Horatio Parker is known today mostly as being Charles Ives' teacher at Yale. In most presentations he's presented as what Charles Ives had to overcome to become one of the earliest of the truly avant garde composers. But Ives was well on his way to being the composer he was long before he went to Yale.
I listened to this Pipedreams program of Parkers music after listening to some of Elgar's music last night. The result of that is that I think Parker was the better composer of the two. Unlike Elgar, Parker's music doesn't have a nationalist music establishment to promote it.
There was a time when, as a devotee of "modern music," I'd have passed Parker's music by but I got over that and listen to everything now. It's a stupid, narrow-minded attitude to have and I'm glad I'm over it.
You can find the scores of some of Parker's music here and some of his choral music here, though, unfortunately, not much mentioned in the program and not the really masterful anthem, Now Sinks The Sun, included in it.
I used to love listening to Pipedreams before my public radio station took it off, no doubt so they could have more NPR junk like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me on. Now I listen to it online as I do so much else now that public radio as it should have been, is dead. To compare Parker's and Ives' music, you can listen to this program from their archive in the Real Audio format.
Monday, September 30, 2013
It's Not A Damned Game, Liberals Advocate For The People And Posterity Not A Level Playing Field
Seven years ago, when I began regularly writing out my ideas, confronting fragments of ideas I'd been tossing over in my head for decades, trying to put them into a coherent form that could then be tested against real life, a lot of the previous assumptions I'd made turned out to be wrong. One of the most wrong ones was the assuring that fair rules for the fight would be sufficient to do what was necessary. What is necessary is to change laws, to change policies that would achieve economic justice, civil rights, peace and a sustained environment. It turns out that when things are as grossly unequal as they are virtually everywhere in the world, as they have increasingly become in the past thirty three years, that a level playing field favors those with the most power and wealth. As if that outcome is not entirely predictable, the most obvious of intuitions.
It is exactly in the matter of outcomes that real, American liberalism* lies, not in the "fairness" of the process that produces it. I have called the kind of "liberal" who pretends that their work is done when everyone has that weird invention, "more speech" "process liberals". But I've come to realize they really aren't liberals at all, they belong to a sect of libertarianism. And, really, that mythical "more speech" which, somehow, never seems to work, unlike that "money-speech" invented by the Supreme Court in Buckley vs. Valeo, is about the only thing that the lib-libertarians have ever produced. "Money-speech" would seem to prove that it is more equal than "more-speech".
The impotence of that "more-speech" is sufficient to explain why the "liberal" Barack Obama, chasing after enough money-speech to do what has been done so seldom in recent years, win as a Democrat, will not produce a truly liberal administration. The legalistic language he learned at Harvard Law soothes whatever scruples might trouble him by his role in it. It also explains the impotence of Democrats in post-Buckley vs Valeo American politics. Money-speech, owned by those with the most money, turns out to not work on behalf of the poor and destitute. Notably few of the "civil liberties" lawyers, the media professionals and the academics who push this tripe are in much danger of being poor and destitute, certainly not as long as they are promoting something that so obviously benefits those with lots and lots of money-speech.
The thing that blinds real American liberals to the counterproductive aspects of a lot of this chasing after the abstract ideals that turn out to be counterproductive - leading to such things as the deregulated media that lies on behalf of the highest bidder, grossly unjust laws that enable the most massive theft on behalf of the ultra-rich, the sustenance of racial and gender oppression, etc. - is the reduction of the words used to advocate those into mere slogans, neglecting to see if the slogans address reality as it is today instead of as it was in the 1780s.
But real liberalism is all about outcomes, about results. There is no room in real liberalism that allows a complacent acceptance of economic, racial, gender injustice merely because the rich and bigoted can obtain results producing those. Though many who are represented as being liberal do accept those results and there is every reason to consider those faux liberals as favoring those. Enough of them benefit from the status quo. Having a free press, after all, is important mostly and most seriously in so far as it aids voters to make informed decisions, changing politics and laws in order to produce an effective beneficial result. A real liberal believes that justice, true equality and the sustenance of life is that absolutely necessary beneficial result.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press... Those are ringing words and generally admirable, all things being equal, but when "the press" means the massive, electronic media proven beyond any shadow of a doubt to rally exactly the kinds of unthinking and violent mobs that the "founders" endlessly worried about, there is every difference between that and a printing press that could print a four page weekly newspaper. The medium isn't the message but it certainly makes all the difference in the world when it comes to the speed and violence of the effect that it can have. And it isn't only the alleged news that has a real, violent effect endangering the lives and rights of people. The film Birth of a Nation helped promote the most extensive fascist movement in American history, the Klu Klux Klan. The "freedom of speech" and of "the press" that D.W. Griffith, Thomas Dixon and Frank Wood exercised, ended up in people being murdered by the Klan revived at Stone Mountain Georgia under the explicit inspiration of that movie. There is a direct line from the movie to those murders through the Klan that used it to organize and inspire its fascist terror.
As an aside, it is notable that Woodrow Wilson, one of the most famous progressives of the Progressive era, a scholar and academic of unimpeachable elite status, made Birth of A Nation the first movie shown in the White House, giving its "more speech" more of a boost in the national consciousness. It's something that is allowed in the rules of the "level playing field". Only later he regretted his role in it.
Since the advent of cabloid TV, it has been instrumental in promoting racism in shows like C.O.P.S, through FOX and through things such as CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight. It has certainly promoted anti-Islamic hysteria that of the kind that has led to attacks against people of perceived middle-eastern ethnicity, including Sikhs. Dobbs has probably done more than anyone to promote bigotry against Latinos. The people influenced by the American media aren't generally a very informed lot. And that is not to mention the media promotion of the hatred of the poor, often by depicting poverty in America as having a black or brown face, though it has no problem depicting poor white people as trash as well. That people like Dobbs** successfully depict themselves as populists while working against The People, even the poor whites who they use, is one of the putrid flowers of our deregulated media. "Populist" should mean a lot more than a rich white racist controlling poor white racists by appealing to their racism. But the destruction of real populism is a large topic which I haven't studied in sufficient depth to write about it.
I would recommend studying the history of NPR as a good example of where the kind of process "liberalism" I'm talking about leads. In each and every case, in the end the process liberal will sell out the poor, the destitute, those who are discriminated against - accounting for such exceptions as those made for wealthy, white gay men and women employed by them. Process liberalism is an elite pose, allowing the P.L. to pretend to be liberal while actually serving P.L.U.
If you find yourself tearing your hair while listening to Morning Edition, as I would be if I were not writing this, or some other NPR show, that's the reason more often than not. The organs of process liberalism should be dumped and defunded, they are a big part of the problem.
* As the living thinker who has had the most profound effect on me in the past decade, Marilynne Robinson, has pointed out, traditional American liberalism is entirely different from European liberalism in that it assumes a higher goal than mere ability to do what you want. Economic justice instead of lassiez faire economics is one essential difference. Matched with real equality it accounts for a complete difference.
** I was recently unsurprised to find out that Dobbs, like so many in our elite ruling class, liberal and conservative, the first black president, Barack Obama, to racists like him, is a Harvard product, fruit of the foremost of the training grounds for our ruling class. Those Ivy League boys love their games with their winners and their losers. And they hate to lose.
It is exactly in the matter of outcomes that real, American liberalism* lies, not in the "fairness" of the process that produces it. I have called the kind of "liberal" who pretends that their work is done when everyone has that weird invention, "more speech" "process liberals". But I've come to realize they really aren't liberals at all, they belong to a sect of libertarianism. And, really, that mythical "more speech" which, somehow, never seems to work, unlike that "money-speech" invented by the Supreme Court in Buckley vs. Valeo, is about the only thing that the lib-libertarians have ever produced. "Money-speech" would seem to prove that it is more equal than "more-speech".
The impotence of that "more-speech" is sufficient to explain why the "liberal" Barack Obama, chasing after enough money-speech to do what has been done so seldom in recent years, win as a Democrat, will not produce a truly liberal administration. The legalistic language he learned at Harvard Law soothes whatever scruples might trouble him by his role in it. It also explains the impotence of Democrats in post-Buckley vs Valeo American politics. Money-speech, owned by those with the most money, turns out to not work on behalf of the poor and destitute. Notably few of the "civil liberties" lawyers, the media professionals and the academics who push this tripe are in much danger of being poor and destitute, certainly not as long as they are promoting something that so obviously benefits those with lots and lots of money-speech.
The thing that blinds real American liberals to the counterproductive aspects of a lot of this chasing after the abstract ideals that turn out to be counterproductive - leading to such things as the deregulated media that lies on behalf of the highest bidder, grossly unjust laws that enable the most massive theft on behalf of the ultra-rich, the sustenance of racial and gender oppression, etc. - is the reduction of the words used to advocate those into mere slogans, neglecting to see if the slogans address reality as it is today instead of as it was in the 1780s.
But real liberalism is all about outcomes, about results. There is no room in real liberalism that allows a complacent acceptance of economic, racial, gender injustice merely because the rich and bigoted can obtain results producing those. Though many who are represented as being liberal do accept those results and there is every reason to consider those faux liberals as favoring those. Enough of them benefit from the status quo. Having a free press, after all, is important mostly and most seriously in so far as it aids voters to make informed decisions, changing politics and laws in order to produce an effective beneficial result. A real liberal believes that justice, true equality and the sustenance of life is that absolutely necessary beneficial result.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press... Those are ringing words and generally admirable, all things being equal, but when "the press" means the massive, electronic media proven beyond any shadow of a doubt to rally exactly the kinds of unthinking and violent mobs that the "founders" endlessly worried about, there is every difference between that and a printing press that could print a four page weekly newspaper. The medium isn't the message but it certainly makes all the difference in the world when it comes to the speed and violence of the effect that it can have. And it isn't only the alleged news that has a real, violent effect endangering the lives and rights of people. The film Birth of a Nation helped promote the most extensive fascist movement in American history, the Klu Klux Klan. The "freedom of speech" and of "the press" that D.W. Griffith, Thomas Dixon and Frank Wood exercised, ended up in people being murdered by the Klan revived at Stone Mountain Georgia under the explicit inspiration of that movie. There is a direct line from the movie to those murders through the Klan that used it to organize and inspire its fascist terror.
As an aside, it is notable that Woodrow Wilson, one of the most famous progressives of the Progressive era, a scholar and academic of unimpeachable elite status, made Birth of A Nation the first movie shown in the White House, giving its "more speech" more of a boost in the national consciousness. It's something that is allowed in the rules of the "level playing field". Only later he regretted his role in it.
Since the advent of cabloid TV, it has been instrumental in promoting racism in shows like C.O.P.S, through FOX and through things such as CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight. It has certainly promoted anti-Islamic hysteria that of the kind that has led to attacks against people of perceived middle-eastern ethnicity, including Sikhs. Dobbs has probably done more than anyone to promote bigotry against Latinos. The people influenced by the American media aren't generally a very informed lot. And that is not to mention the media promotion of the hatred of the poor, often by depicting poverty in America as having a black or brown face, though it has no problem depicting poor white people as trash as well. That people like Dobbs** successfully depict themselves as populists while working against The People, even the poor whites who they use, is one of the putrid flowers of our deregulated media. "Populist" should mean a lot more than a rich white racist controlling poor white racists by appealing to their racism. But the destruction of real populism is a large topic which I haven't studied in sufficient depth to write about it.
I would recommend studying the history of NPR as a good example of where the kind of process "liberalism" I'm talking about leads. In each and every case, in the end the process liberal will sell out the poor, the destitute, those who are discriminated against - accounting for such exceptions as those made for wealthy, white gay men and women employed by them. Process liberalism is an elite pose, allowing the P.L. to pretend to be liberal while actually serving P.L.U.
If you find yourself tearing your hair while listening to Morning Edition, as I would be if I were not writing this, or some other NPR show, that's the reason more often than not. The organs of process liberalism should be dumped and defunded, they are a big part of the problem.
* As the living thinker who has had the most profound effect on me in the past decade, Marilynne Robinson, has pointed out, traditional American liberalism is entirely different from European liberalism in that it assumes a higher goal than mere ability to do what you want. Economic justice instead of lassiez faire economics is one essential difference. Matched with real equality it accounts for a complete difference.
** I was recently unsurprised to find out that Dobbs, like so many in our elite ruling class, liberal and conservative, the first black president, Barack Obama, to racists like him, is a Harvard product, fruit of the foremost of the training grounds for our ruling class. Those Ivy League boys love their games with their winners and their losers. And they hate to lose.
Sunday, September 29, 2013
I'm Holding My Sunday Post Hoping You'll Read This Article
Robert Parry has written an excellent short history of how the United States has had to struggle against the financial enemies of democracy and justice all through our history, The Four Eras of the American Right.
Surprising to many will be his naming of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henrey, George Mason and, in his later life, James Madison as the founders of the problem. But, as I've read more of them and more of what they did instead of what their hagiographies cover up, it's a view of American history which I've come to share. Later crooks and thugs named will come as little to no surprise. It's only those of the "founding" generation that we're required to genuflect to, slave owning, self-interested subverters of democracy and justice, every one of them. That the more genteel modern right is tied to them is a point proven by what should be an infamous quote by the perfumed northerner, William F. Buckley, the brother of James Buckley of Buckley vs. Valeo
On the need to keep blacks under white domination, urbane conservative William F. Buckley declared in 1957 that “the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.”
In my comment to the post, I said that he'd gotten almost the whole thing said, leaving out things like the topic of yesterday's post, the liberalish-libertarians who, somehow, begin by asserting civil rights but who, somehow, always seem to end up enabling the super-rich and their political allies in the ideological right. I said:
Excellent article, showing the ties among today’s conservatives and those of the slave owning past. And in mentioning the Ayn Rand influence you almost get the whole way. The frightening truth is that there is a large faction of the functional right which is commonly mistaken as some species of liberal or leftist who are, actually, motivated primarily by a primitive libertarianism. A good example of that is the ACLU lawyer Joel Gora and his like who are engaged in aiding and abetting the wounding, if not murder of informed self-government through exactly the language of “free speech”. Of course what they and the Supreme Court have done is make “speech” anything but free by embedding monetary value in it. That gives the millionaires and billionaires, the heirs of the slave power and the robber barons, the kind of political power that their ancestors less often had. Until real liberals, the real left gets over the ridiculous scruple that turns “free speech”, for it what the “second amendment” is for gun nuts and the paranoid right that feeds and sustains them, liberals are their suckers.
Dumping the ACLU for its enabling of this could be a way to start. A more realistic analysis, based in the political reality of what the rulings under the Buckley vs. Valeo line of rulings and the broadcast-cable libertarian dogma, and the line of truly awful presidents and congresses that we’ve had under them is necessary before any progress is made. The infantile notion of free speech absolutism turns out to be a danger when corporations are people and money is speech. Who could have guessed that would happen except anyone with a working mind and the slightest experience of the world as it really is and not in some law class what if.
Surprising to many will be his naming of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henrey, George Mason and, in his later life, James Madison as the founders of the problem. But, as I've read more of them and more of what they did instead of what their hagiographies cover up, it's a view of American history which I've come to share. Later crooks and thugs named will come as little to no surprise. It's only those of the "founding" generation that we're required to genuflect to, slave owning, self-interested subverters of democracy and justice, every one of them. That the more genteel modern right is tied to them is a point proven by what should be an infamous quote by the perfumed northerner, William F. Buckley, the brother of James Buckley of Buckley vs. Valeo
On the need to keep blacks under white domination, urbane conservative William F. Buckley declared in 1957 that “the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.”
In my comment to the post, I said that he'd gotten almost the whole thing said, leaving out things like the topic of yesterday's post, the liberalish-libertarians who, somehow, begin by asserting civil rights but who, somehow, always seem to end up enabling the super-rich and their political allies in the ideological right. I said:
Excellent article, showing the ties among today’s conservatives and those of the slave owning past. And in mentioning the Ayn Rand influence you almost get the whole way. The frightening truth is that there is a large faction of the functional right which is commonly mistaken as some species of liberal or leftist who are, actually, motivated primarily by a primitive libertarianism. A good example of that is the ACLU lawyer Joel Gora and his like who are engaged in aiding and abetting the wounding, if not murder of informed self-government through exactly the language of “free speech”. Of course what they and the Supreme Court have done is make “speech” anything but free by embedding monetary value in it. That gives the millionaires and billionaires, the heirs of the slave power and the robber barons, the kind of political power that their ancestors less often had. Until real liberals, the real left gets over the ridiculous scruple that turns “free speech”, for it what the “second amendment” is for gun nuts and the paranoid right that feeds and sustains them, liberals are their suckers.
Dumping the ACLU for its enabling of this could be a way to start. A more realistic analysis, based in the political reality of what the rulings under the Buckley vs. Valeo line of rulings and the broadcast-cable libertarian dogma, and the line of truly awful presidents and congresses that we’ve had under them is necessary before any progress is made. The infantile notion of free speech absolutism turns out to be a danger when corporations are people and money is speech. Who could have guessed that would happen except anyone with a working mind and the slightest experience of the world as it really is and not in some law class what if.
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Dump The American Civil Liberties Union, Opponents of Democratic Self-Government Since At Least 1976
I am slowly making my way through a long article by Joel Gora, law professor at the Brooklyn School of Law and one of the major ACLU lawyers who has been steadily undermining campaign finance reform since the mid-1970s. I know, as if the billionaires don't have enough money to hire the hacks that are hacking democracy into splinters. The slow going is because I can only take just so much dishonest oligarchic empowering doublespeak in one sitting before my boiling point is reached. The piece is published in the Howard Law Journal [ You can read it here beginning on page 763].
Figured I should catch up with what the ACLU was doing to attack self-government before the Roberts Court completely handed our elections systems over to the billionaires* and to the likes of Shaun McCutcheon. And there is no figure who has done more on behalf of the billionaires than Gora. Reading his article I am hard put to understand why he isn't considered as infamous and repugnant a figure as Roy Cohn or Rupert Murdoch. Here is how he describes himself in a footnote on the first page.
I should also note that as an ACLU lawyer I helped challenge the campaign finance restrictions and requirements at issue in many of the cases discussed in this article, most notably, Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976).
You would think that the man who was instrumental in allowing the demigods on the Supreme Court to turn money into speech, enabling the strongest force in lying to people in order to control politics would be widely vilified but, since he is associated with the ACLU, my guess would be that alone would be enough for people on the left to respect him. Well, I don't respect him because he has made a career trying to do what he has. As far as I am concerned, he's at least as worthy of disdain as the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch and all of those more public names. No, he is more worthy of it because he was working under the prestige of the ACLU and with the slogan of "free speech" while making sure speech isn't free because it now has a monetary value embedded in it. As I pointed out, by doing that you give more speech to those with more money and you dispossess those who have no money. That has been the real world effect of Joel Gora's life work as can be seen in the total and absolute disempowerment of, first the destitute and poor and, increasingly, the middle class. When you allow the richest to own information you allow them to dispossess us of the ability to cast an informed vote, the first and most important guarantee against despotism. By allowing the successful selling of lies to an effective margin of voters, you turn what should be a sacred act into one bound to produce government by the liars, for the liars and against The People. That is the real result of the ACLU's participation in these issues. That is why we have been suffering though the appalling series of administrations and congresses, governors and legislatures we have had since that fatal bicentennial year.
Gora and his fellow well tailored enablers of oligarchy hide behind a pretense in the form of instructive legal fables, leaving out the reality of the world as it really is. There isn't enough George Soros money, used boldly and effectively on behalf of the poor and middle class that will effectively counter the combined forces of the super rich who 1. collectively own more money than the large majority of The People, 2. have shown no intention of doing anything but corrupting government to allow them to get even more of it through unillegalizing what they want to do, 3. are psychotically willing to even destroy the biosphere in order to do that. Allowing Gora and the other enablers of oligarchy to pretend that Buckley vs. Valeo enables some heroic billionaire savior of democracy as much as the oligarchs is not something we are required to do. We live in reality not in some Socratic fable discussed in a law class. One of the foremost products of that teaching method seems to be to allow lawyers and judges and justices to avoid dealing with real life depending on the self-interested "what if" pretenses of alleged possibility that never seems to happen in real life.
I was brought up on all of the propaganda that the great and good American Civil Liberties Union told about itself and promoted. I bought it for a long time. The ACLU began to lose me exactly at the point of Gora's win in Buckely vs. Valeo. Finding out its role in that abomination was only the beginning of my total disillusionment with them. It increased two years later with the ACLU role on the side of the Nazis in the Skokie case. As a past contributor to them I suddenly realized that by giving them money my "speech" was going to support the "right" of Nazis to torture Jewish survivors of the Nazi rule in Europe, on my behalf, the "Civil Liberties Union" was supporting the political organization and the propaganda of Nazis. To put it mildly, I stopped giving them my "speech" to use that way. I would very strongly encourage you to ask if you want to hand them your "speech" to promote things like the "citizens" of "Citizens United".
* You can read what Gora and the ACLU are up to in this case coming up in the Court session that is just about to start.
But here is the brutal reality if the Court agrees with McCutcheon: Presidential candidates, House and Senate party leaders, and individual members of Congress could then form joint fundraising committees with national and state party committees and leverage contributions from individuals into huge sums to support their campaigns — maximums of more than $1 million for individual presidential candidates, more than $3.5 million for committees formed by congressional leaders, and nearly $200,000 for individual congressional candidates. We know, based on past experience, that presidential candidates, congressional leaders, and candidates would quickly spring into action to create the maximum number of joint fundraising committees and maximize the number of $3 million donors — and, of course, every candidate and office holder would know who was ponying up the amounts.
What if Congress then moved to outlaw joint fundraising committees (as if that could really happen!)? It would make the massive contributions a bit more cumbersome; donors (or their accountants) would have to write a lot of individual checks to individual party committees and candidates, instead of one or two big checks. The candidates and officeholders would still know clearly who had given the big bucks — and would open their office doors happily to them when they wanted or needed something from the government.
And as an example of the kind of willful unreality that the elite law schools teach their graduates to use to cover up their most self-interested lies:
Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his Citizens United opinion, made the astonishing assertion that unlimited sums spent “independently” of candidates and parties by corporations could not possibly have a corrupting influence. But Citizens United went out of its way not to make the same claim for contributions to candidates and parties. The corruption standard for limits on individual contributions undergirds Buckley and every major campaign finance decision since. Ruling in favor of McCutcheon would knock the pins out from Buckley and set us down a path to obliteration of all remaining campaign-reform limits.
In his confirmation hearing, John Roberts emphasized repeatedly that he would respect the previous decisions of the Court, would look to narrow the scope of decisions so that he could aim for 8-1 or 9-0 decisions instead of the frequent 5-4 divisions, and would bend over backwards to respect the role of other institutions, especially Congress. Citizens United demolished those pledges. A case brought on narrow grounds was abruptly broadened by Chief Justice Roberts and his conservative colleagues to include grounds that had never been initially asserted or briefed by the plaintiffs bringing the case, and the decision threw out one issued by the Court just a few years earlier, and effectively discarded decades of established law, jurisprudence, and practice over the appropriate role of corporations and unions in campaigns.
That is the corrupt, lying, corruptly perjured, real world that Joel Gora's and the ACLU's platitudes and absurd propositions cover up and depend on. With their record in this line of cases they negate every amicus brief they might have ever issued for any poor defendant in their history, in reality as well as in fable.
Figured I should catch up with what the ACLU was doing to attack self-government before the Roberts Court completely handed our elections systems over to the billionaires* and to the likes of Shaun McCutcheon. And there is no figure who has done more on behalf of the billionaires than Gora. Reading his article I am hard put to understand why he isn't considered as infamous and repugnant a figure as Roy Cohn or Rupert Murdoch. Here is how he describes himself in a footnote on the first page.
I should also note that as an ACLU lawyer I helped challenge the campaign finance restrictions and requirements at issue in many of the cases discussed in this article, most notably, Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976).
You would think that the man who was instrumental in allowing the demigods on the Supreme Court to turn money into speech, enabling the strongest force in lying to people in order to control politics would be widely vilified but, since he is associated with the ACLU, my guess would be that alone would be enough for people on the left to respect him. Well, I don't respect him because he has made a career trying to do what he has. As far as I am concerned, he's at least as worthy of disdain as the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch and all of those more public names. No, he is more worthy of it because he was working under the prestige of the ACLU and with the slogan of "free speech" while making sure speech isn't free because it now has a monetary value embedded in it. As I pointed out, by doing that you give more speech to those with more money and you dispossess those who have no money. That has been the real world effect of Joel Gora's life work as can be seen in the total and absolute disempowerment of, first the destitute and poor and, increasingly, the middle class. When you allow the richest to own information you allow them to dispossess us of the ability to cast an informed vote, the first and most important guarantee against despotism. By allowing the successful selling of lies to an effective margin of voters, you turn what should be a sacred act into one bound to produce government by the liars, for the liars and against The People. That is the real result of the ACLU's participation in these issues. That is why we have been suffering though the appalling series of administrations and congresses, governors and legislatures we have had since that fatal bicentennial year.
Gora and his fellow well tailored enablers of oligarchy hide behind a pretense in the form of instructive legal fables, leaving out the reality of the world as it really is. There isn't enough George Soros money, used boldly and effectively on behalf of the poor and middle class that will effectively counter the combined forces of the super rich who 1. collectively own more money than the large majority of The People, 2. have shown no intention of doing anything but corrupting government to allow them to get even more of it through unillegalizing what they want to do, 3. are psychotically willing to even destroy the biosphere in order to do that. Allowing Gora and the other enablers of oligarchy to pretend that Buckley vs. Valeo enables some heroic billionaire savior of democracy as much as the oligarchs is not something we are required to do. We live in reality not in some Socratic fable discussed in a law class. One of the foremost products of that teaching method seems to be to allow lawyers and judges and justices to avoid dealing with real life depending on the self-interested "what if" pretenses of alleged possibility that never seems to happen in real life.
I was brought up on all of the propaganda that the great and good American Civil Liberties Union told about itself and promoted. I bought it for a long time. The ACLU began to lose me exactly at the point of Gora's win in Buckely vs. Valeo. Finding out its role in that abomination was only the beginning of my total disillusionment with them. It increased two years later with the ACLU role on the side of the Nazis in the Skokie case. As a past contributor to them I suddenly realized that by giving them money my "speech" was going to support the "right" of Nazis to torture Jewish survivors of the Nazi rule in Europe, on my behalf, the "Civil Liberties Union" was supporting the political organization and the propaganda of Nazis. To put it mildly, I stopped giving them my "speech" to use that way. I would very strongly encourage you to ask if you want to hand them your "speech" to promote things like the "citizens" of "Citizens United".
* You can read what Gora and the ACLU are up to in this case coming up in the Court session that is just about to start.
But here is the brutal reality if the Court agrees with McCutcheon: Presidential candidates, House and Senate party leaders, and individual members of Congress could then form joint fundraising committees with national and state party committees and leverage contributions from individuals into huge sums to support their campaigns — maximums of more than $1 million for individual presidential candidates, more than $3.5 million for committees formed by congressional leaders, and nearly $200,000 for individual congressional candidates. We know, based on past experience, that presidential candidates, congressional leaders, and candidates would quickly spring into action to create the maximum number of joint fundraising committees and maximize the number of $3 million donors — and, of course, every candidate and office holder would know who was ponying up the amounts.
What if Congress then moved to outlaw joint fundraising committees (as if that could really happen!)? It would make the massive contributions a bit more cumbersome; donors (or their accountants) would have to write a lot of individual checks to individual party committees and candidates, instead of one or two big checks. The candidates and officeholders would still know clearly who had given the big bucks — and would open their office doors happily to them when they wanted or needed something from the government.
And as an example of the kind of willful unreality that the elite law schools teach their graduates to use to cover up their most self-interested lies:
Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his Citizens United opinion, made the astonishing assertion that unlimited sums spent “independently” of candidates and parties by corporations could not possibly have a corrupting influence. But Citizens United went out of its way not to make the same claim for contributions to candidates and parties. The corruption standard for limits on individual contributions undergirds Buckley and every major campaign finance decision since. Ruling in favor of McCutcheon would knock the pins out from Buckley and set us down a path to obliteration of all remaining campaign-reform limits.
In his confirmation hearing, John Roberts emphasized repeatedly that he would respect the previous decisions of the Court, would look to narrow the scope of decisions so that he could aim for 8-1 or 9-0 decisions instead of the frequent 5-4 divisions, and would bend over backwards to respect the role of other institutions, especially Congress. Citizens United demolished those pledges. A case brought on narrow grounds was abruptly broadened by Chief Justice Roberts and his conservative colleagues to include grounds that had never been initially asserted or briefed by the plaintiffs bringing the case, and the decision threw out one issued by the Court just a few years earlier, and effectively discarded decades of established law, jurisprudence, and practice over the appropriate role of corporations and unions in campaigns.
That is the corrupt, lying, corruptly perjured, real world that Joel Gora's and the ACLU's platitudes and absurd propositions cover up and depend on. With their record in this line of cases they negate every amicus brief they might have ever issued for any poor defendant in their history, in reality as well as in fable.
Friday, September 27, 2013
The Maoist Roots of Al Qaeda Revisited
My post on Tuesday was too short. I know people who read what I write are probably laughing now but I reconsidered it and think I jumped to my theme with too little preparation.
The article I was commenting on points out that Al Qaeda's own literature proves that they have been extensively influenced by the ideas of Mao and other allegedly Maxist, and so atheist political-military thinkers. Contrary to stereotype the founders and leaders of Al Qaeda aren't parochial fanatics who see any thought but that of their branch of Islamic fundamentalism as unclean but are at least as able to do research and study history as secular thinkers in the west and, I'd say, seem to be somewhat more likely to consult their ideological opposites to see what they can usefully learn from them. What serious attempt at a revolutionary movement wouldn't look at Mao and the winning side in Vietnam who defeat the greatest military power in the history of the world? They've obviously learned more from that long and terrible war than the big thinkers and movers in the United States have.
It is the double bigotry of the racist establishment and the racists, both atheist and otherwise, who present Muslims as ignorant, fanatical religious fanatics - all billion and a half plus of them - that has set up the west for the disasters of the past and those which will, no doubt, come in the future. When it comes to people in the Islamic world, most of us turn out to be Doug Feiths.
Of course this was bound to interest me since I've become something of a critic of the conventional atheist POV of what passes as an intelligentsia in the United States, Britain and elsewhere. Looking long at things like that gives you a taste for the more bitter varieties of irony. Considering how the Sam Harrises and Christopher Hitchens of fashionable atheism talk about Muslims, how their assertions sound like the worst of the old line racists of the 1950s and before and how those figures have been taken to the bosom of so many who believe themselves to be sophisticated non-racist members of some kind of left, commenting on the article was irresistible to me*. I only wish I'd taken more time to develop my response to it. Though this is a topic which isn't going to go away.
In order to defeat something like Al Qaeda it is necessary to really understand them and what they are doing. The rather insulting and condescending appeal to racism to rally what elites believe are the ignorant masses, exposing their own ignorance and racism in the process, precludes having enough respect for your adversary to see them as they really are, in all of their malignant intentions but, also, admitting that they are not genetically or culturally unable to think. Muslims are presented in the American media, most often, as if they are some kind of dangerous animal. That has been an ongoing effort in the west for centuries. Among the people who like to think of themselves as the educated class I suspect there is a large component of self-congratulation involved. Our educations seem to come with an over sized section teaching a satisfying and pleasurable assumption of superiority that reality doesn't justify. If conceited self-regard built on the backs of the ignorant and inferior masses were true it would have worked out a lot better than it has. One word, Iraq. Another word, Vietnam. When we don't learn from our own massive and horrible mistakes, who's being stupid?
* The most influential strategic documents appear to be anything but religious in origin. For example, Al Qaeda strategist and trainer Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri wrote in his voluminous “The Call to Global Islamic Resistance” that one of the most important books on guerrilla warfare has been written by an American. That book, published in 1965, is “War of the Flea,” by Robert Taber, an investigative journalist who covered Castro’s operations in the late 1950s. The title refers to Mao’s often-cited analogy that guerrilla warfare is like the attack of a weak flea against a powerful dog. The flea first agitates the dog with a few bites, and then the dog attacks itself in a frenzy but is unable to kill the flea; as the bites multiply and other fleas join, the dog is weakened and eventually dies.
Taber’s book, a classic popular study of insurgencies, examines how guerrillas end up succeeding or failing in wars against overwhelmingly powerful enemies. The book’s title was translated into Arabic as, approximately, “The War of the Oppressed”; a more literal translation would be “the war of those thought to be weak.” The message is clear: If you feel weak, this book shows you how to be strong.
Except for history and military buffs, few Americans today read Taber’s book in English; similarly, few Al Qaeda terrorists would have read it in Arabic. But its lessons ended up embedded in Al Qaeda’s philosophy and insurgency campaigns. Al-Suri even recorded a lecture course on the book, and both the failed mid-2000s terrorist campaign in Saudi Arabia and the current war in Yemen bear its imprint.
The article I was commenting on points out that Al Qaeda's own literature proves that they have been extensively influenced by the ideas of Mao and other allegedly Maxist, and so atheist political-military thinkers. Contrary to stereotype the founders and leaders of Al Qaeda aren't parochial fanatics who see any thought but that of their branch of Islamic fundamentalism as unclean but are at least as able to do research and study history as secular thinkers in the west and, I'd say, seem to be somewhat more likely to consult their ideological opposites to see what they can usefully learn from them. What serious attempt at a revolutionary movement wouldn't look at Mao and the winning side in Vietnam who defeat the greatest military power in the history of the world? They've obviously learned more from that long and terrible war than the big thinkers and movers in the United States have.
It is the double bigotry of the racist establishment and the racists, both atheist and otherwise, who present Muslims as ignorant, fanatical religious fanatics - all billion and a half plus of them - that has set up the west for the disasters of the past and those which will, no doubt, come in the future. When it comes to people in the Islamic world, most of us turn out to be Doug Feiths.
Of course this was bound to interest me since I've become something of a critic of the conventional atheist POV of what passes as an intelligentsia in the United States, Britain and elsewhere. Looking long at things like that gives you a taste for the more bitter varieties of irony. Considering how the Sam Harrises and Christopher Hitchens of fashionable atheism talk about Muslims, how their assertions sound like the worst of the old line racists of the 1950s and before and how those figures have been taken to the bosom of so many who believe themselves to be sophisticated non-racist members of some kind of left, commenting on the article was irresistible to me*. I only wish I'd taken more time to develop my response to it. Though this is a topic which isn't going to go away.
In order to defeat something like Al Qaeda it is necessary to really understand them and what they are doing. The rather insulting and condescending appeal to racism to rally what elites believe are the ignorant masses, exposing their own ignorance and racism in the process, precludes having enough respect for your adversary to see them as they really are, in all of their malignant intentions but, also, admitting that they are not genetically or culturally unable to think. Muslims are presented in the American media, most often, as if they are some kind of dangerous animal. That has been an ongoing effort in the west for centuries. Among the people who like to think of themselves as the educated class I suspect there is a large component of self-congratulation involved. Our educations seem to come with an over sized section teaching a satisfying and pleasurable assumption of superiority that reality doesn't justify. If conceited self-regard built on the backs of the ignorant and inferior masses were true it would have worked out a lot better than it has. One word, Iraq. Another word, Vietnam. When we don't learn from our own massive and horrible mistakes, who's being stupid?
* The most influential strategic documents appear to be anything but religious in origin. For example, Al Qaeda strategist and trainer Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri wrote in his voluminous “The Call to Global Islamic Resistance” that one of the most important books on guerrilla warfare has been written by an American. That book, published in 1965, is “War of the Flea,” by Robert Taber, an investigative journalist who covered Castro’s operations in the late 1950s. The title refers to Mao’s often-cited analogy that guerrilla warfare is like the attack of a weak flea against a powerful dog. The flea first agitates the dog with a few bites, and then the dog attacks itself in a frenzy but is unable to kill the flea; as the bites multiply and other fleas join, the dog is weakened and eventually dies.
Taber’s book, a classic popular study of insurgencies, examines how guerrillas end up succeeding or failing in wars against overwhelmingly powerful enemies. The book’s title was translated into Arabic as, approximately, “The War of the Oppressed”; a more literal translation would be “the war of those thought to be weak.” The message is clear: If you feel weak, this book shows you how to be strong.
Except for history and military buffs, few Americans today read Taber’s book in English; similarly, few Al Qaeda terrorists would have read it in Arabic. But its lessons ended up embedded in Al Qaeda’s philosophy and insurgency campaigns. Al-Suri even recorded a lecture course on the book, and both the failed mid-2000s terrorist campaign in Saudi Arabia and the current war in Yemen bear its imprint.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
I'm Going To Be Taking Thursdays Off
I've got a really full schedule building up on Thursdays so I'm going to have to start taking a break from blogging that day. Maybe another day too, but my schedule's still in flux.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
The Amazing Stupidity of Ted Cruz
I haven't been one of those glued to Ted Cruz's grab for stardom so it wasn't until this morning that I hear him distorting one of the greatest works of one of America's greatest writers and artists, a long time and well known liberal-lefty, Dr Seuss.
The idiot product of Harvard Law would have known how stupid and clueless using Green Eggs and Ham in his bid to stop Obamacare was if he'd done what we were all told to do in 1st grade READ EVERY WORD TO THE END OF THE BOOK.
If the widely declared genius had done that he might have read what happens when Sam I Am finally talks the grouchy nay-sayer into trying what he spent the entire previous book saying he didn't like.
The idiot product of Harvard Law would have known how stupid and clueless using Green Eggs and Ham in his bid to stop Obamacare was if he'd done what we were all told to do in 1st grade READ EVERY WORD TO THE END OF THE BOOK.
If the widely declared genius had done that he might have read what happens when Sam I Am finally talks the grouchy nay-sayer into trying what he spent the entire previous book saying he didn't like.
He
found out that once he tried it, he liked it.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Schubert Erstarrung From Die Winterreise Two Hermanns, Two Interpretations
Hermann Prey and an unnamed piano player
Hermann Jadlowker with Bruno Seidler-Winkler Piano c. 1917-1918
Hermann Jadlowker with Bruno Seidler-Winkler Piano c. 1917-1918
Both of them were great singers. Prey was a very great singer but Jadlowker's voice was very unusually fine and used with great artistry. You don't hear tenors with such a dark, rich sound used with the flexibility of a real bel canto singer. Hearing him live must have been a singular experience. It's a shame there isn't more of him singing this repertoire on record and that the recordings were made in the low-fi period.
Here's Hermann Prey singing Der Leiermann about as well as it's ever been sung.
Is it Just Me Or Is Google Software Acting Up All Over The Place?
I've been having all kinds of trouble with Google based software, Gmail, Blogger, the browser. Weird stuff going on.
Maybe it's the NSA. Maybe it's the advertisers. I don't know which direction to point my paranoia in.
Or maybe it's my dissing that Google doodle a few weeks back. The Empire Will Not Be Mocked!
Maybe it's the NSA. Maybe it's the advertisers. I don't know which direction to point my paranoia in.
Or maybe it's my dissing that Google doodle a few weeks back. The Empire Will Not Be Mocked!
The Maoist Roots of Al Qaeda
In an article by Michael W.S. Ryan published in Sunday's Boston Globe, he points out that a lot of Al Qaeda's theory and strategy seems to be derived, not from the Quran and the Haith but from Mao Zedong and General Giap.
Al Qaeda’s strategic foundations are laid out in a variety of documents written by its ideologues and trainers. Originally produced secretly for training recruits and as a legacy for future generations of jihadi guerrillas, the documents began to emerge in the early 2000s—published on jihadist forums, stored on commercial websites, or confiscated from terrorist safe houses and training camps by local police or military
What this body of work reveals might strike even informed readers as surprising. When it comes to strategy, close readings of the documents suggest that Al Qaeda draws its ideas less from classical Islam than from a broad array of sources in 20th-century guerrilla warfare, as well as older European and Chinese military strategists. Its books and articles refer to the ideas of Mao, Che Guevara, Regis Debray, the Vietnamese strategist General Giap, Fidel Castro, and even the somewhat obscure Brazilian urban guerrilla Carlos Marighella. They are secular and analytic, and do not rely on religious arguments as a detailed guide to action.
To study Al Qaeda’s strategic literature is to realize that we should understand it primarily as a new type of revolutionary group—one that is, in fact, less classically “Islamic” than Maoist. It is a modern ideology built on Al Qaeda’s distorted version of Islam, one that is rejected by mainstream Islamic scholars. And this deeper understanding may give us new tools in what is shaping up to be a long fight against Al Qaeda’s influence.
Which forces the question, does the anti-Islamic, openly racist propaganda campaign launched in the wake of 9-11 not play into the hands of the people who attacked the United States? Not to mention the two wars that resulted, especially the one in Afghanistan which was a long shot, based on the history of foreign invasions of that country. If the Soviet Union, sharing a common border with it and without having to worry much about an anti-war movement to restrain its response, it is absurd to think that an aggressive war would do it. The American mind, trained by movies and fiction, has been misunderstanding all wars as being WWII. It's obvious that the people who were planning Al Qaeda didn't make that mistake any more than the North Vietnamese government did in the 1960s and 70s.
We have payed an enormous cost for racism and bigotry over the course of our history and a lot of that cost has been through the attempts of elites to use that racism and bigotry to their own ends. I won't go over those, they are as obvious as the corporate media's attempts to use Barack Obama's race and middle name to win elections.
In this case, the anti-"Arab", generally anti-Islamic branch of that vine has the potential to destroy us. I have no doubt that the racism of Cheney and his band of neo-cons allowed them to ignorantly underestimate the intelligence and dedicated perseverance of what are, essentially, nationalist groups. It's a repeat of the Western mindset that allowed it to deceive itself about national liberation movements which produced Mao and General Giap and the others on that list of works cited by Al Qaeda.
One of the more interesting things about this from a liberal view point is the use of 9-11 in anti-religious bigotry. There is Sam Harris whose flagrant racism and bigotry knows no bounds and it has made him a rich man. Following on that are other figures in new atheism, one of the most sleazy and massively hypocritical is the late Christopher Hitchens who went from Trotsyite to Bush II invasion supporter. They stirred up a large amount of bigotry that is exposed regularly in allegedly lefty venues, though I would say that the presence of that bigotry is a definitive refutation of a person's or venue's genuine liberalism. It is a disproof of it. If you changed the names called and the used what gets said in white supremacist, neo-Nazi circles. It's especially ironic among those whose anti-religiosity falls in line with old-left, vaguely Marxist and anarchist rhetoric. In my time the ideological predecessors of those who slam Al Qaeda and pin them to all of Islam and all religion, generally, supported and venerated the same thinkers that inform Al Qaeda today.
A lot of the religious trappings of Al Qaeda are exactly the same kind of cynical use of religious language and appeal is exactly the same kind of thing that the Republicans have used in the United States. The entire thing is all about political power and economic control among people to whom nothing is sacred, nothing beyond exploitation, no one beyond exploitation. And there is nothing religious about that, it's an entirely secular thing. Anyone who believes that Bush and Cheney have any real religious motivation are as foolish as the poor dupes that Al Qaeda ropes in to do the killing and get killed. In the run-up of their attack, a number of the 9-11 hijackers, including Mohammed Atta, went out partying at strip clubs. I'm unaware of any aspect of Islam that would countenance that. Or any traditional understanding of any of the other Abrahamic faiths. All of which forbid the killing of innocent people in a way that Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens and atheism do not.
Al Qaeda’s strategic foundations are laid out in a variety of documents written by its ideologues and trainers. Originally produced secretly for training recruits and as a legacy for future generations of jihadi guerrillas, the documents began to emerge in the early 2000s—published on jihadist forums, stored on commercial websites, or confiscated from terrorist safe houses and training camps by local police or military
What this body of work reveals might strike even informed readers as surprising. When it comes to strategy, close readings of the documents suggest that Al Qaeda draws its ideas less from classical Islam than from a broad array of sources in 20th-century guerrilla warfare, as well as older European and Chinese military strategists. Its books and articles refer to the ideas of Mao, Che Guevara, Regis Debray, the Vietnamese strategist General Giap, Fidel Castro, and even the somewhat obscure Brazilian urban guerrilla Carlos Marighella. They are secular and analytic, and do not rely on religious arguments as a detailed guide to action.
To study Al Qaeda’s strategic literature is to realize that we should understand it primarily as a new type of revolutionary group—one that is, in fact, less classically “Islamic” than Maoist. It is a modern ideology built on Al Qaeda’s distorted version of Islam, one that is rejected by mainstream Islamic scholars. And this deeper understanding may give us new tools in what is shaping up to be a long fight against Al Qaeda’s influence.
Which forces the question, does the anti-Islamic, openly racist propaganda campaign launched in the wake of 9-11 not play into the hands of the people who attacked the United States? Not to mention the two wars that resulted, especially the one in Afghanistan which was a long shot, based on the history of foreign invasions of that country. If the Soviet Union, sharing a common border with it and without having to worry much about an anti-war movement to restrain its response, it is absurd to think that an aggressive war would do it. The American mind, trained by movies and fiction, has been misunderstanding all wars as being WWII. It's obvious that the people who were planning Al Qaeda didn't make that mistake any more than the North Vietnamese government did in the 1960s and 70s.
We have payed an enormous cost for racism and bigotry over the course of our history and a lot of that cost has been through the attempts of elites to use that racism and bigotry to their own ends. I won't go over those, they are as obvious as the corporate media's attempts to use Barack Obama's race and middle name to win elections.
In this case, the anti-"Arab", generally anti-Islamic branch of that vine has the potential to destroy us. I have no doubt that the racism of Cheney and his band of neo-cons allowed them to ignorantly underestimate the intelligence and dedicated perseverance of what are, essentially, nationalist groups. It's a repeat of the Western mindset that allowed it to deceive itself about national liberation movements which produced Mao and General Giap and the others on that list of works cited by Al Qaeda.
One of the more interesting things about this from a liberal view point is the use of 9-11 in anti-religious bigotry. There is Sam Harris whose flagrant racism and bigotry knows no bounds and it has made him a rich man. Following on that are other figures in new atheism, one of the most sleazy and massively hypocritical is the late Christopher Hitchens who went from Trotsyite to Bush II invasion supporter. They stirred up a large amount of bigotry that is exposed regularly in allegedly lefty venues, though I would say that the presence of that bigotry is a definitive refutation of a person's or venue's genuine liberalism. It is a disproof of it. If you changed the names called and the used what gets said in white supremacist, neo-Nazi circles. It's especially ironic among those whose anti-religiosity falls in line with old-left, vaguely Marxist and anarchist rhetoric. In my time the ideological predecessors of those who slam Al Qaeda and pin them to all of Islam and all religion, generally, supported and venerated the same thinkers that inform Al Qaeda today.
A lot of the religious trappings of Al Qaeda are exactly the same kind of cynical use of religious language and appeal is exactly the same kind of thing that the Republicans have used in the United States. The entire thing is all about political power and economic control among people to whom nothing is sacred, nothing beyond exploitation, no one beyond exploitation. And there is nothing religious about that, it's an entirely secular thing. Anyone who believes that Bush and Cheney have any real religious motivation are as foolish as the poor dupes that Al Qaeda ropes in to do the killing and get killed. In the run-up of their attack, a number of the 9-11 hijackers, including Mohammed Atta, went out partying at strip clubs. I'm unaware of any aspect of Islam that would countenance that. Or any traditional understanding of any of the other Abrahamic faiths. All of which forbid the killing of innocent people in a way that Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens and atheism do not.
Monday, September 23, 2013
More on the Virtue of Moral Relativism
Remember just over a week ago when I wrote about the Celebrity Atheist New Flavor of the Season Stephen Fry? Remember when I gave the stirring battle cry repeated over atheist blogs and websites everywhere that includes this passage?
...they [The Catholic Church] try to accuse people like me who believe in empiricism and the enlightenment of somehow what they call moral relativism as if it's some appalling sin whereas what it actually means is thought...
I remembered it while reading the latest very important but horribly depressing post by Chris Hedges when I came to this passage:
“I killed every Chinese I saw,” Congo remembers as he tours the Chinese area of Medan in a car. “I stabbed them all! I don’t remember how many, but it was dozens of Chinese. If I met them, I stabbed them. All the way to Asia Street, where I met my girlfriend’s dad. Remember, I had two motives: crush the Chinese and crush my girlfriend’s father, so I stabbed him, too! Because he was Chinese too! He fell into a ditch. I hit him with a brick. He sank.”
“Killing is the worst crime you can do,” says one of Congo’s former associates. “So the key is to find a way not to feel guilty. It’s all about finding the right excuse. For example, if I’m asked to kill somebody, if the compensation is right, then of course I’ll do it, and from one perspective it’s not wrong. That’s the perspective we must make ourselves believe. After all, morality is relative.”
The post is about the documentary “The Act of Killing,” by Joshua Oppenheimer, the part about the American backed genocide campaign in Indonesia, Oppenheimer interviews those who did the actual killing. You can see from the excerpts from the interviews, lots of thought has gone into the planning, training, framing and justification of the mass murderers.
Congo patiently explains to Oppenheimer his technique of garroting his victims with a piece of wood, a pole and wire, a technique he adopted to avoid the mess of excessive bleeding.
And they are sharing their thoughts with younger generations of potential mass murders.
There is a scene in the Oppenheimer film where Congo—who parades across the screen like a prima donna, his outsized vanity and love of fine clothing on display—is interviewed on “Special Dialogue,” a program of a state-owned television station with national coverage. I have substituted the word “Jew” for “communist” to put the moral bankruptcy of the Indonesian regime into a cultural context better understood by Americans.
“We had to kill them,” Congo, wearing a black cowboy hat adorned with a gold sheriff’s star, tells the female host.
“And was your method of killing inspired by gangster films?” she asks.
“Sometimes!” Congo says. “It’s like. ... “
“Amazing!” she says. “He was inspired by films!”
The audience, mostly made up of members of the Pancasila Youth in their distinctive orange and black shirts, applauds. At the start of the show, Ibrahim Sinik, a leader of the paramilitary group, lauded the Pancasila Youth as having been “at the core of the extermination.”
“Each genre had its own method,” Congo says. “Like in Mafia movies, they strangle the guy in the car, and dump the body. So we did that too.”
“Which means Anwar and his friends developed a new, more efficient system for exterminating Jews,” the woman says enthusiastically, “a system more humane, less sadistic, and without excessive force.”
Obviously, moral relativism isn't only for celebrity Britatheists who went to Cambridge and are supplementing their career on the movies with a sideline of peddling hatred of a quite similar kind.
I am seriously worried about Chris Hedges who seems to have taken more of the horrors of the world on his shoulders than anyone can carry. But his post should be read by millions more who would have some hope of stopping some of this from happening again. He makes it entirely relevant to today's issues, no doubt knowing that those already murdered as best honored by preventing recurrences to the extent possible.
These same human bonds, along with the same schizophrenic self-delusion, can be glimpsed in photographs of off-duty Nazis in the book “Nein, Onkel: Snapshots From Another Front 1938-1945,” or in the photographs of off-duty SS camp guards at Auschwitz. One of the pictures in the Auschwitz album shows the SS leadership, including the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, and Dr. Joseph Mengele, who carried out inhuman medical experiments on children, in a raucous “sing-along” on a wooden bridge with an accordion player at Solahutte, an SS resort about 20 miles south of Auschwitz on the Sola River. Mothers and children not far away were being gassed to death, some of the 1 million people murdered at Auschwitz. And it is this disquieting moral fragmentation, this ability to commit mass murder and yet to see oneself as a normal, caring human being, that Oppenheimer astutely captures. The bifurcation between work and life—a bifurcation that many in the U.S. military, today’s fossil fuel or health insurance industry or Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs also must make—allows human beings who exploit, destroy and kill other human beings to blot out much of their daily existence.
Only, first, we'd have to get past the stupid and appallingly irresponsible fad for yelling "Godwin's Law", in itself a tool for avoiding thinking about these things in terms relevant to what we're doing today instead of the past which is beyond our help.
...they [The Catholic Church] try to accuse people like me who believe in empiricism and the enlightenment of somehow what they call moral relativism as if it's some appalling sin whereas what it actually means is thought...
I remembered it while reading the latest very important but horribly depressing post by Chris Hedges when I came to this passage:
“I killed every Chinese I saw,” Congo remembers as he tours the Chinese area of Medan in a car. “I stabbed them all! I don’t remember how many, but it was dozens of Chinese. If I met them, I stabbed them. All the way to Asia Street, where I met my girlfriend’s dad. Remember, I had two motives: crush the Chinese and crush my girlfriend’s father, so I stabbed him, too! Because he was Chinese too! He fell into a ditch. I hit him with a brick. He sank.”
“Killing is the worst crime you can do,” says one of Congo’s former associates. “So the key is to find a way not to feel guilty. It’s all about finding the right excuse. For example, if I’m asked to kill somebody, if the compensation is right, then of course I’ll do it, and from one perspective it’s not wrong. That’s the perspective we must make ourselves believe. After all, morality is relative.”
The post is about the documentary “The Act of Killing,” by Joshua Oppenheimer, the part about the American backed genocide campaign in Indonesia, Oppenheimer interviews those who did the actual killing. You can see from the excerpts from the interviews, lots of thought has gone into the planning, training, framing and justification of the mass murderers.
Congo patiently explains to Oppenheimer his technique of garroting his victims with a piece of wood, a pole and wire, a technique he adopted to avoid the mess of excessive bleeding.
And they are sharing their thoughts with younger generations of potential mass murders.
There is a scene in the Oppenheimer film where Congo—who parades across the screen like a prima donna, his outsized vanity and love of fine clothing on display—is interviewed on “Special Dialogue,” a program of a state-owned television station with national coverage. I have substituted the word “Jew” for “communist” to put the moral bankruptcy of the Indonesian regime into a cultural context better understood by Americans.
“We had to kill them,” Congo, wearing a black cowboy hat adorned with a gold sheriff’s star, tells the female host.
“And was your method of killing inspired by gangster films?” she asks.
“Sometimes!” Congo says. “It’s like. ... “
“Amazing!” she says. “He was inspired by films!”
The audience, mostly made up of members of the Pancasila Youth in their distinctive orange and black shirts, applauds. At the start of the show, Ibrahim Sinik, a leader of the paramilitary group, lauded the Pancasila Youth as having been “at the core of the extermination.”
“Each genre had its own method,” Congo says. “Like in Mafia movies, they strangle the guy in the car, and dump the body. So we did that too.”
“Which means Anwar and his friends developed a new, more efficient system for exterminating Jews,” the woman says enthusiastically, “a system more humane, less sadistic, and without excessive force.”
Obviously, moral relativism isn't only for celebrity Britatheists who went to Cambridge and are supplementing their career on the movies with a sideline of peddling hatred of a quite similar kind.
I am seriously worried about Chris Hedges who seems to have taken more of the horrors of the world on his shoulders than anyone can carry. But his post should be read by millions more who would have some hope of stopping some of this from happening again. He makes it entirely relevant to today's issues, no doubt knowing that those already murdered as best honored by preventing recurrences to the extent possible.
These same human bonds, along with the same schizophrenic self-delusion, can be glimpsed in photographs of off-duty Nazis in the book “Nein, Onkel: Snapshots From Another Front 1938-1945,” or in the photographs of off-duty SS camp guards at Auschwitz. One of the pictures in the Auschwitz album shows the SS leadership, including the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, and Dr. Joseph Mengele, who carried out inhuman medical experiments on children, in a raucous “sing-along” on a wooden bridge with an accordion player at Solahutte, an SS resort about 20 miles south of Auschwitz on the Sola River. Mothers and children not far away were being gassed to death, some of the 1 million people murdered at Auschwitz. And it is this disquieting moral fragmentation, this ability to commit mass murder and yet to see oneself as a normal, caring human being, that Oppenheimer astutely captures. The bifurcation between work and life—a bifurcation that many in the U.S. military, today’s fossil fuel or health insurance industry or Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs also must make—allows human beings who exploit, destroy and kill other human beings to blot out much of their daily existence.
Only, first, we'd have to get past the stupid and appallingly irresponsible fad for yelling "Godwin's Law", in itself a tool for avoiding thinking about these things in terms relevant to what we're doing today instead of the past which is beyond our help.
After Not Sleeping On It We Should Put Up or Shut Up in Shame
Didn't get much sleep last night so I had lots of late night thoughts. One was about that proposal I made concerning textbooks and the periodic group whine that goes up all over the left about how "Texas" used their purchasing power to slant the textbooks used across the country.
I'm going to issue it as a challenge to all of the college professors, instructors, assistant instructors, high school teachers etc. who have whined and will whine about the right-wing power play. Put your keystrokes where your .... whiny comments are. If there isn't an organized effort to produce the most excellent e-textbooks possible, including all of the most up to date, effective teaching methods, hypertext links, etc, regularly updated and maintained, and, most important for its effectiveness, made available for free we should all collectively shut up in shame over our hypocrisy. If they announced their effort and produce the most excellent possible texts and programs and provided them to public and private schools and just ordinary people for free, they could corner the market by leaving the market.
If my specialty were a hot topic of contention, I'd participate in the effort and I might do a bit in that way in the near future. But professional biologists, historians, specialists in civics and other topics subjected to this kind of ideological distortion should prove how concerned they really are instead of getting into the perpetual whine and the totally useless and time wasting but oh-so-satisfying exercise in mutual self-congratulations on our mutual smartness as compared to them while being massively stupid about it.
I'm going to issue it as a challenge to all of the college professors, instructors, assistant instructors, high school teachers etc. who have whined and will whine about the right-wing power play. Put your keystrokes where your .... whiny comments are. If there isn't an organized effort to produce the most excellent e-textbooks possible, including all of the most up to date, effective teaching methods, hypertext links, etc, regularly updated and maintained, and, most important for its effectiveness, made available for free we should all collectively shut up in shame over our hypocrisy. If they announced their effort and produce the most excellent possible texts and programs and provided them to public and private schools and just ordinary people for free, they could corner the market by leaving the market.
If my specialty were a hot topic of contention, I'd participate in the effort and I might do a bit in that way in the near future. But professional biologists, historians, specialists in civics and other topics subjected to this kind of ideological distortion should prove how concerned they really are instead of getting into the perpetual whine and the totally useless and time wasting but oh-so-satisfying exercise in mutual self-congratulations on our mutual smartness as compared to them while being massively stupid about it.
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Schubert - Abschied
Werner Güra, Tenor
Christoph Berner, Piano
Sung at a pretty brisk tempo that I really like.
Score C Major (Anyone else suspect he's singing it in a higher key?)
The Answer To Political-Ideological Pressure on Textbook Publishers Is To Bypass Them
Ah, the perennial struggle for control of the integrity of Science vs Texas State Textbook Committee is underway again. You can read about that here if you've missed the earlier rounds that have been pretty much in rerun for decades.
While there might not be a single solution to the problem of right-wing pressure to distort reality in textbooks, effecting the entire country, one is as easy as can be and it would cost little to nothing.
All of the educators and members of university and college faculties who periodically bemoan this have it in their power to create excellent, modern, hyper-text linked, interactive, etc. alternatives to textbooks that could be made available universally a for free online. They could be made so good, so up to date, so well supported that school districts and teachers would want to use them as an alternative to buying expensive, ideologically slanted, soon antiquated paper textbooks. They could then use their textbook budgets to provide tablets or notebook computers to their students who would then never be able to claim they left their textbook at school. Those could be produced by groups of specialists in their fields for free, what Wikipedia should have been but isn't due to its absurd "open editing" that is guaranteed to be as ideologically slanted as anything the most rabidly right-wing party in the struggle for Texas textbook purchasing would love.
So, instead of listening to the tedious whining on the blogs and in the lefty magazines, it's time for these people to put up and put the same kind of effort into a real solution to the problem that they'll put into whining about it. Make it excellent, easy to use, well supported and updated, BRILLIANTLY EDITED and FREE and you can't lose.
While there might not be a single solution to the problem of right-wing pressure to distort reality in textbooks, effecting the entire country, one is as easy as can be and it would cost little to nothing.
All of the educators and members of university and college faculties who periodically bemoan this have it in their power to create excellent, modern, hyper-text linked, interactive, etc. alternatives to textbooks that could be made available universally a for free online. They could be made so good, so up to date, so well supported that school districts and teachers would want to use them as an alternative to buying expensive, ideologically slanted, soon antiquated paper textbooks. They could then use their textbook budgets to provide tablets or notebook computers to their students who would then never be able to claim they left their textbook at school. Those could be produced by groups of specialists in their fields for free, what Wikipedia should have been but isn't due to its absurd "open editing" that is guaranteed to be as ideologically slanted as anything the most rabidly right-wing party in the struggle for Texas textbook purchasing would love.
So, instead of listening to the tedious whining on the blogs and in the lefty magazines, it's time for these people to put up and put the same kind of effort into a real solution to the problem that they'll put into whining about it. Make it excellent, easy to use, well supported and updated, BRILLIANTLY EDITED and FREE and you can't lose.
Risking Losing Readers It's Time To Ask The Question Is Apple a Cult?
I have used Apple hardware before and will admit it tends to be very well made and planned out. I could criticize the flimsy charger cords that seem to be designed to break frequently and cost, literally, ten times the generic replacement cord for my non-prestige lap top but in some ways the hype is nearly matched with performance. And I can also point out that the time I've spent with tech support for the PCs I've used the entire time I've used computers isn't any more than Mac users I know. And, to the theme of this post, I have absolutely no brand loyalty to any of them. I'd have no problem replacing the computer I've used with one from another company, at one time I was seriously considering buying a Mac mini - it was the lack of a CD burner that made me decide against it.
The spectacle of people waiting in line to be the first to buy the latest shiny new toy from Apple, it's latest iPhone is crazy. I strongly suspect that a lot of them are the kind of people who would start with snark about people the smart set deems to be superstitious and ignorant, the ones who will drop the accusation of "woo" faster than their latest model Mac will boot.
I'd thought that once iGod, Steve Jobs, died and was safely discredited as a pretty awful creep by his official biography some of this would decrease. And some of it does seem to have diminished a bit. A lot of the cult-flavored Apple-Mac-iCargo cult was bound up in his phony, constructed persona. But for a lot of people who would scoff at the idea of religion, it is religious. One couple I know are true believers in the Apple religion and their children have learned it from the time of their birth. Their faith in Apple is one of the strongest aspects of their identity. I teased one of the parents - who was complaining about the high cost of replacing those flimsy chargers - about the consequences of buying a Windows based product. I really think it would cause problems in the family. It might lead to a divorce or alienation of the children. Which is just sick. There used to be Ford and Chevy families when I was growing up but I doubt it was really as bad as this is. This is worse, it's almost as bad as devotion to sports teams.
Best thing I ever heard on this topic was said during the week after iGod died and before his scandalous biography came out. While the Jobs devotees were snarking against Bill Gates as opposed to iGod, someone said, "Oh, yeah because providing you with your shiny new toys is SO MUCH more important than curing malaria in Africa." I wish I'd made a note of who it was who said it because it deserved to be the last word on that topic.
The spectacle of people waiting in line to be the first to buy the latest shiny new toy from Apple, it's latest iPhone is crazy. I strongly suspect that a lot of them are the kind of people who would start with snark about people the smart set deems to be superstitious and ignorant, the ones who will drop the accusation of "woo" faster than their latest model Mac will boot.
I'd thought that once iGod, Steve Jobs, died and was safely discredited as a pretty awful creep by his official biography some of this would decrease. And some of it does seem to have diminished a bit. A lot of the cult-flavored Apple-Mac-iCargo cult was bound up in his phony, constructed persona. But for a lot of people who would scoff at the idea of religion, it is religious. One couple I know are true believers in the Apple religion and their children have learned it from the time of their birth. Their faith in Apple is one of the strongest aspects of their identity. I teased one of the parents - who was complaining about the high cost of replacing those flimsy chargers - about the consequences of buying a Windows based product. I really think it would cause problems in the family. It might lead to a divorce or alienation of the children. Which is just sick. There used to be Ford and Chevy families when I was growing up but I doubt it was really as bad as this is. This is worse, it's almost as bad as devotion to sports teams.
Best thing I ever heard on this topic was said during the week after iGod died and before his scandalous biography came out. While the Jobs devotees were snarking against Bill Gates as opposed to iGod, someone said, "Oh, yeah because providing you with your shiny new toys is SO MUCH more important than curing malaria in Africa." I wish I'd made a note of who it was who said it because it deserved to be the last word on that topic.
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Schubert: Ständchen "Zögernd leise"
I love this performance by a soloist and a small chorus of women as much as I love the other version for mezzo soprano and mens chorus and the more rarely heard version for all men's voices. And, I'll point out, it's hard to play those kinds of accompaniments this well.
The story is that Anna Fröhlich commissioned the poet Franz Grillparzer to write the text which she brought to Schubert with a commission to come up with a quick piece for a special occasion. She claimed that he read the poem and said, ‘There, I have it—it’s all worked out.” . Only he didn't realize she wanted him to compose it for a chorus of women and a couple of days later brought her the version for alto solo with mens chorus. But, one of the fastest producers of masterworks in musical history, he recomposed it for her once she made her intentions clear. I don't know if it's true but have no problem believing he was up to it.
The poem in translation.
Hesitating, softly, / under the nightly shell of darkness / we are here.
And with finger gently bent, / softly, softly / we rap at the bedroom door of the beloved.
And now growing, / swelling, rising, / with one voice, loudly / we call out confidently: / Do not sleep / when the voice of affection speaks!
A wise man once sought near and far / for a true human being, with his lantern; / How much more precious than gold / are those who show graciousness and affection for us? / Thus, when friendship and love speak, / my friend, my dear one, do not sleep!
And yet what in all kingdoms / could compare to slumber? / Therefore, instead of words, instead of gifts, / you should now have some rest. / One more greeting, one more word, / and the merry melody falls silent; / softly, softly, we sneak away once more.
Score
Friday, September 20, 2013
Schubert Arppegione Sonata Played on a Real Arpeggione* And Period Fortepiano
The arpeggione was a sort of bowed guitar invented by one of the most famous of the "romantic period" guitar makers, Johann Stauffer. The only well known piece composed for it was the famous sonata by Schubert, which is played on virtually everything but an arpeggione. The young Belgian cellist Nicolas Deletaille, who played the Beethoven Sonata I posted yesterday, is trying to revive the instrument. His has adjustable frets to play intervals closer to pure intervals, something the original didn't have.
Looking at the score it seems to be written like guitar music, in G clef an octave above pitch. I believe the instrument has the same tuning as the guitar.
Score
* For once
The Wedge Experiment 1 Month In
After choking on the price of the ear-training textbook I'd used for decades - it's ridiculous to expect music students to spend c. $80 on a beginning ear training textbook - I decided to look for a public domain alternative. I settled on an old textbook, Sight Singing and Ear Training by George A. Wedge and am delighted with the results after a month. It's not even necessary to print it out on paper so it's essentially free. A lot of his exercises, especially in the beginning with hearing octaves are vitally important and entirely neglected in modern text books.
All ear-training books have their limits but going through just about any of them will move you on. I will probably use Wedge's Advanced Ear-Training for students who get through the first book. It would be a good idea to supplement the major-minor oriented exercises with reading modal melodies and those are available for free as well.
If you went through all of those, learning to sing them on the extended version of fixed-do, using a keyboard or guitar as necessary (keeping in mind that a guitar plays an octave below written pitch) you would be entirely ready to take on any beginning counterpoint or harmony textbook. And the price of harmony textbooks! And my favorite one, Sessions's Harmonic Practice, has been out of print for ages. I'll be looking at pdfs of old ones as well.
All ear-training books have their limits but going through just about any of them will move you on. I will probably use Wedge's Advanced Ear-Training for students who get through the first book. It would be a good idea to supplement the major-minor oriented exercises with reading modal melodies and those are available for free as well.
If you went through all of those, learning to sing them on the extended version of fixed-do, using a keyboard or guitar as necessary (keeping in mind that a guitar plays an octave below written pitch) you would be entirely ready to take on any beginning counterpoint or harmony textbook. And the price of harmony textbooks! And my favorite one, Sessions's Harmonic Practice, has been out of print for ages. I'll be looking at pdfs of old ones as well.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Grab und Mond - Franz Schubert
Schnittpunktvokal Male Quartet
An excellent male quartet singing Schubert's setting of Seidl's meditation at the grave side on mortality and the question of an afterlife. It could have been the kind of group Schubert expected to sing this music instead of the usual choral performances - the only kind I've ever heard. It is a complete success, making me wish they'd record more of his male quartet music.
Schubert set it in September 1826, having stared the prospect of a terrible death by syphilis in the eye, though lots of people think it was typhoid fever that carried him off. The translation of the text will give you a good idea of what inspired one of Schubert's bleakest scores.
Silver-blue moonlight falls down,
Lowers many beams down into the grave.
Friend of slumber, dear moon, don't be silent,
if in the grave, darkness lives, or light.
All is quiet? Now, silent Grave, speak,
You drew so many beams down into the stillness,
You hold so many glances of the moon, silver-blue,
Just give one beam back. Come and see!
Score
Ban And Suppress "Real Men Rape Teenage Boys Tumblr"
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The Roberts Court Have Turned The United States into a Terror State
I just listened to a story about Starbucks deciding, after trying to make nice with the "open carry" terrorists, to tell them they aren't welcome in their stores, terrorizing their unarmed customers. The "open carry" industry has vowed to make them pay for asserting their right to have gun free places of business. We can only hope financially and not violently but I doubt that the organized gun nut industry has that much control over their armed, paranoid, arrogant members.
Starbucks didn't dare outright ban guns for fear of the consequences for their employees if they had to ask armed people to leave. In other words, they are worried that the gun enthsiasts might use their guns in a fit of rage of exactly the kind that produces the movement for "open carry". It is a reasonable expectation that, eventually, someone will be killed by them.
The Roberts Court is to blame for this, they have given a free hand to those who want to intimidate the country with guns, to hold the rest of under a reign of gun terror. I suspect that open carry wouldn't carry the day in the Supreme Court or in venues the RATS+K "Justices" like appearing in. I can only imagine what would happen to someone displaying a gun in a way that could be interpreted as possibly intimidating in a restaurant where Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia or Kennedy were sitting. I hope that someday soon we will find out what happens as they experience the freedom they've granted to the kind of people who want to openly carry guns. Somehow, I don't think it would be seen by them as being the same as it is for the rest of us. But it's always been my opinion that politicians and judges should get to experience the effects of their decisions. Certainly unelected judges shouldn't ever be able to exempt themselves from the rules they make for the rest of us. That should automatically nullify those rulings.
Starbucks didn't dare outright ban guns for fear of the consequences for their employees if they had to ask armed people to leave. In other words, they are worried that the gun enthsiasts might use their guns in a fit of rage of exactly the kind that produces the movement for "open carry". It is a reasonable expectation that, eventually, someone will be killed by them.
The Roberts Court is to blame for this, they have given a free hand to those who want to intimidate the country with guns, to hold the rest of under a reign of gun terror. I suspect that open carry wouldn't carry the day in the Supreme Court or in venues the RATS+K "Justices" like appearing in. I can only imagine what would happen to someone displaying a gun in a way that could be interpreted as possibly intimidating in a restaurant where Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia or Kennedy were sitting. I hope that someday soon we will find out what happens as they experience the freedom they've granted to the kind of people who want to openly carry guns. Somehow, I don't think it would be seen by them as being the same as it is for the rest of us. But it's always been my opinion that politicians and judges should get to experience the effects of their decisions. Certainly unelected judges shouldn't ever be able to exempt themselves from the rules they make for the rest of us. That should automatically nullify those rulings.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Julie London No Moon At All
Well, there is a moon tonight. The harvest moon and they harvested the fodder corn in the 15 acre field today. Not us, the farmer we rent to. Hopefully we can harvest some more from the garden if the scarecrow keeps the deer out of it. Next year, deer fence, this year, Julie London.
The "Holy Water" Story
Yesterday I became vaguely aware of stuff like this streaming from from that font of atheist chop logic, tedious anti-religious snark and instant umbridge, Ophilia Benson:
It turns out that God’s a comedian. Holy water is full of shit.
Of course it was an occasion for religion bashing, especially Catholic bashing. One wit on Eschaton (a certain source to test for religion bashing) made a remark about priests washing off their buggering dicks in baptismal fonts. Which counts as a bright thing to say among the "Brights".
Being concerned with more pressing problems, I vaguely considered the possibilities of contamination in samples taken from stoupes, the small holy water fonts at the door of the sanctuary in Catholic churches. I can easily imagine a small bowl of water that had scores if not hundreds of fingers dipped in it would be less than pristine and hygienic. You could probably find problems with frequently handled objects in any heavily used public venues. And it turns out that is one of the things they were talking about.
The study, published in the Journal of Water and Health, also found that all church and hospital chapel fonts contained bacteria -- the busier the church, the higher the bacterial count.
"This may represent a problem that has hitherto been underestimated, especially in hospitals, since there a lot of people with weakened immune systems there," Kirschner said.
Which is hardly a surprise, especially with what we've learned about hospital hygiene in recent years. I will have to say that the descriptions of the ABC report, that water from the door font was used to anoint the lips was something I've never seen or hear of. It was used to make the sign of the cross and it was never something required. I'd thought it was something that went out of fashion forty years back or so. A quick check with the three church going members of my family, two of whom are Eucharistic ministers, they said they didn't do it. None of us ever heard of anyone putting it on the lips. Considering the outraged reactions I've gotten from the religion bashers while bringing up issues of e coli and other fecal borne pathogens during kinky sex, this is comparatively low in risk. One of those who Catholic-bashed about it on one of the blogs I checked had previously announced her enthusiasm for anal sex in the past.
Apparently the problem was known before now as means to improve things were already underway even the report Benson relied on noted that:
There have been advances made for the more hygienic use of holy water, including the invention of a holy water dispenser a few years ago by an Italian priest, while studies have also indicated that adding salt (at recommended levels of 20 percent) can help disinfect the water.
Which is a big improvement but I'd think it would probably be a better idea to discontinue the tradition which was never considered to be a sacramental necessity. Or, at least, telling people of the risk. From what I've read, this doesn't indicate that the holy water used in baptism is known to be at risk, though I'd think it was important to test that too. I doubt that priests take that water from door side stoupes but from a supply which could be maintained under hygienic conditions.
To add to the confusion, holy water, that is water blessed during the Easter Vigil Mass, is mixed up in the reporters imagination with water from so-called "holy springs" which, I'll bet, wouldn't fare much worse in testing with just plain old springs found in similar locations. The semi-famous Maud Muller spring, located several miles from where I'm typing this carries health warnings and, safely protestant, if not entirely secular, it's got nothing to do with holiness. As I recall, it was located not far from fields that used to be under active cultivation though I have no idea if cow manure was applied to those in the past. I haven't gone past there in ages. For all I know it's surrounded by housing projects by now. I wouldn't drink unboiled water from any source except a tested well. And those should be periodically tested.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Getting Old
Family crises seem to proliferate at just the time of life when you're least able to deal with them. This one isn't the worst but it's really time consuming. And then there's all of the students eating up my time again. I'll be trying to get some writing done tomorrow.
The Gun Industry And Their Allies The Corporate Republicans Have Been In A Real Shooting War Against Us It Will Get Worse
A mixture of gun industry propaganda, the paranoia among gun nuts that they have whipped up, Republicans' exploiting that weakness - mixing in the racism it has also gone with in lieu of coming up with anything positive - and the Republicans who came to dominate the courts and who openly serve their party and the corporations that own the Republican soul are at war against the American People.
The figures of gun deaths in the United States are the casualties a war on the United States made by the gun industry and its political allies. They've duped a fifth column of some but not all gun owners and hunters into funding and staffing that war even as some of them become victims in it and if not them than the children in their families. The political and legal response to the epidemic of gun shootings has shown that for those who are warring against us even the youngest children are not exempt from attack, and the many victims of accidental shootings by children playing with guns have shown that even the children of gun enthusiasts are not too big a price for them to extract from us.
Many tens of times more Americans have been killed in the gun industry war on us than any foreign government or terrorist organization have murdered. And the courts have sanctioned that war. There is no immediate prospect of that changing as even Supreme Court "Justices" expand the opportunities for the gun industry to arm the enemies of the American People who are murdering us. I know that's not how it's usually put but that's exactly what they did, they may as well have legalized terror attacks on us because it probably would have ended up with fewer Americans dead and living in terror.
I'm fed up with this situation in which we have to pay for judges, politicians and even the lobbyists who are the willing dupes of those who are engaged in a terror campaign against us. The Roberts Court and the present day Republican caucus are the enemy as well as the gun industry and the organized paranoids of the gun industry are the enemies of the American People.
Monday, September 16, 2013
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Guilty Pleasures
I've got to admit I've always liked this song even though I know it's definitely regressive.
Milton Babbitt Two Easy Pieces
Duet: Hannah Ryu Piano
Semi-Simple Variations: Niklas Kniesche Piano
I could hug these kids. So good though so young.
Semi-Simple Variations: Niklas Kniesche Piano
I could hug these kids. So good though so young.
The Brightest Sparks of Britatheism Are Just Glitter In the Lime Light
From RMJ's blog, I got to this video of an "Intelligence Squared" "Oxford style debate" on the proposition “The Catholic Church is a Force for Good in the World”. The debate was held in Central Hall Westminster in London on October 21st 2009. The big draw was certainly those great historians and scholars, Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens. They were up against the incredible star power of Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe. I know it's going to shake your expectations to their very foundations but the crowd that roster of debaters drew our to listen in London came down rather heavily on the atheist - Catholic bashing side, side. I know, what a surprise.
I have never been very big on formal debating, on a stage with a voting audience, as a useful way to learn things and come to conclusions. It is are a form of show biz, entertainment, first and foremost. As compared to even a lackadaisical perusal of real scholarship, debates are at least as likely to lead you to a faulty conclusion based on superficial thinking and performance talent as they are to lead to a sound conclusion. Reality, on the other hand, seems to be rather resistant to that method of attack. Especially taking performance talent into the mix. In this particular case, with the combined erudition of Fry and Hitchens presented to the kind of British audience who would come out to hear them, it is a virtual guarantee of a confirmation of predispositions. Nothing new was likely to be learned. I didn't hear anything I hadn't before, debunked lies included. "Oxford style debate" has a tendency to do that. It has a lot in common with another show biz style stunt, James Randi's completely bogus "Million Dollar Challenge" which precludes any science happening.
Apparently listening to the entire thing was even too much for the atheist attention span because a tiny fragment of Fry going on like a 19th century British Catholic-baiter has been the most circulated part of it. In one blog post it was asserted:
Stephen Fry is the kind of person to avoid debating against. He's basically a huge brain piloting a finely tuned public speaking machine.
"A huge brain"? Perhaps that was based on his head-size because I didn't hear anything that would lead me to believe that. Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt that Fry isn't actually stupid. He is, though, a thoroughly superficial and pedestrian middle-brow Brit who went into show biz after going to one of the big-name Brit training grounds in the common received POV. Cambridge, in his case. And he says nothing daring or original or especially informed. The money shot consists of this assertion:
But on the other hand we must remember the point that was made that the church is very loose on moral evils because although they try to accuse people like me who believe in empiricism and the enlightenment of somehow what they call moral relativism as if it's some appalling sin whereas what it actually means is thought they, they, for example, thought that slavery was perfectly fine absolutely OK and then they didn't. What's the point of the Catholic Church if they say, Oh, well we couldn't know any better because nobody else did. [Said with that kind of dramatic outrage that only a Brit anti-Catholic with a posh education and acting experience can ] Then what are you for!
I guess that the "brain" of Stephen Fry was more focused on the Cambridge Footlights than on the history of his university, which was chartered and authorized by several medieval Popes as well as originally staffed by clerics well into the modern period. Not to mention the foundations of virtually all other early universities in England and Europe. Apparently Fry suspects there was no "thought" going on there until it became, first, safely Anglican and then atheist dominated.
Not to mention the beginnings of empiricism or the fact that quite a number of bright lights of the "enlightenment" had no problem with slavery, some of the early figures in the "enlightenment" were slave holders, themselves.
The Catholic history on slavery covers the gamut from the authorization and practice of slavery to it being specifically forbidden in many specific instances and strongly discouraged by other Catholics, including popes. Any institution that has lasted the best part of two thousand years is bound to amass a record full of compromise, depravity and their opposite. It is kind of funny for the self-appointed champion of reason AND relativism to insist on a consistent record in this one instance. Apparently his relativism is also relative, especially when it is relatively convenient for him to appeal to the prejudice of his audience. Ironically, for Fry's declaration, one of the Catholic theologians who held it was sometimes morally justifiable to hold people in slavery was the early empiricist, Thomas Aquinas. Though I strongly suspect that Fry doesn't really know much about empiricism or its intellectual history. It sounds more like a slogan coming from him.
Along side the history of papal and ecclesiastical permission of slavery, there is the long history of Catholic criticism of slavery and, in some rare cases, successfully agitating for its abolition, which goes back a lot farther than any atheistic effort I'm aware of. I've mentioned the early success of St. Patrick in abolishing slavery in Ireland only to have it re-established during the English occupation. There were Catholic institutions and religious orders that were dedicated to buying people out of slavery.
There is no doubt that the papacy and many bishops and many Catholics were morally compromised by slavery and the economic-political system which benefited from slavery but they were hardly alone. I remember once listening to Carl Sagan admit the paucity of rationalist and materialist anti-slavery literature and remarking on how surprising that was. Considering that you have to hold moral positions that can't be discovered in materialism to even assert that slavery is a violation of objectively real rights and a violation of real moral obligations to respect those, there isn't anything surprising in that omission from the "empirical" and "enlightened" literature. In 18th century America it was the Quaker saint, John Woolman, who dedicated his life to convincing people to free slaves, not Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. One interesting point to make is that it was the very devout Catholic, Toussaint Louverture, who was the man who overthrew slavery in the liberated Haiti which the combined forces of the American Enlightenment fought tooth and nail to sabotage for fear that it would endanger the slave power which most of them were the beneficiaries of.
If forced to participate in this kind of dog and pony show, I'd have answered Fry's Thomas Huxley moment** by pointing out that it was irrelevant to the proposition of the debate. The question isn't whether or not the Catholic Church in the past supported slavery, the proposition was stated in the present tense, it is a proposition about the Catholic Church today, in which slavery is officially condemned as immoral. Present day Catholics just as anyone else alive today is not answerable to the sins of the past, they are responsible for their own actions. That is also true of institutions. Present day Catholics are answerable for their own actions, for better and for worse.
Catholic religion, unlike atheism, teaches the moral necessity of examination of conscience and the confession AND CESSATION of sin and a righting of wrongs. If that is inconsistently practiced by people who hold that as a moral necessity, it is certainly less likely to be practiced by people who don't believe there is any requirement.
In recent history atheists who hold political power have been noticeably ready to use slave labor. I am fairly certain that more people are held in slavery, born into slavery, destroyed by slavery in the 100% atheist controlled North Korea and China than in the entirely of the Catholic church today. Modern popes of roughly the period of those atheist governments, from Leo III to John Paul II have explicitly condemned slave holding. In 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, which led to one of the major institutions practicing slave labor in the 20th century, Benedict XV outlawed slavery under cannon law. The condemnation of slavery was incorporated by Vatican II into the pastoral constitutions of the church, reaffirmed by John Paul II (by far, not my favorite of recent popes, I'll note in passing).
The Second Vatican Council itself, in discussing the respect due to the human person, gives a number of examples of such acts: "Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator"
While I don't agree with some of that passage, I'd ask Fry where he finds such a definitive condemnation of slavery - especially in its widest meaning today - in his version of atheist "relativism".
* See the point about atheism being presented as a reliable guarantee of intellectual status, entirely divorced from the substance of what is said. That goes especially for the long oral and written literature of atheist lore, especially that emerging from Brits. Quite a lot of that is no more based in actual fact than some of the more widely believed lore among biblical fundamentalists, though, I'll be frank, I was unhappy, as an opponent of fundamentalism, to find out that among fundamentalist intellectuals, there's more of a chance that they'll have looked at the available written records. I suspect that is due to fundamentalists not enjoying the same status in superficial intellectualism that atheists claim for themselves.
** That is as portrayed in Brit costume dramas of the totally phony and largely mythical confrontation between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce, part and parcel of the lore of Britatheism.
I have never been very big on formal debating, on a stage with a voting audience, as a useful way to learn things and come to conclusions. It is are a form of show biz, entertainment, first and foremost. As compared to even a lackadaisical perusal of real scholarship, debates are at least as likely to lead you to a faulty conclusion based on superficial thinking and performance talent as they are to lead to a sound conclusion. Reality, on the other hand, seems to be rather resistant to that method of attack. Especially taking performance talent into the mix. In this particular case, with the combined erudition of Fry and Hitchens presented to the kind of British audience who would come out to hear them, it is a virtual guarantee of a confirmation of predispositions. Nothing new was likely to be learned. I didn't hear anything I hadn't before, debunked lies included. "Oxford style debate" has a tendency to do that. It has a lot in common with another show biz style stunt, James Randi's completely bogus "Million Dollar Challenge" which precludes any science happening.
Apparently listening to the entire thing was even too much for the atheist attention span because a tiny fragment of Fry going on like a 19th century British Catholic-baiter has been the most circulated part of it. In one blog post it was asserted:
Stephen Fry is the kind of person to avoid debating against. He's basically a huge brain piloting a finely tuned public speaking machine.
"A huge brain"? Perhaps that was based on his head-size because I didn't hear anything that would lead me to believe that. Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt that Fry isn't actually stupid. He is, though, a thoroughly superficial and pedestrian middle-brow Brit who went into show biz after going to one of the big-name Brit training grounds in the common received POV. Cambridge, in his case. And he says nothing daring or original or especially informed. The money shot consists of this assertion:
But on the other hand we must remember the point that was made that the church is very loose on moral evils because although they try to accuse people like me who believe in empiricism and the enlightenment of somehow what they call moral relativism as if it's some appalling sin whereas what it actually means is thought they, they, for example, thought that slavery was perfectly fine absolutely OK and then they didn't. What's the point of the Catholic Church if they say, Oh, well we couldn't know any better because nobody else did. [Said with that kind of dramatic outrage that only a Brit anti-Catholic with a posh education and acting experience can ] Then what are you for!
I guess that the "brain" of Stephen Fry was more focused on the Cambridge Footlights than on the history of his university, which was chartered and authorized by several medieval Popes as well as originally staffed by clerics well into the modern period. Not to mention the foundations of virtually all other early universities in England and Europe. Apparently Fry suspects there was no "thought" going on there until it became, first, safely Anglican and then atheist dominated.
Not to mention the beginnings of empiricism or the fact that quite a number of bright lights of the "enlightenment" had no problem with slavery, some of the early figures in the "enlightenment" were slave holders, themselves.
The Catholic history on slavery covers the gamut from the authorization and practice of slavery to it being specifically forbidden in many specific instances and strongly discouraged by other Catholics, including popes. Any institution that has lasted the best part of two thousand years is bound to amass a record full of compromise, depravity and their opposite. It is kind of funny for the self-appointed champion of reason AND relativism to insist on a consistent record in this one instance. Apparently his relativism is also relative, especially when it is relatively convenient for him to appeal to the prejudice of his audience. Ironically, for Fry's declaration, one of the Catholic theologians who held it was sometimes morally justifiable to hold people in slavery was the early empiricist, Thomas Aquinas. Though I strongly suspect that Fry doesn't really know much about empiricism or its intellectual history. It sounds more like a slogan coming from him.
Along side the history of papal and ecclesiastical permission of slavery, there is the long history of Catholic criticism of slavery and, in some rare cases, successfully agitating for its abolition, which goes back a lot farther than any atheistic effort I'm aware of. I've mentioned the early success of St. Patrick in abolishing slavery in Ireland only to have it re-established during the English occupation. There were Catholic institutions and religious orders that were dedicated to buying people out of slavery.
There is no doubt that the papacy and many bishops and many Catholics were morally compromised by slavery and the economic-political system which benefited from slavery but they were hardly alone. I remember once listening to Carl Sagan admit the paucity of rationalist and materialist anti-slavery literature and remarking on how surprising that was. Considering that you have to hold moral positions that can't be discovered in materialism to even assert that slavery is a violation of objectively real rights and a violation of real moral obligations to respect those, there isn't anything surprising in that omission from the "empirical" and "enlightened" literature. In 18th century America it was the Quaker saint, John Woolman, who dedicated his life to convincing people to free slaves, not Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. One interesting point to make is that it was the very devout Catholic, Toussaint Louverture, who was the man who overthrew slavery in the liberated Haiti which the combined forces of the American Enlightenment fought tooth and nail to sabotage for fear that it would endanger the slave power which most of them were the beneficiaries of.
If forced to participate in this kind of dog and pony show, I'd have answered Fry's Thomas Huxley moment** by pointing out that it was irrelevant to the proposition of the debate. The question isn't whether or not the Catholic Church in the past supported slavery, the proposition was stated in the present tense, it is a proposition about the Catholic Church today, in which slavery is officially condemned as immoral. Present day Catholics just as anyone else alive today is not answerable to the sins of the past, they are responsible for their own actions. That is also true of institutions. Present day Catholics are answerable for their own actions, for better and for worse.
Catholic religion, unlike atheism, teaches the moral necessity of examination of conscience and the confession AND CESSATION of sin and a righting of wrongs. If that is inconsistently practiced by people who hold that as a moral necessity, it is certainly less likely to be practiced by people who don't believe there is any requirement.
In recent history atheists who hold political power have been noticeably ready to use slave labor. I am fairly certain that more people are held in slavery, born into slavery, destroyed by slavery in the 100% atheist controlled North Korea and China than in the entirely of the Catholic church today. Modern popes of roughly the period of those atheist governments, from Leo III to John Paul II have explicitly condemned slave holding. In 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, which led to one of the major institutions practicing slave labor in the 20th century, Benedict XV outlawed slavery under cannon law. The condemnation of slavery was incorporated by Vatican II into the pastoral constitutions of the church, reaffirmed by John Paul II (by far, not my favorite of recent popes, I'll note in passing).
The Second Vatican Council itself, in discussing the respect due to the human person, gives a number of examples of such acts: "Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator"
While I don't agree with some of that passage, I'd ask Fry where he finds such a definitive condemnation of slavery - especially in its widest meaning today - in his version of atheist "relativism".
* See the point about atheism being presented as a reliable guarantee of intellectual status, entirely divorced from the substance of what is said. That goes especially for the long oral and written literature of atheist lore, especially that emerging from Brits. Quite a lot of that is no more based in actual fact than some of the more widely believed lore among biblical fundamentalists, though, I'll be frank, I was unhappy, as an opponent of fundamentalism, to find out that among fundamentalist intellectuals, there's more of a chance that they'll have looked at the available written records. I suspect that is due to fundamentalists not enjoying the same status in superficial intellectualism that atheists claim for themselves.
** That is as portrayed in Brit costume dramas of the totally phony and largely mythical confrontation between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce, part and parcel of the lore of Britatheism.
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Interruption of Service
First the power was out, then there were some serious family matters to deal with. I will post a piece on Sunday.
In the meantime, if I may, RMJ has been on fire and posting great stuff.
In the meantime, if I may, RMJ has been on fire and posting great stuff.
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Being a "Skeptic" Means You'll Never Suffer Disadvantage For Your Lies.
Earlier this year I did a series exploring the interesting fact that materialists are allowed to get away with lying and distorting the truth, what some would call "reality", by virtue of their being champions of "reality". Some of them have made a career of it, some becoming rather wealthy from it. In this case "reality" means some species of materialism. When that materialist assertion is made in the guise of journalism it compounds the problem because journalists, like scientists, pretend to be answerable to enhanced mechanisms of review insuring a higher level of reliability in what they say than we mere non-journalists. In reality those mechanisms are frequently bypassed and platitudes less expensive and time consuming than careful fact checking and strict editing are substituted. In no other area of journalism is that as true as when something purported to wear the mantle of science or even just something that can be passed off as sciency is being written about. And that last venue of journalistic fraud, the merely sciency, has become an article of faith within the industry that journalism is. There are scientists who tear their hair out as they read or hear science reporters making a total hash of the science in a way that misleads their audience. But other scientists - I'm trying hard to cut down on the number of quote marks I'm using - seem to have no problem with it, especially when they are also part of the march away from reality.
To a great extent, I suspect, it is tied in to the cult of cynical manliness that replaces other values in journalism and the larger commercial and popular culture. Values such as careful reporting of facts, of, you know, REPORTING THE TRUTH NON-IDEOLOGICALLY. Ironically, a lot of it is cowardly acquiescence to an open campaign of intimidation practiced, first by CSICOP and its successor organizations in ideological atheism. This post looks at a recent example.
Dr. Eben Alexander wrote a book which became a best seller about his experiences during a long coma caused by a severe case of bacterial meningitis. The case of meningitis is medically documented and Alexander, as a neurosurgeon at Harvard Medical School, among others and a surgeon in some of the most respected hospitals in the country is more than a reliable judge of his own case. And, in the appendix of the book, he presents the evaluation of another doctor, Scott Wade, who was involved with the case*
What he said he experienced is known as a near death experience, an entirely internal experience of which the person having the experience is the only possible expert. I have never had that kind of experience and know of only one story in our family or among my friends that is sort of indicative of something like that, it happened when my great-grandmother was dying**.
I have no stand on the "reality" of near death experiences except that, since it's a personal experience, the person having one is the only possible expert on it, what they choose to say about it is nothing that anyone has to believe but it is also nothing anyone else can refute. In other words, I take that lost and unstylish stand in this world of pseudo-skeptical coercion, that, short of clear and obvious and actually harmful irrationality, people have a right to their own thoughts and experiences.
As Dr. Alexander's book hit the best seller list, the predictable happened, the big guns of the modern atheism industry started on the attack. Sam Harris was one of the early ones, whose debunking effort preceded his reading the book. And even some of the minor guns came out, such as the lovable Dr. Oliver Sacks, who agreed with the far less than lovable Harris. That neither of them were involved with the case and had no direct evidence to base their assertions on didn't prevent them from making what goes as definitive statements on what "must have been going on". That both of them have ideological positions, in which they are as invested and interested in as any TV preacher or celebrity psychic, is not to be considered in judging the validity of their pronouncements. Being an atheist means never having your motives explored. Being based on nothing but conjecture, their statements aren't the most useful for exploring that little explored filter on our culture. But a far more elaborate debunking effort is useful for it because it asserts to be reporting of fact and is presented by a major publication as such.
Luke Dittrich, a writer at Esquire magazine, wrote what was clearly intended as a debunking of Alexander's story and it is being marketed as such by Esquire's Editor in Chief, David Granger. No doubt it will become part of the armamentarium of pseudo-skeptics to try to keep people from talking about such things.
I had not read Alexander's book or anything about it but, while looking for something to listen to while I snapped a large amount of green beans last Saturday, I happened across this Skeptico podcast of Alex Tarkiris talking with Robert Mays, the author of a long article in which he documents what appear to be scandalously shoddy journlistic practices by Dittrich. If the article is accurate it seems very possible that Dittrich misrepresented what Dr. Laura Potter said about Alexander's case. She was the emergency room physician who originally handled Alexander in the earliest part of his hospitalization, on which Dittrich bases most of his debunking campaign. He apparently failed to get other doctors who handled more of the case to talk to him. Maybe they didn't want to be involved, no doubt knowing that they could expose themselves to a damaging ideological campaign of the kind that can destroy a career if they got on the wrong side of the "skeptics". If they said anything supporting what Wade and Alexander said about his conscious state during the coma - the reality of which has become important for the "skeptics" to attack - their competence would be attacked, very likely damaging their reputations and careers. I suspect that Dr. Potter didn't realize how dangerous it was to do more than issue a no-comment to Dittrich, but after his article came out, Potter seemed to regret having done so. She did send out an e-mail that said:
“I am saddened by and gravely disappointed by the article recently published in Esquire. The content attributed to me is both out of context and does not accurately portray the events around Dr. Eben Alexander’s hospitalization. I felt my side of the story was misrepresented by the reporter. I believe Dr. Alexander has made every attempt to be factual in his accounting of events.”
Considering his status as a reporter, that Dittrich failed to talk to other witnesses to the periods and events which Dr. Potter says he misrepresented, is a rather serious lapse. He didn't talk to Alexander's wife, Holley, or Michael Sullivan, the Alexander's next door neighbor, who were with Eben Alexander during events Dittrich asserted couldn't have happened. Unlike Dr. Potter, they were with him continuously while Dr. Potter may not have been because she was in and out of the room as any emergency room physician has to be. In one instance that could make all the difference in his debunking effort, whether or not Alexander cried out to God is the issue. He claims that Dr. Potter said she had intubated Alexander an hour earlier so he couldn't have cried out. If he had asked other people who were there, such as his wife he would have gotten a report less useful to his debunking.
“It happened before they sedated him, while the doctors were trying to get vital signs and spinal fluid and all that. I said to Michael [Sullivan], ‘He spoke!’ and Eben kept writhing. Dr. Potter might not have heard it. She was in and out, checking scans, spinal fluid, so it’s very likely that she wasn’t there.”
A lot of what Dittrich says can't be checked by those of us without access to witnesses, some of whom have dispute what he claimed, but in one case what he said can be clearly seen to be a total distortion, turning what was said to mean the opposite of what was said. He reported that the Dahli Lama dressed down Alexander, shaking his finger at him and asserting his unreliability. As Robert Mays points out in his article, the Esquire editors put what he claimed in capital letters, making His Holiness sound like the eternal CSICOP tape loop:
THE DALAI LAMA WAGS A FINGER AT ALEXANDER. WHEN A MAN MAKES EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS, HE SAYS, A "THOROUGH INVESTIGATION" IS REQUIRED, TO ENSURE THAT PERSON IS "RELIABLE," HAS "NO REASON TO LIE."
But Dittrich's account of what the Dahli Lama said about Eben Alexander's account is clearly a misrpresentation. You can hear that yourself because the video of those comments is available, if a bit hard to hear due to the combination of his English interspersed with his speaking Tibetan with the aid of a simultaneous translator. [Note: It was part of a college convocation which is why Alexander is wearing an academic robe.] If Dittrich had taken the time to actually listen to it numerous times and watch, using headphones and full screen as I did, he couldn't have failed to hear that the Dahli Lama said that Alexander had no reason to lie about his experience and had no history of lying so his account had to be taken seriously. I saw and hear nothing like what Dittrich described, what I heard and saw were favorable to Alexander's account. As Mays transcribes it (as it appears on the video, not in the order it appears in the article. which I indicate with elipsis):
...Then [at 44:25 in the video] His Holiness turned to address Dr. Alexander...
... [44:25, DL gestures to EA] As for your own, as your explanation, on the basis of your own sort of experience, quite sort of, ah, amazing. (emphasis added) ...
... Here Dittrich picks up the story: [45:50] His Holiness explained that phenomena are categorized into "evident phenomena" that can be studied by direct observation, "hidden phenomena" that can be inferred based on observed phenomena, and then the third category is "extremely hidden phenomena" which can be accessed only through our own first-person experience or the first-person testimony of someone else.
[46:54] "Now for example," the Dalai Lama says, "his sort of experience." He points to Alexander. "For him, it's something reality. Real. But those people who never sort of experienced that, still, his mind is a little bit sort of..." He taps his fingers against the side of his head. "Different!" he says...
[47:46] "For that also, we must investigate," the Dalai Lama says. "Through investigation we must get sure that person is truly reliable." He wags a finger in Alexander's direction. When a man makes extraordinary claims, a "thorough investigation" is required, to ensure "that person reliable, never telling lie," and has "no reason to lie." (emphasis added)...
... [46:54, DL gestures to EA] Now for example, his own sort of experience: for him it's something real. But those people who never sort of experienced that, still, his mind is a little bit sort of different. It's possible like that. [translator] So when we touch upon the third category of phenomena which is really extremely hidden and obscure, then, for the time being, for the other people -- there's no real access, direct or inferential, so the only method that is left is to really rely on the testimony of the first-person experience of the person himself or herself.
[47:46] [DL] And for that also you see, we must investigate. Through investigation we must get sure that person is truly reliable and his experience is something not just illusion of these things. [48:02] Through then thorough investigation, that person is reliable, never telling lie – and in this particular case this is no reason to tell lie – therefore, [translator] so then one can take the testimony to be credible. [translator] So the point I'm trying to make is that with respect to science and its scope for discovering knowledge, we need to make a distinction about the fact that there might be certain types of phenomena which are beyond the scope of scientific inquiry. (emphasis added) ...
... And His Holiness goes on to show his acceptance of the validity of Eben Alexander's experience:
[49:12] [DL] Among the scientists so far as I notice, the later part of the twentieth century, they [created] a sort of knowledge or field, they carried a sort of research about the brain – quite subtly. [49:30, pointing to EA] At a more deeper level there is still more mysterious things. (emphasis added)
You can listen for yourself and compare the accuracy of Dittrich's report of what the Dahli Lama said with what you can hear and see for yourself. I would encourage you to read both his debunking effort and Mays rather detailed debunking of the Esquire debunking - taking into account that Mays is obviously a less skilled writer than Dittrich - I would assert that he's obviously been a more careful reporter in this case. And, unlike Dittrich, Mays has been entirely up front about his ideological intentions. I'm not surprised that he is a more careful reporter on this topic. He, as anyone who writes seriously on topics on the "Skeptics" index of prohibited ideas, he knows he will be the subject of attacks and ridicule and dishonest debunkery of the kind that atheists are seldom subjected to in the allegedly serious corporate media.
The media takes materialism, "Skepticism", atheism, as a sort of Underwriters Lab style guarantee of reliability and they almost never bother to do even the most basic level of fact checking of claims made in that framing. And, heavens knows, their vehemently, at times viciously, asserted ideological position is never to be taken into account when testing what they say. That is the opposite of how they treat people holding other beliefs. Religious people, people who accept even the possibility that there are things which don't fit into the most primitive style of materialism are automatically held to be suspect, even when there is no rational reason to suspect them of lying. I am sure that Dr. Eben Alexander, Dr. Scott Wade, and any doctor or scientist who support them have far more to lose in their professional lives than they will ever gain from it. I would expect Dittrich will be invited to join in "Skeptical" events and groups. And his rather large lapses of journalistic practice have yet to even be noticed by his employers.
I am not more than mildly interested in "NDE's" other than to assert peoples' superior right to their own experience as compared to ideologues and putative journalists pushing an ideological agenda. It is that last thing that hooked my attention enough for me to listen to the podcast and read the articles. Does a journalist who is pushing a pseudo-skeptical, and you can read that to mean "atheist" agenda get to take the liberties that Dittrich seems to have taken in his debunking effort? Does he get to ignore possible eye-witnesses on an alleged basis of their unreliability while ignoring the possible ideological distortions caused by materialism, "skepticism" or atheism of other witnesses? And that doesn't include the writers biases and those of his editors and publishers and fellow journalists. Those are as evident as the blanket requirement that people who write for magazines either suppress any beliefs they have in anything on the "skeptics" list of prohibited ideas - including religion - to merely being open to considering their possibility. If someone submitted an article supporting even some of Alexander's book to Esquire, I am certain it would have been rejected, probably the topic of derisive laughter around the office and at the bar after work. The author would find it difficult to be published elsewhere.
* As an Infectious infectious diseases specialist I was asked to see Dr. Eben Alexander when he presented to the hospital on November 10, 2008, and was found to have bacterial meningitis. Dr. Alexander had become ill quickly with flu-like symptoms, back pain, and a headache. He was promptly transported to the Emergency Room, where he had a CT scan of his head and then a lumbar puncture with spinal fluid suggesting a gram-negative meningitis. He was immediately begun on intravenous antibiotics targeting that and placed on a ventilator machine because of his critical condition and coma. Within twenty-four hours the gram-negative bacteria in the spinal fluid was confirmed as E.coli. An infection more common in infants, E. coli meningitis is very rare in adults (less than one in 10 million annual incidence in the United States), especially in the absence of any head trauma, neurosurgery, or other medical conditions such as diabetes. Dr. Alexander was very healthy at the time of his diagnosis and no underlying cause for his meningitis could be identified.
The mortality rate for gram-negative meningitis in children and adults ranges from 40 to 80 percent. Dr. Alexander presented to the hospital with seizures and a markedly altered mental status, both of which are risk factors for neurological complications or death (mortality over 90 percent). Despite prompt and aggressive antibiotic treatment for his E.coli meningitis as well as continued care in the medical intensive care unit, he remained in a coma six days and hope for a quick recovery faded (mortality over 97 percent). Then, on the sixth day, the miraculous happened—he opened his eyes, became alert, and was quickly weaned from the ventilator. The fact that he went on to have a full recovery from this illness after being in a coma for nearly a week is truly remarkable.
* Shortly before she died in the early 1950s, my grandmother and mother reported that she said, "I thought it would be Willie who came for me because he's been there so much longer (her youngest son who died of an acute illness, probably a burst appendix, in 1911) but it's Papa who's come." She then kissed her daughters and my mother and shortly after that died. That was more than two decades before the "near death experience" was named. I wasn't there but I do know that my grandmother and mother both believed it's a serious sin to bear false witness. I don't know them to have lied.
To a great extent, I suspect, it is tied in to the cult of cynical manliness that replaces other values in journalism and the larger commercial and popular culture. Values such as careful reporting of facts, of, you know, REPORTING THE TRUTH NON-IDEOLOGICALLY. Ironically, a lot of it is cowardly acquiescence to an open campaign of intimidation practiced, first by CSICOP and its successor organizations in ideological atheism. This post looks at a recent example.
Dr. Eben Alexander wrote a book which became a best seller about his experiences during a long coma caused by a severe case of bacterial meningitis. The case of meningitis is medically documented and Alexander, as a neurosurgeon at Harvard Medical School, among others and a surgeon in some of the most respected hospitals in the country is more than a reliable judge of his own case. And, in the appendix of the book, he presents the evaluation of another doctor, Scott Wade, who was involved with the case*
What he said he experienced is known as a near death experience, an entirely internal experience of which the person having the experience is the only possible expert. I have never had that kind of experience and know of only one story in our family or among my friends that is sort of indicative of something like that, it happened when my great-grandmother was dying**.
I have no stand on the "reality" of near death experiences except that, since it's a personal experience, the person having one is the only possible expert on it, what they choose to say about it is nothing that anyone has to believe but it is also nothing anyone else can refute. In other words, I take that lost and unstylish stand in this world of pseudo-skeptical coercion, that, short of clear and obvious and actually harmful irrationality, people have a right to their own thoughts and experiences.
As Dr. Alexander's book hit the best seller list, the predictable happened, the big guns of the modern atheism industry started on the attack. Sam Harris was one of the early ones, whose debunking effort preceded his reading the book. And even some of the minor guns came out, such as the lovable Dr. Oliver Sacks, who agreed with the far less than lovable Harris. That neither of them were involved with the case and had no direct evidence to base their assertions on didn't prevent them from making what goes as definitive statements on what "must have been going on". That both of them have ideological positions, in which they are as invested and interested in as any TV preacher or celebrity psychic, is not to be considered in judging the validity of their pronouncements. Being an atheist means never having your motives explored. Being based on nothing but conjecture, their statements aren't the most useful for exploring that little explored filter on our culture. But a far more elaborate debunking effort is useful for it because it asserts to be reporting of fact and is presented by a major publication as such.
Luke Dittrich, a writer at Esquire magazine, wrote what was clearly intended as a debunking of Alexander's story and it is being marketed as such by Esquire's Editor in Chief, David Granger. No doubt it will become part of the armamentarium of pseudo-skeptics to try to keep people from talking about such things.
I had not read Alexander's book or anything about it but, while looking for something to listen to while I snapped a large amount of green beans last Saturday, I happened across this Skeptico podcast of Alex Tarkiris talking with Robert Mays, the author of a long article in which he documents what appear to be scandalously shoddy journlistic practices by Dittrich. If the article is accurate it seems very possible that Dittrich misrepresented what Dr. Laura Potter said about Alexander's case. She was the emergency room physician who originally handled Alexander in the earliest part of his hospitalization, on which Dittrich bases most of his debunking campaign. He apparently failed to get other doctors who handled more of the case to talk to him. Maybe they didn't want to be involved, no doubt knowing that they could expose themselves to a damaging ideological campaign of the kind that can destroy a career if they got on the wrong side of the "skeptics". If they said anything supporting what Wade and Alexander said about his conscious state during the coma - the reality of which has become important for the "skeptics" to attack - their competence would be attacked, very likely damaging their reputations and careers. I suspect that Dr. Potter didn't realize how dangerous it was to do more than issue a no-comment to Dittrich, but after his article came out, Potter seemed to regret having done so. She did send out an e-mail that said:
“I am saddened by and gravely disappointed by the article recently published in Esquire. The content attributed to me is both out of context and does not accurately portray the events around Dr. Eben Alexander’s hospitalization. I felt my side of the story was misrepresented by the reporter. I believe Dr. Alexander has made every attempt to be factual in his accounting of events.”
Considering his status as a reporter, that Dittrich failed to talk to other witnesses to the periods and events which Dr. Potter says he misrepresented, is a rather serious lapse. He didn't talk to Alexander's wife, Holley, or Michael Sullivan, the Alexander's next door neighbor, who were with Eben Alexander during events Dittrich asserted couldn't have happened. Unlike Dr. Potter, they were with him continuously while Dr. Potter may not have been because she was in and out of the room as any emergency room physician has to be. In one instance that could make all the difference in his debunking effort, whether or not Alexander cried out to God is the issue. He claims that Dr. Potter said she had intubated Alexander an hour earlier so he couldn't have cried out. If he had asked other people who were there, such as his wife he would have gotten a report less useful to his debunking.
“It happened before they sedated him, while the doctors were trying to get vital signs and spinal fluid and all that. I said to Michael [Sullivan], ‘He spoke!’ and Eben kept writhing. Dr. Potter might not have heard it. She was in and out, checking scans, spinal fluid, so it’s very likely that she wasn’t there.”
A lot of what Dittrich says can't be checked by those of us without access to witnesses, some of whom have dispute what he claimed, but in one case what he said can be clearly seen to be a total distortion, turning what was said to mean the opposite of what was said. He reported that the Dahli Lama dressed down Alexander, shaking his finger at him and asserting his unreliability. As Robert Mays points out in his article, the Esquire editors put what he claimed in capital letters, making His Holiness sound like the eternal CSICOP tape loop:
THE DALAI LAMA WAGS A FINGER AT ALEXANDER. WHEN A MAN MAKES EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS, HE SAYS, A "THOROUGH INVESTIGATION" IS REQUIRED, TO ENSURE THAT PERSON IS "RELIABLE," HAS "NO REASON TO LIE."
But Dittrich's account of what the Dahli Lama said about Eben Alexander's account is clearly a misrpresentation. You can hear that yourself because the video of those comments is available, if a bit hard to hear due to the combination of his English interspersed with his speaking Tibetan with the aid of a simultaneous translator. [Note: It was part of a college convocation which is why Alexander is wearing an academic robe.] If Dittrich had taken the time to actually listen to it numerous times and watch, using headphones and full screen as I did, he couldn't have failed to hear that the Dahli Lama said that Alexander had no reason to lie about his experience and had no history of lying so his account had to be taken seriously. I saw and hear nothing like what Dittrich described, what I heard and saw were favorable to Alexander's account. As Mays transcribes it (as it appears on the video, not in the order it appears in the article. which I indicate with elipsis):
...Then [at 44:25 in the video] His Holiness turned to address Dr. Alexander...
... [44:25, DL gestures to EA] As for your own, as your explanation, on the basis of your own sort of experience, quite sort of, ah, amazing. (emphasis added) ...
... Here Dittrich picks up the story: [45:50] His Holiness explained that phenomena are categorized into "evident phenomena" that can be studied by direct observation, "hidden phenomena" that can be inferred based on observed phenomena, and then the third category is "extremely hidden phenomena" which can be accessed only through our own first-person experience or the first-person testimony of someone else.
[46:54] "Now for example," the Dalai Lama says, "his sort of experience." He points to Alexander. "For him, it's something reality. Real. But those people who never sort of experienced that, still, his mind is a little bit sort of..." He taps his fingers against the side of his head. "Different!" he says...
[47:46] "For that also, we must investigate," the Dalai Lama says. "Through investigation we must get sure that person is truly reliable." He wags a finger in Alexander's direction. When a man makes extraordinary claims, a "thorough investigation" is required, to ensure "that person reliable, never telling lie," and has "no reason to lie." (emphasis added)...
... [46:54, DL gestures to EA] Now for example, his own sort of experience: for him it's something real. But those people who never sort of experienced that, still, his mind is a little bit sort of different. It's possible like that. [translator] So when we touch upon the third category of phenomena which is really extremely hidden and obscure, then, for the time being, for the other people -- there's no real access, direct or inferential, so the only method that is left is to really rely on the testimony of the first-person experience of the person himself or herself.
[47:46] [DL] And for that also you see, we must investigate. Through investigation we must get sure that person is truly reliable and his experience is something not just illusion of these things. [48:02] Through then thorough investigation, that person is reliable, never telling lie – and in this particular case this is no reason to tell lie – therefore, [translator] so then one can take the testimony to be credible. [translator] So the point I'm trying to make is that with respect to science and its scope for discovering knowledge, we need to make a distinction about the fact that there might be certain types of phenomena which are beyond the scope of scientific inquiry. (emphasis added) ...
... And His Holiness goes on to show his acceptance of the validity of Eben Alexander's experience:
[49:12] [DL] Among the scientists so far as I notice, the later part of the twentieth century, they [created] a sort of knowledge or field, they carried a sort of research about the brain – quite subtly. [49:30, pointing to EA] At a more deeper level there is still more mysterious things. (emphasis added)
You can listen for yourself and compare the accuracy of Dittrich's report of what the Dahli Lama said with what you can hear and see for yourself. I would encourage you to read both his debunking effort and Mays rather detailed debunking of the Esquire debunking - taking into account that Mays is obviously a less skilled writer than Dittrich - I would assert that he's obviously been a more careful reporter in this case. And, unlike Dittrich, Mays has been entirely up front about his ideological intentions. I'm not surprised that he is a more careful reporter on this topic. He, as anyone who writes seriously on topics on the "Skeptics" index of prohibited ideas, he knows he will be the subject of attacks and ridicule and dishonest debunkery of the kind that atheists are seldom subjected to in the allegedly serious corporate media.
The media takes materialism, "Skepticism", atheism, as a sort of Underwriters Lab style guarantee of reliability and they almost never bother to do even the most basic level of fact checking of claims made in that framing. And, heavens knows, their vehemently, at times viciously, asserted ideological position is never to be taken into account when testing what they say. That is the opposite of how they treat people holding other beliefs. Religious people, people who accept even the possibility that there are things which don't fit into the most primitive style of materialism are automatically held to be suspect, even when there is no rational reason to suspect them of lying. I am sure that Dr. Eben Alexander, Dr. Scott Wade, and any doctor or scientist who support them have far more to lose in their professional lives than they will ever gain from it. I would expect Dittrich will be invited to join in "Skeptical" events and groups. And his rather large lapses of journalistic practice have yet to even be noticed by his employers.
I am not more than mildly interested in "NDE's" other than to assert peoples' superior right to their own experience as compared to ideologues and putative journalists pushing an ideological agenda. It is that last thing that hooked my attention enough for me to listen to the podcast and read the articles. Does a journalist who is pushing a pseudo-skeptical, and you can read that to mean "atheist" agenda get to take the liberties that Dittrich seems to have taken in his debunking effort? Does he get to ignore possible eye-witnesses on an alleged basis of their unreliability while ignoring the possible ideological distortions caused by materialism, "skepticism" or atheism of other witnesses? And that doesn't include the writers biases and those of his editors and publishers and fellow journalists. Those are as evident as the blanket requirement that people who write for magazines either suppress any beliefs they have in anything on the "skeptics" list of prohibited ideas - including religion - to merely being open to considering their possibility. If someone submitted an article supporting even some of Alexander's book to Esquire, I am certain it would have been rejected, probably the topic of derisive laughter around the office and at the bar after work. The author would find it difficult to be published elsewhere.
* As an Infectious infectious diseases specialist I was asked to see Dr. Eben Alexander when he presented to the hospital on November 10, 2008, and was found to have bacterial meningitis. Dr. Alexander had become ill quickly with flu-like symptoms, back pain, and a headache. He was promptly transported to the Emergency Room, where he had a CT scan of his head and then a lumbar puncture with spinal fluid suggesting a gram-negative meningitis. He was immediately begun on intravenous antibiotics targeting that and placed on a ventilator machine because of his critical condition and coma. Within twenty-four hours the gram-negative bacteria in the spinal fluid was confirmed as E.coli. An infection more common in infants, E. coli meningitis is very rare in adults (less than one in 10 million annual incidence in the United States), especially in the absence of any head trauma, neurosurgery, or other medical conditions such as diabetes. Dr. Alexander was very healthy at the time of his diagnosis and no underlying cause for his meningitis could be identified.
The mortality rate for gram-negative meningitis in children and adults ranges from 40 to 80 percent. Dr. Alexander presented to the hospital with seizures and a markedly altered mental status, both of which are risk factors for neurological complications or death (mortality over 90 percent). Despite prompt and aggressive antibiotic treatment for his E.coli meningitis as well as continued care in the medical intensive care unit, he remained in a coma six days and hope for a quick recovery faded (mortality over 97 percent). Then, on the sixth day, the miraculous happened—he opened his eyes, became alert, and was quickly weaned from the ventilator. The fact that he went on to have a full recovery from this illness after being in a coma for nearly a week is truly remarkable.
* Shortly before she died in the early 1950s, my grandmother and mother reported that she said, "I thought it would be Willie who came for me because he's been there so much longer (her youngest son who died of an acute illness, probably a burst appendix, in 1911) but it's Papa who's come." She then kissed her daughters and my mother and shortly after that died. That was more than two decades before the "near death experience" was named. I wasn't there but I do know that my grandmother and mother both believed it's a serious sin to bear false witness. I don't know them to have lied.
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