Scapegoat Sins and Denial

Once again, I have a post in the works, but do not have time to finish it.  So today's post will be short.  This post concerns my observations of the attempts by the American White Right to use religion - specifically Christianity - as a tool of earthly political and economic domination.  As one might guess, I think those attempts will ultimately fail, for they are built on an unsustainable foundation.  The un-Scriptural elements of that foundation have been the following assumptions:

• That God has chosen religious white America from the foundation of the world to be the absolute masters of the world.
• That God has therefore given these holders of white power and white supremacy the right to murder and enslave all the rest of us because supposedly we are morally defective while the white supremacists are supposedly morally superior to all the rest of us.
• That the proof of this moral superiority is that religious white America upholds Biblical morality and has certain intellectual beliefs about Jesus while the rest of us do not.
• That the sole sum and substance of Biblical morality consists of being monogamous and heterosexual, and that God is absolutely not concerned about how white supremacists treat the poor and the nonwhite.

A very quick look at the New Testament disproves this last point completely.  For while it is absolutely true that God hates sexual sin, it is also true that white evangelical America would have been guilty of breaking every commandment of God even without sexual sin, as noted in the part of the epistle of James which says "Now if you do not commit adultery, but you do commit murder, you have become a transgressor of the law."  There is also an added difficulty for white evangelicals these days: namely the abundant evidence that white American evangelicalism is guilty of adultery (and much, much more!), as seen by the legions of white evangelical pastors and Republican politicians who have been caught with their pants down (often with members of the same sex) over the last few decades.  The most recent evangelical fiasco involves the ongoing revelations of the crimes and corruption of the political darling of white evangelicals, namely, former U.S. president Donald John Trump, and the ongoing refusal of white evangelicals to admit that they devoted themselves to supporting the presidency of a complete piece of garbage.

But I am thinking now of how impossible it has been for anyone to get white evangelicals to see and admit the error of their ways.  From climate change denialism to chants of "Blue Lives Matter!" to COVID denialism, white evangelicals continue to remain willfully blind.  And when they continue to say that they have been put here on earth to violently punish the evil of other people, yet they refuse to see and punish the evil in their own ranks (Josh Duggar and Dennis Hastert, for instance), the blindness becomes even more willful.

Thus I find it fitting to share a video with you my readers.  I stumbled on it entirely by accident, as it was recommended to me by someone I know.  I'm sure you will see the parallels.

You Won't Mind Your Own Business, So Why Are You Trying To Mind Mine?

I have a post in the works which will address the attempts by the American Religious Right to establish a white supremacist theocracy in the U.S.  Hint: I have reason to believe that these attempts are about to fail spectacularly.  But I don't have time to write that post just yet.  (Entrepreneurs need to learn sometimes to say no to new work!)  So today's post will not be on that subject.  Today's post will also be short.

I have written in this blog about the ecological devastation being wrought on the Russian landscape under the reign of Vladimir Putin.  Specifically, I have written about the spectacularly widespread Russian wildfires of 2020 and 2021.  It should not be surprising therefore to learn that the Russian wildfire season of 2022 has started off with a bang.  (See this, this, and this for instance.)  According to a Wikipedia article on the subject, 

"The 2022 Siberian wildfires are a series of ongoing wildfires in Siberia, Russia that began in Siberia in early May 2022. Fires are concentrated in the Krasnoyarsk, Altai, Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Omsk, Kurgan regions, Khakassia and Sakha republics. The total area of ​​fires, as of 15 May, is about 20 thousand hectares, and since the beginning of 2022 - more than 100 thousand hectares."

The Wikipedia article also has a map which illustrates how much of the Russian landscape has been plagued by the fires this year.  (Click on this link to see or download the map.)  From this map we can see that nearly a third of the Russian land mass was affected by wildfires as of May.  Russian president Vladimir Putin called for aggressive action to deal with the wildfires, but it should be obvious that his statements are merely a blowing of useless smoke.  For the track record of the Russian government from at least as far back as 2019 shows a singular lack of willingness to effectively deal with the wildfire threat.  And by spending so many Russian resources in trying to take over other people's countries, Putin has left very little to competently manage the affairs of his own country.  Score another point for that thieving little man in his bunker and his piece-of-garbage regime.  This is the man who was worshiped by an idiot named Donald John Trump.

Science Fiction As Cultural Soft Power

Over the last several months, I've been listening to a lot of stories.  I have also listened to the reasons which authors give for wanting to tell a story, for wanting to become skilled at creating and delivering a story.  Why create stories?  I have become interested in the benefits which are experienced by the writers, and to me the most interesting of those benefits are not monetary.  Such benefits include the learning of strategic thinking through storytelling, learning to discover and explore the various possibilities in a possibility space, and learning to foresee the various ways people may react to a set of possibilities, as well as the motives for those reactions.  A writer who applies himself to sharpening his skill also gains the ability to craft his own narrative, thus taking control of his own narrative and preserving himself and his narrative from the voices of others who want to slander the writer and his people through their own narrative.  Learning to craft a good story aids the writer's projection of his own narrative into the world.  By this projection, the author creates a bridge between human beings.  I have come to believe that speculative fiction - particularly, science fiction - has unique advantages as a means of exploring possibilities of situations, and of the possible human reactions (and their motives) to those situational possibilities.  It also has unique advantages as a vehicle for human narratives.

These conclusions of mine have been formed by my introduction over the last year to Chinese science fiction.  That introduction came in a way that would make sense to most of us who have had to live through the last year as citizens of the United States.  It all started with the restrictions on life and movement which reality forced on us through the COVID-19 pandemic.  Being cut off from much in-person contact with others meant that I was to a large degree cut off from cognitive stimulation from other minds.  I engaged in a bit of binge-watching YouTube, but always felt terrible about the amount of time that thus got wasted.  And I'm not a Netflix kind of guy.  But I was open to listening to audiobooks, since I could work out, wash dishes, mow the lawn, etc. while listening.  So I turned to Librivox.  But most of the fiction on Librivox is characterized by the sort of triumphalist point of view common to 19th century authors who came from the "dominant culture", the point of view that people and communities of color find to be intensely annoying because it sings the praises of our oppressors.   I got very quickly tired of trying to listen to that trash.  However, Librivox did not seem to have very many audiobooks whose texts had been written by non-Western, nonwhite authors.  So I began searching for modern stories written by people from non-European cultures.  And I decided to stop being a cheapskate and to become willing to pay to buy recordings of such stories.  Thus I went to an indie audiobook site and discovered Liu Cixin.  I got hooked!    

I discovered that Liu Cixin's works of fiction were part of a massive display of burgeoning Chinese (and Asian) cultural soft power.  Liu is part of what is called a "new wave" of Chinese science fiction.  Other writers in this new wave include Ken Liu, Hao Jingfang, Xia Jia, Chen Qiufan, and Chen Chuncheng, to name a few.  These authors share some key common characteristics: all are quite educated.  All are able to think deeply, to explore deeply a space of possibilities and the possible human reactions to those possibilities.  All are able to write their explorations from a refreshingly non-Western perspective.  All are good, strong, entertaining writers!  Examples which struck me:

• Liu Cixin: The Three-Body trilogy (English title: Remembrance of Earth's Past) is his most famous work.  It was this trilogy that hooked me.  The trilogy concerns the social and technological challenges faced by humanity under the threat of an invasion from alien creatures who are as far advanced above us as a modern First-World nation is above a pack of monkeys.  (Two memorable quotes from the first book: "消灭人类暴政!" "世界属于三体!", and " 不要回答! 不要回答!! 不要回答!!!")  Liu has been compared to Arthur C. Clarke, but in my opinion he is much, much better.  For one thing, his characters are fully fleshed and deeply complex.  For those who have read the books, think of Ye Wenjie, of Luo Ji, of Cheng Xin, of the unforeseen effects of the psychic injury suffered by someone who is deeply violated by the people of her own country.  One other note: It has been reported that Netflix is in the process of screwing up (Oops!  I mean, "creating a movie adaptation of") Three Body, and that their adaptation may be released this year.  I hope that Chinese filmmakers create their own version as well.  Even though I do not speak Chinese, I think I will enjoy the Chinese version much better.

• Hao Jingfang: Ms. Hao is the author of a number of stories.  One of those stories, "Folding Beijing," is a commentary on the effects of inequality and of unequal distribution of privilege in a society.  The other, a novel titled Vagabonds, is a story about a group of kids from Mars who, as a result of a five-year stay on Earth as teenagers, become "Third Culture Kids" who are able to see the flaws in both the hyper-capitalist world of Earth and the stifling central planning of the Martian society.  This leads to conflicts which the kids must navigate.

• Chen Qiufan: Mr. Chen, who goes by the name Stanley Chan when outside China, is the author of Waste Tide, a novel which explores the ways in which even seemingly homogeneous societies create caste systems so that a small number of privileged people can benefit from the dirty work done by those without privilege.  In this case, the dirty work consists of the hand-intensive labor needed to support a low-cost e-waste recycling business and its resulting economy.

• Ken Liu: Mr. Liu is an American citizen of Chinese ancestry.  I got to listen to the audiobook version of his short story collection titled The Paper Menagerie.  Some of the stories that stood out to me concern a social media company that takes over the lives of everyone on earth, a "generation ship" traveling to another star and the heroic choice that saves it, and the consequences to a society that refuses to acknowledge its historical guilt for past injustices.

• Chen Chuncheng: Mr. Chen is the author of a number of short stories.  I read one of these yesterday between cleaning the house and fixing my backyard fence.  The story was titled, "A Cloudcutter's Diary".  I won't tell any more about it except to say that it was a trip!

Let us consider what has been accomplished by these writers and their narratives.  One of their accomplishments has been to refute the white supremacist narrative pushed by Trumpoids such as Fox News that tries to dehumanize the Chinese as monsters and that tries to depict Chinese society as some sort of monolithic monstrosity.  This refutation has been accomplished by telling deeply human stories about complex, deeply human Chinese characters.  (Think again of Ye Wenjie, for instance.)  These authors have presented the Chinese narrative in a compelling manner and from multiple perspectives.  They have also offered trenchant critique of many social and political systems (including their own!)  Their stories have begun to build a bridge between ordinary Westerners and ordinary Chinese people.  They have also provoked their readers into a more rigorous exploration of spaces of possibilities, which is a hallmark of good speculative fiction.  And very importantly, by their own example they have shown other historically marginalized nonwhite populations a path forward to personal and collective liberation by developing technical and scientific expertise in order to create beautifully good work.  Liu Cixin's characters in particular move me to regret every minute of my youth which was wasted in watching cartoons on TV instead of studying technically challenging subjects.  

Chinese SF writers are an example of what Asef Bayat describes as "the art of presence" in Life As Politics: the kind of excellence of work that forces a change in the narrative told against a historically marginalized people by a dominant society.  To quote:

"In this respect, I envision a strategy whereby every social group generates change in society through active citizenship in their immediate domains: children at home and at schools, students in colleges, teachers in classrooms, workers in factories, the poor in

their neighborhoods, athletes in stadiums, artists through their art, intellectuals through media, women at home and as public actors. Not only are they to voice their claims, broadcast violations done unto them, and make themselves heard, but also to take responsibility for excelling at what they do. An authoritarian regime should not be a reason for not producing excellent novels, brilliant handicrafts, math champions, world- class athletes, dedicated teachers, or a global film industry. Excellence is power; it is identity."

Note that when I read the word "authoritarian" this passage, I am not focusing primarily on the authoritarianism of China's current government under Xi Jinping, although that authoritarianism is something which we should definitely be concerned about.  I am rather focusing on the authoritarianism of the white supremacist Global Far Right which has had, among its ugliest manifestations, the United States under Donald Trump from 2017 to 2020 and Russia under Vladimir Putin. 

A surprising final note: consider the role of religion in the writings of these authors.  Reading them completely refutes the story we in the West have been told that China is rigidly and rigorously atheist, and that the Chinese government forbids any kind of religious expression.  The reality is not nearly as black-and-white.  It should rather be said that many Chinese are becoming open to spiritual explorations.  However, the white evangelical churches of the West should not construe this as "the opening of a missionary door" for the white evangelical message, but should take a good look at themselves to ask why on earth any reasonable person would want to listen to them, or believe in the sort of "jesus" they preach.  More on that in a future post.

The Sacking of The Libraries

Imagine if you will a scene in which a young Southern California boy and his mother are about to enter the Norwalk Library sometime during an evening of a school year shortly before the advent of the Internet.  (Note: I have nothing against the Norwalk Library - it's just that I happen to know where it is because I used to live in So. Cal.)  Let's say that the mom has taken the boy to the library so that he may search for books on treatments for mange in animals such as dogs and cats.  Let's also say that the boy needs this information in order to write a book report (remember those?) for his middle-school biology class.  However, just as the boy and his mom cross the threshold, a mysterious space-time bubble phenomenon transports them to a library built 50 or 60 years into the future.  Imagine that libraries of the future have been shaped by the evolution of commercial culture in ways that could not have been imagined by our hapless boy and mom pair.  

Thus, when the boy and mom go to an information terminal to look for books on veterinary medicine, the first thing they see is not the location of the books they desire, but rather a screenful of paid ads for vets, pet stores, pet treats, pet grooming supplies, cat and dog clothes, etc.  Bemused and befuddled by the screen, the boy and mom start walking around the library in search of a librarian.  Once they find her, they ask where the books on veterinary science are located.  The librarian asks whether they want to buy some dog or cat food while they are at the library, explaining that she gets a commission from every sale she makes.  Oh, and by the way, would they like a recommendation for a vet?  Perhaps some "natural, drug-free remedies"? Or maybe some shampoo?  In a state of both mounting confusion and mounting frustration, the mother of the boy grumbles that she is just looking for books written by veterinary authorities so that her son can write a book report for school.  "Besides," the mom says, "our family doesn't have any pets!"  Grudgingly, the librarian leads the mom and her son to the bookshelves that contain books on veterinary science and diseases in pets.  However, the boy and mom notice that most of these books are actually coupon books advertising veterinary services and pet hospitals in Southern California!  In desperation the boy and mom walk out, wondering what on earth happened to their library.  As they are walking through the parking lot to their car, a man sidles up to them and says, "I noticed that you were looking for information on treating mange.  You must like pets! I have some hamsters in the trunk of my car, and I'm willing to let you have one for a special low price..."

Although this scene may sound far-fetched, I'd like to suggest that this perverse "library of the future" accurately describes the state into which our society has increasingly evolved, and that this is a consequence of the monetization of information exchange.  The prime example of this is the evolution of the internet from its inception until now.  This evolution has been especially rapid and widespread during the last seven or eight years.  Perceptive souls can remember a time in which information that was transmitted electronically was not monetized, and those who provided information via the World Wide Web did so for reasons that had little to do with financial gain.  Indeed, the explosive growth of free exchange of information that occurred during the 1990's was a consequence not only of the growth of the Web, but also of the growth of the availability of technologies that allowed people to bypass traditional gatekeepers in order to publish their own creative content.  A case in point is the miniaturization and lowering of cost of technologies for recording and storage that allowed musicians to mass-produce recordings of their own performances without having to sign on to a record label.  (In fact, I own a few self-published CD's from such "indie" artists.)  Such technologies for self-publishing became known as "democratizing technologies" because they allowed large numbers of ordinary people to publish their creative content without needing access to costly centralized infrastructure.

The internet was originally born out of the need for large governmental agencies and public research institutions to share information easily and cheaply.  Yet the internet swiftly became one of the most powerful democratizing technologies, since it drastically reduced the cost any individual had to pay to reach a large audience quickly.  Moreover, the culture and worldview of the original architects of the internet prioritized its democratizing nature.  To quote from an Atlantic article titled, "The Rotting Internet Is A Collective Hallucination":

"The internet’s distinct architecture arose from a distinct constraint and a distinct

freedom: First, its academically minded designers didn’t have or expect to raise

massive amounts of capital to build the network; and second, they didn’t want or

expect to make money from their invention.  The internet’s framers thus had no money to simply roll out a uniform centralized network ... Instead, they settled on the equivalent

of rules for how to bolt existing networks together.

"Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system,

operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow

any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able

to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party. And because the

network’s creators did not mean to monetize, much less monopolize, any of it, the key

was for desirable content to be provided naturally by the network’s users, some of

whom would act as content producers or hosts, setting up watering holes for others to

frequent." (Emphasis added.)

Because access to the original internet was not centrally owned or controlled, the internet became self-curating.  In other words, websites naturally began to be ranked according to how many people found their content to be interesting or useful.  A website thus gathered many hits by being genuinely good.  Thus the early internet became a legitimate source of edification, education, often extremely high-quality information, and exhilaratingly interesting conversation between people who might not otherwise have connected with each other.  

But then certain individuals began to see how they could make money from this sudden outburst of connection and conversation.  The first monetizers were creators of centralized platforms for connecting people to each other.  These creators exploited a weakness of the proto-internet, namely the need for early participants to have somewhat deep knowledge of programming languages and things like Java and HTML.  Since most people did not have this knowledge, they welcomed such platforms as MySpace and Facebook which allowed people to connect with each other electronically without needing deep coding knowledge.  Once most users of the internet were aggregated by the owners of these platforms, it was only natural for corporations and capitalists to seek to monetize these platforms.  At first the monetization was rather clunky and clumsy.  (Remember when big corporations like the Ford Motor Company or Eaton were urging us to "like them on Facebook"?)  But the eventual form taken by platform monetization consisted of pushing advertising (both of the obvious kind and of more subtle, sneaky kinds) on these platforms.

Within the last seven or eight years, this pushing of advertising has conquered its final frontier: the monetization of search engines.  This is certainly true of Google (who are now owned by Alphabet Inc.).  But it is also true of Duck Duck Go, Bing, Brave, Smartpage, Yahoo, and every other advertiser-supported search provider.  Thus when one conducts a Web search using any of these engines, the top results are usually either ads or are webpages that have been monetized by hosting ads on them.  The mission of these advertiser-supported search platforms has thus changed from helping people effectively search for information.  The mission now is to direct people to advertising packaged as clickbait.  I'd like to suggest that this is leading to certain consequences which have possibly not been foreseen by the monetizers.

The first of these consequences is the increase in transaction costs, that is the costs involved in exchanges taking place in a given economy.   To quote from Transaction Costs, Institutions and Economic Performance by Douglass C. North:

"It is the cost of measuring the valuable attributes of the goods and services or the performance of agents in exchange that is the fundamental key to the cost of transacting."

In other words, in making an economic transaction between two parties, each party must spend time and resources to accurately determine what kind of value and how much of this value they are likely to get from the transaction.  When each side has unbiased information from impartial sources, the transaction costs are relatively low.  When the only information that is available comes from paid advertisers, the transaction costs become much higher, because part of the transaction costs consists of spending time trying to figure out how much the information sources are lying.  Case in point: about fifteen or twenty years ago, manufacturers of health supplements began to tout the health benefits of fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS).  Some of the things these manufacturers said began to be of interest to people suffering from intestinal disorders.  However, these sufferers were forced to take what they were hearing with a massive grain of salt, because some of the claims made about FOS were outlandish.  In order to make an informed decision regarding FOS, some of these sufferers turned to the internet, where they encountered a massive amount of unbelievable claims.  These sufferers were stymied until they discovered that FOS is also called inulin (not insulin), and they began to do Web searches with the keyword "inulin."  That was when they found the peer-reviewed papers from research institutions that enabled them to make an informed decision.  (Note: since then, things have undergone a further mutation.  Supplement manufacturers discovered that people were researching inulin and that searches for information on FOS were falling off.  So now these manufacturers have modified their Web advertising to push the fact that their products contain "inulin."  "A rose by any other name...")  From this we see the general principle that when people are faced with decisions regarding transactions that have potentially large consequences (either because of the money that must be spent or the effect of the transaction or both), an increase in transaction costs resulting from a decline in the quality of available information about the transaction leads to a decrease in the number and rate of transactions.  Or to put it simply, if when you walk into a market, you know that all the sellers in the market are lying to you, you tend to not want to spend your money.

The second consequence is a decrease in connected conversations resulting from the restriction of the free flow of free (as in free coffee) information.  Monetization of information flows often means that valuable and useful information is locked behind paywalls guarded by rent-seeking corporations.  This is especially true of the kind of academic knowledge formerly disseminated free of charge by publicly funded research institutions.  The flow of this knowledge is increasingly controlled by gatekeepers such as Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons Inc., the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and Science Direct.   The combination of monetization of the channels of conversation (through advertising) and monetization of the valuable things that may arise in any potential conversation (through rent-seeking and paywalls) produces a decrease in productive conversation.  This leads to a decrease in innovation within a society.  To see how innovation in the United States and the West has begun to decline, click here and here.  Note especially how at least one of these sources mentions the restriction of the free flow of information.  Also, a fictional case of this decrease can be found in a recent novel called Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang.  (Ms. Hao has a bachelors degree in physics and a doctorate in economics, is a mother of two, a social entrepreneur, a scholar who is part of a think tank in China, and a member of a new wave of Chinese science-fiction writers who have crafted extremely strong, thought-provoking and awesomely good stories.  More on the Chinese sci-fi phenomenon in another post.)  In that novel, set in the 22nd century, Mars has been colonized by humans (sorry, Elon Musk, but Ms. Hao doesn't mention you at all), and has successfully fought a war of independence to break away from the government and economy of Earth.  In her novel, Earth's economy is described as a hyper-monetized "information economy" obsessed with guarding "intellectual property" while the Martians have created a society of free information exchange in which citizens make contributions motivated solely by their desire to create.  As a result, the Martian society becomes more advanced technologically while Earth begins to stagnate.  Although this is a fictional example, I would argue that it reflects what is seen in real life in organizations, institutions, and societies in which the free flow of information is constrained.  Our problem in the West, particularly in the United States, is that we have failed to recognize the constraints which our very own hyper-capitalist system imposes on our own ability to have the sort of cross-disciplinary, spontaneous conversations in which disparate ideas collide to produce innovation.  The internet in its early days began to provide a forum for those sorts of productive conversations, but the monetization of the internet has begun to choke off those conversations.

I predict that this choking off will lead (perhaps has already begun to lead) to a third consequence: an increasing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, and an increasing push by many people to "get back to the garden"; that is a push by many people to re-create spaces in which neither information nor the channels of conversation are monetized.  I don't believe that I'm the only person who is becoming tired of high transaction costs.  And I don't believe that I'm the only one who is looking for a way to build spaces of connectedness and conversation that are free from the corruption of advertising and rent-seeking.   But those of us who seek to build such spaces must know that we must pay a price in sweat equity (that is, our own hard work) to build such spaces.  They don't come for free.  As the old internet adage goes, "If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product."  Perhaps some will need to work to build spaces in realspace where conversations between diverse partners can arise.  Such spaces will be the strongest form of the revival I am thinking of.  But such spaces may also be virtual.  However, for such virtual spaces to arise, the participants will need to learn to do for themselves many things which they have been taught to take for granted due to the ease of using centralized platforms for connection such as social media.  In the absence of these platforms, people who want to build networks of conversation and information exchange will have to take themselves back to the mindset that built the internet in the first place.  Some of us may have to learn coding (especially HTML); some of us will have to learn how to build our own Web crawlers.  Some of us may have to read books or take courses to learn these things.  Whether in realspace or in cyberspace, it will be interesting to see the ways in which groups of people reclaim spaces for constructive conversation.

Russia Must Not Be Allowed To Win

The Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to have evolved into a war of attrition.  On the one hand is Putin's Russia, the revanchist monster which has thrown staggering amounts of men and materiel into its attempt to conquer a sovereign and free nation.  Many of these men have been killed and wounded, and much of the materiel has been destroyed.  Yet Russia still has men and materiel to blow on its stupid and evil endeavor.  On the other hand is Ukraine, a small nation which Putin had hoped to make into the first appetizer in his meal of devouring Europe (and after that, the world).  Ukraine has done mighty deeds in resisting the Russian monster, but the people of Ukraine are worn down by weeks of unrestrained war and an onslaught of crimes against humanity which have been perpetrated by Russia.

Russia must be taught that crime does not pay.  Russia must instead pay an unbearable price for its attempt to take over the world.  Therefore, the West must do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia loses completely and decisively in Ukraine.  The West must furthermore destroy Russian power so that Russia never again tries to exalt itself above the rest of the world in order to build a global empire.

A Few Thoughts On The Death of Betty Geftakys

My foray into blogging initially began while I was living in Southern California, in the aftermath of my departure from an abusive evangelical group known as "The Assemblies."  Those who want to find out more about the group can click here.  My first blog was an account of my experiences in that group (especially as an African-American in that group), and my thoughts and reflections upon leaving it.  When I left the Assemblies back in 2003, it was because I had come to realize that the family that was in charge of the group - namely, George and Betty Geftakys and their two sons - were a collection of crooks.  Back then I was under the impression that the Assemblies were an example of a "fringe" group that did not reflect white American evangelicalism as a whole, and that evangelicalism was, by and large, healthy - so that I believed that in order to heal from the damage I suffered, I simply needed to find a "healthy" church after leaving the Assemblies.  What a far cry from my attitude today, when most of the world can now see that white American evangelicalism is a disgusting barrel of monkeys, and that it has been so for a rather long time!

As I mentioned, the Assemblies were abusive.  This abuse was an outworking of the way in which the head family exploited the members, and an outworking also of the way we were taught to relate to each other in our bid to climb the ladder of church leadership.  But some small element of Scriptural truth managed to seep into the consciousness of most of us members - especially the part of Scripture that teaches that when you do wrong to others, you need to repent.  And that this repentance must involve making things right with the people you wronged.  So when the Assemblies were blown apart by scandals in 2003, many of us hoped, prayed, and half expected that George, Betty, and their two sons would sooner or later take that step of repentance.

In the years since my departure, George Geftakys died (in 2014), and his son David died (in 2017).  I learned today that George's wife Betty died just last month.  I am ashamed to admit that upon hearing of the deaths of each of these people, my first reaction was a rather strong feeling of schadenfreude.  Today I have once again needed to repent of that feeling.  For I still follow the Good Book, which says in part that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked.  Yet as I read that same Good Book, I can't help but shudder at the thought of the legacy these people have left and the future that awaits them.  Their later years remind me of a chapter from a Chinese sci-fi book that I recently enjoyed, namely the Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.  The chapter in question is titled, "No One Repents."

The Boil That Must Be Lanced

The Russian invasion of Ukraine which began in late February is now in the midst of its fourth month.  This invasion is not some isolated sudden manifestation of evil, but rather merely the sharpest and most obvious sign of an ongoing, historical evil.  It is the manifestation of the deep-seated evil of Russian national narcissism.  The invasion has been accompanied by verbal threats made by Russia against others of its neighbors, including Poland, because these other nations are building up their defenses to prevent themselves from being invaded by Russia.  These threats, along with the invasion and all the Russian efforts before the invasion to subvert the governments of free and sovereign nations, are the manifestation of Russia's contempt for the entire non-Russian world, the manifestation of Russia's desire to be some sort of "Third Rome" that rules the entire earth and makes Russia great by trashing everyone else.

So we who are not Russian and who do not want to be turned into Russian subjects are once again confronted with the necessity of the task before us.  And we must not look at the world - or at Russia - through the rose-colored glasses of wish-fulfillment fantasy.  Rather, we must face our task with clear-eyed, hard-edged realism.  

We must not become enamored of the idea of "peace through negotiations."  Negotiations only work with people who have "better angels" that we can appeal to.  Putin's Russia has no "better angels."

We must face the fact that our task is to completely shatter present-day Russian power. 

We must create a situation in which Russia's ability to project either hard power or soft power (including cultural power) is annulled.  

Our efforts must continue without slacking until our goal is achieved.

And our goal must be pursued through the evolution of a strategy which combines a number of indirect approaches to cut off Russian power.  (Think of both Basil Liddell-Hart and Salvor Hardin.)  Here I want to re-emphasize the fact that a key component of our strategy must be to eliminate Western economic dependence on Russia as much as possible.  It is heartening to see that both Europe and the United States have begun to cut themselves off from dependence on Russian oil and gas.  This has brought a period of some pain and suffering in both Europe and the U.S.; however, it is opening up opportunities to create a sustainable global zero-carbon economy.  It is interesting that the emergence of such an economy will occur at the same time that Russia is demonstrating its own unwillingness to manage its own internal ecological affairs.  I fully expect that this year, while Putin continues to spend tens of millions of rubles on his futile war, he will fail to spend as much as a dime on preventing the sort of devastating Arctic wildfires that have burned in Russia over the last several years.  Putin's regime is a piece of garbage.

Lastly, our strategy must continue without wavering until the moment when the Russian people overthrow their megalomaniac, kleptocratic leaders and install a government that is willing to live in peace with the rest of humanity.