Carla
Bley Steve Swallow
Saturday, May 24, 2014
A Simple Answer To a Bitter Complaint About The Statement Of a Simple Fact
It is a simple fact that no scientists could come to their understanding of science, founded on science. That understanding is founded on language, on common sense understanding of the world through the most pedestrian of human experience, it is a product of expectations developed through those. Those are not based in science. A child would have to have had an understanding of science before they learned the first thing about science if that were not the case. The same is true of logic and mathematics, on which science depends but which are also not present in a person's mind before they are first learned about the world, through their "subjective" experience.
All of those depend on raw human experience, on raw human observation even on raw human minds before verbal articulation is present in it. Even in the understanding of language as an innate human faculty, if, through some kind of sensory deprivation, the experiences that lead to language developing, that potential won't be fulfilled. The thankfully rare case of "Genie" a child entirely deprived of the necessary experience by an abusive father would seem to never be able to develop speech so speech, as well, despite existing as a potential, depends on having raw experience to exist as a human faculty.
None of this is surprising when it comes to something like language which is so commonly held by people but it seems to surprise people when it's a matter of science. There is nothing prestigious in learning to talk.
I suspect it is prestige of scientific knowledge, the status the scientist is given and the relative rarity of scientific knowledge, of its association with sophisticated adults that leads to the irrational disconnect between its acquisition and the earliest experience on which the disconnection with this obvious truth rests. I think that the proud adults who have obtained the advanced degrees to have a career in science don't like to be reminded of that fact, that the attainments of their post-doc years rests on the experiences of their first two years anymore than an eleven year old likes to have their peers see their baby pictures. Oddly, the very greatest geniuses of science, Newton, Einstein, don't seem to be embarrassed by the fact that their great thoughts are based in the experience of earliest childhood, that would seem to be more embarrassing to those whose accomplishments are somewhat more modest. Perhaps arrogance is a compensatory comfort they allow themselves due to that modest accomplishment. It seems to be most prominent in the shallower thinkers.
Friday, May 23, 2014
Terry Pollard Quintet Feddi
Don Fagerquist trumpet
Terry Pollard piano
Howard Roberts guitar
Herman Wright bass
Frank DeVito drums
She was a great, great pianist who suffered a disability that ended her career. I've read that Charlie Parker tried to recruit her to play with him but she turned him down over loyalty to her own musicians. She was also a superbly good pre-Burton style vibes player. Watch this incredible couple of performances from the very early Tonight Show. Especially the second one, a vibes duel with Terry Gibbs where she more than holds her own.
The Burden of Proof
"god is imaginary" (Salon comment thread bloviator)
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
― Albert Einstein
One of the most silly of atheist strategies for setting up a double standard in their favor is their declaration that the "burden of proof" rests on religious believers. They assert that since atheism is merely a lack of belief that the burden isn't on them, they can just rest on their pose of saying, "Na-uh" and they've done all they need to do to declare themselves The Winnah!
You would think that, perhaps, the fact that the large majority of humanity has not agreed that they have won, that in places such as the Soviet Union which actively propagandized against religion, killing enormous numbers of people, dynamiting tens of thousands of churches, teaching anti-religious propaganda in the schools, merely suppressed religion and, in the absence of state oppression, religion came back, that atheists here declaring themselves the winner with no effort at all is a delusional denial of historical reality.
People get to decide what they find persuasive and, while some insecure people can be hoodwinked into denying their own perception of reality, of their own conclusions about the meaning of their lives, the majority of people don't seem to be willing to do atheists that favor. I doubt that the current fad of atheism will prove any more effective in it goals than the Soviet or Albanian or East German governments were in abolishing religious belief.
Is atheism a mere lack of belief? Certainly not in the sci-rangers and pseudo-skeptics whose atheism is as intimately tied to scientism and materialism as it could be. And for a mere, content free "nothing" atheism certainly seems to move its (dis)believers into making an enormous number of positive statements, again quite strikingly about scientism and materialism, using their atheism to declare all kinds of things to be delusions, many of those things, such as my favorites of equal rights and obligations to respect those, hard fought truths based, not on the abstractions that mathematics and the physical sciences are based in, but in the absolute basis those share with other human knowledge, individual and collective human experience.
Mathematics and logic, two of the essential foundations of science, are based on human experience, it was human experience that validated its historical foundations, on which all further developments in those depend, which can't invalidate those foundations without the entire edifice falling down. Lacking an absolute logical foundation, logic and mathematics have to fall back on a reliance on that history, on that human experience. Science, even more so, is dependent on that accumulation of human experience, it is the ultimate source of its validity. That "it works," the frequent boast of the adherents of scientism, when faced with the lack of an internally logical foundation of science, is an appeal to human experience and a non-formal method of validation. The other foundations of science are even more obviously based in raw human experience, observation, and the social aspects of science, publication and review by the society of scientists and other reviewers.
Atheism, when it seeks converts, when it seeks to establish its dominance as an ideology isn't attempting to lay out a formal, logical foundation for itself. It is attempting to persuade people and people can believe what they believe on other bases than those of formal logic. Human experience happens prior to any logical, quantitative or analytical processing of it. Because science is based on and dependent on forms of human experience, it is, in a real sense, secondary to it and, since there are realities in human experience that science can't contain, it is not necessary to being persuaded of realities it can't contain.
Since logic and mathematics have no absolute foundation, their acceptance has to be based in the same kinds of raw human experience that observation consists of. No scientist can practice science without having, first, accepted those things on a non-scientific basis, some of those in such early childhood that logic certainly didn't play a role in it, nor mathematics. Even such arrogant believers in scientism as Sean Carroll and Richard Dawkins base the science that they have turned into an idol on the same foundations that they reject when people come to other conclusions than those they like. Only they seem to have never gone through the exercise of really looking at the foundations of their own thinking with sufficient rigor to admit that. Perhaps it's a matter of arrogance winning out over reality. It's my experience of deeply religious people that they are more likely to have questioned the foundations of what they believe with more rigor than these atheists have. That gives them every right to demand that the atheists show the same kind of questioning of their faith.
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
― Albert Einstein
One of the most silly of atheist strategies for setting up a double standard in their favor is their declaration that the "burden of proof" rests on religious believers. They assert that since atheism is merely a lack of belief that the burden isn't on them, they can just rest on their pose of saying, "Na-uh" and they've done all they need to do to declare themselves The Winnah!
You would think that, perhaps, the fact that the large majority of humanity has not agreed that they have won, that in places such as the Soviet Union which actively propagandized against religion, killing enormous numbers of people, dynamiting tens of thousands of churches, teaching anti-religious propaganda in the schools, merely suppressed religion and, in the absence of state oppression, religion came back, that atheists here declaring themselves the winner with no effort at all is a delusional denial of historical reality.
People get to decide what they find persuasive and, while some insecure people can be hoodwinked into denying their own perception of reality, of their own conclusions about the meaning of their lives, the majority of people don't seem to be willing to do atheists that favor. I doubt that the current fad of atheism will prove any more effective in it goals than the Soviet or Albanian or East German governments were in abolishing religious belief.
Is atheism a mere lack of belief? Certainly not in the sci-rangers and pseudo-skeptics whose atheism is as intimately tied to scientism and materialism as it could be. And for a mere, content free "nothing" atheism certainly seems to move its (dis)believers into making an enormous number of positive statements, again quite strikingly about scientism and materialism, using their atheism to declare all kinds of things to be delusions, many of those things, such as my favorites of equal rights and obligations to respect those, hard fought truths based, not on the abstractions that mathematics and the physical sciences are based in, but in the absolute basis those share with other human knowledge, individual and collective human experience.
Mathematics and logic, two of the essential foundations of science, are based on human experience, it was human experience that validated its historical foundations, on which all further developments in those depend, which can't invalidate those foundations without the entire edifice falling down. Lacking an absolute logical foundation, logic and mathematics have to fall back on a reliance on that history, on that human experience. Science, even more so, is dependent on that accumulation of human experience, it is the ultimate source of its validity. That "it works," the frequent boast of the adherents of scientism, when faced with the lack of an internally logical foundation of science, is an appeal to human experience and a non-formal method of validation. The other foundations of science are even more obviously based in raw human experience, observation, and the social aspects of science, publication and review by the society of scientists and other reviewers.
Atheism, when it seeks converts, when it seeks to establish its dominance as an ideology isn't attempting to lay out a formal, logical foundation for itself. It is attempting to persuade people and people can believe what they believe on other bases than those of formal logic. Human experience happens prior to any logical, quantitative or analytical processing of it. Because science is based on and dependent on forms of human experience, it is, in a real sense, secondary to it and, since there are realities in human experience that science can't contain, it is not necessary to being persuaded of realities it can't contain.
Since logic and mathematics have no absolute foundation, their acceptance has to be based in the same kinds of raw human experience that observation consists of. No scientist can practice science without having, first, accepted those things on a non-scientific basis, some of those in such early childhood that logic certainly didn't play a role in it, nor mathematics. Even such arrogant believers in scientism as Sean Carroll and Richard Dawkins base the science that they have turned into an idol on the same foundations that they reject when people come to other conclusions than those they like. Only they seem to have never gone through the exercise of really looking at the foundations of their own thinking with sufficient rigor to admit that. Perhaps it's a matter of arrogance winning out over reality. It's my experience of deeply religious people that they are more likely to have questioned the foundations of what they believe with more rigor than these atheists have. That gives them every right to demand that the atheists show the same kind of questioning of their faith.
Thursday, May 22, 2014
The Mary Osborne Trio - Blues In Mary's Flat & Oops My Lady
Mary Osborne - guitar
Sanford Gold - piano
Frenchy Couette - bass%
Let's Get A Frank Explanation of Why We Should Vote For Atheists
I was busy with family matters when Barney Frank came out as a "pot smoking atheist" on Bill Maher's show. It, apparently, wasn't big enough news in New England that it made it up here from the Boston news market. What it means, who knows? Frank's record in office is quite good, how it relates to him being an atheist would be for Frank to parse. I would love to ask Frank some questions about what he thinks of the wide-spread atheist denial of the reality of free will, free thought, things I'd expect Frank believes in. I would love to discuss where he believes rights come from and where the moral obligation to respect those rights arises.
Once, years ago, I heard him on TV on the topic of suicide responding to Henry Hyde going on about suicide being a violation of the right to life. Frank made what I've always thought was a good point, that a right resides in the person who has it and, in the case of suicide, it would be the person who possessed the right who would be violating it. I'd like to ask him how he squares his view of rights as an inherent possession of persons with his atheism. If he has come to some non-materialist atheism, it would be fascinating to hear someone of his intelligence and practical experience as a politician elucidate it. I don't read anywhere that Bill Maher pursued any of those interesting topics. I know, shocking how Maher could have let those pass.
I have always liked Frank, have favored his election and would have loved to vote for him and I still would based on his record. This isn't about whether or not I'd vote for Barney Frank, it's about whether or not the ideological declarations of atheists over the centuries have made atheism a legitimate issue for people to consider in whether or not to vote for an atheist. Atheism isn't a neutral attribute, it is an ideological position generally containing a belief in materialism and materialism has no ability to generate the bases of egalitarian democracy. It has proven unable to do that. An atheist has no more right to someone's vote than a biblical fundamentalist does and a politicians thinking about rights, obligations to respect those rights, etc. are entirely legitimate questions when they will be voting on exactly those issues and making laws affecting us. And, have you ever heard an atheist declare that someone has the right to someone's vote because they were religious?
-------
This is all about a rather silly article by Mary Elizabeth Williams who cites Frank and a handful of other out atheists who are politicians claiming that we need to vote for more atheists. She cites a Win-Gallup survey to claim that the number of atheists has grown enormously in the past nine years, 1 to 5 % and that religion has dropped 13% in the same time. Perhaps Williams missed a few details in the news report of the survey that SHE LINKED TO but there are some rather bizarre features to it.
Barry Kosmin, the principal investigator for the ARIS report, said he’s skeptical of the new study.
“The U.S. trends are what we have found and would expect, but the actual numbers are peculiar to say the least,” he said. “The drops in religiosity seem too sharp for the time period — people just don’t change their beliefs that quickly. Most of the trend away from religion has demographic causes and demography moves ‘glacially.’”
Specifically, he points to the poll’s finding that Vietnam, while showing a sharp 23 percent drop in religiosity since 2005, also shows no atheists. “Eight million Communist Party members but zero atheists?” he said. “That statistic makes me very doubtful of the accuracy of the survey overall and some of the international comparisons.”
Which would lead one to strongly suspect that there is something wrong with the study, which is quite at odds with the Pew Surveys that are usually the go-to organization for atheists to make claims about the success of their insurgency, generally either misunderstanding or falsifying what those surveys say. Did she actually read her own citation?
Furthermore what the report Williams cites says about other countries makes you wonder how she could make her claims from it:
— Besides Vietnam, Ireland had the greatest change in religiosity, down from 69 percent to 47 percent.
— China has the most “convinced atheists,” at 47 percent, followed by Japan (31 percent), Czech Republic (30 percent) and France (29 percent)
— The most religious countries are in Africa (Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya), South America (Brazil, Peru) and Eastern Europe (Macedonia, Romania, Armenia).
— Countries with the same percentage of atheists as the U.S. are Poland, Moldova and Saudi Arabia.
I strongly suspect that Win-Gallup conducted and published this poll to get some news attention, which is why I think Williams wrote what she did and the reason Salon published it. I've come across lots of atheist-click bait of the same quality, when you click on the links to their citations, those don't say what the article claims. I mean, the article she cites pretty much trashes the credibility of the Win-Gallup survey that she makes her claims from.
But it isn't until the end of her column that the real problems become obvious.
Nevertheless, it’s frustrating that in a nation that built the ideal of keeping God out of government into its foundation, voters are still so reluctant to support candidates who keep God out of their own lives. As a Catholic, I want leaders who don’t interfere with my faith but I don’t need them to share in it. In fact, I strongly prefer they not. I want politicians who can serve all their constituents, without moral conflicts of interest. You’d better believe I don’t like what happens when the dictates of a faith collide with the healthcare needs of women. That’s why I vote in a manner that works toward keeping religion out of government. And one of the easiest ways to bring that about is to support more candidates without religion in the first place.
There are so many problems with this paragraph that it would take a really long post to go through them. The United States was not founded on "the ideal of keeping God out of government" it was founded on the ideal that governments were there to "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity". The only relevance of religion in that is exactly the opposite of what Williams says, IT IS TO KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF RELIGION. Especially that the government not establish one religion, to the discredit of it when the government is discreditable, and the disadvantage of members of other religions.
But her assumption that religion shouldn't and has not informed the decisions of The People, including those in who they vote for, to good effect is what's really wrong with it. While it's fashionable to pretend otherwise, every single advance in rights, including the rights of women and GLBT people, certainly of Black people, Latinos and others has been more based on religious belief than it has on standard civics. The Constitution with The Bill of Rights didn't end slavery, it didn't enfranchise women and poor men, it didn't provide welfare to the destitute or do much of anything that wouldn't be perfectly OK with the most right-wing, paleo-federalist sitting in a well upholstered office at any neo-fascist DC area think tank.
Every single effort to make the aristocratic 18th century document that the original Constitution was into a vehicle of equality and rights, was either explicitly religious or it included a major component of religious involvement. The People are the real foundation of government, in the past I said it was the trunk from which the branches of government take its life and from whom it derives its only legitimacy. It has been when The People are convinced that there is a religious requirement to pay a cost to provide justice, the exercise of rights to other people, AT A COST TO THEMSELVES, that real progress has been made. Atheism has provided no such motivation, it has, most typically, resorted to some analysis under the guise of natural selection, which is inevitably an unequal competition in which the "fittest" survive and the weakest die.
On issue after issue fought out in the 19th and early 20th century, it was religious belief that powered movements to change laws. There is no record of atheism powering any of that change, frankly, I doubt that in any form I'm aware of, atheist ideology would most likely either be impotent or counter-productive in pursuing those goals. Materialism, for its entire existence, has most often denied anything so metaphysical as inherent rights which it can't account for either existing or being equally distributed in the population. It can't account for where a moral obligation to universally respect those rights exists in equal distribution, falling as much on the most intelligent, most favored by circumstances as it does on the least intelligent and most unlucky.
When you are talking about politics, making laws, being a judge, those are what governments do. Unless someone has an absolute belief in the equal distribution of rights as an inherent endowment of people and the moral obligation to respect those then The People have more than a right to reject them, they have a moral obligation to reject them. The only people who can tell us how atheism is compatible with those metaphysical endowments are atheists and, frankly, I read more of them denying the possibility that those are real than have demonstrated any kind of respect for them. Barney Frank's record is what needs explaining in those terms. If he can provide what generations of atheists have not, a secure and powerful foundation for rights and moral obligations, a powerful motive for people to trouble themselves and pay a cost for people unconcerned with them, he should do so. He should because the common materialist rejection of them has been articulated for centuries.
Once, years ago, I heard him on TV on the topic of suicide responding to Henry Hyde going on about suicide being a violation of the right to life. Frank made what I've always thought was a good point, that a right resides in the person who has it and, in the case of suicide, it would be the person who possessed the right who would be violating it. I'd like to ask him how he squares his view of rights as an inherent possession of persons with his atheism. If he has come to some non-materialist atheism, it would be fascinating to hear someone of his intelligence and practical experience as a politician elucidate it. I don't read anywhere that Bill Maher pursued any of those interesting topics. I know, shocking how Maher could have let those pass.
I have always liked Frank, have favored his election and would have loved to vote for him and I still would based on his record. This isn't about whether or not I'd vote for Barney Frank, it's about whether or not the ideological declarations of atheists over the centuries have made atheism a legitimate issue for people to consider in whether or not to vote for an atheist. Atheism isn't a neutral attribute, it is an ideological position generally containing a belief in materialism and materialism has no ability to generate the bases of egalitarian democracy. It has proven unable to do that. An atheist has no more right to someone's vote than a biblical fundamentalist does and a politicians thinking about rights, obligations to respect those rights, etc. are entirely legitimate questions when they will be voting on exactly those issues and making laws affecting us. And, have you ever heard an atheist declare that someone has the right to someone's vote because they were religious?
-------
This is all about a rather silly article by Mary Elizabeth Williams who cites Frank and a handful of other out atheists who are politicians claiming that we need to vote for more atheists. She cites a Win-Gallup survey to claim that the number of atheists has grown enormously in the past nine years, 1 to 5 % and that religion has dropped 13% in the same time. Perhaps Williams missed a few details in the news report of the survey that SHE LINKED TO but there are some rather bizarre features to it.
Barry Kosmin, the principal investigator for the ARIS report, said he’s skeptical of the new study.
“The U.S. trends are what we have found and would expect, but the actual numbers are peculiar to say the least,” he said. “The drops in religiosity seem too sharp for the time period — people just don’t change their beliefs that quickly. Most of the trend away from religion has demographic causes and demography moves ‘glacially.’”
Specifically, he points to the poll’s finding that Vietnam, while showing a sharp 23 percent drop in religiosity since 2005, also shows no atheists. “Eight million Communist Party members but zero atheists?” he said. “That statistic makes me very doubtful of the accuracy of the survey overall and some of the international comparisons.”
Which would lead one to strongly suspect that there is something wrong with the study, which is quite at odds with the Pew Surveys that are usually the go-to organization for atheists to make claims about the success of their insurgency, generally either misunderstanding or falsifying what those surveys say. Did she actually read her own citation?
Furthermore what the report Williams cites says about other countries makes you wonder how she could make her claims from it:
— Besides Vietnam, Ireland had the greatest change in religiosity, down from 69 percent to 47 percent.
— China has the most “convinced atheists,” at 47 percent, followed by Japan (31 percent), Czech Republic (30 percent) and France (29 percent)
— The most religious countries are in Africa (Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya), South America (Brazil, Peru) and Eastern Europe (Macedonia, Romania, Armenia).
— Countries with the same percentage of atheists as the U.S. are Poland, Moldova and Saudi Arabia.
I strongly suspect that Win-Gallup conducted and published this poll to get some news attention, which is why I think Williams wrote what she did and the reason Salon published it. I've come across lots of atheist-click bait of the same quality, when you click on the links to their citations, those don't say what the article claims. I mean, the article she cites pretty much trashes the credibility of the Win-Gallup survey that she makes her claims from.
But it isn't until the end of her column that the real problems become obvious.
Nevertheless, it’s frustrating that in a nation that built the ideal of keeping God out of government into its foundation, voters are still so reluctant to support candidates who keep God out of their own lives. As a Catholic, I want leaders who don’t interfere with my faith but I don’t need them to share in it. In fact, I strongly prefer they not. I want politicians who can serve all their constituents, without moral conflicts of interest. You’d better believe I don’t like what happens when the dictates of a faith collide with the healthcare needs of women. That’s why I vote in a manner that works toward keeping religion out of government. And one of the easiest ways to bring that about is to support more candidates without religion in the first place.
There are so many problems with this paragraph that it would take a really long post to go through them. The United States was not founded on "the ideal of keeping God out of government" it was founded on the ideal that governments were there to "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity". The only relevance of religion in that is exactly the opposite of what Williams says, IT IS TO KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF RELIGION. Especially that the government not establish one religion, to the discredit of it when the government is discreditable, and the disadvantage of members of other religions.
But her assumption that religion shouldn't and has not informed the decisions of The People, including those in who they vote for, to good effect is what's really wrong with it. While it's fashionable to pretend otherwise, every single advance in rights, including the rights of women and GLBT people, certainly of Black people, Latinos and others has been more based on religious belief than it has on standard civics. The Constitution with The Bill of Rights didn't end slavery, it didn't enfranchise women and poor men, it didn't provide welfare to the destitute or do much of anything that wouldn't be perfectly OK with the most right-wing, paleo-federalist sitting in a well upholstered office at any neo-fascist DC area think tank.
Every single effort to make the aristocratic 18th century document that the original Constitution was into a vehicle of equality and rights, was either explicitly religious or it included a major component of religious involvement. The People are the real foundation of government, in the past I said it was the trunk from which the branches of government take its life and from whom it derives its only legitimacy. It has been when The People are convinced that there is a religious requirement to pay a cost to provide justice, the exercise of rights to other people, AT A COST TO THEMSELVES, that real progress has been made. Atheism has provided no such motivation, it has, most typically, resorted to some analysis under the guise of natural selection, which is inevitably an unequal competition in which the "fittest" survive and the weakest die.
On issue after issue fought out in the 19th and early 20th century, it was religious belief that powered movements to change laws. There is no record of atheism powering any of that change, frankly, I doubt that in any form I'm aware of, atheist ideology would most likely either be impotent or counter-productive in pursuing those goals. Materialism, for its entire existence, has most often denied anything so metaphysical as inherent rights which it can't account for either existing or being equally distributed in the population. It can't account for where a moral obligation to universally respect those rights exists in equal distribution, falling as much on the most intelligent, most favored by circumstances as it does on the least intelligent and most unlucky.
When you are talking about politics, making laws, being a judge, those are what governments do. Unless someone has an absolute belief in the equal distribution of rights as an inherent endowment of people and the moral obligation to respect those then The People have more than a right to reject them, they have a moral obligation to reject them. The only people who can tell us how atheism is compatible with those metaphysical endowments are atheists and, frankly, I read more of them denying the possibility that those are real than have demonstrated any kind of respect for them. Barney Frank's record is what needs explaining in those terms. If he can provide what generations of atheists have not, a secure and powerful foundation for rights and moral obligations, a powerful motive for people to trouble themselves and pay a cost for people unconcerned with them, he should do so. He should because the common materialist rejection of them has been articulated for centuries.
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Also from June 2006
MORE TROLL LORE
My friends, a troll on Kevin Drum's blog has brandishd another weapon from the trolls armamentarium. I have been accused of conceit.
The late John Kenneth Galbraith didn't have much use for the virtue of modesty. He held it to be overrated. He might have been right about that, but more practically, when a leftist lets modesty get in the way they don't fight aggressively for the leftist agenda.
My fellow leftists, please, make the same sacrifice I have. Put aside that most charming of personal traits, demure modesty. It has no place in a brawl and politics is a brawl. If someone, even your inner liberal niceness angel, scolds that you are being immodest, consider it to be a noble and worthwhile sacrifice for the cause. If your angel keeps bugging you, promise it you'll try to cut down on the use of the first person.
Conservatives, motivated only by greed and hate, have much to be modest about. But you don't see them hiding behind the couch.
My friends, a troll on Kevin Drum's blog has brandishd another weapon from the trolls armamentarium. I have been accused of conceit.
The late John Kenneth Galbraith didn't have much use for the virtue of modesty. He held it to be overrated. He might have been right about that, but more practically, when a leftist lets modesty get in the way they don't fight aggressively for the leftist agenda.
My fellow leftists, please, make the same sacrifice I have. Put aside that most charming of personal traits, demure modesty. It has no place in a brawl and politics is a brawl. If someone, even your inner liberal niceness angel, scolds that you are being immodest, consider it to be a noble and worthwhile sacrifice for the cause. If your angel keeps bugging you, promise it you'll try to cut down on the use of the first person.
Conservatives, motivated only by greed and hate, have much to be modest about. But you don't see them hiding behind the couch.
Tuesdays Are Hard
Even with my reduced work schedule (got to get more students) Tuesdays are my difficult days this year. Sorry for the slighter posting. Here's a little something from my early days of blogging.
Untitled
The Civil War dead
Painted the house
ashes of roses.
The parlor, olive.
The girl went out,
Took off her shoes
And ran through
the June weeds.
None of them grey.
Untitled
The Civil War dead
Painted the house
ashes of roses.
The parlor, olive.
The girl went out,
Took off her shoes
And ran through
the June weeds.
None of them grey.
What Don't These "Brights" Get About Their Intention To Offend People?
Jim Reed Anthony_McCarthy • 9 hours ago
This is an asymmetrical battle. Catholics have nothing to gain and much to lose. The Satanist side has nothing to lose and they can make a point. The Catholics are prisoners to their own feeling of importance. They lost at the point where they took the disrespect shown them by the Satanists, and did what they could to apply pressure and shut them down. From the Satanist point of view it doesn't matter if they are shut down because the point has already been made, so they have already won, and they didn't even need to hold their meeting. Some of the Catholics can see the problem, and wish it could have been worked out differently, but there is nothing they can do. Those on the attack won't get it, and if there is any more conflict like this they will dig themselves in deeper. They see their religion as more important, and something they must fight to protect, and that blinds them to what they are doing.
Anthony_McCarthy Jim Reed • 34 minutes ago
The point is a bunch of atheists who are calling themselves "Satanists" purposely do something to offend Catholics and Catholics do the rational thing, they are offended. Then the atheist-"Satanists" whine that the people they intended to offend were offended. The Catholics didn't shut them down, they protested the offense and someone else decided they'd rather not be part of offending a large number of people so they shut them down.
Let me repeat, kid, if you decide to intentionally offend someone they are entirely within their right to have the reaction you intended and they have the right to do something about it. The Catholics did nothing wrong in this, they did what anyone has a right to do, defend themselves. That you don't get that is only proof that you're not as "Bright" as people like Daniel Dennett have told you you are.
This much is clear about how internet atheists think. When people react to their offensive behavior in a way to protest the offense or to defend themselves against the offense, the online atheist's brilliant response is
"THAT'S NOT FAIR!"
The temptation is to point out that they're twelve. But I think that's giving them too much credit. They're about four.
This is an asymmetrical battle. Catholics have nothing to gain and much to lose. The Satanist side has nothing to lose and they can make a point. The Catholics are prisoners to their own feeling of importance. They lost at the point where they took the disrespect shown them by the Satanists, and did what they could to apply pressure and shut them down. From the Satanist point of view it doesn't matter if they are shut down because the point has already been made, so they have already won, and they didn't even need to hold their meeting. Some of the Catholics can see the problem, and wish it could have been worked out differently, but there is nothing they can do. Those on the attack won't get it, and if there is any more conflict like this they will dig themselves in deeper. They see their religion as more important, and something they must fight to protect, and that blinds them to what they are doing.
Anthony_McCarthy Jim Reed • 34 minutes ago
The point is a bunch of atheists who are calling themselves "Satanists" purposely do something to offend Catholics and Catholics do the rational thing, they are offended. Then the atheist-"Satanists" whine that the people they intended to offend were offended. The Catholics didn't shut them down, they protested the offense and someone else decided they'd rather not be part of offending a large number of people so they shut them down.
Let me repeat, kid, if you decide to intentionally offend someone they are entirely within their right to have the reaction you intended and they have the right to do something about it. The Catholics did nothing wrong in this, they did what anyone has a right to do, defend themselves. That you don't get that is only proof that you're not as "Bright" as people like Daniel Dennett have told you you are.
This much is clear about how internet atheists think. When people react to their offensive behavior in a way to protest the offense or to defend themselves against the offense, the online atheist's brilliant response is
"THAT'S NOT FAIR!"
The temptation is to point out that they're twelve. But I think that's giving them too much credit. They're about four.
Monday, May 19, 2014
"Sex Pos" Hucksters Are The Anti-Vaxxers Of The "Reality Community" If Not Its Climate Change Deniers
It probably is the second most serious of mortal sins on the pseudo-left, the denial of science. What else does the febrile anger at creationists by people, some of whom know as little as they do about evolution consist of by damning the sinners to the hellishness of being them? The most serious sin among the pseudo-left is being not being all up to date and modernistic, the ultimate fashion faux pas, what replaces a sense of sin when the reality of sin is to not to be considered real on pain of being not kewl.
And it is the reason that when it comes to the real and undeniable results of sexual promiscuity, sleeping around, screwing around, one is required to pretend that the massive science documenting those results is wrong. Or, failing that, to pretend that the science doesn't exist. Of course the results of promiscuous sex are well documented even in the popular culture, known to just about anyone as soon as they find out what sex is. Pregnancy, in the case of straight sex, infections in any instance when an exchange of bodily fluids is possible. No one who has an understanding of the most basic biology of the matter can misunderstand that. Only you are required to pretend that you don't understand it, you are to suppress that knowledge.
The conflict between some of the most obvious, relevant and life saving science that identifies sleeping around as a dangerous practice* and that grooviness requires a breezy, insouciant, contra-scientific requirement to approve of sexual promiscuity proves that the coercion to be in step with fashion wins out over science and personal experience among the "rational class". Their objects of worship, their substitute state of grace, are, arguably, more powerful than those of the fundamentalist religion that leads unfashionable people to deny the far more remote reality of evolution.
The denial of science by the "sex pos" hucksters and their dupes is a far greater denial of known reality than the denial of science by those who will never experience or observe evolution. I doubt there is a sentient adult who has not know of, observed or experienced the negative consequences of sexual promiscuity.
The arithmetic of infection with STDs isn't complex, your chances of infection increase with both the numbers of people you have sex with AND with the number of people the person or people you have sex with have had sex with. This is the same as with any communicable disease. The "sex pos" people who deny that is the case are at least as stupid and irresponsible as the anti-vaxx people. The result of both practices will be larger numbers of people contracting preventable diseases and the endangerment of other people, some of whom have the misfortune of being married or in what they believe is a monogamous relationship with someone who engages in a known risk factor to them.
The "sex pos" people are as irresponsible as the Muslim fundamentalists who prevent vaccination programs because they encourage a risky behavior, they recruit people to turn their bodies into the vector of infection. The few ways we have of reducing the risks of sleeping around, chlamydia vaccines, various drugs that may reduce risk of other infections**, don't anticipate the evolution of viruses into new pathogens. The time between the evolution of HIV as a human pathogen and the first conclusions that something was happening in gay men was long enough for a catastrophic, world-wide pandemic to have developed.
IT IS AFTER PEOPLE BECOME SICK AND DIE THAT NEW PATHOGENS ARE EVEN NOTICED BY THE SCIENTISTS WHO ARE LOOKING FOR THINGS LIKE THAT. In the case of HIV-AIDS and antibiotic resistant forms of old fashioned STDs, those incubate in the bodies of people who have been exposed to them through people having multiple sex partners, especially those who have had many. Yet that is what "sex pos" encourages, especially to young people who can reasonably claim to not have seen the results of that behavior, yet. It's too bad that they will probably have to experience it themselves to understand that they were being lied to, often by old people in the pay of the sex industry or those who are desperate to remain trendy and groovy well after their days of finding non-paying sex partners in large numbers are past.
There is as much if not more denial of science and what it means for people and their lives among what passes, pathetically, as hipsters these days as there is among the creationists and the dupes of FOX, it's just different science that is denied. And the difference in what is acceptable to who isn't based on anything more serious than in-crowd identity or fundamentalist coercion.
* There is so much science done on this and the basic facts of it are so well known to the people who are reading this that it is ridiculous to keep pointing it out. I doubt that among people old enough to remember the 1980s and 90s those facts aren't known except among the least intelligent and most willfully ignorant. Though anyone who knows that science and denies it probably shouldn't qualify as being smarter than them.
** In looking to see how this issue is covered at the "Scienceblogs" I came across this post that looks rather realistically about the problems of the recently developed prophylactic pill that may "help" prevent the spread of infection. Among other things noted, people are notorious for not taking pills as prescribed. I am skeptical that it will turn out to be an unmitigated success due to that and due to its inevitable use in convincing people that they are safe to sleep around without the use of a condom. If it works as advertised, it will work in some cases but its use won't be entirely successful. The post also talks realistically about problems that even what would seem to be a more reliable means of prevention, inoculations, are problematic.
And it is the reason that when it comes to the real and undeniable results of sexual promiscuity, sleeping around, screwing around, one is required to pretend that the massive science documenting those results is wrong. Or, failing that, to pretend that the science doesn't exist. Of course the results of promiscuous sex are well documented even in the popular culture, known to just about anyone as soon as they find out what sex is. Pregnancy, in the case of straight sex, infections in any instance when an exchange of bodily fluids is possible. No one who has an understanding of the most basic biology of the matter can misunderstand that. Only you are required to pretend that you don't understand it, you are to suppress that knowledge.
The conflict between some of the most obvious, relevant and life saving science that identifies sleeping around as a dangerous practice* and that grooviness requires a breezy, insouciant, contra-scientific requirement to approve of sexual promiscuity proves that the coercion to be in step with fashion wins out over science and personal experience among the "rational class". Their objects of worship, their substitute state of grace, are, arguably, more powerful than those of the fundamentalist religion that leads unfashionable people to deny the far more remote reality of evolution.
The denial of science by the "sex pos" hucksters and their dupes is a far greater denial of known reality than the denial of science by those who will never experience or observe evolution. I doubt there is a sentient adult who has not know of, observed or experienced the negative consequences of sexual promiscuity.
The arithmetic of infection with STDs isn't complex, your chances of infection increase with both the numbers of people you have sex with AND with the number of people the person or people you have sex with have had sex with. This is the same as with any communicable disease. The "sex pos" people who deny that is the case are at least as stupid and irresponsible as the anti-vaxx people. The result of both practices will be larger numbers of people contracting preventable diseases and the endangerment of other people, some of whom have the misfortune of being married or in what they believe is a monogamous relationship with someone who engages in a known risk factor to them.
The "sex pos" people are as irresponsible as the Muslim fundamentalists who prevent vaccination programs because they encourage a risky behavior, they recruit people to turn their bodies into the vector of infection. The few ways we have of reducing the risks of sleeping around, chlamydia vaccines, various drugs that may reduce risk of other infections**, don't anticipate the evolution of viruses into new pathogens. The time between the evolution of HIV as a human pathogen and the first conclusions that something was happening in gay men was long enough for a catastrophic, world-wide pandemic to have developed.
IT IS AFTER PEOPLE BECOME SICK AND DIE THAT NEW PATHOGENS ARE EVEN NOTICED BY THE SCIENTISTS WHO ARE LOOKING FOR THINGS LIKE THAT. In the case of HIV-AIDS and antibiotic resistant forms of old fashioned STDs, those incubate in the bodies of people who have been exposed to them through people having multiple sex partners, especially those who have had many. Yet that is what "sex pos" encourages, especially to young people who can reasonably claim to not have seen the results of that behavior, yet. It's too bad that they will probably have to experience it themselves to understand that they were being lied to, often by old people in the pay of the sex industry or those who are desperate to remain trendy and groovy well after their days of finding non-paying sex partners in large numbers are past.
There is as much if not more denial of science and what it means for people and their lives among what passes, pathetically, as hipsters these days as there is among the creationists and the dupes of FOX, it's just different science that is denied. And the difference in what is acceptable to who isn't based on anything more serious than in-crowd identity or fundamentalist coercion.
* There is so much science done on this and the basic facts of it are so well known to the people who are reading this that it is ridiculous to keep pointing it out. I doubt that among people old enough to remember the 1980s and 90s those facts aren't known except among the least intelligent and most willfully ignorant. Though anyone who knows that science and denies it probably shouldn't qualify as being smarter than them.
** In looking to see how this issue is covered at the "Scienceblogs" I came across this post that looks rather realistically about the problems of the recently developed prophylactic pill that may "help" prevent the spread of infection. Among other things noted, people are notorious for not taking pills as prescribed. I am skeptical that it will turn out to be an unmitigated success due to that and due to its inevitable use in convincing people that they are safe to sleep around without the use of a condom. If it works as advertised, it will work in some cases but its use won't be entirely successful. The post also talks realistically about problems that even what would seem to be a more reliable means of prevention, inoculations, are problematic.
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Charles Tomlinson Griffes Three Tone Pictures op. 5
Denver Oldham Piano,
Of all of the composers who were heavily influenced by Debussy I think Griffes was the one who most successfully avoided becoming entirely submerged under that ocean.
Score
Perhaps Legacy Admissions at Harvard Are At The Bottom of This
I hadn't paid that much attention to the "Black Mass" stunt announced by the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club until it was called off, sort of. Like PZ Myer's ersatz "Great Desecration" the stunt is supposed to center around the desecration of a consecrated communion wafer, an act that is intentionally offensive to Catholics and what they hold to be sacred. I strongly suspect that, whatever communion wafer is used when this kind of thing happens, it would likely not be consecrated. I'm almost certain it probably wouldn't have been, just as I am almost certain that the one in Myer's stunt was not. So we are left with the intentionally offensive act.
Oddly, for a bunch of Harvard students, supposedly representative of the cream of intellectual potential in their generation, the kiddies who commissioned the "Black Mass" seem to be upset that people who were intended to be offended got offended by their adolescent level attention getting. Perhaps someone at Harvard should inform these kids that that's how giving intentional offense works. You do something to offend, those you intend to offend are offended. To pretend to confusion as to why they were offended by feigning an innocent desire to merely satisfy intellectual curiosity is a lame trick teenagers have been pulling for generations. No, kiddies, by the time you're in college, it's time that you stopped pretending to not understand what you're doing. Grow up. Perhaps they only teach that at land-grant universities, these days. Places that don't harbor the kinds of clubs that the Ivy League day care centers for the elite do. The extension of adolescence well into adulthood, if not right through senescence is a luxury more common to those with too much money.
As is common with acts of intentional offensiveness, those marked to be offended seldom ask to be offended, in this case Catholics. That so many on the pseudo-left are both delighted that they were offended while pretending to be outraged that they are offended only points to their immaturity, similar to that of the kids at the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club. As a matter of political realism, I'll point out that the Holy Hour held to counter the "Satanic" stunt was standing room only. The planned for crowd at the "Black Mass" was never intended to be more than a few hundred at most. It's a pretty stupid political calculation that needlessly offends more people than it attracts. But such is the pseudo-left's political arithmetic. I am pretty disgusted that, with the response of the "left" that leaves conservatives an open field to gain the good will of those so offended.
In my response to an article chiding the Catholic Church for its response, I said this:
Oh, for crying out loud, the central aspect of this, the organizing of the stunt by Harvard Extension School Cultural Studies Club was juvenile thrill seeking through that most superficial of cultural acts, being all naughty and transgressive by offending other people believed to represent some kind of oppressive authority. Well, what a surprise, an act that is intended to be offensive, offended an got all involved lots of attention. While there is a lot in this "eulogy" that is worth thinking about, one thing that isn't addressed is that of all of those involved, the Catholic hierarchy and laity, those designated as the offended, didn't choose to start the entire affair. I'm sure that the Cardinal and others would have rather spent their time on something productive rather than addressing an adolescent attention getting and thrill seeking stunt.
The real harm, the real violation of Jesus is done by the dogmas taught at the Harvard Business School, is Law School, other Harvard entities like the Kennedy School of Government, which oppress the least among us for the benefit of the class that goes to Harvard as legacy admissions, the ones who make Harvard's endowment so obscenely enormous while schools within easy walking distance or a quick subway ride away, those which try to serve poor people, are dying for lack of funds. The real violation of the Body of Christ happens by the preferential option for the rich that is taught at Harvard and other elite institutions, something which any group, Catholic or "Satanist" or even those within the Harvard community would not be wasting their time addressing and, heaven help us, actually doing something to help. And I'd include Boston College and Holy Cross among those who should look at who their teaching prefers, some of their product is as truly Satanic as the "Justices" and lawyers and government officials [not to mention businessmen and women, economists, bankers, etc.] who come out of Harvard.
If you want to read the exchange that led to with a few atheists, or, as I suspect, one atheist using sock puppets, the people who are blathering the most about this, online, here's the link.
Update: Allergy season, benadryl, the editing is the first casualty. Sorry for the more the usual screw ups and overdependence on spell check to fix things to bad results.
Oddly, for a bunch of Harvard students, supposedly representative of the cream of intellectual potential in their generation, the kiddies who commissioned the "Black Mass" seem to be upset that people who were intended to be offended got offended by their adolescent level attention getting. Perhaps someone at Harvard should inform these kids that that's how giving intentional offense works. You do something to offend, those you intend to offend are offended. To pretend to confusion as to why they were offended by feigning an innocent desire to merely satisfy intellectual curiosity is a lame trick teenagers have been pulling for generations. No, kiddies, by the time you're in college, it's time that you stopped pretending to not understand what you're doing. Grow up. Perhaps they only teach that at land-grant universities, these days. Places that don't harbor the kinds of clubs that the Ivy League day care centers for the elite do. The extension of adolescence well into adulthood, if not right through senescence is a luxury more common to those with too much money.
As is common with acts of intentional offensiveness, those marked to be offended seldom ask to be offended, in this case Catholics. That so many on the pseudo-left are both delighted that they were offended while pretending to be outraged that they are offended only points to their immaturity, similar to that of the kids at the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club. As a matter of political realism, I'll point out that the Holy Hour held to counter the "Satanic" stunt was standing room only. The planned for crowd at the "Black Mass" was never intended to be more than a few hundred at most. It's a pretty stupid political calculation that needlessly offends more people than it attracts. But such is the pseudo-left's political arithmetic. I am pretty disgusted that, with the response of the "left" that leaves conservatives an open field to gain the good will of those so offended.
In my response to an article chiding the Catholic Church for its response, I said this:
Oh, for crying out loud, the central aspect of this, the organizing of the stunt by Harvard Extension School Cultural Studies Club was juvenile thrill seeking through that most superficial of cultural acts, being all naughty and transgressive by offending other people believed to represent some kind of oppressive authority. Well, what a surprise, an act that is intended to be offensive, offended an got all involved lots of attention. While there is a lot in this "eulogy" that is worth thinking about, one thing that isn't addressed is that of all of those involved, the Catholic hierarchy and laity, those designated as the offended, didn't choose to start the entire affair. I'm sure that the Cardinal and others would have rather spent their time on something productive rather than addressing an adolescent attention getting and thrill seeking stunt.
The real harm, the real violation of Jesus is done by the dogmas taught at the Harvard Business School, is Law School, other Harvard entities like the Kennedy School of Government, which oppress the least among us for the benefit of the class that goes to Harvard as legacy admissions, the ones who make Harvard's endowment so obscenely enormous while schools within easy walking distance or a quick subway ride away, those which try to serve poor people, are dying for lack of funds. The real violation of the Body of Christ happens by the preferential option for the rich that is taught at Harvard and other elite institutions, something which any group, Catholic or "Satanist" or even those within the Harvard community would not be wasting their time addressing and, heaven help us, actually doing something to help. And I'd include Boston College and Holy Cross among those who should look at who their teaching prefers, some of their product is as truly Satanic as the "Justices" and lawyers and government officials [not to mention businessmen and women, economists, bankers, etc.] who come out of Harvard.
If you want to read the exchange that led to with a few atheists, or, as I suspect, one atheist using sock puppets, the people who are blathering the most about this, online, here's the link.
Update: Allergy season, benadryl, the editing is the first casualty. Sorry for the more the usual screw ups and overdependence on spell check to fix things to bad results.
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