I've dealt before with the several passages in the writings of Darwin that the Darwin industry hauls out whenever someone brings up the fact that Darwin was the inspiration and an early promoter of eugenics and that he endorsed and promoted the interpretation of natural selection and its application to human populations found in Ernst Haeckel's fully developed materialist monism, including his racism, encouragement to kill the disabled and to practice systematic infanticide. One of those, a small snip of his answer to G.A. Gaskell's comparatively moderate proposal to force the "unfit" to practice birth control. That opportunistic pro-Darwin quote-mining distorts Darwin's rejection of artificial birth control because it might lead to women enjoying sex outside of marriage into some kind of refutation of his eugenics assertions. Gaskell had clearly read The Descent of Man and understood Darwin's alternative to that kind of eugenics was a bloody, violent murder of the "weaker members" of the population and allowing them to die of hunger, disease and neglect. In the full exchange of letters, which I posted, it's clear that Darwin saw the evils of women fooling around as far worse than the horrific struggle for life he proposed as inescapable.
To support that interpretation, I noted his letter to Charles Bradlaugh, the most famous British atheist of the time, saying if Darwin went to court to testify, as Bradlaugh requested him to, in the case brought against Bradlaugh and Annie Besant for distributing information on birth control, he would testify for the prosecution. Darwin sounded not much different from those who prosecuted Margaret Sanger for essentially the same crime. So much for Darwin as the champion of women's emancipation and self-determination. Not to mention 21st century notions of liberalism.
But in the Darwin Wars there is one passage that is always brought out by Darwin's champions, in cropped form, from The Descent of Man, the famous "Aid which must be given" passage. A tiny fragment of it is always taken from within a complete paragraph, always cut off before the end of the paragraph. That was done in a response to me last night. I will give the passage, as cited, and then put it in the context of the entire paragraph. Here's what "exileetleroyaume" said about it.
And you're a liar outright, with regards to Darwin, and I quote, "Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature....We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind" (Darwin, p. 182). ....
.... Don't attempt to lecture me or anyone else who has studied the evolution of the ideology of racism, of which Social Darwinism was but one of element. It is you who have proved yourself a dishonest.
Here is the entire paragraph that escape clause is found in with what immediately precedes it:
I have hitherto only considered the advancement of man from a semi-human condition to that of the modern savage. But some remarks on the action of natural selection on civilised nations may be worth adding. This subject has been ably discussed by Mr. W.R. Greg (9. 'Fraser's Magazine,' Sept. 1868, p. 353. This article seems to have struck many persons, and has given rise to two remarkable essays and a rejoinder in the 'Spectator,' Oct. 3rd and 17th, 1868. It has also been discussed in the 'Quarterly Journal of Science,' 1869, p. 152, and by Mr. Lawson Tait in the 'Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science,' Feb. 1869, and by Mr. E. Ray Lankester in his 'Comparative Longevity,' 1870, p. 128. Similar views appeared previously in the 'Australasian,' July 13, 1867. I have borrowed ideas from several of these writers.), and previously by Mr. Wallace and Mr. Galton. (10. For Mr. Wallace, see 'Anthropological Review,' as before cited. Mr. Galton in 'Macmillan's Magazine,' Aug. 1865, p. 318; also his great work, 'Hereditary Genius,' 1870.) Most of my remarks are taken from these three authors. With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.
I'm going to give a fuller analysis of the passage to show just how much of a cynical ruse Darwin's life jacket, contained in it, is.
Notice, first, who Darwin cited in support of what he said. Francis Galton, specifically his book Hereditary Genius and articles published in Macmillians magazine, a book and articles which Galton said were the first of his eugenics publications [Memoir of My Life: Francis Galton Chapter. XX] Note that Darwin calls Hereditary Genius "his great work", just one such citation of that major work on eugenics available when Darwin wrote Descent of Man. He also cites W.R. Greg who is sometimes regarded as a co-inventor of eugenics, an article which is more characterized by its bigotry than its scientific documentation. Neither of those authors, purported to be science could be suspected of producing assertions contradicting eugenics from the very works in which they assert eugenics.
I have not read the citations of Wallace and Lankester so I can't comment on those. I will note, again, that Lankester was either working on or would soon begin his translation of Haeckel's Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte an even more profoundly demented assertion of the most extreme of eugenics. A book that Darwin cites with the most extreme possible praise throughout The Descent of Man. I will also note that late in his life, Wallace was a severe critic of eugenics, calling it meddlesome scientific priest-craft. I don't think he had expressed himself on the topic at the time Darwin wrote The Descent of Man.
After Darwin gives as scientific citations in support of what he is about to say, he begins to present what he clearly intends the reader to take as very well supported science. It is, indisputably, a presentation of the premise of eugenics:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
"Savages" either kill off or allow "the weak in body or mind" to die. The "savages" do that "soon", not later. If Darwin expected his readers to imagine those "savages" as white, Northern Europeans, I very much doubt. Though, given the citation of Greg's article, and Darwin's further use of it in Descent of Man, he clearly would have excluded the Irish from the "civilised".
Darwin then goes on to assert that "those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health". He clearly asserts that the survivors of this culling of a human herd results, somehow, in an improved state of health for those who do or allow the culling. This was clearly based on his mention of commercial animal breeding operations later in the passage, which is rather outrageous for anyone who grew up among farmers, as Darwin had, who would know that those selected as inferior stock would be marked for early slaughter. If Darwin hadn't meant for that implication to be read into his passage he wouldn't have included the mention of animal breeding. If he didn't mean that it is his fault for including it. I am not the first person to have drawn that meaning from his analogy.
I will note that just how "those that survive" would be of enhanced health is not explained. Killing off the "weak" wouldn't do anything to change the bodies of those who did the killing. Slaughtering a weaker calf wouldn't make the survivor anything other than it already was, after all.
Darwin immediately turns to the crux of the eugenicist argument, "We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind."
Sounding like the most extreme of contemporary conservatives, fans of ruthless competion of the Anglo-American sort, virtually everything that has been instituted to alleviate human misery, including THE DICKENS ERA POOR-LAWS AND ASYLUMS AND VACCINATION, is responsible for a crisis of breeding of the "weak members" of society, drgging the "vigorous in health" down. Instead of allowing "weak members" to die before they reached the age when the could have children, they were kept alive by charity and the results were that "civilised societies" were overrun with degenerate stock.
Again, no actual scientific data from scientific observation of humans is provided to support this contention, in its place Darwin makes reference to what happens in the artificial manipulation of farm animals. "No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."
Given, as I noted in the beginning of this post, Darwin's rejection of artificial birth control as a means of preventing the "weaker members" of the population from "breeding" the only alternative to preventing that happening is either allowing them to die from starvation, disease or neglect or to actively kill them. Given his repeated, glowing and unreserved endorsement of Haeckel's book,
Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte in which Haeckel explicitly calls for infanticide of those deemed "inferior" and the killing of the disabled, a book that Darwin obviously had read with enough understanding to cite it as reliable science, a book in which Haeckel credits Darwin with the final triumph of his monism, the font of those calls for murder, that rejection of the relatively moderate proposal for mandatory birth control is positively damning. An author of a scientific book doesn't give glowing citations expecting no one will look at those and read what is there to be seen.
Darwin obviously warns that providing the stingiest of means to the poor, the destitute and the disabled, such as was given in Victorian Britain, would inevitably lead to disaster. He knew enough of British politics to know that the ancient poor-laws, which essentially outlawed being poor, was "reformed" by those following the great and "enlightened" ideas of Parson Malthus, who was also Darwin's great inspiration for his claim to fame, natural selection. He obviously knew that vaccination against small pox had hardly been effective in preventing the disease even in Britain, never mind among those "savages" whose early deaths he presented as a sort of ideal situation. He had traveled among such "savages".
As an aside, I would like to know if Darwin had been vaccinated against small pox and if he, a famous valetudinarian, looked to his large family as an example of the dysgenesis he warned of if the "weaker members" "bred". I've seen no evidence of the Darwin-Wedgewood families foregoing vaccination of their children, subjecting them to the natural culling that their most famous member recommended. I have no reason to believe that, as members of the economic elite, Darwin's own children and grandchildren went unvaccinated, not even those of his four eugenicist sons or other Darwins deeply involved in British eugenics. I've seen no account of small pox in subsequent generations of Darwins, or of the families of any of his eugenics oriented followers, for that matter.
-------
It is only after that passage, so extravagantly provided with "scientific" citations to support Darwin's dire warning of the results of Victorian era charity, he provided himself with his escape clause in case anyone brought him up on what he'd just said and what he would repeatedly assert to support that passage in the rest of that long book. Here it is.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.
The first thing to notice is that, in contrast to his exposition of the premise of eugenics, Darwin's turn around to contradict what he'd just said has no scientific citations to support it. A reader could ask just on what he bases his assertions calling for "aid to be given" in exactly the way he had just said would lead to a catastrophe for humanity. His assertions about the origin of charity as merely "an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy" has no scientific support.
And, especially in the context of what Darwin had just given as highly supported science, a reader of the entire passage might note that Darwin continually said that giving such "aid" would be catastrophic AS HE IS PRETENDING TO RECOMMEND GIVING SUCH "AID". He presents the origin of charity in purely naturalistic terms, calling it "an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts." I'd have welcomed a scientific citation in support of that notion, a citation oddly missing in a book full to the gills in citations. Why something he is about to assert the necessity of, irrationally and in total contradiction to the severe "scientific" warning he'd just given, is presented as merely "incidental" is suggestive but it is not as telling as his continual undermining of his U-turn.
Darwin says, "Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature." Darwin says, explicitly, that the impulse to sympathy is in opposition to "hard reason". In a scientific book he is arguing, irrationally, for going against "hard reason" to satisfy a mere incidental feeling, merely "a part of the social instinct". How a scientist can urge a violation of "hard reason" is interesting.
Even more bizarre is the next sentence, "The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil."
Darwin is comparing "the weak and helpless" to what a surgeon would remove to save the patient and, incredibly, recommending leaving the tumor or potentially gangrenous tissue in place. The entire sentence is self contradictory and irrational. "The patient" is clearly the human population, Darwin is pretending to call for putting the entire population at risk by preserving the "weak and helpless". The negligence of leaving the "weak and helpless" to breed is clearly being called to be left in place, risking a catastrophe for what "could only be a contingent benefit". Considering the "scientific" assertion in the preceding paragraph, carrying a scientific guarantee of that catastrophe, one that Darwin would go on to support in the rest of the book, the "contingency" of that benefit is presented, by Darwin, himself, is virtually nonexistent. The "overwhelming present evil", the death of the "weak and helpless" through such means as he'd already positively admired among "savages" was one that Darwin was seeing inacted by law during the same period he was writing his book. He had every reason to know that his bleated, half-hearted, cynical plea would be drowned out by his warnings of the alternative.
And he goes on to undermine his call for charity again, and again. "We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected."
"We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind". THE UNDOUBTEDLY BAD EFFECTS. This comes immediately after the passage just analyzed. If they are undoubtedly bad effects, he just completely impeached what he'd just said about "a contingent benefit". Did I mention that this passage is an exercise in cynicism?
What he says about the prospect of "the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage" is even more cynical double-talk considering what he'd said in the complete passage*. Even Darwin doesn't believe it at all because he finishes, "this is more to be hoped for than expected".
The entire "aid" passage is an exercise in cynical dishonesty. If you read The Descent of Man you will find at least one other, comparable example in Darwin's condescending answer to "Miss Cobbe" in relation to his and Haeckel's assertions of the beneficial effects of infanticide. As can be seen in Darwin's exchange of letters with Gaskell I link to at the beginning of this post, you can see that as one who had obviously read the entire book, Gaskell didn't buy Darwin's escape clause. You can see in my analysis of Darwin's answer to Gaskell's clear understanding of Darwin's thesis in the book, he reached for his escape clause, weakly asserting that he'd written it, though he could see in Gaskell's letter that even such a Darwinist as he was saw through the ruse. So did every single other major figure in Darwinism during Darwin's lifetime and those after who I have read. The escape clause emerged from the wreckage of the Second World War to figure, in radically "quote-mined" form, in the creation of a more palatable Darwin than a full reading of him provides.
* Darwin, in his letter to Gaskell, undermines the prospect of enacting marriage restrictions on the "unfit".
With respect to your third law, I do not know whether you have read an article (I forget when published) by F. Galton, in which he proposes certificates of health, etc., for marriage, and that the best should be matched.
I have lately been led to reflect a little (for now that I am growing old, my work has become merely special) on the artificial checks to increase, and I cannot but doubt greatly, whether such would be advantageous to the world at large at present, however it may be in the distant future.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Friday, February 15, 2013
On Being Accused of Having Said The Same Thing
Going online and interacting with lots of college educated people over the past decade has been pretty discouraging. It's astonishing and alarming how the most self-congratulating of those are entirely unaware of the most basic and common sense aspects of reading, thinking and writing. I was tempted to write about the citation of Inherit the Wind, a near total distortion of the Scopes trial, as if it were fact, which happened yet again this week. In the same discussion someone recommended reading The Origin, a Darwinian novel by Irving Stone, which I've never read. Considering how peculiar some of the participants in the discussion found the recommendation to read the primary documentation, having people turning to fiction as an alternative - while asserting their higher sciencyness - was jaw dropping.
But I'm going to write about something else, the weird idea that if right wingers have cited facts in the writing of Charles Darwin not to mention other issues of the "reality community", that means those sections of his writing are harem and are not to be cited by someone on the left. And here, I thought that when someone based an argument in fact, it was something good, a step closer to the truth, no matter where that leads. Only, when it's something of interest to the materialists, it's clear that it's got to lead to their predetermined direction. Something they habitually accuse religious folks of but which they assert they never, ever do.
An angry e-mail by someone who assures me that they'll never read my blog again alleges that I've said the same things about Charles Darwin as some creationist website. It is the same charge made to anyone who has dissed Darwin, criticized pornography, noted the faults of Paul Kurtz, Martin Gardner, James Randi, Penn Jillette..... If there's one thing that the free thinkers show by their whining it's how angry they get when people speak critically about what their gods do and say. I will just have to learn to live with one less reader, I guess.
Back in the early 1960s, when I was coming up, the idea was that accurately citing what someone said was how you made arguments about what they said, whether favorable or unfavorable. People might argue about the wider context of a quotation but no one I ever encountered held that you couldn't cite what someone said.
In my Darwin battles I've always depended, first, on an adequately full reading of what he said,. noting when he said the same things in different ways at different times. If he said it more than once, especially in a book meant to comprise science, he can't be held to not have meant it. Secondly I've depended on works by other authors he has cited or endorsed. I've generally limited those to things Darwin showed he had read by his quotations or endorsements. Unless Darwin specifically expressed disagreements or reservations about what was written in those endorsements, his endorsement has to stand as his complete approval of what was written in those. On two occasions I'm aware of, he endorsed entire books by Haeckel so anything said in those books must be taken as having Darwin's approval. The third level of documentation I rely on is what Darwin's children and family, his closest associates and colleagues said about their private interactions with him. Unless there are conflicting accounts or conflicting evidence of those reports, what they say constitutes direct experience of the unrecorded Charles Darwin. They were there, with him, unless what they said conflicts with another report, it has to be taken as definitive. I will note that Charles Darwin, himself, relies on the written record in the same ways.
Nothing I've relied on in writing about Charles Darwin is unavailable in his published record, or in published documents in his hand writing, or in the published record of his family, colleagues and associates. Just about everything I've used online is available online. Those documents are all in the public domain, they are available for the use of his critics as well as anyone who wants to use them in his praise. There is no law reserving their use to the hagiographic Darwin literature. Anyone who thinks that the opponents of evolution would avoid reading him and finding the sources of eugenics, Social Darwinism and the monism of Haeckel is deluding themselves. The ideological enemies of Charles Darwin on the right are entirely within their rights to accurately quote him.
In one of the pieces I wrote last summer I noted that documentary evidence is often able to provide a far higher level of certainty than scientific evidence. Documents are written to articulate ideas and thoughts and opinions. Their value consists of how well they communicate those facts. Scientific evidence always has to be interpreted without that kind of intentional meaning, it is often far more ambiguous in its meaning.
When Darwin said something, more than once, especially as science, it is certain that he really meant what he said. I, coming from a far different ideological orientation, reading the same record am likely to come to the same conclusions about what Darwin said as someone wanting to make a different argument about it. If, as he did in several famous short examples, Darwin contradicts a massive body of other statements he made in the same book, to give himself cover, the discrepancy is notable and accusations of insincerity, hypocrisy and cynicism are justly made. Nothing in the rules of scholarly or even polemical writing forbids doing that when it is His Holiness St. Charles Darwin The Undissable who is under scrutiny. There's no rule of blog writing that puts figures of atheist and secular veneration off limits, not even for sarcasm really aimed at their ignorant fan boys.
But I'm going to write about something else, the weird idea that if right wingers have cited facts in the writing of Charles Darwin not to mention other issues of the "reality community", that means those sections of his writing are harem and are not to be cited by someone on the left. And here, I thought that when someone based an argument in fact, it was something good, a step closer to the truth, no matter where that leads. Only, when it's something of interest to the materialists, it's clear that it's got to lead to their predetermined direction. Something they habitually accuse religious folks of but which they assert they never, ever do.
An angry e-mail by someone who assures me that they'll never read my blog again alleges that I've said the same things about Charles Darwin as some creationist website. It is the same charge made to anyone who has dissed Darwin, criticized pornography, noted the faults of Paul Kurtz, Martin Gardner, James Randi, Penn Jillette..... If there's one thing that the free thinkers show by their whining it's how angry they get when people speak critically about what their gods do and say. I will just have to learn to live with one less reader, I guess.
Back in the early 1960s, when I was coming up, the idea was that accurately citing what someone said was how you made arguments about what they said, whether favorable or unfavorable. People might argue about the wider context of a quotation but no one I ever encountered held that you couldn't cite what someone said.
In my Darwin battles I've always depended, first, on an adequately full reading of what he said,. noting when he said the same things in different ways at different times. If he said it more than once, especially in a book meant to comprise science, he can't be held to not have meant it. Secondly I've depended on works by other authors he has cited or endorsed. I've generally limited those to things Darwin showed he had read by his quotations or endorsements. Unless Darwin specifically expressed disagreements or reservations about what was written in those endorsements, his endorsement has to stand as his complete approval of what was written in those. On two occasions I'm aware of, he endorsed entire books by Haeckel so anything said in those books must be taken as having Darwin's approval. The third level of documentation I rely on is what Darwin's children and family, his closest associates and colleagues said about their private interactions with him. Unless there are conflicting accounts or conflicting evidence of those reports, what they say constitutes direct experience of the unrecorded Charles Darwin. They were there, with him, unless what they said conflicts with another report, it has to be taken as definitive. I will note that Charles Darwin, himself, relies on the written record in the same ways.
Nothing I've relied on in writing about Charles Darwin is unavailable in his published record, or in published documents in his hand writing, or in the published record of his family, colleagues and associates. Just about everything I've used online is available online. Those documents are all in the public domain, they are available for the use of his critics as well as anyone who wants to use them in his praise. There is no law reserving their use to the hagiographic Darwin literature. Anyone who thinks that the opponents of evolution would avoid reading him and finding the sources of eugenics, Social Darwinism and the monism of Haeckel is deluding themselves. The ideological enemies of Charles Darwin on the right are entirely within their rights to accurately quote him.
In one of the pieces I wrote last summer I noted that documentary evidence is often able to provide a far higher level of certainty than scientific evidence. Documents are written to articulate ideas and thoughts and opinions. Their value consists of how well they communicate those facts. Scientific evidence always has to be interpreted without that kind of intentional meaning, it is often far more ambiguous in its meaning.
When Darwin said something, more than once, especially as science, it is certain that he really meant what he said. I, coming from a far different ideological orientation, reading the same record am likely to come to the same conclusions about what Darwin said as someone wanting to make a different argument about it. If, as he did in several famous short examples, Darwin contradicts a massive body of other statements he made in the same book, to give himself cover, the discrepancy is notable and accusations of insincerity, hypocrisy and cynicism are justly made. Nothing in the rules of scholarly or even polemical writing forbids doing that when it is His Holiness St. Charles Darwin The Undissable who is under scrutiny. There's no rule of blog writing that puts figures of atheist and secular veneration off limits, not even for sarcasm really aimed at their ignorant fan boys.
Thursday, February 14, 2013
An Example
Letter of Charles Darwin to Heinrich Fick
July 26 [1872]
Down Beckenham, Kent
Dear Sir,
I am much obliged for your kindness in having sent me your essay, which I have read with very great interest. Your view of the daughters of short-lived parents inheriting property at an early age, and thus getting married with its consequences, is an original and quite new idea to me. — So would have been what you say about soldiers, had I not read an article published about a year ago by a German (name forgotten just at present) who takes nearly the same view with yours, and thus accounts for great military nations having had a short existence.
I much wish that you would sometimes take occasion to discuss an allied point, if it holds good on the continent,—namely the rule insisted on by all our Trades-Unions, that all workmen,—the good and bad, the strong and weak,—sh[oul]d all work for the same number of hours and receive the same wages. The unions are also opposed to piece-work,—in short to all competition. I fear that Cooperative Societies, which many look at as the main hope for the future, likewise exclude competition. This seems to me a great evil for the future progress of mankind. — Nevertheless under any system, temperate and frugal workmen will have an advantage and leave more offspring than the drunken and reckless.—
With my best thanks for the interest which I have received from your Essay, and with my respect, I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully
Ch. Darwin
This is the full letter, from Darwin Online, not some anti-evolution website. Notice what Darwin said about trade unions from his framework of natural selection and compare it to liberal policy of the past two centuries. Ask yourself how President Obama's proposal to raise the minimum wage to the near desperation level of $9.00 an hour would survive in Darwin's "scientific" economic analysis. Unions would, clearly, have to go. It is an irony, isn't it, that this aspect of Darwinism is most popular in those states in which creationism has political power. Only, that's only ironic if you haven't read Darwin in detail. Both Darwin and conservative economic policy are derived from Malthus.
The nearly ubiquitous belief among people on the nominal left is that Darwin's legacy is, somehow, a bulwark of liberalism. The history of Darwinism as politics is anything but liberal. Eugenics and Social Darwinism (which Darwin explicitly endorsed), extremely regressive taxation schemes - taxing the poor at a higher rate than the rich to discourage the poor having children and the rich to have more, on the assumption of the biological superiority of the rich - the assertion of the negative effects of Cesarean delivery of babies (saving presumably 'unfit' babies or the presumably "unfit" mothers), opposition to artificial birth control (though, tellingly, not infanticide or abortion) .... All of those positions, and I can back every one of them up with quotes, have been proposed on the basis of protecting the population from the presumed interruption of natural selection, allowing the unfit to produce children, all of them citing Charles Darwin's authority for the idea. There is nothing, whatsoever, in Darwin's understanding of natural selection that could be considered as consistent with assertions of equality, inherent rights, an obligation to protect the rights of the most vulnerable in the population. As seen in the quotation from Thomas Huxley yesterday, natural selection was implied to negate the reality of equality. Equality is the absolutely essential holding of democracy and a just world and natural selection is based in an assumption that equality doesn't really exist and that political attempts to create equality will be a disaster for the human species.
Rush Holt is a physicist, he likely never read any of the relevant literature from Charles Darwin, his closest associates and children. I've found very few of Darwin's greatest fans who have done that. He really should look into the explicit record that they and those they passed the torch to have produced. Up until the Second World War, eugenics and Social Darwinism were considered respectable applications of natural selection. It was only after the war that the history built up in the previous eighty-six years was denied and suppressed. It would be a moot point if neo-eugenics and a refurbished Social Darwinism didn't reemerge among what Gould and Lewontin called "Darwinian fundamentalists", finding their most extreme forms in Sociobiologists and "Evolutionary" Psychologists. You can read W. D. Hamilton's promotion of eugenics to see that it is not any kind of departure from the most putrid eugenics of Karl Pearson early in the 20th century. Both Hamilton and Pearson derive their ideas from things that Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel and others within the Darwin circle wrote.
Political liberalism is not based in science, it is based in the history of human beings in the real world, in real societies, it is founded in the human experience of imposed inequality, discrimination, racism, sexism. That experience is no less real than the fossil record and the mapping of DNA, it is far more intimately known in excruciating detail than any of the purportedly objective observations of scientists. History and human testimony carry a mass of detailed information that is far too complex to treat with science, it takes human experience, the widest of human understanding to derive the truth from that abundant mass of evidence and information. The lessons for anyone who has the integrity to look at it without self-interest and the blinders of privilege knows that equality is real, it has a real and beneficial effect in the world. By the pursuit of equality and justice, life is transformed into something greater and more real than science can account for, science could look for it forever and never find it. The attempt to find a basis of political liberalism in science is an illogical folly, the attempt will end up destroying the only reason for it to matter.
The reality of equality, inherent rights, and justice, of the benefits of those is confirmed by the hardest of reality, the human history of their absence. Thomas Huxley's Darwinian analysis of Lincoln's Emancipation is shown to be false by the history of the United States, especially in the short period during which the last legal remnants of it are being destroyed. Darwin's predictions for human societies in The Descent of Man have proven false as well. The human experience of putting Darwinism into the law has shown it produces a reign of terror, not the dream of an ever better human population. Considering that Darwin, Haeckel and others held up ancient Sparta as an example of what could be achieved by enhanced human breeding, that's not such a surprise.
Liberals need to get over Darwin. They really do. The post-war propaganda is shown to be false by anyone who does what anyone should do before expounding on it, read the record left by him and those he was promoting. Until that is done, anything that is said about him will be the product of ignorance. Reading the conventional political, application of Darwinism starting in the late 19th century is a history that has to be known if it is not to be repeated.
Rush Holt became a politician when he ran for office, it is his responsibility to know that history as revealed in the primary documentation and not in post-war fables. His oath of office requires that he learn what it has to tell him.
July 26 [1872]
Down Beckenham, Kent
Dear Sir,
I am much obliged for your kindness in having sent me your essay, which I have read with very great interest. Your view of the daughters of short-lived parents inheriting property at an early age, and thus getting married with its consequences, is an original and quite new idea to me. — So would have been what you say about soldiers, had I not read an article published about a year ago by a German (name forgotten just at present) who takes nearly the same view with yours, and thus accounts for great military nations having had a short existence.
I much wish that you would sometimes take occasion to discuss an allied point, if it holds good on the continent,—namely the rule insisted on by all our Trades-Unions, that all workmen,—the good and bad, the strong and weak,—sh[oul]d all work for the same number of hours and receive the same wages. The unions are also opposed to piece-work,—in short to all competition. I fear that Cooperative Societies, which many look at as the main hope for the future, likewise exclude competition. This seems to me a great evil for the future progress of mankind. — Nevertheless under any system, temperate and frugal workmen will have an advantage and leave more offspring than the drunken and reckless.—
With my best thanks for the interest which I have received from your Essay, and with my respect, I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully
Ch. Darwin
This is the full letter, from Darwin Online, not some anti-evolution website. Notice what Darwin said about trade unions from his framework of natural selection and compare it to liberal policy of the past two centuries. Ask yourself how President Obama's proposal to raise the minimum wage to the near desperation level of $9.00 an hour would survive in Darwin's "scientific" economic analysis. Unions would, clearly, have to go. It is an irony, isn't it, that this aspect of Darwinism is most popular in those states in which creationism has political power. Only, that's only ironic if you haven't read Darwin in detail. Both Darwin and conservative economic policy are derived from Malthus.
The nearly ubiquitous belief among people on the nominal left is that Darwin's legacy is, somehow, a bulwark of liberalism. The history of Darwinism as politics is anything but liberal. Eugenics and Social Darwinism (which Darwin explicitly endorsed), extremely regressive taxation schemes - taxing the poor at a higher rate than the rich to discourage the poor having children and the rich to have more, on the assumption of the biological superiority of the rich - the assertion of the negative effects of Cesarean delivery of babies (saving presumably 'unfit' babies or the presumably "unfit" mothers), opposition to artificial birth control (though, tellingly, not infanticide or abortion) .... All of those positions, and I can back every one of them up with quotes, have been proposed on the basis of protecting the population from the presumed interruption of natural selection, allowing the unfit to produce children, all of them citing Charles Darwin's authority for the idea. There is nothing, whatsoever, in Darwin's understanding of natural selection that could be considered as consistent with assertions of equality, inherent rights, an obligation to protect the rights of the most vulnerable in the population. As seen in the quotation from Thomas Huxley yesterday, natural selection was implied to negate the reality of equality. Equality is the absolutely essential holding of democracy and a just world and natural selection is based in an assumption that equality doesn't really exist and that political attempts to create equality will be a disaster for the human species.
Rush Holt is a physicist, he likely never read any of the relevant literature from Charles Darwin, his closest associates and children. I've found very few of Darwin's greatest fans who have done that. He really should look into the explicit record that they and those they passed the torch to have produced. Up until the Second World War, eugenics and Social Darwinism were considered respectable applications of natural selection. It was only after the war that the history built up in the previous eighty-six years was denied and suppressed. It would be a moot point if neo-eugenics and a refurbished Social Darwinism didn't reemerge among what Gould and Lewontin called "Darwinian fundamentalists", finding their most extreme forms in Sociobiologists and "Evolutionary" Psychologists. You can read W. D. Hamilton's promotion of eugenics to see that it is not any kind of departure from the most putrid eugenics of Karl Pearson early in the 20th century. Both Hamilton and Pearson derive their ideas from things that Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel and others within the Darwin circle wrote.
Political liberalism is not based in science, it is based in the history of human beings in the real world, in real societies, it is founded in the human experience of imposed inequality, discrimination, racism, sexism. That experience is no less real than the fossil record and the mapping of DNA, it is far more intimately known in excruciating detail than any of the purportedly objective observations of scientists. History and human testimony carry a mass of detailed information that is far too complex to treat with science, it takes human experience, the widest of human understanding to derive the truth from that abundant mass of evidence and information. The lessons for anyone who has the integrity to look at it without self-interest and the blinders of privilege knows that equality is real, it has a real and beneficial effect in the world. By the pursuit of equality and justice, life is transformed into something greater and more real than science can account for, science could look for it forever and never find it. The attempt to find a basis of political liberalism in science is an illogical folly, the attempt will end up destroying the only reason for it to matter.
The reality of equality, inherent rights, and justice, of the benefits of those is confirmed by the hardest of reality, the human history of their absence. Thomas Huxley's Darwinian analysis of Lincoln's Emancipation is shown to be false by the history of the United States, especially in the short period during which the last legal remnants of it are being destroyed. Darwin's predictions for human societies in The Descent of Man have proven false as well. The human experience of putting Darwinism into the law has shown it produces a reign of terror, not the dream of an ever better human population. Considering that Darwin, Haeckel and others held up ancient Sparta as an example of what could be achieved by enhanced human breeding, that's not such a surprise.
Liberals need to get over Darwin. They really do. The post-war propaganda is shown to be false by anyone who does what anyone should do before expounding on it, read the record left by him and those he was promoting. Until that is done, anything that is said about him will be the product of ignorance. Reading the conventional political, application of Darwinism starting in the late 19th century is a history that has to be known if it is not to be repeated.
Rush Holt became a politician when he ran for office, it is his responsibility to know that history as revealed in the primary documentation and not in post-war fables. His oath of office requires that he learn what it has to tell him.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Rush Holt's Bad Idea: If You Buy Charles Darwin You Get The Whole Package
Apparently in today's intellectual culture, what I propose is a rather radical step. I propose that people read Charles Darwin's full writings on natural selection in relation to human beings, following up his citations, as Darwin, himself recommended. Apparently that is something that Darwin's greatest promoters in the United States haven't done and aren't enthusiastic for other people to do.
Rep. Rush Holt is introducing a bill to make Februrary 12 "Darwin Day" and it's a really bad idea. Bad for democracy, bad for science and really bad for the Democratic Party. I'd forgotten that extremely bad idea in relation to February 12, a day that, in the United States, should be reserved for Abraham Lincoln, a man whose record is a near complete contradiction of the scientific assertions of Charles Darwin.
I will almost guarantee you that, like most of Charles Darwin's fans, Rush Holt has not read both On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin's two most substantial books on the subject of evolution. And even if Holt has read On the Origin of Species, as probably a minority of Darwin's fans have, I will bet he is unfamiliar with facts about it, such as his endorsement of Herbert Spencer's interpretation of natural selection in the later editions of it. And even fewer of Darwin's supporters have read Darwin's letters, especially those to Ernst Haeckel, full of insights into Darwin's political campaign to spread the influence of his natural selection and its eventual expansion along lines Haeckel was already laying out in depraved detail.
In comments to an article Rush Holt had at Huff Post on his Darwin Day bill, I encouraged Holt to read The Descent of Man and follow up the citations of Ernst Haeckel, Francis Galton and W. R. Greg, to see that Darwin fully and enthusiastically endorsed eugenics, Haeckel's expansive and depraved monism, his racism and enthusiasm for both the "beneficial" effects of racial extermination and infanticide, and Greg's extreme bigotry. Holt being a trained scientist, might be impressed, as I was, how much of Charles Darwin's documentation in support of his contentions in that book, utterly fail as science. Much of what he relied on is rightly seen as unsubstantiated, commonly held bigotry.
It was rather odd that the comment moderators at Huff Post held my comments for quite a while last night, until I posted more comments pointing out that I'd encouraged Darwin's fans to do what so few of them have done, read his books and look at his citations. And I do encourage that for everyone who believes they know all about Charles Darwin, that he's the celluloid saint that the Darwin Hagiography Industry has sold to the world. Anyone with training in science should take a rigorous look at his science and see how well it is supported with data.
Especially look at Darwin's more moderate contentions of the dysgenic effects of vaccination, medical care and aid to the poor and destitute to see that it is absolutely not based in data of any kind. Darwin's assertions of the beneficial effects of allowing the "lesser members" of the population die as children, before they can have children, is not supported by any science, whatsoever. It is, though, supported by citations of Ernst Haeckel equally unsupported assertions of that beneficial effect, which he didn't support with data from observation.
Darwin's second major book applying his theory of natural selection to the human population is inadequate as science. I would think that a physicist who looks at it, applying the minimal requirements of scientific verification to it would find that it isn't very good. Holt, as a Democratic representative in Congress should ask himself how he could support any of the Democratic social legislation of the past eighty years if he believed what Charles Darwin said in that book.
Charles Darwin, in the post WWII period, has been the beneficiary of a cover up of the record he, himself, left, there to be seen now that virtually his full record is available to be seen online. Full, accurate online versions of The Descent of Man are available, free, as are editions of Galton's Hereditary Genius and his articles in Macmillan's that Charles Darwin cited enthusiastically as science. Galton's autobiography is also available online. In that Galton, himself, definitively said that his eugenics was directly inspired by his cousin's natural selection and he published Darwin's letter praising "Hereditary Genius" which Galton lists as the seminal book of eugenics.
Even more disturbing and in contradiction to the Darwin industry white wash is Darwin's citation of Ernst Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte , also available online, in both the German original and in the translation made by E Ray Lankester one of Darwin's close associates, six years before Darwin died. Darwin gave that book, full of enthusiasm for infanticide, murder of the disabled, extreme racism and assertions of white supremacy, his highest compliment in the introduction of The Descent of Man and in his numerous citations of it.
Darwin's numerous, extravagantly enthusiastic citations of both books only confirms that he agrees with Galton's eugenics and Haeckel's extreme racism and his generally depraved prescriptions for human society. I have looked, long and hard, for condemnation of those by Charles Darwin and I have not found them. I have only found his encouragement of both as he showed he was completely aware of what they said in those books he gave his highest praise as reliable science.
There is no room in culture for both the real Charles Darwin, as revealed in his full record and the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, a man whose public career contradicts the "science" that Charles Darwin and his closest associates were asserting at the same time.
Several times Charles Darwin issued weak assertions that he didn't really mean the appalling things he just said. If you read the entire book in the context of what Darwin said in letters and, especially, what Haeckel said in Darwin's effusive citations those escape clauses ring as hollow and quite cynical. Darwin often let his disciples articulate the fuller and more depraved things he says in a more politically sanitized form* It is those several, very brief, passages that the Darwin industry latches on to to excuse the impact of the entire book and Darwin's promotion of Haeckel and Galton. The history of Darwinism, as continued by Darwin's closest associates and his own children, during his life and after his death, shows that they were in on the ruse. It is only people who never knew the man who assert that those few paragraphs, often quite misrepresented in secondary and lower presentations of Darwin, represent his legacy.
Read the Darwin record, the entire thing, read the things he promoted as being reliable science, read how the people who knew Darwin understood what he was saying. If you want that to be the public understanding of science, don't be shocked when people who belong to groups Darwin marked for extinction and as inferior don't accept it. Don't be shocked when real liberals reject what is, actually, an exposition of the worst of right wing politics in the guise of science. Anyone who doesn't have a stake in Darwinism as public policy will reject it.
I agree with Rep. Holt on the majority of his positions but, having studied Darwin in detail, from the primary documents from him, his cited associates, his children and others who new him intimately, I have to disagree entirely with his proposal. It would be a disaster for Democrats and political liberals to tie themselves to the millstone that Charles Darwin's record is.
* Darwin's closest British associate and an enthusiastic promoter of Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, wrote one extremely racist "scientific" analysis of Lincoln's greatest act, the emancipation, on thoroughly Darwinian lines.
The question is settled; but even those who are most thoroughly convinced that the doom is just, must see good grounds for repudiating half the arguments which have been employed by the winning side; and for doubting whether its ultimate results will embody the hopes of the victors, though they may more than realize the fears of the vanquished. It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest. But whatever the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforward lie between Nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore. And this, if we look to the bottom of the matter, is the real justification for the abolition policy.
The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion; emancipation may convert the slave from a well fed animal into a pauperised man; mankind may even have to do without cotton shirts; but all these evils must be faced, if the moral law, that no human being can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own nature, be, as many think, as readily demonstrable by experiment as any physical truth. If this be true, no slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
If Rep. Holt reads The Descent of Man, after reading Huxley's essay, he won't find anything in Darwin's second major book to contradict that passage. He will only find assertions of the scientific correctness of Huxley's inverted and perverted concept of Lincoln's greatest act. For example:
- At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18. 'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Rep. Rush Holt is introducing a bill to make Februrary 12 "Darwin Day" and it's a really bad idea. Bad for democracy, bad for science and really bad for the Democratic Party. I'd forgotten that extremely bad idea in relation to February 12, a day that, in the United States, should be reserved for Abraham Lincoln, a man whose record is a near complete contradiction of the scientific assertions of Charles Darwin.
I will almost guarantee you that, like most of Charles Darwin's fans, Rush Holt has not read both On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin's two most substantial books on the subject of evolution. And even if Holt has read On the Origin of Species, as probably a minority of Darwin's fans have, I will bet he is unfamiliar with facts about it, such as his endorsement of Herbert Spencer's interpretation of natural selection in the later editions of it. And even fewer of Darwin's supporters have read Darwin's letters, especially those to Ernst Haeckel, full of insights into Darwin's political campaign to spread the influence of his natural selection and its eventual expansion along lines Haeckel was already laying out in depraved detail.
In comments to an article Rush Holt had at Huff Post on his Darwin Day bill, I encouraged Holt to read The Descent of Man and follow up the citations of Ernst Haeckel, Francis Galton and W. R. Greg, to see that Darwin fully and enthusiastically endorsed eugenics, Haeckel's expansive and depraved monism, his racism and enthusiasm for both the "beneficial" effects of racial extermination and infanticide, and Greg's extreme bigotry. Holt being a trained scientist, might be impressed, as I was, how much of Charles Darwin's documentation in support of his contentions in that book, utterly fail as science. Much of what he relied on is rightly seen as unsubstantiated, commonly held bigotry.
It was rather odd that the comment moderators at Huff Post held my comments for quite a while last night, until I posted more comments pointing out that I'd encouraged Darwin's fans to do what so few of them have done, read his books and look at his citations. And I do encourage that for everyone who believes they know all about Charles Darwin, that he's the celluloid saint that the Darwin Hagiography Industry has sold to the world. Anyone with training in science should take a rigorous look at his science and see how well it is supported with data.
Especially look at Darwin's more moderate contentions of the dysgenic effects of vaccination, medical care and aid to the poor and destitute to see that it is absolutely not based in data of any kind. Darwin's assertions of the beneficial effects of allowing the "lesser members" of the population die as children, before they can have children, is not supported by any science, whatsoever. It is, though, supported by citations of Ernst Haeckel equally unsupported assertions of that beneficial effect, which he didn't support with data from observation.
Darwin's second major book applying his theory of natural selection to the human population is inadequate as science. I would think that a physicist who looks at it, applying the minimal requirements of scientific verification to it would find that it isn't very good. Holt, as a Democratic representative in Congress should ask himself how he could support any of the Democratic social legislation of the past eighty years if he believed what Charles Darwin said in that book.
Charles Darwin, in the post WWII period, has been the beneficiary of a cover up of the record he, himself, left, there to be seen now that virtually his full record is available to be seen online. Full, accurate online versions of The Descent of Man are available, free, as are editions of Galton's Hereditary Genius and his articles in Macmillan's that Charles Darwin cited enthusiastically as science. Galton's autobiography is also available online. In that Galton, himself, definitively said that his eugenics was directly inspired by his cousin's natural selection and he published Darwin's letter praising "Hereditary Genius" which Galton lists as the seminal book of eugenics.
Even more disturbing and in contradiction to the Darwin industry white wash is Darwin's citation of Ernst Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte , also available online, in both the German original and in the translation made by E Ray Lankester one of Darwin's close associates, six years before Darwin died. Darwin gave that book, full of enthusiasm for infanticide, murder of the disabled, extreme racism and assertions of white supremacy, his highest compliment in the introduction of The Descent of Man and in his numerous citations of it.
Darwin's numerous, extravagantly enthusiastic citations of both books only confirms that he agrees with Galton's eugenics and Haeckel's extreme racism and his generally depraved prescriptions for human society. I have looked, long and hard, for condemnation of those by Charles Darwin and I have not found them. I have only found his encouragement of both as he showed he was completely aware of what they said in those books he gave his highest praise as reliable science.
There is no room in culture for both the real Charles Darwin, as revealed in his full record and the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, a man whose public career contradicts the "science" that Charles Darwin and his closest associates were asserting at the same time.
Several times Charles Darwin issued weak assertions that he didn't really mean the appalling things he just said. If you read the entire book in the context of what Darwin said in letters and, especially, what Haeckel said in Darwin's effusive citations those escape clauses ring as hollow and quite cynical. Darwin often let his disciples articulate the fuller and more depraved things he says in a more politically sanitized form* It is those several, very brief, passages that the Darwin industry latches on to to excuse the impact of the entire book and Darwin's promotion of Haeckel and Galton. The history of Darwinism, as continued by Darwin's closest associates and his own children, during his life and after his death, shows that they were in on the ruse. It is only people who never knew the man who assert that those few paragraphs, often quite misrepresented in secondary and lower presentations of Darwin, represent his legacy.
Read the Darwin record, the entire thing, read the things he promoted as being reliable science, read how the people who knew Darwin understood what he was saying. If you want that to be the public understanding of science, don't be shocked when people who belong to groups Darwin marked for extinction and as inferior don't accept it. Don't be shocked when real liberals reject what is, actually, an exposition of the worst of right wing politics in the guise of science. Anyone who doesn't have a stake in Darwinism as public policy will reject it.
I agree with Rep. Holt on the majority of his positions but, having studied Darwin in detail, from the primary documents from him, his cited associates, his children and others who new him intimately, I have to disagree entirely with his proposal. It would be a disaster for Democrats and political liberals to tie themselves to the millstone that Charles Darwin's record is.
* Darwin's closest British associate and an enthusiastic promoter of Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, wrote one extremely racist "scientific" analysis of Lincoln's greatest act, the emancipation, on thoroughly Darwinian lines.
The question is settled; but even those who are most thoroughly convinced that the doom is just, must see good grounds for repudiating half the arguments which have been employed by the winning side; and for doubting whether its ultimate results will embody the hopes of the victors, though they may more than realize the fears of the vanquished. It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest. But whatever the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforward lie between Nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore. And this, if we look to the bottom of the matter, is the real justification for the abolition policy.
The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion; emancipation may convert the slave from a well fed animal into a pauperised man; mankind may even have to do without cotton shirts; but all these evils must be faced, if the moral law, that no human being can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own nature, be, as many think, as readily demonstrable by experiment as any physical truth. If this be true, no slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
If Rep. Holt reads The Descent of Man, after reading Huxley's essay, he won't find anything in Darwin's second major book to contradict that passage. He will only find assertions of the scientific correctness of Huxley's inverted and perverted concept of Lincoln's greatest act. For example:
- At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18. 'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Didn't Fall Off
Sorry but any atheists who were praying for me to fall off the roof yesterday didn't get what they prayed for. So you don't have to give up your doubt on that point, today, at least.
Looking around the blogs I usually check out, the speculation on why Benedict XVI is really resigning was based firmly on nothing. All we know about his reasons for doing so is what he said, in Latin. If he told other reasons to anyone else I'd imagine they could be trusted to keep it one of those Vatican secrets that don't get out for five hundred years when someone stumbles over something forgotten in the library. So all of those reasons, from the mundane to the Dan Brown level BS that the "reality community" loves as much as they do over at World Nutz Daily and Rapture Ready are firmly based on nothing.
Of course, something must be behind it. I mean, 85 year olds in bad health never just decide to retire because they can't do the job, do they?
As an exCatholic one of the things that I'm finding that's as annoying as the totally baseless and absurd speculation is the ignorance of so many about the Catholic Church. With all that there is to legitimately critisize about the Catholic hierarchy and the bishop who used to be called Ratzinger, why invent stupid lies? One clue. If there's one thing that anyone might know it's that Catholics don't believe in the "rapture", which is an idea peculiar to a form of Protestantism which was characterized by its extreme anti-Catholicism. If you're going to spout hate at Catholics you should at least get what you're spouting hate about, you just sound stupid to anyone who knows anything about it, otherwise. But knowing what you're talking about is something like work, so much harder than just spouting hate talk like a right winger.
The shape of this series isn't forming as fast as my last one. I'll probably post the next part of it within the week.
Looking around the blogs I usually check out, the speculation on why Benedict XVI is really resigning was based firmly on nothing. All we know about his reasons for doing so is what he said, in Latin. If he told other reasons to anyone else I'd imagine they could be trusted to keep it one of those Vatican secrets that don't get out for five hundred years when someone stumbles over something forgotten in the library. So all of those reasons, from the mundane to the Dan Brown level BS that the "reality community" loves as much as they do over at World Nutz Daily and Rapture Ready are firmly based on nothing.
Of course, something must be behind it. I mean, 85 year olds in bad health never just decide to retire because they can't do the job, do they?
As an exCatholic one of the things that I'm finding that's as annoying as the totally baseless and absurd speculation is the ignorance of so many about the Catholic Church. With all that there is to legitimately critisize about the Catholic hierarchy and the bishop who used to be called Ratzinger, why invent stupid lies? One clue. If there's one thing that anyone might know it's that Catholics don't believe in the "rapture", which is an idea peculiar to a form of Protestantism which was characterized by its extreme anti-Catholicism. If you're going to spout hate at Catholics you should at least get what you're spouting hate about, you just sound stupid to anyone who knows anything about it, otherwise. But knowing what you're talking about is something like work, so much harder than just spouting hate talk like a right winger.
The shape of this series isn't forming as fast as my last one. I'll probably post the next part of it within the week.
Monday, February 11, 2013
PZ's Great Desecration A Fake?
Note: We're still digging out from the storm here in Maine, and they're talking about snow changing to rain later today. I'll be up on the roof trying to prevent a collapse so I'm going to post the second of the pieces I wrote about P.Z. Myers last fall. It was a lot of fun generating the material of the piece several years ago, using methods that the "skeptics" do to find avenues of possible and, I'd maintain, probable faking by the great hero of pseudo-skepticism and blog atheism. It was especially fun to prove that no matter what PZ and his Nay-men Choir said, over and over again, it was extremely important to them that the "host" he claims to have desecrated had been consecrated by a Catholic priest. Far more than to many of the Catholics I asked about it, it was clearly not "just a cracker" to the PZites.
Also, to any bog atheists who see this, I'm always real careful when I'm up on a roof, following my sensible blue collar heritage. You can pray all you want that I break my neck but it probably won't work. I'd encourage you to go for it, anyway. If I do, you'll have to conclude that prayer is efficacious sometimes. I'd better point out now that I told you so.
PZ Myers, whose major intellectual contribution, "The Courtier's Reply", I wrote about the other day, is more famous for a publicity stunt he mounted called "The Great Descecration". In his act he stuck a nail through a consecrated communion host, a page ripped out of The Quran, and more pages from The God Delusion, covered all with coffee grounds and banana peels, took a picture of it and put it on his blog with a puerile description of what he did and why he did it. And, remember, Myers did so on his "Science" blog*.
I'm not going to go into the Webster Cook incident or Bill Donohue's own PR campaign riffing off of that, PZ's motivation for doing what he did. This post isn't about his act of desecration, which I pretty much ignored when he first did it to squeals of glee in the halls of blog atheistdom and outrage from other people. I thought it was an act of juvenile attention getting, all round and suspected it would turn out to not end the world as we know it. But in the blog brawl over its authenticity I was involved in several years back, I found out that atheists are not only supposed to be immune from knowing what they're talking about, their improbable sounding claims are NOT to be treated with skepticism. The uber-"Skeptics" are not to be treated skeptically. Something I found not to be in keeping with the requirements of science.
When one of his fans gave extremely improbable details of his most famous act, as told, I asked what if PZ Myers faked it? Accusations of fakery are the bread and butter of pop-atheism and its conjoined twin, organized "skepticism". I figured it was entirely fair to hold them to their own standards.
It began on Chris Mooney's blog, The Intersection. In a long discussion about PZ Myers, and his "Desecration" I first critisized his using pages of a Quran at comment 15. In the context of the times and previous events it was extremely irresponsible, especially when Myers said he was responding to threats of violence as the reason for his claim to have desecrated a consecrated host.
I haven’t heard any reaction to the Quran desecration, though I’d imagine any might be gratifying to someone who publicly did that during a period when the reaction to that kind of act, getting large numbers of people injured and even killed. Anyone who assumes Myers knew what had happened in the aftermath of the cartoons published in the Danish newspaper, could hardly be faulted for assuming PZ would be prepared for some kind of reaction to his publicity stunt. I haven’t checked his archive to see if he’d commented on the demonstrations and riots that had left people dead in the aftermath of the cartoons. Did he comment on that?
Looking at PZ's archive, I found that he had addressed and expressed understanding at how the desecration of the image of Muhammad had sparked the violence that had gotten people killed and maimed. At comment 18 I quoted PZ.:
There are some things a cartoonist would be rightly excoriated for publishing: imagine that one had drawn an African-American figure as thick-lipped, low-browed, smirking clown with a watermelon in one hand and a fried chicken drumstick in the other. Feeding bigotry and flaunting racist stereotypes would be something that would drive me to protest any newspaper that endorsed it—of course, my protests would involve writing letters and canceling subscriptions, not rioting and burning down buildings. There is a genuine social concern here, I think. Muslims represent a poor and oppressed underclass, and those cartoons represent a ruling establishment intentionally taunting them and basically flipping them off. They have cause to be furious!
So, Myers, himself had noted the potential of desecration of religious objects to incite violence among Muslims before he used pages of the Quran in his publicity stunt. I will note that I'm not sure the English translation of the Quran that Myers used actually qualifies as desecration of the holy book, I'm no Islamic scholar, which was mentioned. But it's more than possible that just the rumor of such a desecration, as Myer's alleged he performed, could be enough to get people killed. That would be proved when the Florida "pastor" announced his intention to burn a copy of it. I have not checked to see if PZ commented on that incident but I may and will report what I might find. Atheists on the blogs I frequented condemned the Florida pastor for threatening to do what, perhaps, their hero PZ Myers had already done to widespread atheist approval. Consistency in such matters is not to be found among the atheists of the blogs. It's entirely a question of who they hate more on what occasion. Mocking Muslims is only somewhat less popular among blog atheists than anti-Christian and, especially, anti-Catholic hate talk.
But things really didn't get going until I found out a detail I'd missed in my general indifference to PZ's great stunt. In a discussion of whether or not PZ had gotten the consecrated host from someone who stole it, someone pointed out that part of the tale is that it was sent to PZ by an apostate Catholic who had brought a consecrated host home and kept it until he became an atheist, when, for some reason, he'd sent it to Myers in time to be used in his star turn. I found that particular assertion fishy.
Wowbagger at comment 319:
He made it quite clear the crackers he received were sent to him by now ex-Catholics who’d taken them when they were still members of the church. None of them were ’stolen’ by anyone.
I said this:
321. Anthony McCarthy Says:
July 15th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
— He made it quite clear the crackers he received were sent to him by now ex-Catholics who’d taken them when they were still members of the church.
Is that what PZ claimed? I find it very hard to believe that. I’ll bet it was never consecrated, I’ll bet it was a fake.
PZ's fans quickly took offense at my skepticism and in the discussion that followed, what they said made me even more skeptical than I'd been about the authenticity of his publicity stunt. The scenario as laid out by them was seeming ever more far fetched. For reasons known to him alone, PZ, himself jumped into the long discussion for the first time soon after that.
329. Anthony McCarthy Says:
July 15th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Oh, I forgot this.
—- Catholics on the threads admit taking the cracker home rather than eating it; why is it such a stretch that they may have kept it? Wowbagger
I came from a very Catholic family and know a very large number of Catholics. I have never once heard of one of them doing that, not even the ones who left the church and wouldn’t have any reason to not talk about it. I’ll have to ask someone who’s still active in the Church what they’re saying about it these days, but back when I was still a Catholic there were extremely strict rules about how a consecrated host was supposed to be treated.
I think it’s a fake.
330. PZ Myers Says:
July 15th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
The source of the cracker was documented on video.
331. PZ Myers Says:
July 15th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Of course, anyone who believes it was fake are free to do so. Those people, though, would then have nothing to complain about.
Which I thought was PZ throwing in the towel awfully fast. The You-tube he asserted was his evidence of the authenticity of his stunt has been taken down, I don't know how soon after this. I did see it when I could get to a faster connection (was on dial-up at the time) it showed nothing that could be positively linked to PZ's "host".
Apparently, everyone is supposed to believe, this Catholic boy, for some reason, while he was still a Catholic, just happened to have had video of himself taken while he was given communion. Remember PZ's fans said this was while he was still a Catholic, well before the boy turned atheist and sent PZ a consecrated host. The coincidence of a Catholic having a video of him going to communion on that one occasion is too big a stretch to be credible. Adding in the extreme unliklihood that a faithful Catholic, in violation of church law I was taught when I was six, had taken it home for some unstated reason instead of eaten it, the story is absurd. As I said, the more details that were added to the story, the more like a fake it seemed. I said that I was certain, if that's how the story was being told, that it was a total fake, either PZ had faked his desecration diorama or that the kid was hoaxing him and PZ was a victim of what he wanted to believe was true. And I still think it was a fake.
In the ensuing hundreds of comments - really, hundreds of them - many of PZ's adoring fans defended their faith in the authenticity of his publicity stunt, to which I pointed out the simplest explanation was that PZ had faked the "host" by cutting it out of paper or flattening a circle cut out of Wonder Bread or that Myers could have ordered communion wafers which are available online, something I hadn't know about when the brawl started. I pointed out there were a number of explanations, more credible and parsimonious, than the Catholic boy happening to have had a video taken of the time he stole a consecrated host, only to turn atheist and send it to PZ so he could desecrate it in the wake of the Webster Cook incident. And, as I noted, PZ Myers had destroyed any possible evidence that could prove his staged photo was a fake or if it might be real when he threw it away. That, is, of course, exactly the same thing that even a real skeptic would point out about any claim they didn't like. But skepticism is another thing that atheists hold themselves to be immune from. And note:
Despite PZ Myers' mantra that "it was just a cracker", asserted all through the incident, one thing that was proved was that to him and his fans, it was extremely important that everyone believe that it was a genuinely consecrated host. And that all must believe in PZ's Desecration Diorama. PZ and his fan base PROVED IT WAS NOT "JUST A CRACKER" TO THEM.
If you want to go through the entire thread to read how very rigorously skeptical these atheists are NOT of their great hero, you can find some real gems of credulous faith in PZ and his great act of attention getting. I will confess that I had a lot of fun raising one point after another before the blog owner called an end to it at comment 856. Really, it went for 856 comments.
* The "Science Blogs" are mostly a vehicle for conventional scientism and self-congratulatory religion bashing with a bit of science reporting thrown in. The "Science Blogs" that concentrate mostly on science seem to be less popular than those that regularly feature atheist boy-bonding hate rap sessions. At their worst they are hate-jock talk, call-in radio in print. I once challenged Myers to see just how interested in science his fan-boys and girls were by going all-science-all-the-time for a few weeks to see how many of them stuck by him, and then he could resume his Rush Limbaugh level content later. to see if his audience returned. He flatly refused to run the experiment to test his blogs scienciness. I have posted that exchange here.
Also, to any bog atheists who see this, I'm always real careful when I'm up on a roof, following my sensible blue collar heritage. You can pray all you want that I break my neck but it probably won't work. I'd encourage you to go for it, anyway. If I do, you'll have to conclude that prayer is efficacious sometimes. I'd better point out now that I told you so.
PZ Myers, whose major intellectual contribution, "The Courtier's Reply", I wrote about the other day, is more famous for a publicity stunt he mounted called "The Great Descecration". In his act he stuck a nail through a consecrated communion host, a page ripped out of The Quran, and more pages from The God Delusion, covered all with coffee grounds and banana peels, took a picture of it and put it on his blog with a puerile description of what he did and why he did it. And, remember, Myers did so on his "Science" blog*.
I'm not going to go into the Webster Cook incident or Bill Donohue's own PR campaign riffing off of that, PZ's motivation for doing what he did. This post isn't about his act of desecration, which I pretty much ignored when he first did it to squeals of glee in the halls of blog atheistdom and outrage from other people. I thought it was an act of juvenile attention getting, all round and suspected it would turn out to not end the world as we know it. But in the blog brawl over its authenticity I was involved in several years back, I found out that atheists are not only supposed to be immune from knowing what they're talking about, their improbable sounding claims are NOT to be treated with skepticism. The uber-"Skeptics" are not to be treated skeptically. Something I found not to be in keeping with the requirements of science.
When one of his fans gave extremely improbable details of his most famous act, as told, I asked what if PZ Myers faked it? Accusations of fakery are the bread and butter of pop-atheism and its conjoined twin, organized "skepticism". I figured it was entirely fair to hold them to their own standards.
It began on Chris Mooney's blog, The Intersection. In a long discussion about PZ Myers, and his "Desecration" I first critisized his using pages of a Quran at comment 15. In the context of the times and previous events it was extremely irresponsible, especially when Myers said he was responding to threats of violence as the reason for his claim to have desecrated a consecrated host.
I haven’t heard any reaction to the Quran desecration, though I’d imagine any might be gratifying to someone who publicly did that during a period when the reaction to that kind of act, getting large numbers of people injured and even killed. Anyone who assumes Myers knew what had happened in the aftermath of the cartoons published in the Danish newspaper, could hardly be faulted for assuming PZ would be prepared for some kind of reaction to his publicity stunt. I haven’t checked his archive to see if he’d commented on the demonstrations and riots that had left people dead in the aftermath of the cartoons. Did he comment on that?
Looking at PZ's archive, I found that he had addressed and expressed understanding at how the desecration of the image of Muhammad had sparked the violence that had gotten people killed and maimed. At comment 18 I quoted PZ.:
There are some things a cartoonist would be rightly excoriated for publishing: imagine that one had drawn an African-American figure as thick-lipped, low-browed, smirking clown with a watermelon in one hand and a fried chicken drumstick in the other. Feeding bigotry and flaunting racist stereotypes would be something that would drive me to protest any newspaper that endorsed it—of course, my protests would involve writing letters and canceling subscriptions, not rioting and burning down buildings. There is a genuine social concern here, I think. Muslims represent a poor and oppressed underclass, and those cartoons represent a ruling establishment intentionally taunting them and basically flipping them off. They have cause to be furious!
So, Myers, himself had noted the potential of desecration of religious objects to incite violence among Muslims before he used pages of the Quran in his publicity stunt. I will note that I'm not sure the English translation of the Quran that Myers used actually qualifies as desecration of the holy book, I'm no Islamic scholar, which was mentioned. But it's more than possible that just the rumor of such a desecration, as Myer's alleged he performed, could be enough to get people killed. That would be proved when the Florida "pastor" announced his intention to burn a copy of it. I have not checked to see if PZ commented on that incident but I may and will report what I might find. Atheists on the blogs I frequented condemned the Florida pastor for threatening to do what, perhaps, their hero PZ Myers had already done to widespread atheist approval. Consistency in such matters is not to be found among the atheists of the blogs. It's entirely a question of who they hate more on what occasion. Mocking Muslims is only somewhat less popular among blog atheists than anti-Christian and, especially, anti-Catholic hate talk.
But things really didn't get going until I found out a detail I'd missed in my general indifference to PZ's great stunt. In a discussion of whether or not PZ had gotten the consecrated host from someone who stole it, someone pointed out that part of the tale is that it was sent to PZ by an apostate Catholic who had brought a consecrated host home and kept it until he became an atheist, when, for some reason, he'd sent it to Myers in time to be used in his star turn. I found that particular assertion fishy.
Wowbagger at comment 319:
He made it quite clear the crackers he received were sent to him by now ex-Catholics who’d taken them when they were still members of the church. None of them were ’stolen’ by anyone.
I said this:
321. Anthony McCarthy Says:
July 15th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
— He made it quite clear the crackers he received were sent to him by now ex-Catholics who’d taken them when they were still members of the church.
Is that what PZ claimed? I find it very hard to believe that. I’ll bet it was never consecrated, I’ll bet it was a fake.
PZ's fans quickly took offense at my skepticism and in the discussion that followed, what they said made me even more skeptical than I'd been about the authenticity of his publicity stunt. The scenario as laid out by them was seeming ever more far fetched. For reasons known to him alone, PZ, himself jumped into the long discussion for the first time soon after that.
329. Anthony McCarthy Says:
July 15th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Oh, I forgot this.
—- Catholics on the threads admit taking the cracker home rather than eating it; why is it such a stretch that they may have kept it? Wowbagger
I came from a very Catholic family and know a very large number of Catholics. I have never once heard of one of them doing that, not even the ones who left the church and wouldn’t have any reason to not talk about it. I’ll have to ask someone who’s still active in the Church what they’re saying about it these days, but back when I was still a Catholic there were extremely strict rules about how a consecrated host was supposed to be treated.
I think it’s a fake.
330. PZ Myers Says:
July 15th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
The source of the cracker was documented on video.
331. PZ Myers Says:
July 15th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Of course, anyone who believes it was fake are free to do so. Those people, though, would then have nothing to complain about.
Which I thought was PZ throwing in the towel awfully fast. The You-tube he asserted was his evidence of the authenticity of his stunt has been taken down, I don't know how soon after this. I did see it when I could get to a faster connection (was on dial-up at the time) it showed nothing that could be positively linked to PZ's "host".
Apparently, everyone is supposed to believe, this Catholic boy, for some reason, while he was still a Catholic, just happened to have had video of himself taken while he was given communion. Remember PZ's fans said this was while he was still a Catholic, well before the boy turned atheist and sent PZ a consecrated host. The coincidence of a Catholic having a video of him going to communion on that one occasion is too big a stretch to be credible. Adding in the extreme unliklihood that a faithful Catholic, in violation of church law I was taught when I was six, had taken it home for some unstated reason instead of eaten it, the story is absurd. As I said, the more details that were added to the story, the more like a fake it seemed. I said that I was certain, if that's how the story was being told, that it was a total fake, either PZ had faked his desecration diorama or that the kid was hoaxing him and PZ was a victim of what he wanted to believe was true. And I still think it was a fake.
In the ensuing hundreds of comments - really, hundreds of them - many of PZ's adoring fans defended their faith in the authenticity of his publicity stunt, to which I pointed out the simplest explanation was that PZ had faked the "host" by cutting it out of paper or flattening a circle cut out of Wonder Bread or that Myers could have ordered communion wafers which are available online, something I hadn't know about when the brawl started. I pointed out there were a number of explanations, more credible and parsimonious, than the Catholic boy happening to have had a video taken of the time he stole a consecrated host, only to turn atheist and send it to PZ so he could desecrate it in the wake of the Webster Cook incident. And, as I noted, PZ Myers had destroyed any possible evidence that could prove his staged photo was a fake or if it might be real when he threw it away. That, is, of course, exactly the same thing that even a real skeptic would point out about any claim they didn't like. But skepticism is another thing that atheists hold themselves to be immune from. And note:
Despite PZ Myers' mantra that "it was just a cracker", asserted all through the incident, one thing that was proved was that to him and his fans, it was extremely important that everyone believe that it was a genuinely consecrated host. And that all must believe in PZ's Desecration Diorama. PZ and his fan base PROVED IT WAS NOT "JUST A CRACKER" TO THEM.
If you want to go through the entire thread to read how very rigorously skeptical these atheists are NOT of their great hero, you can find some real gems of credulous faith in PZ and his great act of attention getting. I will confess that I had a lot of fun raising one point after another before the blog owner called an end to it at comment 856. Really, it went for 856 comments.
* The "Science Blogs" are mostly a vehicle for conventional scientism and self-congratulatory religion bashing with a bit of science reporting thrown in. The "Science Blogs" that concentrate mostly on science seem to be less popular than those that regularly feature atheist boy-bonding hate rap sessions. At their worst they are hate-jock talk, call-in radio in print. I once challenged Myers to see just how interested in science his fan-boys and girls were by going all-science-all-the-time for a few weeks to see how many of them stuck by him, and then he could resume his Rush Limbaugh level content later. to see if his audience returned. He flatly refused to run the experiment to test his blogs scienciness. I have posted that exchange here.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
It Had To Be Said
Having never replaced my old analogue TV when they switched to high definition, I don't see it much unless I'm visiting someone's house. One thing that I see enough to have developed a deep hatred of is those spots with the icy blonde lying on behalf of the Petroleum Institute. They're on all the time but especially during "news" programming. Those are as good an example of why broadcasters shouldn't be free to carry lies as it is possible to find. The incessantly repeated lies, quite often by a woman hired on the belief that women can lie for big money more credibly than men, are intended to have a real life effect on how people think and act. And by the time you've heard the lie for the thousandth time, it's undeniably implanted in the mind. Unless there is countering information to inform you that it's a lie, it's reasonable to believe the lie will be effective.
Looking it up online I find that the blonde oil shill is named Brooke Alexander who has had roles on a couple of soap operas, several nighttime shows and was hired by those organs of no-credibility, CNN and FOX "News" in a "journalistic capacity". Clearly she's far more successful as a professional liar than as an actor.
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