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The following is a simile of the "Fountain of All Righteousness" being Faith, Hope and Charity. This illustrates how these principles apply to our progression and remain as "pillars" In the lower, right-hand corner is a birds-eye view of the spiral staircase and is likened to God's eternal round progressing from Faith, Hope and Charity endlessly. The next diagram shows how the symmetry works for the scripture about knowledge and intelligence

On a few random occasions, found myself getting forgetful as to why I entered a room, as 3DOP previously mentioned. Seems like a good piece of advice from Emily. As long as I don't forget which door I came in by 😊.

That's the Threshold Effect or Door Effect. It's not an old person thing. It's a memory storage thing. Working memory has very limited capacity. To avoid information overload, the brain routinely "flushes" details to free up mental space for whatever it expects to encounter in a new environment. Walking through a physical threshold signals to the brain that one event has ended and a new one has begun so it treats it like walking into a new environment and clears out working memory. It happens to children and teenagers and young adults as well. They just aren't worried about going senile so they don't particularly notice when it happens. Also, I think as you get older and collect responsibilities you tend to have more on your mind to fill up your brain or distract you before you step through the door. Stepping back into the room where you were before will often restore the memory. Then you just need to concentrate on what you wanted and not get distracted with other thoughts when you go through the door. 😄 I always figure cats don't have threshold effect memory issues. They stand in doorways SOOOOO long before stepping through I'm quite sure they know exactly why they went into every room. 😝

So it's okay to impute motives to people we think are advocating for socialism. When the evidence is there, yes. Lenin. "Peace, land, and bread." Before and during the seizure of power, Bolshevik propaganda emphasized “peace, land, and bread,” workers’ control, and an end to exploitation. The actual program—dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, suppression of rival socialist parties, nationalization by decree, and the Red Terror—followed immediately once power was secured. Lenin’s own writings (e.g., State and Revolution) were more explicit about the need for dictatorship, but the public-facing appeals were framed as liberation. Stalin. He presented collectivization as voluntary modernization and a path to abundance. In practice it was enforced by confiscation, deportation, and the engineered famine in Ukraine and elsewhere Mao. Land reform was advertised as giving land to the tiller and ending landlord oppression. Once implemented, however, it moved rapidly to mutual-aid teams, then full collectivization, and finally the people’s communes. The Great Leap Forward was promoted as a voluntary leap into prosperity through mass mobilization; the result was widespread famine and intensified party control. Public language remained populist and egalitarian. Castro. The revolution was initially framed as nationalist, anti-Batista, and democratic, with promises of elections and restoration of the 1940 constitution. Nationalizations, the suppression of the independent press, the banning of opposition parties, and the alignment with the Soviet model followed within a few years. Allende. A military coup stopped this one before it could be fully deployed. Chavez. “21st-century socialism” was presented as participatory democracy, poverty reduction, and the empowerment of the poor against elites. The practical steps—expropriations, packing of institutions, use of state oil revenues for political control, and the marginalization of the opposition—accumulated over time. I am not imputing motives to these actors. I am reading history. Now, am I imputing motives to some current actors? Yes. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) platform: The organization’s formal platform calls for public ownership of railroads, utilities, critical manufacturing, finance, insurance, real estate, hospitals, and the socialization of agriculture, plus “social ownership” of media. Individual DSA-backed candidates often campaign on rent control, public options, and higher taxes rather than leading with the full ownership agenda. The gap between platform and candidate rhetoric is the contemporary version of the pattern. Zohran Mamdani has used the classical formulation. In a 2021 Young Democratic Socialists of America appearance he distinguished popular demands (student-debt cancellation, Medicare for All) from goals that currently lack majority support, explicitly including “the end goal of seizing the means of production.” He has also posted language echoing “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” and, in 2020, called for abolishing private insurance and nationalizing the medical supply chain. Mamdani is wrapping incremental compulsory collectivization in cheerful words and phrases. "Socialism, to me, it means that you will have whatever you need to live a dignified life and that it is the government's job to deliver on that." Deploying socialism in a constitutional republic is going to be a difficult thing, hence the motte-and-bailey stuff and the incrementalism. I'd first need to see a non-ad hoc, non-idiosyncratic definition of "fascism." I guess we could start here: I guess we could discuss the alleged "fascist" in view: Charlie Kirk. Historical markers of fascism: Classical fascism (Italian Fascism, Nazism, and close variants) featured: Explicit rejection of liberal democracy, multi-party competition, and constitutional constraints in favor of a one-party state under a dictatorial leader. Corporatist economic organization subordinating private enterprise to state direction. Party-controlled paramilitary violence and systematic suppression of opposition. An ideology of national rebirth through hierarchical authority, often with racial or expansionist elements. Cult of the leader tied to a formal party program that treated dissent as treason. Kirk neither participated in or endorsed any of these things. Kirk’s actual positions: Kirk was a conventional American conservative activist: He defended the U.S. Constitution, free speech, free markets, and limited government. He was murdered while in the very act of engaging in Free Speech. He opposed identity politics, DEI mandates, and what he viewed as progressive overreach in universities and corporations. He supported traditional social views (on family, sex, and religion) and was a vocal Trump ally, but he operated inside electoral politics, campus organizing, and media—not through paramilitary organization or calls to abolish multi-party competition. His rhetoric was often combative and populist, but it remained within the framework of constitutional republicanism and market economics. He did not advocate one-party rule, state control of the economy, or the suppression of opposition by force. Why I think the label fails: Applying “fascist” to Kirk requires the elastic method discussed earlier with Devereaux’s checklist (the article was previously provided by Nehor) : treating ordinary conservative positions on immigration, national identity, or cultural issues as equivalent to interwar fascist ideology, and treating sharp political rhetoric as equivalent to organized political violence or institutional dismantling. That method can be (and has been) turned against figures across the spectrum; it does not isolate a distinctive fascist program in Kirk’s case. The elastic and ad hoc application of "fascist" is applied to people like Kirk and Trump, but it could also readily apply to folks like Obama and Biden. Obama examples offered Executive actions on immigration (DACA), the Iran deal’s circumvention of Senate treaty requirements, expansive regulatory-agency use, and IRS targeting of conservative groups framed as bypassing Congress and punishing opposition. Eco-style features: “cult of action” and skepticism of institutional checks in “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” rhetoric; selective populism against the “1%”; disagreement-as-treason language; newspeak around surveillance and drone strikes. Expanded drone programs, the Libya intervention without congressional authorization, and Fast and Furious as willingness to use or tolerate state violence outside ordinary constraints. Biden examples offered Vaccine mandates, attempted student-loan forgiveness via executive action, pressure on social-media companies, and border-enforcement handling framed as regimentation and forcible constraint. Eco-style features: dismissal of scientific dissent on COVID policy; certain DEI frameworks as fear of difference; “MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country” as selective populism; permanent-warfare and newspeak language in branding; characterization of election-integrity measures and parental protests as domestic threats. Devereaux’s piece treats Trump’s statements as literal intent while treating comparable institutional actions by the other side as ordinary politics or justified responses. Once the criteria are elastic enough to reach any major political figure through selective reading, the label loses discriminatory power and functions more as pejorative intensifier than descriptive category. Historical fascism had tighter institutional markers (party-controlled paramilitaries, explicit one-party ideology, corporatist takeover) that the relaxed checklist does not require. Kirk’s assassination and the subsequent - and ongoing - celebrations by some who called him a fascist illustrate the practical danger of the loose usage. Once the label is detached from its historical content and used as a moral intensifier, it lowers the threshold for treating political disagreement as justification for violence. On the evidence of his stated views and activities, the characterization is not descriptively accurate. If someone declares himself a "Socialist," I don't need to impute motives. The motives of Socialism are baked into the ideology. Thanks, -Smac

The images are too dark for me to pick out anything distinctive. It does appear that the one with the bow is Native American and the one with the spear is female who appears to be Black to me due to what facial features I think I can see, but is the spear or clothing a reference to African culture? The third is too indistinct for me for even facial features but looks male, might an Asian, might be something else. It did come across to me as going for a more universal look. Not sure I like the pure warrior/secret assassin look, but that is certainly biblical in some places (angels not only deliver messages, they destroy armies). I wonder if anyone complaining has an issue with Michael Landon as an angel. Certainly referred to a non biblical culture with him (even if his dad was Jewish). Then there is the Irish angel in Touched by an Angel. Both very ‘white’ characters. I can see if the complaint is they are out of place, highly unlikely to be seen walking around Palestine in the markets, etc. But does the Bible restrict angels in that fashion, matching the culture they appear in or is it just assumed? Have there been portrayals of angels before? (Haven’t watched the show)

Your link to the article just goes back to your post.

My mother got to hold a baby lion once. She was helping at a local parade (her sister was in the parade) and it was handed to her to hold while the owner did something on the float. Mom says she was taken aback at first, because she was just standing there and had a lion shoved at her. But it was nicely behaved, very soft, and she held really still because it had big feet with even bigger claws. 😄

Spoiler Alert. 😝

So glad you shared that, I hadn't seen it before. Really beautiful art he has there.

This is exactly what I have a problem with the use of socialist in our current political discussion. It has too often been broadened unreasonably just as Nazi and fascist is to become a pejorative for opponents, misrepresenting social democracy as if equivalent to socialism…or the slippery slope, etc. Its also why I am not wasting time scolding Nehor over his imo improper use of Nazi, because I am guessing he sees many (most?) people advocating for "Christian Nationalism” are, I am guessing, intending to convey an ultranationalist, authoritarian Christian state***. But in his view (possibly) they don't want to actually say that, as it almost immediately sounds creepy and authoritarian. So we get evasions and equivocations and bright and airy and cheerful characterizations of Christian Nationalism to get it implemented. The compulsory element is what happens after the changeover…though in some ways I bet he thinks we haven’t had to wait that long (ICE). ***Christian Nationalism, in the sense that I see others, possibly Nehor but he may use another, incorrectly using the term by going to the extreme positions as if ‘mainstream’, has a different sine qua non: the compulsory replacement of constitutional government and religious pluralism with a state-sanctioned Christian moral and political order. That is not a marginal accommodation of religious values within an existing constitutional framework; it is the abolition of the secular foundation of the constitutional order that the American system presupposes.

I think my post explains that well enough if you had read it to the end before asking.

So it's okay to impute motives to people we think are advocating for socialism. Is it okay to impute motives to people we think are advocating for fascism?

Have you ever read Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card? It is a story about a future time where this is an ability that is figured out in future generations and how it changes the history of the world and the consequences of having that ability. One of my favorite books. I tend to like "what if" books.

So you aren't opposed to government coercion, but rather only against unchecked government coercion? Effectively, yes. A state must exercise force when enforcing laws. A recent example: I think the police officer properly exercised coercive force against the assailant. The Police Power is a necessary component of the State and our constitutional order. Fortunately, it operates within constraints. Thanks, -Smac

I think this is the bait and switch though, isn't it? This is indeed a fine definition of socialism. But there are very few people advocating for this. Oddly, I think "bait and switch" explains what is going on. See also Motte and Bailey. Many (most?) people advocating for "Socialism" are, I think, intending to convey the sine qua non idea noted above. But they don't want to actually say that, as it almost immediately sounds creepy and authoritarian. So we get evasions and equivocations and bright and airy and cheerful characterizations of Socialism to get it implemented. The compulsory element is what happens after the changeover. Yes, the distinction matters, and the conflation is common. The definition I am using—compulsory replacement of private ownership of the means of production and market allocation with collective or state ownership and central direction—is the one that corresponds to the historical program that produced the large-scale violence and one-party systems we have been discussing. It is also the definition that still appears in the platforms and self-descriptions of parties and movements that call themselves socialist or communist in the classical sense. Social democracy, by contrast, accepts private ownership of most productive assets, market allocation, and constitutional multi-party competition, while favoring higher taxation, broader regulation, and a larger welfare state. That is a different program. It does not require the abolition of the private-property foundation of a constitutional order, and it has not historically required revolutionary violence or one-party rule. Again, the bait-and-switch problem runs in both directions: Critics sometimes apply the classical definition to people who are only advocating higher taxes and more regulation inside a market system. Advocates sometimes use the milder and cheerier language of “social democracy,” “democratic socialism,” or simply “socialism” while retaining the classical goal of socializing major sectors or treating private ownership as illegitimate in principle. When the same speaker or organization moves between the two without clear demarcation, observers reasonably ask which program is actually intended. And the likely answer is Motte and Bailey. Bait and switch. I am not claiming every person who favors a stronger safety net or higher marginal tax rates is pursuing the abolition of private ownership. I am claiming that when the stated or practiced objective is that abolition, the requirement for compulsion reappears, and that this objective is still actively advanced under the socialist label by some parties, intellectuals, and governments. The practical question in any given case is which of the two programs is being proposed, not whether the labels are sometimes used loosely. Thanks, -Smac

So you aren't opposed to government coercion, but rather only against unchecked government coercion?

I think this is the bait and switch though, isn't it? This is indeed a fine definition of socialism. But there are very few people advocating for this. Rather more common is advocacy for social democracy, which at it's base maintains a capitalistic system while pushing a stronger regulatory framework, higher taxes and a stronger social safety network. So it seems pretty common for me to see people define socialism as you do, and then label advocates of social democracy as socialists. Do you see that too?

Sailing in the Mediterranean every summer comes pretty close to your heaven. And I agree completely. It is heaven here on earth.

Can't this describe every government action? Speeding laws. Drunk driving enforcement. Removing immigrants from the country. Income and property taxes. Everything any government does comes down to the threat and eventual use of violence. That is a fair and reasonable question. Here are my thoughts, and I would like to hear more of yours. Ordinary government coercion as seen in the U.S. (speed limits, drunk-driving laws, tax collection, border enforcement) operates inside a constitutional framework that imposes material constraints on the use of coercive means. That framework still leaves the bulk of productive property in private hands and allows individuals to buy, sell, work, invest, and exit under generally known rules. Locke's "Life, Liberty and Property" has a strong presence in the Constitution. State force is further constrained by constitutional limits on what the state may take, how it may take it, and what procedural protections apply. The threat of force enforces rules within that system; it does not abolish the system itself. Socialism, in the sense I am using the term, has a different sine qua non: the compulsory replacement of private ownership of the means of production and market allocation with collective or state ownership and central direction. That is not a marginal regulation of an existing constitutional order; it is the abolition of the private-property foundation that the constitutional order presupposes. Human nature must, I think, be taken into account. America has traditionally been called the "Land of Opportunity." That opportunity requires the individual to have some assurance that he can work hard and get ahead and (mostly) keep the fruits of his labors, and not have it compulsorily taken away from him and redistributed to others. The people who currently own factories, farms, shops, and capital, and the people who prefer to make their own economic decisions, do not, as a rule, voluntarily surrender those things on a society-wide scale. The gap between what the program requires and what people will freely give is closed by expropriation, prohibition of private trade, suppression of exit, and the criminalization of independent economic activity—measures that cannot be squared with constitutional protections for property, contract, and due process without effectively suspending those protections. That is why every historical attempt to carry out Socialism has required sustained, large-scale political violence and one-party control, while ordinary regulatory and tax states operating under constitutional constraints have not. The difference is not the mere presence of coercion; it is the scope and purpose of the coercion—whether it enforces rules inside a constitutionally limited system of private property or whether it is used to eliminate that system. USSR. China. Cambodia. Eastern Europe. North Korea. Cuba. Venezuela. The examples of socialism as a failed experiment are extensive, and the human cost has been terrible. In contrast, constitutional republics that protect, rather than appropriate, private property, enforce contracts, and allow market allocation (the United States, post-war West Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Nordic countries in their more market-oriented phases, etc.) have produced higher average living standards, longer life expectancy, greater technological innovation, and more durable political competition than the systems that attempted society-wide replacement of private ownership with state or collective direction. Thanks, -Smac

I retract my statement. 😁

I agree. How does that work with your statement "Odd that that Jesus never said one word about abortion. Not while alive. Not in an canonized modern revelation."? D&C 59:6 is presented in a "saith the Lord" context (see verse 1). I have more or less the same stance. I think Dobbs was correctly decided, and I think those opposed to abortion need to focus on a "persuading the hearts and minds" approach as much as, or more than, legislative remedies. That's understandable. And not just with candidates, but with political parties and platforms. A lot of nose-holding going on these days. Thanks, -Smac

Can't this describe every government action? Speeding laws. Drunk driving enforcement. Removing immigrants from the country. Income and property taxes. Everything any government does comes down to the threat and eventual use of violence.

Certainly the passage can be extrapolated to include abortion. I really do not want to wade into an abortion debate. Personally, I oppose abortion and think the stand the church has is reasonable. As my politics have trended more liberal over the years I have struggled to reconcile my view on abortion with my support for more liberal candidates on the issue. My only reconciling factor is that the current GOP and their filed of candidates so repugnant that I have to hold my nose on the liberal candidates abortion provisions.

I am glad we agree on that. What are your thoughts about how these terms are being used in today's American discourse? Nehor uses both of these terms a lot, a lot, but he notably never defines them (I am open to correction on this point). I think this is because he is not using them in a "tightly defined" sense or "for the correct political ideology," but rather for their emotive and pejorative effects. What do you think? Nehor uses "nazi" fairly frequently, though not as much as "fascist" these days. See, e.g., here, here, here, here, Couldn’t have said it better myself. here (referring to Sen. Mike Lee) : And so on. I think the vast majority of "nazi" and "fascist" usage is straight-up unreasoned demagoguery. If I'm wrong, I'd like to see the reasoning used to get there. I think it is. Two main reasons for this: First, I think Socialism is "inherently violent" because its sine qua non tenet is to replace private ownership and market allocation with collective or state ownership and central direction. I don't think that can be done without the threat and eventual use of violence. Socialism requires the compulsory transfer of productive assets (land, factories, capital) from their existing owners and the suppression of independent economic decision-making. Most people who currently own or control those assets do not voluntarily surrender them. Most people who prefer to work, invest, or trade on their own terms do not voluntarily accept permanent direction by a planning authority. Therefore the transition and the maintenance of the new system both depend on the credible threat of force. Second, historical practices make the foregoing point manifest: Collectivization of agriculture in the USSR, China, and elsewhere was enforced by confiscation, deportation, and lethal coercion against peasants who resisted. Nationalization of industry was accompanied by the elimination of independent unions, the banning of opposition parties, and the criminalization of “speculation” or private trade. Once established, the system required ongoing repression (secret police, internal passports, labor camps, border controls) to prevent exit, black markets, and political challenge. Where that repression was relaxed, the economic and political structures quickly unraveled. Social-democratic welfare states avoid this problem by leaving the bulk of productive assets in private hands and operating inside competitive elections and the rule of law. They redistribute through taxation and regulation rather than through the abolition of private ownership (and taxation and regulation are effective because noncompliance is threatened with force and, ultimately, violence). That is why they have not needed revolutionary violence or one-party dictatorship. The moment the goal shifts from redistribution inside a market order to the replacement of that order, the requirement for compulsion reappears. In short, voluntary socialism on a society-wide scale has not been achieved because the number of people willing to surrender their property and autonomy is never large enough. The shortfall has always been made up by force. Thanks, -Smac

Excellent suggestion, and yes. I've done extensive DBT, MBCT and CBT. Incredible tools. Never really seems to have had much impact on my hobbies though (and the inevitable transition from obsession to apathy). Then again, that was never a stated goal that we were working towards, so might be worth bringing up next time I do a round of therapy, and have it as a goal.