Crush Seth MacFarlane's Nuts
New posts up at the above link.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Friday, March 1, 2013
Carla Bley Trio Ups and Downs
This is Carla Bley, Steve Swallow and Andy Sheppard in live concert. A much different performance from the version I posted last year or so.
Thursday, February 28, 2013
The Suppression Of Clearly Bigoted Words Is A Necessary Step
Note: This piece from right before the election in 2008 is reposted in response to the wit at the Onion who thought it was clever and kewly transgressive to call a wonderful 9-year-old actress a "cunt" and the idiots who thought it was kewl and OK to do that because, you know, it was Free Speech being exercised. Free speech absolutism is the lefty version of second amendment gun nuttery. And, yes, I do mean the boys and girls on so many of the lefty blogs when I say that. Anyone who could call a little girl a "cunt" should be drummed out of the left and out of the media as an example to the next such wit tempted to use a child like that.
As entire classes of people are still subjected to destructive inequality and the protest against that inequality has been made to seem passé, the far easier to assert equality of words seems to have become entrenched as an assumption. This is, to not mince words, stupid.
Words aren't enumerated as a class having rights under the Bill of Rights, The Civil Rights amendments or the Civil Rights Act, they are not all created equal. They are not all “perfectly good words”. Some of them should be suppressed. Some should be hunted to extinction, remaining only as mounted, academic specimens.
Achieving the suppression of the language of bigotry is straight forward, you suppress it. You make the use of the words uncomfortable and an invitation to be hassled. For example, the blog boys use the word “cunt”. The way to make them uncomfortable is to constantly call them on it when they use it. It’s simple as that. They refer to women in that way, you make that uncomfortable for them, you harass them whenever they say it. You make it not worth their wile to use the word. When they whine about your calling them on it, you just do it anyway. They pout about you ruining their fun and boy bonding, you ignore it and keep calling them on it while taking pleasure at their discomfort. Their discomfort is a sign your plan is working, I see nothing wrong with enjoying it, privately. Of course, you've got to give up using language like that yourself, you've got to have credibility.
Whenever you propose something like this you can count on two things happening. The first is the invocation of “freedom of speech” or “The First Amendment”. I’m happy to report to you that we are not bound in our personal lives to uphold the “speech rights” of bigots. As I never tire of pointing out, we are not the government. You’d think the left has been out of power long enough to not suffer from that mistaken idea. If a commercial establishment can suppress the use of profane language on its property, individual people certainly have that right in the common ground of life. Those we target for this kind of coercion have no recourse to constitutional relief from us. When it comes to bigots, it’s a mistake to worry about their right to promote the violation of other peoples’ rights. Let them do the worrying. And it gets better, there is no reason for us to treat bigotry as equal to other modes of human interaction. It intentionally hurts people, it has no rightful place in the world. And, let it not be forgotten, strident objection to hateful words is just as much an expression as bigotry, only it doesn't try to harm entire groups of people on the basis of who they are.
The second thing brought up is whether or not it is the most important issue, the matter of priorities. Who knows what’s “most important”? This election season has certainly shown that it isn't a little problem, IT HURTS MEMBERS OF OUR CAUCUS. If the protection from harm to our members isn't a priority for us then we've got to rearrange our priorities. It also divides the left, it harms our efforts to make progress. This is a big deal, as well, because it prevents other important things from happening. This is a fact to use against blog bigots as well. Calling Ann Coulter sexist names doesn't hurt her but it hurts her opposition which then has to deal with the division of the left due to the childishness of these jerks. It’s not as if we've got a rip roaring huge majority to work with as it is and can spare the members or time spent trying to patch things up. If anyone wants to be on the left, the minimal requirement is that they not divide and distract those who are doing the real work and so enable our opponents. If they choose to run their mouths at our expense, kick them out. It’s not as if the Coulters of the world aren't vulnerable on the basis of things they say, themselves, many of those on the grounds of bigotry. Being a bigot in response weakens your position against someone like her.
Those words and similar ones shouldn't be tolerated no matter what comedian or pop star has used them in their act, no matter how gratifyingly transgressive they make the user feel. People using them have to be made to feel too hot to mistake it as ‘cool’. The soft-handed, man-talkin’, tough guys who, in reality, risk nothing in life more serious than repetitive stress should be derided and made to feel the fools they are.
Not using those words is a part of removing bad habits of thinking from the common discourse. If I was planning a strategy I’d say go after the clear cut offenses first, the easiest ones to target. Just getting rid of those annoyances would be worth the effort, I’d think. I don’t want people thinking in those terms and I do think that is important. I don’t think pay equity or Title Nine or the equal right to public accommodation would have ever become law if those terms were an acceptable default way to think about the covered classes in the voting public. It was certainly no coincidence that gay rights legislation finally started making it out of committees as it became less acceptable to target us with bigoted language and that those reforms fail in those places where verbal gay bashing is still tolerated It really matters.
As a member of a massively targeted minority group, I've never been much on adopting the language of the enemy. I never believed that it would subvert the intentions of the ones who really meant it. You can’t redeem a term of hatred in common use by using it yourself, you can’t capture it and change its meaning. Words obtain their meaning by their history and their contemporary common use. Words of bigotry are defined by bigots who use them. No matter what the language-pop-sci folk would lead you to believe.
The use of bigotry in “comedy” isn't funny, even when used by otherwise funny comedians. Though it will get you a cheap laugh from other schmucks. Hearing bigotry freely expressed makes it seem acceptable and it influences the thinking of those who might go either way. It gives permission.
It certainly snowballed on the blogs of the left in ways I’d never have believed before last year. It was a real shock that even anti-gay invective is less accepted than the most revolting terms of misogyny. But I’ve also seen real racism, religious bigotry, ethnic bigotry and other forms of expression destructive of the effort to promote real equality and freedom. It all has to be called, it’s not as if we don’t have real ideas and problems that need to be addressed. Making all forms of bigotry out of bounds is helpful to making any form of bigotry unacceptable. The partial acceptance of bigotry is a stupid blunder.
I am just about certain that the real names of the ideals of liberalism, freedom, equality, yes, especially, love, would be considered more outré than the words of real, explicit, misogyny on some blogs of the left. And racism on others, While that might be due to their overuse in some rather gooey contexts, their intrinsically negative context doesn't seem to have rendered the hateful words unfashionable in the same way. Though they've certainly gotten old.
It's one of the more irrational aspects of this that those words, the sure sign of childish, lazy thinking, are, somehow, mistaken to be a sign of adulthood. I don't know what you can do about that except to refuse to go along with that stupid idea.
So feel free to be inventive, be clever, be scathing in your suppression of the “c” word and others worthy of destruction. If you don't like it, you have every right to say so. And do it every time.
Addendum: There is a third thing that can happen in this kind of effort.
I firmly suspect that there is a constant temptation in people to be as bad as they figure they can get away with, though some people regularly seem to be able to resist. This effort can’t be seen as a license to do another stupid, divisive and time wasting* thing, inventing convenient, imaginary implied slights.
In our pop-psych addled age, the temptation of those on the losing end of an argument is sometimes to go from what’s explicitly stated to conveniently asserting things like “body language” and “unconscious intentions”, which aren’t stated explicitly. Usually it is the minutia of nuance beloved of some leftists that elicits that response rather than in the important, commonly agreed to, difference. Occult, interior motives are asserted to be the unseen taint, the mark of the bad seed, in otherwise sound leftists, asserting their otherwise reasoned arguments to be functionally unsound for the vaguest of reasons. I’d say that splitting those hairs should wait until the explicit expression of bigotry is effectively eliminated. That’s going to be a big enough job to start with. Effectively targeting those who are explicit bigots might help to eliminate those in the second tier of bigoted expression without spending time on them.
As anyone who has ever played cards knows, it’s a hallmark of the unexpressed idea that you really don’t know what it might mean or even if it’s there to begin with. Maybe it exists only in your imagination. If it’s really there it will find explicit expression, if it doesn't you are free to assume that the interpretation more favorable to you is what was intended all along and to act accordingly. I've found that assuming that sometimes has the gratifying result of avoiding a pointless argument and sometimes actually turns things in a more productive direction than angry confrontation over the imagined slight. On many occasions, when the assumed interior intention becomes clear, it was quite harmless anyway.
* I've noticed in meetings of non-profits something like this often takes the form of “not wanting to set a precedent”. Who hasn't sat though twenty-five minute of loftily vicious and absurd argument about just such a “precedent” issue? Well, unless explicitly stated, non-profits can pick and choose on the basis of individual merits and their own contemporary situation without worrying about precedents of that kind. I've never yet seen the bylaws of one that forbids that.
The Legacy of Two Really Bad Popes
Benedict XVI's retirement is probably going to be the most popular thing he's done as pope. Lacking any pastoral talents or inclinations, lacking the show-biz acumen of his predecessor, he hasn't been a popular pope. As the church continues to suffer through the greatest modern scandal of priestly pedophile rape and abuse and hierarchical enabling and cover up, he has misspent his time reasserting the centralized power of the pope and his inner circle and reviving neo-medieval aspects of liturgy. In those he follows John Paul II, who made no secret of his desire to have Cardinal Ratzinger follow him. The two last popes have done more to discredit the papacy than any modern pope, with the possible exceptions of Pius XII, another neo-medievalist.
From what I can see, the bishops and cardinals appointed by those popes will continue to alienate Catholics, who are either leaving the church or going underground in large numbers. I don't get the sense from any of those bishops or cardinals I've read or heard that they care about The Church, defined by Vatican II as The People. They care about their power, their control of finances and their ability to rise by the impotent attempts to force Catholics and others to abide by their hypocritical dogmas on sexual morality. The same hierarchs who have banned remarrying, divorced Catholic lay people from receiving communion have not done much to ensure that priests who have raped and molested children are not in the position to say mass and enforce that ban. They have done nothing by way of ending the scandal by ending the rape of children voluntarily. They've been shown, by their own documents to have done virtually nothing until forced to by revelations by the secular media and prosecutors.
The hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the clergy, even some of the non-ordained religious communities, are in serious need of a complete cleansing. There is no sign that the non-married men who run things will ever do that unless they are forced to and they will resist any movement to change things. The men who run things now, the cardinals and bishops were appointed first and foremost for their devotion and service to the hierarchy as it has been under these two bad popes. The medieval, monarchical structure of church governance will be what they lean on to protect their power and control of property and finance. It's not got an awful lot to do with the gospel of Jesus who told preachers that they were to carry no money, to wear the bare minimum in clothing, even going without shoes at all, never mind swapping out red Prada for brown, hand made Mexican shoes. That Benedict XVI is more well known for his shoes than any move for reform or any great adherence to the teachings of Jesus is his own personal scandal, it has earned him an undistinguished place in the roll of popes through history. He will probably be best remembered for his retirement, which will probably live as his most popular act as pope.
It will be a real miracle if his successor isn't as bad.
From what I can see, the bishops and cardinals appointed by those popes will continue to alienate Catholics, who are either leaving the church or going underground in large numbers. I don't get the sense from any of those bishops or cardinals I've read or heard that they care about The Church, defined by Vatican II as The People. They care about their power, their control of finances and their ability to rise by the impotent attempts to force Catholics and others to abide by their hypocritical dogmas on sexual morality. The same hierarchs who have banned remarrying, divorced Catholic lay people from receiving communion have not done much to ensure that priests who have raped and molested children are not in the position to say mass and enforce that ban. They have done nothing by way of ending the scandal by ending the rape of children voluntarily. They've been shown, by their own documents to have done virtually nothing until forced to by revelations by the secular media and prosecutors.
The hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the clergy, even some of the non-ordained religious communities, are in serious need of a complete cleansing. There is no sign that the non-married men who run things will ever do that unless they are forced to and they will resist any movement to change things. The men who run things now, the cardinals and bishops were appointed first and foremost for their devotion and service to the hierarchy as it has been under these two bad popes. The medieval, monarchical structure of church governance will be what they lean on to protect their power and control of property and finance. It's not got an awful lot to do with the gospel of Jesus who told preachers that they were to carry no money, to wear the bare minimum in clothing, even going without shoes at all, never mind swapping out red Prada for brown, hand made Mexican shoes. That Benedict XVI is more well known for his shoes than any move for reform or any great adherence to the teachings of Jesus is his own personal scandal, it has earned him an undistinguished place in the roll of popes through history. He will probably be best remembered for his retirement, which will probably live as his most popular act as pope.
It will be a real miracle if his successor isn't as bad.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Writer's Query
My dearest friend who died last week used to encourage me to write less and to put what I choose to say in more finished form. I'm a really crumby editor. I'm thinking of posting pieces only once or twice a week on a fixed schedule, probably Thursdays and Sundays, probably posting music on other days.
Please write to me or use the comments to let me know what you think.
Please write to me or use the comments to let me know what you think.
Missing Links
Anyone who is sexually aroused by accounts of murder, torture and domination is demented and dangerous. They should always be suspected as capable of acting out what they've read. As the lives of so many sadistic sex murderers has shown. There, I said it. Any intellectual who presents erotic accounts of murder, torture and domination as anything other than entirely unacceptable is even more dangerous and history proves that, as well. There, I've said that, too.
Needing something to think about, thinking about Pier Paolo Pasolini's massively degenerate movie, Salo: 120 Days in Sodom, trying to fill in what I already knew, I've come across a link with the interrupted series about Darwinism I've been working on. The links and strands of history and intellectual activity are extremely twisted and embedded in what are held to be unrelated ideas and ideologies but the more I've looked in the past several days, the more obvious those links are.
As many another piece of stupid and immoral and amoral so-called art, these days, Salo was openly copied from an earlier piece of depravity. That's supposed to mean it's high art, what with the historical referencing and an assumption of research and the opportunity of scholarly papers saying that, and all. Such is a consequence of judging art on the basis of what prestigious critics say, getting talked out of acknowledging what you're seeing and hearing right in front of you.
The book Pasolini used as a model was The Marquis de Sade's Les 120 journées de Sodome or l'école du libertinage. I haven't read all of that book, having slogged my way through most of of de Sade's Justine much earlier. I was a teenager and had been told it was naughty, risque art. That book provided enough information about his diseased mind to suffice, what I've seen of his other scribbleage, including Les 120 journées merely confirmed what I had concluded about forty years ago.
The most extensive treatment of his thinking I've read was Simone de Beauvoir's unintentionally revealing, Must We Burn Sade? From that I found confirmation of the conclusion that her brand of existentialism was a crock of silliness. It also led to the inevitable conclusion that what De Beauvoir had to say about the rights of women should be checked for counterproductive features.
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Let me pause to say, intellectual movements and, even more so, movements that aspire to politics and actually changing real life can't both hold assertions of the rights dignity, self determination of women, gay folk and others and also contain an assertion of the rights of the enemies of women, gay folk and others TO COMPLETELY VIOLATE THE BEING OF THE PEOPLE who those goods exist to benefit. De Beauvoir, as a professional writer has the same defect that so many who make their living by writing have, a superstitious belief that all writing is valuable and that words on paper or images and words on a screen have rights superior to those who can be murdered or enslaved or oppressed by those words and images. Having lived through the Nazi occupation of France it would seem that the great intellectuals don't seem to get that there is a basic and total difference between the assertion of equality and rights and the assertions made by de Sade and other such promoters of the torture, rape and murder, most often OF WOMEN. As if there wasn't already enough of that happening in every, single country without it being encouraged by decadent intellectuals claiming to be feminists or champions of freedom. You wonder how intellectuals can be assumed to be capable of learning anything from their basis in intellectualism if they've missed those things.
I could change every reference to women in the last paragraph to gay men and exactly the same thing could be said. By an enormous percentage the foremost literary representation of gay men is in pornography, the degradation, bondage, enslavement and sadistic use of a weaker man by a stronger man is one of the most commonly found themes of gay porn. I'm convinced that gay porn has been a force to turn gay men against each other, to become each other's oppressors, presenting gay sex as a pathological expression of self-hatred, murdering the souls of gay men far more effectively than any fundamentalist campaigners have. Struggle against fundamentalist opposition has positive effects, the porn industry does their hateful work without eliciting a resistance. The same can be said of the purportedly "feminist" promotion of pornography, sometimes funded by straight, male pornographer.
The recent statements by a claimant to the mantle of de Beauvoir, Elisabeth Badinter support that idea that any citation of her should not be regarded as above suspicion. As I recently pointed out, if you buy into the identity of a writer and take them as an authority, you might get a lot more than you wanted. To put a point on that, the pseudo-feminist, pseudo-intellectual, Camille Paglia, has echoed that earlier piece of insanely over-respected crot about de Sade. Any rational witness can see that feminism had been down taken the same destructive detour into counterproductive futility that gay liberation and, indeed, the entire left has, by such "feminists". Nothing proves that as clearly as the embrace of the most extreme expressions of misogyny in pornography and the sex industry. There are feminist critics of, not only de Sade but the pseudo-feminist support of it, and the far more extensive slamming of those feminist critics only compounds the validity of what they said.
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The title of the book is worth a post in itself, Like Salo, The 120 days of Sodom or the school of libertinism ends in the death of the kidnapped victims of an orgy of sadistic and degrading homicidal sex, most of them women, on behalf of aristocratic "scholars". The basis of that is the sexually gratifying ability of men with more money and power to turn other people into objects for them to consume. Clearly, de Sade presented his imagined criminal insanity as lessons to be followed. That is the kind of thing that de Beauvoir, Pasolini and other high intellectual champions of the book are promoting as a great blow for liberty, most certainly not for equality, though of a fraternity excluding women and the other victims of fascistic frat brothers such as will take de Sade's course in how to exercise their, exclusive, liberty. Any alleged feminist who would assert that is anything except something to resist and suppress would be self-impeached past the point of ever being taken seriously by an intellectual milieu based in reason and democratic values. The ability of such to survive as an intellectual figure is a general indictment of the culture that allows that survival. Liberty to oppress is something that has always been claimed by oligarchs and aristocrats, it is no accident that the books libertine heroes are aristocrats.
Pasolini produced an intentionally disgusting and depraved simulated snuff porn movie, pretending that it was more than that. He was an intellectual. I read somewhere that one of his circles of hell, "The circle of shit" was calimed by him to be a commentary on the industrial food industry. Which was something I would almost guarantee that not a single person who hadn't read his claim would have gotten from the movie. His transposition of de Sade's depravity to the waning days of fascist Italy is, similarly, a shallow pose to give his piece of pornography a skim coat of intellectual-political polish. And in that Pasolini merely cheapens the literary genre that actually does that.
When I found out, after seeing the movie, that a 17-year-old boy who Pasolini had just had paid sex with was arrested for his brutal murder I can't say that I was terribly surprised or upset. Given what he had presented in Salo, I can imagine Pasolini giving the kid more than enough reason for an enraged reaction. Pasolini was more than three times the boy's age and he was, beyond doubt, far richer and more powerful than the boy was. I can only imagine what might have happened to the boy. I don't believe the cover stories about political and mafia involvement.
The intellectual response to both the book and the movie have been valuable only in showing how dishonest, hypocritical and stupid the intellectuals can be, telling lies that they really don't believe, themselves. It's more true now than ever that a large part of the semi-official intelligensia tell each other things that are known to be acceptable to their common consensus, with small variations as points of view fall, slightly out of style, only to reemerge in retro fashion. Intellectual life has a lot in common with the fashion industry, in which what sells is virtuous because it sells. Perhaps the least viable variations in those fashions are those that contain moral requirements of real equality that could cost the elite, which the same intelligentsia largely, service.
The promotion of sadistic sexual murder, sexual enslavement, sexual torture, sexual imprisonment which is what the entire positive view of de Sade and Pasolini's movie really boils down to is bad enough as an intellectual pose. The entire enterprise has a far wider political and historical presence in some of the most profoundly evil expressions of 20th century history.
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De Sade's manuscript of Les 120 journées de Sodome, written while he was imprisoned at the Bastille, was lost during the looting of the building at the start of the revolution. De Sade believed it had been destroyed - he said he "wept tears of blood" over it. But it, somehow, survived to be first published in 1905 by the founder of "scientific" sexology, the psycothreapist Iwan Bloch, a colleague of Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld. The NOVEL, the product of a clearly diseased and officially insane mind, was presented as a scientifically important document in that pseudo-science, it should be asked what kind of a base that was to build on. Having just found out about Iwan Bloch's connection to the book, it's a question that is even more important than it first seemed.
Iwan Bloch is a name I'd come across only once before, during my research of Ernst Haeckel, in a short notice about the symposium organized in honor of Haeckel's 80th birthday**, in February 1914.
Bloch said that Haeckel was:
A St. George who has slain the dragon of the maladies of modern man and has fearlessly marked all the dualistic survivals of prescientific culture as obstacles to the mental and moral progress of humanity.
Which you might be rather astonished to read if you read much of Haeckel. Anyone who had could hardly have missed such typical passages as this one:*
In our day the number of lunatics in civilized countries is, on the average, five-sixths per thousand. If the total population of Europe is put at three hundred and ninety to four hundred millions, we have at least two million lunatics among them, and of these more than two hundred thousand are incurable. What an enormous mass of suffering these figures indicate for the invalids themselves, and what a vast amount of trouble and sorrow for their families, what a huge private and public expenditure! How much of this pain and expense could be spared if people could make up their minds to free the incurable from their indescribable torments by a dose of morphia!
Naturally this act of kindness should not be left to the discretion of an individual physician, but be determined by a commission of competent and conscientious medical men. So, in the case of other incurables and great sufferers (from cancer, for instance), the "redemption from evil” should only be accomplished by a dose of some painless and rapid poison when they have expressed a deliberate wish (to be afterward juridically proved) for this, and under the control of an authoritative commission.
The ancient Spartans owed a good deal of their famous bravery, their bodily strength and beauty, as well their mental energy and capacity, to the old custom of doing away with new-born children who were born weakly or crippled. We find the same custom today among many savage races. When I pointed out the advantages of this Spartan selection for the improvement of the race in 1868 (chapter vii. of the History of Creation) there was a storm of pious indignation in the religious journals, as always happens when pure reason ventures to oppose the current prejudices and traditional beliefs. But I ask: What good does, it do to humanity to maintain artificially and rear the thousands cripples, deaf-mutes, idiots, etc., who are born every year with an hereditary burden of incurable disease Is it not better and more rational to cut off from first this unavoidable misery which their poor lives bring to themselves and their families?
"Wonders of Life" 1904 Trans. Joseph McCabe
Such were, clearly, the kinds of mental and moral progress that Bloch, the man responsible for first giving the world de Sade's book in published form, meant. As a convinced monist and a scholar of Haeckel, Bloch must have read that as well as almost the same, exact, assertions Haeckel repeatedly made in many books from 1868 down to the end of his writing career. Haeckel repeatedly, on the basis of science, and as an example of the progressive production of increased fitness within species by natural selection, predicted the eventual eradication of entire races of people by those he names as their biological superiors, white Europeans, "Aryans". There is no way that Bloch could not have included that major theme of Haeckel's science in his assertion.
The bizarre and entirely screwed up analysis of recent cultural and allegedly scientific history as seen in these intersecting lines provides a lot to think about.
Any line that could begin with de Sade's depraved concept of "liberty" in which the more powerful can imprison, bind, use, torture and even kill people, mostly women but men as well, victims who are not at liberty but who are presented by their consumers as wanting "it" should carry nothing but warning signs. That his most infamously depraved book - de Sade credited himself with having produced the filthiest book ever written, in it - should have ever been imagined to have "scientific value" would do nothing but impeach the science that made use of THE PIECE OF FICTION as if it constituted scientific data.
Only, as can be seen in Haeckel's passage, he also relied on far from scientific and obviously ideological, anti-democratic lore from ancient Greece in order to recommend mass murder as the hygienic cleansing of the human species. And, as is so often the case in the intellectual and "scientific" promotion of killing, he presents his proposal for mass murder as being "for the good" of those murdered. The more I've delved into Haeckel's writing, the more I have become convinced that what is obvious on first reading is the actual case, Haeckel's science was vital to the development of Nazism. That conclusion is avoidable only by lying about what he said and the clearest connections with him and the Nazis, beginning the very year of Haeckel's death. Vital to that development was the dependence on a simulation of information from real life instead of actual data. When that artificial substitute for data is looked at, its clear, ideological nature is obvious.
That a line of 20th century anti-Nazi, intellectuals, such as de Beauvoir and Pasolini, have taken up de Sade's cause - as some expression of liberty - as well as the proto-Nazis is a general indictment of such an intellectual culture. De Sade was criminally insane, the incarceration of an ARISTOCRAT like de Sade, first in the Bastille and later in various venues, to end up in the Sanitorium at Charenton is kind of a clue that he had real life issues. His writing is depraved, it is the absolute opposite of universal rights, of equality, though it's a good example of the kind of thinking that "liberty" and "fraternity" could become in the absence of equality. In the most telling of events in his life was his election to the National Convention as a radical. His erratic, often contradictory and bizarre performance in that insane governing body didn't exactly stand out in the homicidal, intellectual insanity that was The French Revolution. What his presence in that revolutionary government tells of is the pathological nature of the time and people held up by subsequent radicals as some great advance in enlightenment.
That existentialists, many of them elite Marxists, were pushing de Sade on the basis of "freedom" is entirely consistent with the real political character of genocidal Marxist governments that they were covering up for. An honest analysis of political identity would not fail to see that there was a lot in common between the Nazis and the Marxists. Their real life histories of genocide and mass murder first and foremost. Those are certainly more important than any intellectual abstractions, though it's the intellectual abstractions that carry the most "intellectual" interest. The crucial issue is the consideration of people as merely their material substance, of the denial of the spiritual basis of their rights. As I've pointed out before, in the absence of a real, effective belief in the metaphysical attributes of equality, inherent rights and an absolute moral obligation to respect those rights of all other people, even when someone is able to get away with violating them, is the crucial point in evaluating political ideologies. Both fascism and Marxism deny the reality of those metaphysical attributes and on the basis of their being unscientific delusions they demote them to unimportance, burying them beneath some alleged scientific truth.
Pasolini's life and his family were an odd cross roads between fascism, communism and libertinism. He worked for a fascist literary magazine into the 1940s until he was fired. Drafted into the fascist army, he was imprisoned by the Nazis - for reasons I'm not certain of - and emerged a communist. He is one of those literary types who moved easily from fascist to communist, what is usually taken as opposites on the line of political identity but which are, in reality, first cousins. That's something I've written about several times. It's remarkable how many times that enormous distance on that imaginary line of political identity has been crossed from one to the other in one step, quite often without any real change of content.
It is a tragedy of the political identity of gay folk that it developed struggling against laws created at the behest of institutional Christianity***. It is also a tragedy that that fact led it to be so mixed up with such perversions of sexual love that de Sade and others promoted, the unloving sexual use of people which constantly turns on either indifference or hate. It being impossible to form open, loving relationships, gay people, especially gay men, have had to resort to being part of the demimonde. It is also a tragic and odd feature of being gay that its outlaw definition has made being gay an issue of materialism that denies the very existence of rights that are the only real and reliable basis for the real liberation of any oppressed group. I could go on and on with this piece, trying to unravel and expose the twisted and strange strands of intellectual pathology that finding these weird and seemingly contradictory facts consist of.
Real freedom for gay folk, for GLBT people, for women, for everyone will be found in the rejection of this complete mess, the legacy of pseudo-science, pseudo-liberation, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-enlightenment for the entirely clear insistence on the reality of equality of inherent rights and the really required practice of respecting those rights in real life, not in the mere and impotent assertions of them. The intellectual analyses of the lives of people that has been ongoing from the 19th century till today is morally and intellectually fraudulent. It is based on a worship of power and death, not on the real things in real life that constitute freedom. Those are entirely too every-day and decent to be temporarily titillating and stimulating for superficial, bored intellectuals who don't have to do much but impress other superficial and bored intellectuals, all more interested in protecting their place on the rotting edifice than in the real lives of real people who need real things and real respect for their real rights on an absolutely equal basis.
* For more about Haeckel's advocacy of murdering people who would later be on the Nazi's extermination list, read him.
** The New York Times account of the occasion is notable for it being another instance in which the pre-Nazi depravity of Haeckel's monism is not noticed by someone who, obviously, was familiar with books in which he'd expounded it.
*** It's the great tragedy of Christianity that it ever took on that kind of political power. The greatest aspect of that was the oligarchic necessity of suppressing the real nature of the Gospel of Jesus, the most radical economic justice, through the method of obsessive concentration on suppressing the sexual expression of love. Jesus didn't mention same sex relations even once. He didn't mention abortion or birth control once. He mentioned the moral obligation to do justice continually.
Needing something to think about, thinking about Pier Paolo Pasolini's massively degenerate movie, Salo: 120 Days in Sodom, trying to fill in what I already knew, I've come across a link with the interrupted series about Darwinism I've been working on. The links and strands of history and intellectual activity are extremely twisted and embedded in what are held to be unrelated ideas and ideologies but the more I've looked in the past several days, the more obvious those links are.
As many another piece of stupid and immoral and amoral so-called art, these days, Salo was openly copied from an earlier piece of depravity. That's supposed to mean it's high art, what with the historical referencing and an assumption of research and the opportunity of scholarly papers saying that, and all. Such is a consequence of judging art on the basis of what prestigious critics say, getting talked out of acknowledging what you're seeing and hearing right in front of you.
The book Pasolini used as a model was The Marquis de Sade's Les 120 journées de Sodome or l'école du libertinage. I haven't read all of that book, having slogged my way through most of of de Sade's Justine much earlier. I was a teenager and had been told it was naughty, risque art. That book provided enough information about his diseased mind to suffice, what I've seen of his other scribbleage, including Les 120 journées merely confirmed what I had concluded about forty years ago.
The most extensive treatment of his thinking I've read was Simone de Beauvoir's unintentionally revealing, Must We Burn Sade? From that I found confirmation of the conclusion that her brand of existentialism was a crock of silliness. It also led to the inevitable conclusion that what De Beauvoir had to say about the rights of women should be checked for counterproductive features.
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Let me pause to say, intellectual movements and, even more so, movements that aspire to politics and actually changing real life can't both hold assertions of the rights dignity, self determination of women, gay folk and others and also contain an assertion of the rights of the enemies of women, gay folk and others TO COMPLETELY VIOLATE THE BEING OF THE PEOPLE who those goods exist to benefit. De Beauvoir, as a professional writer has the same defect that so many who make their living by writing have, a superstitious belief that all writing is valuable and that words on paper or images and words on a screen have rights superior to those who can be murdered or enslaved or oppressed by those words and images. Having lived through the Nazi occupation of France it would seem that the great intellectuals don't seem to get that there is a basic and total difference between the assertion of equality and rights and the assertions made by de Sade and other such promoters of the torture, rape and murder, most often OF WOMEN. As if there wasn't already enough of that happening in every, single country without it being encouraged by decadent intellectuals claiming to be feminists or champions of freedom. You wonder how intellectuals can be assumed to be capable of learning anything from their basis in intellectualism if they've missed those things.
I could change every reference to women in the last paragraph to gay men and exactly the same thing could be said. By an enormous percentage the foremost literary representation of gay men is in pornography, the degradation, bondage, enslavement and sadistic use of a weaker man by a stronger man is one of the most commonly found themes of gay porn. I'm convinced that gay porn has been a force to turn gay men against each other, to become each other's oppressors, presenting gay sex as a pathological expression of self-hatred, murdering the souls of gay men far more effectively than any fundamentalist campaigners have. Struggle against fundamentalist opposition has positive effects, the porn industry does their hateful work without eliciting a resistance. The same can be said of the purportedly "feminist" promotion of pornography, sometimes funded by straight, male pornographer.
The recent statements by a claimant to the mantle of de Beauvoir, Elisabeth Badinter support that idea that any citation of her should not be regarded as above suspicion. As I recently pointed out, if you buy into the identity of a writer and take them as an authority, you might get a lot more than you wanted. To put a point on that, the pseudo-feminist, pseudo-intellectual, Camille Paglia, has echoed that earlier piece of insanely over-respected crot about de Sade. Any rational witness can see that feminism had been down taken the same destructive detour into counterproductive futility that gay liberation and, indeed, the entire left has, by such "feminists". Nothing proves that as clearly as the embrace of the most extreme expressions of misogyny in pornography and the sex industry. There are feminist critics of, not only de Sade but the pseudo-feminist support of it, and the far more extensive slamming of those feminist critics only compounds the validity of what they said.
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The title of the book is worth a post in itself, Like Salo, The 120 days of Sodom or the school of libertinism ends in the death of the kidnapped victims of an orgy of sadistic and degrading homicidal sex, most of them women, on behalf of aristocratic "scholars". The basis of that is the sexually gratifying ability of men with more money and power to turn other people into objects for them to consume. Clearly, de Sade presented his imagined criminal insanity as lessons to be followed. That is the kind of thing that de Beauvoir, Pasolini and other high intellectual champions of the book are promoting as a great blow for liberty, most certainly not for equality, though of a fraternity excluding women and the other victims of fascistic frat brothers such as will take de Sade's course in how to exercise their, exclusive, liberty. Any alleged feminist who would assert that is anything except something to resist and suppress would be self-impeached past the point of ever being taken seriously by an intellectual milieu based in reason and democratic values. The ability of such to survive as an intellectual figure is a general indictment of the culture that allows that survival. Liberty to oppress is something that has always been claimed by oligarchs and aristocrats, it is no accident that the books libertine heroes are aristocrats.
Pasolini produced an intentionally disgusting and depraved simulated snuff porn movie, pretending that it was more than that. He was an intellectual. I read somewhere that one of his circles of hell, "The circle of shit" was calimed by him to be a commentary on the industrial food industry. Which was something I would almost guarantee that not a single person who hadn't read his claim would have gotten from the movie. His transposition of de Sade's depravity to the waning days of fascist Italy is, similarly, a shallow pose to give his piece of pornography a skim coat of intellectual-political polish. And in that Pasolini merely cheapens the literary genre that actually does that.
When I found out, after seeing the movie, that a 17-year-old boy who Pasolini had just had paid sex with was arrested for his brutal murder I can't say that I was terribly surprised or upset. Given what he had presented in Salo, I can imagine Pasolini giving the kid more than enough reason for an enraged reaction. Pasolini was more than three times the boy's age and he was, beyond doubt, far richer and more powerful than the boy was. I can only imagine what might have happened to the boy. I don't believe the cover stories about political and mafia involvement.
The intellectual response to both the book and the movie have been valuable only in showing how dishonest, hypocritical and stupid the intellectuals can be, telling lies that they really don't believe, themselves. It's more true now than ever that a large part of the semi-official intelligensia tell each other things that are known to be acceptable to their common consensus, with small variations as points of view fall, slightly out of style, only to reemerge in retro fashion. Intellectual life has a lot in common with the fashion industry, in which what sells is virtuous because it sells. Perhaps the least viable variations in those fashions are those that contain moral requirements of real equality that could cost the elite, which the same intelligentsia largely, service.
The promotion of sadistic sexual murder, sexual enslavement, sexual torture, sexual imprisonment which is what the entire positive view of de Sade and Pasolini's movie really boils down to is bad enough as an intellectual pose. The entire enterprise has a far wider political and historical presence in some of the most profoundly evil expressions of 20th century history.
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De Sade's manuscript of Les 120 journées de Sodome, written while he was imprisoned at the Bastille, was lost during the looting of the building at the start of the revolution. De Sade believed it had been destroyed - he said he "wept tears of blood" over it. But it, somehow, survived to be first published in 1905 by the founder of "scientific" sexology, the psycothreapist Iwan Bloch, a colleague of Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld. The NOVEL, the product of a clearly diseased and officially insane mind, was presented as a scientifically important document in that pseudo-science, it should be asked what kind of a base that was to build on. Having just found out about Iwan Bloch's connection to the book, it's a question that is even more important than it first seemed.
Iwan Bloch is a name I'd come across only once before, during my research of Ernst Haeckel, in a short notice about the symposium organized in honor of Haeckel's 80th birthday**, in February 1914.
Bloch said that Haeckel was:
A St. George who has slain the dragon of the maladies of modern man and has fearlessly marked all the dualistic survivals of prescientific culture as obstacles to the mental and moral progress of humanity.
Which you might be rather astonished to read if you read much of Haeckel. Anyone who had could hardly have missed such typical passages as this one:*
In our day the number of lunatics in civilized countries is, on the average, five-sixths per thousand. If the total population of Europe is put at three hundred and ninety to four hundred millions, we have at least two million lunatics among them, and of these more than two hundred thousand are incurable. What an enormous mass of suffering these figures indicate for the invalids themselves, and what a vast amount of trouble and sorrow for their families, what a huge private and public expenditure! How much of this pain and expense could be spared if people could make up their minds to free the incurable from their indescribable torments by a dose of morphia!
Naturally this act of kindness should not be left to the discretion of an individual physician, but be determined by a commission of competent and conscientious medical men. So, in the case of other incurables and great sufferers (from cancer, for instance), the "redemption from evil” should only be accomplished by a dose of some painless and rapid poison when they have expressed a deliberate wish (to be afterward juridically proved) for this, and under the control of an authoritative commission.
The ancient Spartans owed a good deal of their famous bravery, their bodily strength and beauty, as well their mental energy and capacity, to the old custom of doing away with new-born children who were born weakly or crippled. We find the same custom today among many savage races. When I pointed out the advantages of this Spartan selection for the improvement of the race in 1868 (chapter vii. of the History of Creation) there was a storm of pious indignation in the religious journals, as always happens when pure reason ventures to oppose the current prejudices and traditional beliefs. But I ask: What good does, it do to humanity to maintain artificially and rear the thousands cripples, deaf-mutes, idiots, etc., who are born every year with an hereditary burden of incurable disease Is it not better and more rational to cut off from first this unavoidable misery which their poor lives bring to themselves and their families?
"Wonders of Life" 1904 Trans. Joseph McCabe
Such were, clearly, the kinds of mental and moral progress that Bloch, the man responsible for first giving the world de Sade's book in published form, meant. As a convinced monist and a scholar of Haeckel, Bloch must have read that as well as almost the same, exact, assertions Haeckel repeatedly made in many books from 1868 down to the end of his writing career. Haeckel repeatedly, on the basis of science, and as an example of the progressive production of increased fitness within species by natural selection, predicted the eventual eradication of entire races of people by those he names as their biological superiors, white Europeans, "Aryans". There is no way that Bloch could not have included that major theme of Haeckel's science in his assertion.
The bizarre and entirely screwed up analysis of recent cultural and allegedly scientific history as seen in these intersecting lines provides a lot to think about.
Any line that could begin with de Sade's depraved concept of "liberty" in which the more powerful can imprison, bind, use, torture and even kill people, mostly women but men as well, victims who are not at liberty but who are presented by their consumers as wanting "it" should carry nothing but warning signs. That his most infamously depraved book - de Sade credited himself with having produced the filthiest book ever written, in it - should have ever been imagined to have "scientific value" would do nothing but impeach the science that made use of THE PIECE OF FICTION as if it constituted scientific data.
Only, as can be seen in Haeckel's passage, he also relied on far from scientific and obviously ideological, anti-democratic lore from ancient Greece in order to recommend mass murder as the hygienic cleansing of the human species. And, as is so often the case in the intellectual and "scientific" promotion of killing, he presents his proposal for mass murder as being "for the good" of those murdered. The more I've delved into Haeckel's writing, the more I have become convinced that what is obvious on first reading is the actual case, Haeckel's science was vital to the development of Nazism. That conclusion is avoidable only by lying about what he said and the clearest connections with him and the Nazis, beginning the very year of Haeckel's death. Vital to that development was the dependence on a simulation of information from real life instead of actual data. When that artificial substitute for data is looked at, its clear, ideological nature is obvious.
That a line of 20th century anti-Nazi, intellectuals, such as de Beauvoir and Pasolini, have taken up de Sade's cause - as some expression of liberty - as well as the proto-Nazis is a general indictment of such an intellectual culture. De Sade was criminally insane, the incarceration of an ARISTOCRAT like de Sade, first in the Bastille and later in various venues, to end up in the Sanitorium at Charenton is kind of a clue that he had real life issues. His writing is depraved, it is the absolute opposite of universal rights, of equality, though it's a good example of the kind of thinking that "liberty" and "fraternity" could become in the absence of equality. In the most telling of events in his life was his election to the National Convention as a radical. His erratic, often contradictory and bizarre performance in that insane governing body didn't exactly stand out in the homicidal, intellectual insanity that was The French Revolution. What his presence in that revolutionary government tells of is the pathological nature of the time and people held up by subsequent radicals as some great advance in enlightenment.
That existentialists, many of them elite Marxists, were pushing de Sade on the basis of "freedom" is entirely consistent with the real political character of genocidal Marxist governments that they were covering up for. An honest analysis of political identity would not fail to see that there was a lot in common between the Nazis and the Marxists. Their real life histories of genocide and mass murder first and foremost. Those are certainly more important than any intellectual abstractions, though it's the intellectual abstractions that carry the most "intellectual" interest. The crucial issue is the consideration of people as merely their material substance, of the denial of the spiritual basis of their rights. As I've pointed out before, in the absence of a real, effective belief in the metaphysical attributes of equality, inherent rights and an absolute moral obligation to respect those rights of all other people, even when someone is able to get away with violating them, is the crucial point in evaluating political ideologies. Both fascism and Marxism deny the reality of those metaphysical attributes and on the basis of their being unscientific delusions they demote them to unimportance, burying them beneath some alleged scientific truth.
Pasolini's life and his family were an odd cross roads between fascism, communism and libertinism. He worked for a fascist literary magazine into the 1940s until he was fired. Drafted into the fascist army, he was imprisoned by the Nazis - for reasons I'm not certain of - and emerged a communist. He is one of those literary types who moved easily from fascist to communist, what is usually taken as opposites on the line of political identity but which are, in reality, first cousins. That's something I've written about several times. It's remarkable how many times that enormous distance on that imaginary line of political identity has been crossed from one to the other in one step, quite often without any real change of content.
It is a tragedy of the political identity of gay folk that it developed struggling against laws created at the behest of institutional Christianity***. It is also a tragedy that that fact led it to be so mixed up with such perversions of sexual love that de Sade and others promoted, the unloving sexual use of people which constantly turns on either indifference or hate. It being impossible to form open, loving relationships, gay people, especially gay men, have had to resort to being part of the demimonde. It is also a tragic and odd feature of being gay that its outlaw definition has made being gay an issue of materialism that denies the very existence of rights that are the only real and reliable basis for the real liberation of any oppressed group. I could go on and on with this piece, trying to unravel and expose the twisted and strange strands of intellectual pathology that finding these weird and seemingly contradictory facts consist of.
Real freedom for gay folk, for GLBT people, for women, for everyone will be found in the rejection of this complete mess, the legacy of pseudo-science, pseudo-liberation, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-enlightenment for the entirely clear insistence on the reality of equality of inherent rights and the really required practice of respecting those rights in real life, not in the mere and impotent assertions of them. The intellectual analyses of the lives of people that has been ongoing from the 19th century till today is morally and intellectually fraudulent. It is based on a worship of power and death, not on the real things in real life that constitute freedom. Those are entirely too every-day and decent to be temporarily titillating and stimulating for superficial, bored intellectuals who don't have to do much but impress other superficial and bored intellectuals, all more interested in protecting their place on the rotting edifice than in the real lives of real people who need real things and real respect for their real rights on an absolutely equal basis.
* For more about Haeckel's advocacy of murdering people who would later be on the Nazi's extermination list, read him.
** The New York Times account of the occasion is notable for it being another instance in which the pre-Nazi depravity of Haeckel's monism is not noticed by someone who, obviously, was familiar with books in which he'd expounded it.
*** It's the great tragedy of Christianity that it ever took on that kind of political power. The greatest aspect of that was the oligarchic necessity of suppressing the real nature of the Gospel of Jesus, the most radical economic justice, through the method of obsessive concentration on suppressing the sexual expression of love. Jesus didn't mention same sex relations even once. He didn't mention abortion or birth control once. He mentioned the moral obligation to do justice continually.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Love or leave me - Mel Torme
Since so many people seem to be confused about what good jazz singing as done by a man sounds like.
Update: How High The Moon
Update: How High The Moon
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