan Fertig via OE" <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote: How in the world did you infer that I must be a Trump supporter from my message?
Susan
Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Droid On Nov 1, 2016 7:56 AM, Ken Fisher <kenfisher1942@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Susan,
Writing to you as a Canadian Christian and 16-year Order member, I am awed by your commitment to American Republicanism and conservative Christianity. How in the world did you spend so much time with the EI/OE/ICA community and have your world view remain unaffected?
From the perspective of Canada, we are 87% supporters of HRC and the image of America she represents. Probably Russia is 87% in favour of Donald.
Each and every ‘crime’ that I have read about that is attributed to Hillary has been most grandly committed by Republicans in previous Bush administrations.
Surely you would agree that Donald Trump is an out and out racist, sexist, homophobe, parochial narcissist and most of all a climate change denier? HRC is none of the above. Thankfully, she is responsive to both Bernie and to Elizabeth. We may get out of this mess yet.
Your phrase: "only values I see are abject greed, a pathological allegiance to lies, and arrogant flaunting of her ability to circumvent the law. She has done absolutely nothing to improve the lives of the poor and disadvantaged yet claims she has in the face of all evidence to the contrary.” is really the truth that the world sees about Trump.
I would invite you to see all that as a projection.
Should Trump take ownership of any of the above, that would be a fine moment of grace. Would you not agree?
Margaret Atwood, (a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist) describes America in the midst of a Salem type witch hunt. I agree. It is, at the bottom a war against women.
While there are indeed my contradictions in American society that both the Republican and Democratic administrations must answer for, the attached article came closest - for me - in describing how the Republican voice has committed itself to an ‘end game’ and it would seem that indeed, the GOP will ‘end’.
Love and best wishes to you, Susan and to all Trump supporters who have been left without any vision other than rebellion or depression.
We are all responsible. Everyone.
Ken in Canada.
A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die http://www.vox.com/2016/7/25/1 2256510/republican-party-trump -avik-roy
On Nov 1, 2016, at 12:03 AM, Susan Fertig via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
Values??? The only values I see are abject greed, a pathological allegiance to lies, and arrogant flaunting of her ability to circumvent the law. She has done absolutely nothing to improve the lives of the poor and disadvantaged yet claims she has in the face of all evidence to the contrary. I've heard for years about this possible connection to EI/ICA, and I truly hope it's not true. It would be a horrible embarrassment to the movement.
Susan
Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Droid On Oct 31, 2016 11:22 PM, William Salmon via OE <oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote: Colleagues-- So many raise the question concerning Hillary Clinton's relationship to E.I. I decided to cast this bread upon the waters. The first sign is that while I addressed it to Hillary Clinton, an alternate address popped up. Consequently, it may really get to her attention, to that of some aid. May it be a Kool-Aid. Inner Peace, Bill
Mrs. Hillary Clinton: It is my prayer that this reaches you concerning your experience in 5th City, Chicago, or it could have been in Evanston. Your Youth Director, Don Jones, must have been at a training event to become known as RS-I. About the same time, a large number of us dedicated ourselves to this renewal movement that grew from our experience in Chicago Ghetto to literally embrace the world. It makes me wonder if your experience under his leadership influenced the values you hold dear, and now wish to step onto the platform of the Presidency to do for our United States and for the world what was embraced by the courageous citizens in 5th City. You carry my prayers during this last turbulent week. You have my vote. Grace and Peace, Pastor William E. Salmon 744 So. 10th Salina, KS 67401 wsalmon@cox.net
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