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Jim Miles

Tag: Essays, Rants, and Reviews

  • No Sympathy From History

    jimmiles

    I feel sorry for Palestinians languishing under the boot of Israel who cry out for sympathy from Americans, because I know they won’t get it. We have been trained to ignore such cries.

    I’m not talking about the modern infotainment news industry that slants every story on Israel vs Palestine into pro-Israel propaganda. It’s a factor, especially because it prevents many from questioning “the way things are.” But the media didn’t train us to ignore our sympathetic impulses.

    I’m not talking about our terrible Civil Rights history, which a new crop of fascist governors and State legislatures are busy whitewashing. While you still can, educate yourself about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, for example, in which White Americans got fed up with Black Americans enjoying prosperity. And because Whites were stronger, they destroyed Black Wall Street. Racism is good at destroying sympathetic feelings, but it didn’t train us to ignore them.

    I’m not even talking about Bible-thumping idiot America putting conspiracy theories (known to the believers as “Bible Prophecies”) above people.

    I’m talking about a training that goes back to the very beginning, and may be in our DNA. By that I do not mean this defect is destiny, but only wish to point out that we who yearn for a more perfect union and who want to make this nation an enlightened member of the geopolitical world need to remember what we’re up against: our own genetic heritage. We must evolve our minds.

    We have always subscribed to the philosophy that If you are strong enough to keep it, You should grab more land. It goes back so much further than the indigenous in the Americas finding themselves on reservations or worse. The strongest of every continent have always stolen land for the entire history of our evolution as a species. The old euphemism is “War;” the new one is “national security.” The fact that this planet has plenty of territory for everyone to enjoy a generous piece of it never occurs to us.

    It’s been US versus THEM since we were apes. Do apes go to war over territory? Do white supremacist Christians want to Make America Great Again?

    Make Apes Greedy Again.

    It’s the racism, stupid! It’s the ape’s instinctual adaptive greed for territory translated into the maladaptive human obsession with race.

    We are Frank Herbert’s Harkonnens, George Lucas’s Empire, Gene Roddenberry’s Klingons (or perhaps the Borg). We got ours, fuck everybody else; unless they have something we want, then take it from them, and after that, fuck everyone else. We are brutal, and I’m afraid that’s built-in. To deny that is to fail at a worthy goal before we’ve started: becoming better human beings. If you want to win at war you must know your enemy. We have found the enemy, and he is us!

  • There Were No Stenographers

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    A page from an ancient Greek New Testament manuscript sits next to a page from a modern New Testament, with a question comparing them: "How did we get from this, to this?"
    How’s your oral history hygiene?

     

    Those who believe that their New Testament is an accurate translation are fooling themselves, even if they are able to read it in the “original” Greek. Every gospel is paraphrased. Neither Jesus nor any eyewitness to his life sat down in his generation and put pen to paper. Believers are trusting the memories of illiterate fishermen (they would never tell tall tales, eh?). Jesus died around 30 AD; between 70 and 90 AD the gospels were written as compilations of oral histories. Christian doctrine is based on the illusion that believers have an accurate version of an anciently written document. But that is only an illusion.

    Traditions about Jesus, who died circa 33 AD, spread by word of mouth (i.e. as oral history) in Aramaic for four decades until Greek scribes began writing it in 70 AD. Literacy in the ancient world was a vastly different situation than today. Most people of that time had no need for the literacy skills we take for granted, such as the ability to read and write and the possession of tools for doing so. Even when writing was mastered, it took a very different form than our modern written languages.

    Narratives have always been with us, but there was no precision possible in recording them. Important events remained in cultural memory over generations but without the kind of modern accuracy claimed by Christians for their bible doctrines. Until the printing press and mass distribution of literature those narratives were molded by the bias and faulty memories of oral historians. Even after printed pages captured narratives, the accuracy of history always suffers from the creative imaginations of history writers.
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  • Worse Than We Thought

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    Image of author standing next to FDR's Washington DC memorial wall which reads I Hate War

    War, it turns out, is much, much worse than we civilian history students thought. Worse than the victims knew, those poor young boys and girls killing and being killed.

    The new insight into the old plague War comes from those young victims themselves. From those young people wounding, and their wounded.

    Cameras built in to the now ubiquitous mobile phones are providing the new evidence. The very few platforms brave enough to share the horrible video evidence give the few willing to see it an unwanted glimpse into just how evil war has always been.

    Always, I insist, because I cannot pretend that this generation invented the horrors of War. They are merely the current players in a very old narrative. The propaganda and motives for it vacillate between hatred and greed, but the story plays out the same every time. It’s just that historical memory serves war as obediently as the young soldiers drafted to experience it.  
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  • Come and See the Violence Inherent in the System!

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    TL;DR: As a species, we used to need religion and other pleasant fictions in order to cope with the wild world that spawned us. Now that we Homo sapiens are the wildest threat on Earth, we need truth more than fiction. Religion was initially an adaptive invention of Homo sapiens. Eventually, religion became maladaptive, threatening our survival. We need to put aside dangerous religions, especially the monotheistic religion, since monotheism tends to breed violence.

    We don’t know when, how, or why apes experienced a cognitive revolution and became sentient, conscious, so-called wise ape-people (Homo sapiens: “Wise man”). We do know that consciousness brought to the newly sentient Homo sapiens mental abilities which enabled the species to ultimately dominate the planet. Abstract ideas now became tools and weapons.

    Contemplation of abstract ideas was a new tool unavailable to non-sentient species, but it came at a cost. Now the species could ponder death, not simply witness, grieve, and experience it. Now they could recognize violence, be impressed or disgusted by it, instead of just instinctively using it as another tool of survival. Now they could contemplate the meaninglessness of existence, and be crushed by it, or even driven insane by it. Unless, of course, they could find a way to cope with this unwelcome awakening. 
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  • Wasted Patriotism

    jimmiles

    If our Constitution formed the oldest democracy on Earth, as many boast, then why do our non-white, non-cis male, non-straight, non-wealthy, non-healthy citizens enjoy vanishingly few of its benefits?

    Why did democracies much younger than ours speed so far ahead of ours in spreading the benefits of their egalitarian societies to their most marginalized and vulnerable citizens?

    If the United States is somehow “exceptional,” it is exceptional only in this: we’re the democracy which hoards constitutional rights to the few. In comparison to the rest of the Free World, we are not free. Not great. Our patriotism is wasted, if it is spent on dead white men from forgotten cultures. 
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  • Religious Bullshit, Religious Gaslighting: A Few Thoughts About the Religious Right

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    Cartoonist Duff Moses — „Some are trying to inflame those people“ | Cicero Online

    The most dangerous thing about religion is how it can take a moderate case of youthful naiveté, the kind that asserts “I think I know what’s good for the world” and explode it up into a god complex. Most kinds of Christian-style religions elevate the God complex further, into full-blown assholery. These are those obnoxious true believers filling the ranks of the Christian nationalists, the militant advocacy groups usually choosing one or more of the words American, Freedom, and Patriot in their titles, and the general Trump-loving MAGA crowd. These are those who know what is best for you, and they feel a righteous duty not only to tell you but also change the law to force you to conform to their goals for your life. In a word, insufferable.

    I had many advantages growing up white, male, and middle class, in the USA. I squandered most of them, because my survival didn’t depend on me maximizing my privilege. I did, however, often indulge in the aforementioned youthful naive mindset, thinking I knew SO much better than everyone. Luckily, I was also shy, to a fault, so I didn’t gain a reputation for being an asshole.

    Then I embraced conservative christianity in my twenties Boy, did I become a god overnight! The speed of the mental transition is truly breathtaking. You can wake up one morning humble and full of all kinds of healthy curiosity and skepticism about your world, and by the time you go to bed that night, you can be utterly confident of the truth of one specific set of views about the whole universe, such that you just CAN’T WAIT to convince everyone you meet that you are right, and they are wrong, and lost, and sinners in need of your savior. 
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  • Editor

    jimmiles

    It’s about damn time I updated this thing. I don’t even know what to call this, because literally no one reads it, so… Whatever.

    I’m a few days from my last shift at Disney. My wonderful daughter Jana saved my sanity by hiring me, training me, and paying me to be editor of her wedding videos at Milestones Studios. She’s been in this industry for many years now, has polished her skills, and has a backlog of work, so she needs employees. I don’t know how I got so lucky. I blame my wife, Kimberly, the best person I have ever met, whose graces she passed on to both of our daughters.

    I’m rambling.

    I’m assembling my portfolio, and now include in this blog’s about menu a link to it. Check it out, especially if you need a wedding captured in video and/or stills by the best in the biz.

  • The Courage To Understand

    jimmiles

    “It is not knowledge we lack.

    What is missing is the courage

    to understand what we know and draw conclusions.”

    – Exterminate All The Brutes, by Raoul Peck.

  • Hurricane Of Lies

    jimmiles

    “And I leave behind this hurricane of fucking lies,”

    Green Day – Jesus Of Suburbia

    I gave it a good two and a half decades, but I finally left my religious life behind. I moved beyond what had become painful cognitive dissonance. I yearned for reality, scorning the lying map by which my Christianity obscured it. There’s nothing more dangerous than a lying map. It can only mislead you.

    Delusions, once recognized, became instantly tiresome. It didn’t take long to toss them aside.

    Ten years after I shed the self-deluding lies, I fear my country is drowning in them. They’re only slightly different in form from those in which I had trapped myself. But they have the same paralyzing effects: science is rejected, fellow citizens are shunned, and the refuges of calm logic and rational reasoning are abandoned, distrusted. 
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  • Moral Superiority

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    Recently I visited De Leon Springs State Park, in Central Florida. The part of that excursion that sticks with me is the historical information supplied in the surprisingly non-traditional visitor’s center. It documents a sad tale of the different peoples who lived on the land surrounding it: native peoples and African slaves. But then it departs from the normal sleepy park museum presentation to become a frank exposure of the hypocrisy of a State not willing to come to grips with the damage its industries have done to its water supply.  
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