Thursday, August 7, 2014

The Last Words of Copernicus Sacred Harp #112 At Noon



Update:  I haven't been able to trace the authenticity of it, but I've read that Copernicus requested that his epitaph be, in English translation,

O Lord, the faith thou didst give to St. Paul , I cannot ask; the mercy thou didst show to St. Peter, I dare not ask; but, Lord, the grace thou didst show unto the dying robber, that, Lord, show to me.

I will admit that if I found the authentication of that it would tickle me pink.

Democracy Will Die by The Lie

One of the more remarkable things about our era is how it isn't lies that have become disreputable, it is morality.   When our society, our politics, our courts and other institutions are pervaded with lies and liars, it is calling their lies, lies that is forbidden.  Perhaps that is because of the possibility of lawsuits that won't get thrown out before they become expensive, it is certainly related to the fashion of even Supreme Court judges rejecting their job description as arbiters of the truth.  Perhaps the problem is that the incredibly low quality of justices appointed and confirmed by a lazy and cynical Senate during Republican administrations don't lead other justices to trusting them.  I mean, look at how Alito lied in his decision in the Hobby Lobby case, as proven in Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent. Such a court as the Roberts court and the Rehnquist court that got away with imposing the worst president in our history in a baldly political act, is hardly trustworthy.  Such courts, with no use for the truth have even rejected the role of a judge as the one who legally determines the truth, make a show of a respect for the truth very much a very rare and sometimes thing.

The courts and the FCC and other regulators have given the media pretty much a carte blanche for lying about politicians and politics and, increasingly, even private citizens, without suffering any real penalty.  Perhaps that is due to how many of the regulators are the product of the same elite law schools as have given us the Supreme Court.   In an aside, it was gratifying to see Robert Reich noting how the Ivy League universities have produced our elite criminal class of oligarchs and their intrinsic role in the complete corruption of American society, politics and touching on their corruption of the law as well as business and financial institutions.   For American democracy to survive, the stranglehold on American institutions of the Ivy Leaguers and their legal theories will have to go.

The absurd corrective of "more speech" the antidote to slander and libel and bigotry which the media "free speech" absolutists recommend is entirely inadequate to prevent the damage of lies, especially those multiplied and magnified by the large media organizations that employ most of them.   The period when "free speech" has gone from being a vital tool of telling the truth to a permission to the hugely rich porn industry and onward to being the major tool by which the Berger, Rehnquist and now Roberts courts have attacked representative democracy, has entirely disproved that theory of free speech.   "More speech" can be more lies told by the same liars that the "more speech" was supposed to correct.  We now have an absurd situation in which lies are protected by courts, even issued by the in court rulings, and the truth is suppressed in the media that is supposed to be the last best defense of government by an informed public.   Only, it's not at all an uncommon situation, it is the common operating procedure for despots and dictatorships around the world and in history, societies in which lies are empowered and the truth is punished.

This can continue or we can stop fetishizing free speech that protects lies and liars who are destroying democracy.   But to do that we also have to stop pretending that people are incapable of discerning the difference between lies and the truth in most of the important contexts in which that must be done in everyday life.   We have to reassert our powers to do that in a democratic context.   I think that the free speech absolutist cult grew out of the distrust of governments by liberals when they saw how bad it could get in the Nazi and fascist governments of the 1930s and 40s.  They lost faith in the ability of democratic governments and courts and politicians working within the framework of democracy to do what dictatorships reject, discern the truth and use it to make life better.  Only their solution, suspending critical judgement of speech, pretending that, somehow, allowing lies to be broadcast freely will produce a situation in which by magic, the truth will win, enabled the same force that produced those very dictatorships. *

There was never any reason to be fair to fascists or nice to Nazis, there was never any reason or even right to pretend that their theories and ideas haven't been given one of the most disastrous of all tests in real time that human beings have ever given to theories and ideas and they failed them absolutely.

In the end of her book, The Walk Down Mainstreet,  showing life in a small Maine town in the throes of and aftermath of a state basketball championship in the late 1950s, Ruth Moore has a scene in which the former basketball star who was sent to prison for armed robbery comes back to his high school to look at the trophies and the picture of him on an earlier state championship team.  In having a nasty conversation with the old principal who encounters him, he says that while he was in prison he read Mein Kampf which some idiot liberal had donated to the prison library, no doubt in line with "being fair to all points of view" or that the prisoners "had a right to read all sides"  that was part of the same "free speech" fetish in that period.  Just for the record, no one ever always read "both sides" of things, that was a pose behind which there was just more pose.  The young thug had been converted to Nazism by reading the book mixing it with his own self-pity, to the horror of the principal.   Moore obviously saw the stupidity of ignoring the fact that the world had just seen what permitting Nazi propaganda to become influential and effective in the real world meant.  Perhaps she also wanted to make the point that the Nazis gained their first foothold by appealing to thugs and criminals who were their first soldiers even before they gained power, officially. The same kind of people who the gun industry and the Republicans on the bench recruit and arm with their Second Amendment fetishism.   It is such an obviously dangerous mix, that danger massively proved by both recent history and the current world today, that anyone who pretends it can't happen here is a total idiot.  

It is so bizarre today to have the same people who loudly scoff and mock "magical thinking" ignoring the truth that we have learned about how dangerous permitting lies in the mass, electronic media is, in favor of their own magical thinking that giving permission for the magnification and multiplication and continual repetition of those lies will, somehow, produce the triumph of the truth, clearly, by magic.

The worst idea can defeat the best idea if the worst idea is promoted through the media.  That is a truth revealed by human experience, in real life, in real societies.  It is a truth that speech in the media produced Nazism, fascism, the mass slaughters of history, the attempted genocide in Rwanda was a product of free speech and free press, that truth falsifies the theory of free speech absolutism.   Our own Supreme Court proves that the slogans of the free speech fetishists can be used to attack our democracy on behalf of the stinking rich oligarchs who will give massive endowments to the elite law schools and universities where such theories are taught and made official legal dogma and which, in a self-reinforcing cycle, produce Supreme Court justices who give the First Amendment that meaning.  

Democracy will die by the lie and it's not going to go out with a whimper but with mass slaughter, of us,  civil insurrection, civil war and it will likely not rise again. It certainly will not rise in any safe way unless lies are called lies and are punished when they are broadcast, the liars banned from the media.   I'd have banned Mein Kampf from prisons and any other book that promoted violence and murder.  There is no rational case for allowing them the same protection of books and ideas that promote equality, moral obligations and democracy.  Democracy doesn't owe anti-democratic evil the time of day, never mind the protection of the law.  It doesn't owe those who enable it more than total rejection.

* The promotion of free speech absolutism by the Marxist left in the United States and other Western democracies was never anything but self-serving.  The idea that "if we suppress the speech of Nazis it will be used to suppress us" is just stupid.  There was never any comparable advantage given to the speech of leftists under that absolutism.   When's the last time you heard a democratic socialist, or even just a real liberal,  being given equal time on American radio or TV?   How often does Diane Rehm have on competent democratic socialists to balance her typical panels of people from Cato and Am. Enterprise Inst, balanced by some NPR journalist (who is supposed to be impartial) or some bleeting dolt from The Brookings Prostitution?

The duping of liberals by Marxists, anarchists and others who solicited our pity while they rejected or scoffed at democracy, was one of the stupider things that happened in the past century and more.  We never owed them any more than we owed fascists or Nazis, and we gave all of them far, far more than we owed them. And that only discredited and destroyed the political effectiveness of liberalism.

I would certainly include all anti-democratic ideologies and rants in what should not automatically have total support and protection.  The domestic Stalinists were, no less than the domestic Nazis, supporting a mass murderer and dictator who totally suppressed free speech and free press as much as Hitler did,  while presenting themselves and being presented as the martyrs of free speech here.   People who advocate theories of government that depend on killing people and violating even their most vital of inherent rights should be treated in line with their own theories.  I wouldn't be surprised if, when democracies survive, they don't find something like that is a certain requirement if you want to keep it.   The lessons of history can be ignored for a people with the luxury of pissing away their democracy but those lessons will have to be repeated until they are learned and acted on.

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

The Staple Singers At Noon


And I can't help but repost this masterpiece


The Title "Freethinker" is Generally A Lie

I have to apologize to everyone, yesterday was a hard at work and I spent most of last night mucking around in the mire that is an atheist dominated comment thread to see if I could come up with any new angle on the delusion that is and pervades atheism.   Not much new, just points to reconsider.

In short, atheists are pretty much the same thing as materialists, some in its old fashioned expression, some under its new names "phyicalism" "naturalism" which are the same thing as the old materialism trying to pretend that physics and logic didn't pretty much blow materialism out of the water about ninety years ago.  They pretend not to have known that or not that their "physicalism" and "naturalism" is identical to old fashioned materialism with a tiny twist in its statement to ignore that it has been refuted.

And they don't seem to understand that materialism means, in the words of one of their man-gods, Carl Sagan, that "The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be."   That "Cosmos"  being that material universe, the objects in the universe moving, combining and breaking apart, according to fixed rules of nature.   Though the materialists online seldom can even express that much knowledge of their faith, theirs is a radically monist system, as Sagan put it, it's all there is.  There is nothing outside of that system ruled by causation, in which one thing causes another, according to fixed law.  As mentioned the other day, that such people have gotten away with calling themselves "freethinkers" is them claiming a concept which their faith refutes and branding themselves with it.  Their thoughts are merely The Cosmos sending their materialist brains through their predetermined destiny to produce ideas that the materialist had no role in producing, before those brains die and fall apart into their constituent molecules which may go on to be consumed by a future Pentacostalist snake handler or strychnine drinker or even some more fitting example of degraded humanity like a cabloid TV pundit like Penn Jillette or Ann Coulter.  The very same molecules that produced the thinking of the greatest of scientists can go on to produce the, uh, thinking of  al Qaeda or the producers of Honey Boo Boo.   And the materialist can't explain how those molecules went wrong, in the process.  They can't even explain why one is right and the others are wrong.

To put it plainly, materialism means that any idea is merely the correct working out of physical laws working on whatever material is randomly present at the time the idea was produced.   According to materialism, no idea can be anything but the right result, since the laws of nature are invariably correct.   Which, as I've also pointed out before, idealism, realism, romanticism, Calvinism, Shintoism, Snake handling Pentacostalism, are all the right results of brain chemistry as much so as what goes on in the brains of Sean Carroll, Daniel Dennett, Larry Krauss, etc. There is no materialist explanation of how one idea can be preferable to any other idea, to do that you would have to explain what laws of nature failed in the production of those ideas.  The thinking of Bill Nye has the same value as that of Ken Hamm under a strict interpretation of materialism and, as I pointed out, as a monist system, a uniformly strict interpretation is all that is allowable under the very definition of materialism is all that it permits.

The name "freethinker" can only be applied to materialists through a lie, the claim to that name shows either a complete lack of understanding of materialism by materialists or it show a complete lack of honesty among materialists.  Since morality is, similarly, demoted to a delusion under materialism, they don't believe it's wrong to tell a lie,  a lie is merely what the randomly available molecules produced under the ambient and appropriate laws of nature that produced the lie.  You'd have to show what was wrong with the laws of nature to assert that a lie was wrong,  that is within the materialist system, and the laws of nature can't be wrong under that.   You have to believe in moral absolutes to explain why a lie is wrong and those can only exist outside of that kind of a monist system.

Either the "freethinker" is lying about being a free thinker or they are lying about having thought about it.   As they want to force everyone else into about the most rigid form of thought that dictates to everyone what they can possibly think WHILE EXEMPTING THEIR OWN THOUGHT FROM THEIR OWN SYSTEM, the word "free" would seem to mean some are more free to make up their minds than others, and they are the chosen ones to do that.

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Monday, August 4, 2014

Question of the Day

Am I the only one who never got the point of Venn diagrams?   I got a good grade in the Foundations of Math course I took and at one time had what was probably a somewhat better than merely average grasp of set theory but Venn diagrams always seemed irrelevant to me.

In what might be a good example of how the set of really smart people can contain some entirely stupid thinking, here's one of the celebratory Venn diagrams I saw online today.


Since the God presumably being addressed includes that God is any number of stated ultimate superlatives, surpassing human understanding and many if not an infinite number which even surpass human definition, including the entire universe and all of existence, the diagram is stupidly drawn.   I'd give it a failing grade.

Not to mention the clever boy (a guess at the gender in which the stupid often is strong) who drew it doesn't understand much about the other sets and subsets, not to mention the intersections of them.  I mean, Saint Nicholas predates The Spanish Inquisition by any number of years and there is no record of him ever leaving Lyia in Anatolia for the Iberian peninsula that I'm aware of, give or take a few miraculous apparitions to save sailors at sea.   I'm rather doubtful that he could even be considered a member of the Roman Catholic Church.   How he comes to be in the same subset as Spider Man is also something I'd have expected even my Algebra 1 instructor to demand an explanation for.    This diagram is an element of the set of all x such that x is a rather stupid and puerile means of showing how stupid an attempt at cleverness based on putting other people down with implications of class snobbery can be.   So it's only apparent use, to show how clever the one drawing it and posting it online, is, only shows how clever they are not.   Hey, I might not see the point of Venn diagrams but that doesn't mean I can't respect the integrity of the system.  I did take the course.

Primitive Sacred Harp Style Singing At Noon



Late Afternoon Update:  
The Sacred Harp style predates the Civil War and, though, today, it is often seen as a Southern tradition, it was also influenced by a string of early New England hymn writers, William Billings, Jeremiah Ingalls, Daniel Read, etc.  I believe it is the same tradition that Charles Ives talked about in his famous Essays Before a Sonata, in which Ives' prophetic vision includes the vulgar and common forms of rural striving with high art and philosophy and with the most profound and transcendental forces of the universe.   It is contained in the ultimate universal music.

The man "born down to Babbitt's Corners," may find a deep appeal in the simple but acute "Gospel Hymns of the New England camp meetin'," of a generation or so ago. He finds in them—some of them—a vigor, a depth of feeling, a natural-soil rhythm, a sincerity, emphatic but inartistic, which, in spite of a vociferous sentimentality, carries him nearer the "Christ of the people" than does the Te Deum of the greatest cathedral. These tunes have, for him, a truer ring than many of those groove-made, even-measured, monotonous, non-rhythmed, indoor-smelling, priest-taught, academic, English or neo-English hymns (and anthems)—well-written, well-harmonized things, well-voice-led, well-counterpointed, well-corrected, and well O.K.'d, by well corrected Mus. Bac. R.F.O.G.'s-personified sounds, correct and inevitable to sight and hearing—in a word, those proper forms of stained-glass beauty, which our over-drilled mechanisms-boy-choirs are limited to. But, if the Yankee can reflect the fervency with which "his gospels" were sung—the fervency of "Aunt Sarah," who scrubbed her life away, for her brother's ten orphans, the fervency with which this woman, after a fourteen-hour work day on the farm, would hitch up and drive five miles, through the mud and rain to "prayer meetin'"—her one articulate outlet for the fullness of her unselfish soul—if he can reflect the fervency of such a spirit, he may find there a local color that will do all the world good. If his music can but catch that "spirit" by being a part with itself, it will come somewhere near his ideal—and it will be American, too, perhaps nearer so than that of the devotee of Indian or negro melody. In other words, if local color, national color, any color, is a true pigment of the universal color, it is a divine quality, it is a part of substance in art—not of manner. The preceding illustrations are but attempts to show that whatever excellence an artist sees in life, a community, in a people, or in any valuable object or experience, if sincerely and intuitively reflected in his work, and so he himself, is, in a way, a reflected part of that excellence. Whether he be accepted or rejected, whether his music is always played, or never played—all this has nothing to do with it—it is true or false by his own measure. If we may be permitted to leave out two words, and add a few more, a sentence of Hegel appears to sum up this idea, "The universal need for expression in art lies in man's rational impulse to exalt the inner ... world (i.e., the highest ideals he sees in the inner life of others) together with what he finds in his own life—into a spiritual consciousness for himself." The artist does feel or does not feel that a sympathy has been approved by an artistic intuition and so reflected in his work. Whether he feels this sympathy is true or not in the final analysis, is a thing probably that no one but he (the artist) knows but the truer he feels it, the more substance it has, or as Sturt puts it, "his work is art, so long as he feels in doing it as true artists feel, and so long as his object is akin to the objects that true artists admire."

It's dated aspects aside, it's a pretty good example of how the music of the ultimate modernist composer of the 20th century in North America, perhaps in the west, was fundamentally at odds with modernism as commonly understood.  If there is something that is not modern,  it is the style of singing of which the shape-note tradition in the south is the strongest modern survival, from which it has been reintroduced in places like New England where it had almost entirely died out. From that source came a good part of what informed Ive's Second Sonata, The Concord Sonata and his other music.  A source which he stood up as the equal to any other style or school.   Which is more radical than modernism gets.  You can understand why that other pole star of musical modernism, Arnold Schoenberg, who also found his inspiration in older music, admired Ives so much.

When a TV Celebrity Scientist Uses His Celebrity To Tell Industry Skeptics to Shut Up

Neil deGrasse Tyson, the massively promoted celebrity face of science, today, was the subject of a post on Mother Jones by science reporter Chris Mooney.   It is a good example of several of the problems with TV celebrity scientists.

1. He feels comfortable with peddling views on topics outside of, not only his specialty, but in a totally different branch of science using his identity as "A SCIENTIST" to do that.

2. In the process he completely muddies the issues showing that he really doesn't seem to understand them.   He clearly doesn't understand the difference between the hybridization of naturally occurring variations and inserting entirely novel genes into an organism, making it an artificial organism with unknowable and possibly permanent modifications.  Even Chris Mooney, while pushing the video notes that he seems to be rather confused about the science he is commenting on.*

3, He feels entirely comfortable, using his celebrity as "A SCIENTIST" to tell the critics of a massively profitable industry to shut up.  Or, being a geezer whose career as a celebrity scientist is based on a certain degree of kewlitude, "chill out".



One of my earliest blog brawls was over just an atheist demanding that laypeople must accept what scientists say.   Re-reading it after seven years, I'm glad to see I'd pointed out that the kind of authority claimed by scientists doing what the pop-hero of celebrity science,  Neil deGrasse Tyson, has been granted by virtue of his appearances on TV, lead to religious authorities, claiming a similar right to be believed provided them with their propaganda to attack religion.   I also noted another case when a celebrity scientist, another physicist, presented their superstitions about the life sciences as an example of why the public should not just trust what scientists say.

I have noticed that people and groups in the Center for Inquiry, CSICOP, and others started by the atheist ideologue and promoter of scientism, Paul Kurtz are remarkable in demanding that the skeptics of the GMO industry shut up.  I would include Tyson in that group, he certainly seems to associate with them an awful lot.  Which makes me want to know if there are any financial ties among those people and groups with the GMO industry.  Only, I guess that's one of the things we're supposed to shut up about.

The first time I remember hearing of Neil deGrasse Tyson was when he hosted some Nova programs, just about the same time I came to conclude that what was once the finest science program on American TV had become a vehicle of corporate and ideological propaganda.  I'd assumed that the Koch family was the only thing at work in that but a lot of it is also the same kind of materialistic scientism of the kind that Tyson and his media celebrity associates push.  That the pseudo-skepticism industry is telling the skeptics of industry to shut up was probably a predictable trend.   It's a big part of why I find Tyson to mostly just be annoying.

*  Chris Mooney is enough of a journalist to have noted,

In fairness, critics of GM foods make a variety of arguments that go beyond the simple question of whether the foods we eat were modified prior to the onset of modern biotechnology. They also draw a distinction between modifying plants and animals through traditional breeding and genetic modification that requires the use of biotechnology, and involves techniques such as inserting genes from different species.

Mooney has had extensive relationships with CFI, Paul Kurtz and others in the pseudo-skeptical industry, though he is also a real journalist.  I recall reading he left CFI over some disagreement about journalism so maybe he will, eventually, think more critically about the lines they are promoting.

Update During The Late Lunch Shift:  A Salon-Alternet article by the "Freethought" blogger and atheist analog of Ann Coulter, Greta Christina, which RMJ writes about today, uses, quite irrelevantly, a picture of Neil dG Tyson as some kind of atheist religious icon.  



The article, itself, is only good as an example of the jr. high logic that passes muster as atheist thinking, these days.  The neo-atheism is a fad that passed its sell by so long ago that it's sale should be legally prohibited.   I wish I could tell you that Greta Christina is the nadir of neo-atheist . um.......... thought?,  but there is even worse in comment threads.


Saturday, August 2, 2014

Mary Lou Williams Lullaby of the Leaves

Mary Lou Williams 

Lullaby of the Leaves

With a really wonderful arrangement which sounds like her style.  I can't find who the band is.

And here in what I believe is a later and more intimate interpretation

with Don Byas



Mary Lou Williams Waltz Boogie


I love this so much.  Mary Lou Williams was a great composer, easily as good as many of the men who are more famous, at times reaching up to the top with people like Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus.

A Grand Night For Swinging


Hesitation Boogie

I'd cut off my right arm for her technique.  Lord knows what I'd do for her compositional genius. 

A Quick Lunch Hour Post

Just when you thought that the Salon, Alternet, etc. sex articles couldn't get any stupider.

"Why do so many straight women prefer penetration to oral sex?
Vlogger Arielle Scarcella wants to know: Are lesbian vaginas somehow different from straight ones?

Oh, but wait, it's not just any brand of stupid, it's sciency.

Scarcella did a bit of background research in the weeks before she released her new “Straight Girls Explain” video, asking 500 of her straight-identifying female viewers and 500 lesbian viewers whether they prefer oral sex to penetration. She found that while 55 percent of straight women preferred penetration, just 25 percent of lesbian viewers felt the same. So, for her follow up, Scarcella tried to figure out why.

I would suggest that no one ever be allowed to post something this clueless pretending it was anything that should be called research, science and statistics unless they can prove they have mastered the material in the first two chapters of Jessica Utt's absolutely useful book "Seeing Through Statistics" which would give them enough knowledge so they would never even try to do something so stupid, so full of flaws and follies and faddish stupidity and put their name on it.  Not to mention an editor of a magazine publishing it. 

That Salon would post such transparent and complete crap WHILE HOSTING MULTIPLE ARTICLES MOCKING THE RIGHT WING FOR THEIR VIOLATIONS OF SCIENCE, 
IS A DISGRACE
And the only reason I posted that at 96 points is that my word processor doesn't have 128 point fonts.

A Book Read Fifty Years Too Late

I am going to have to work today so here's an old piece I wrote for Echidne of the Snakes in March of 2009.   

My thanks to the anonymous e-mailer who recommended that I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave new World Revisited. Having admired the novel, which I think is a lot more impressive than 1984 in its vision of domestic social and political trends, I’m ashamed to admit to never having read Aldous Huxley’s essays. There are points on which we differ, some sharply, but he said a lot of the things I have been harping on about fifty years earlier. And a lot better. 


Here’s a link to the book online, The Art of Selling is the chapter that was pointed out to me as being very similar to some of the things I’ve written. .

- The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

- Effective rational propaganda becomes possible only when there is a clear understanding, on the part of all concerned, of the nature of symbols and of their relations to the things and events symbolized. Irrational propaganda depends for its effectiveness on a general failure to understand the nature of symbols.

- But unfortunately propaganda in the Western democracies, above all in America, has two faces and a divided personality. In charge of the editorial department there is often a democratic Dr. Jekyll -- a propagandist who would be very happy to prove that John Dewey had been right about the ability of human nature to respond to truth and reason. But this worthy man controls only a part of the machinery of mass communication. In charge of advertising we find an anti-democratic, because anti-rational, Mr. Hyde -- or rather a Dr. Hyde, for Hyde is now a Ph.D. in psychology and has a master's degree as well in the social sciences. This Dr. Hyde would be very unhappy indeed if everybody always lived up to John Dewey's faith in human nature. Truth and reason are Jekyll's affair, not his. Hyde is a motivation analyst, and his business is to study human weaknesses and failings, to investigate those unconscious desires and fears by which so much of men's conscious thinking and overt doing is determined. And he does this, not in the spirit of the moralist who would like to make people better, or of the physician who would like to improve their health, but simply in order to find out the best way to take advantage of their ignorance and to exploit their irrationality for the pecuniary benefit of his employers.

And from the previous chapter:

- Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and their propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.

I was afraid that Huxley wouldn’t go as far as I’m afraid we’ll have to in order to save democracy but as he states the obvious truth that the prerequisites for The People to govern themselves by a representative democracy are not optional but are, in fact, absolutely mandatory, democracy won’t survive without legislation preventing mass marketed lies. From the last chapter, What Can Be Done?

- No, I repeat, there can never be such a thing as a writ of habeas mentem. But there can be preventive legislation -- an outlawing of the psychological slave trade, a statute for the protection of minds against the unscrupulous purveyors of poisonous propaganda, modeled on the statutes for the protection of bodies against the unscrupulous purveyors of adulterated food and dangerous drugs. For example, there could and, I think, there should be legislation limiting the right of public officials, civil or military, to subject the captive audiences under their command or in their custody to sleep-teaching. There could and, I think, there should be legislation prohibiting the use of subliminal projection in public places or on television screens. There could and, I think, there should be legislation to prevent political candidates not merely from spending more than a certain amount of money on their election campaigns, but also to prevent them from resorting to the kind of anti-rational propaganda that makes nonsense of the whole democratic process.

Such preventive legislation might do some good; but if the great impersonal forces now menacing freedom continue to gather momentum, they cannot do much good for very long. The best of constitutions and preventive laws will be powerless against the steadily increasing pressures of over-population and of the over-organization imposed by growing numbers and advancing technology. The constitutions will not be abrogated and the good laws will remain on the statute book; but these liberal forms will merely serve to mask and adorn a profoundly illiberal substance. Given unchecked over-population and over-organization, we may expect to see in the democratic countries a reversal of the process which transformed England into a democracy, while retaining all the outward forms of a monarchy. Under the relentless thrust of accelerating overpopulation and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms -- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -- will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial -- but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

The fifty years since the book was published prove that we are living out what Huxley saw with such impressive insight. Maybe, due to his family heritage, he realized that the mass media had fundamentally changed the political environment to the extent that the old guarantees which would have provided the possibility of an informed vote no longer hold. We can only look back at the developments in politics and the media and see the reality of what Huxley saw made true.

Last year the possibility of democracy was saved, for a time, by the disgust of the public over the Bush regime or, less optimistically, by the results of his economic pillage catching up with his party. It wasn’t the “free press” that saved us from four more years, it was reality going over the heads of the press. As the biological environment won’t survive delay in facing up to the ruinous environmental results of corporate libertarianism, democracy won’t survive with the media we’ve got today. I don’t think the new media will prove to be the savior many are confident it will be. If anything lies are more easily spread online than before. We risk too much if their hunch is wrong. The dangers of requiring the press to serve the essential needs of a democratic society are real, abuses of any kind of regulation will arise. But those dangers are prospective, uncertain and remedial. The dangers of the media we have now are a clear danger to the life of a democracy and the free people it serves.

I Prefer to Think You Are Polite

I noticed, just now, that either I've got the most indifferent or the most polite readers online.  No one has pointed out that I provided everyone with an "Ear Wrom" in a headline yesterday.  Or maybe that's one of the products of online, unedited writing, that people take typos, misspellings, and other accidents in the mechanics of writing in stride. 

Friday, August 1, 2014

Peggy Lee Goody Goody Your Friday Afternoon Ear Wrom


Pseudo-Science The Right Likes and Pseudo-Science The Left Likes Is Sometimes Just About The Same Science

One of the worst things about an ignorance of science while holding that science is the very embodiment of all that is good and great and wonderful, the ultimate source of knowledge and progress, is that it leads to uncritical acceptance of anything that gets the label SCIENCE attached to it.  "Science" as a category in the wider society, isn't a methodology invented to increase the chances that what is presented is of enhanced reliability,  it isn't a rigorous practice of controlled and rigorously reviewed research, it is a slogan, a sort of trade mark.

Even among science journalists as good as Chris Mooney can be, the emotional attachment to science can override what they know science requires.  In his case I suspect it isn't unrelated to the ideological involvement he has had with the atheist promotion unit, Center for Inquiry.  Though I do respect some of his work, especially his books, and he has shown he is able to exercise some critical judgement, in other cases that seems to give way as he looks at that word "science" on the label and critical judgement stops*.

But Chris Mooney is certainly far more knowledgeable than most of the sci-ranger scribblers for the online magazines, many of them, also, with a professional attachment to CFI and other Kurtz originated groups, and even some without that. Many of them are engaged primarily in the promotion of their latest celeb-sci-guy, Neil deGrasse Tyson or some other cable TV sci-shows.  Most of those don't share either Mooney's dedication to research or have anywhere near his appreciation of what science is supposed to be and what it is not.  Chris Mooney is, after all, a journalist of the kind who actually does some research, something I'd never accuse most of them of being. Though, as I said, he does have some of the same blind spots his journalistic colleagues do, some of them only have blind spots.

There is an article on Salon by Paul Rosenberg this week, pushing the same pseudo-scientific paper, produced by three political scientists, not even real scientists, that Chris Mooney was promoting a couple of weeks ago.  It insists that there are differences in the brains of "conservatives" that make them different from "liberals" and that those are to an extent, innate, genetic.  I noted some huge problems with that idea, not the least of which is that the definition of what a "conservative" or "liberal" is changes over time and that people change their political identity, quite often.  Attributing political differences to differences in the physical organ, the brain, is entirely in line with materialist ideology, it doesn't match the known reality of what political position is in real life, in the MINDS of real people.

If Mooney and Rosenberg had stated it unfashionably, that there were differences in THE MINDS of liberals and conservatives, they could have avoided the problems with pretending that was a physical difference with biological and even genetic causes brings but they'd have violated the code of materialism that you must always pretend to have reduced a problem to a physical cause.  Of course, the observation that the minds of conservatives and liberals aren't the same is hardly news, it's what constitutes an actual difference that the imaginary act of positioning them on an imaginary line notes. So, no publishable article stating that fact.   In the case of Rosenberg it also would save him from the potentially embarrassing explanation of how he squares what he promotes in this week's article with one he posted TWO DAYS EARLIER!,  Right wing’s worst nightmare: The master stroke that turns red states blue.  Apparently he thinks it's easier to change a state's collective "brain" than it would be to change an individual conservative's brain.  Or something like that.   I'm having a really hard time coming to an understanding of how his "brain" could have produced those two articles within two days.

The thinking of the science scribbling community on this stuff would seem to be rather muddled, though I don't think there is a physiological or genetic explanation for that.   I think their even more ignorant or indifferent editors and publishers don't much care what they write as long as people click on it.  So, it's a purely profit motivated phenomenon, in the end, not different in kind from the pseudo-science that the extraction industries push because the real science of climate change is unprofitable for them, just far less catastrophic in the short and long term.

And there is far worse on even the high end magazines of the alleged and even the real left that shows that it is no less gullible about what science is and what it isn't, what is and isn't science.  Both sides have science it rejects and science it adores, in the case of biological determinism, both sides seem to buy that, though for different reasons.**

*  I've noticed one area, GMO foods, where a suspicious number of people related to CFI and other Paul Kurtz originated groups are really big proponents of GMO and the clear online effort to suppress criticism of it.   It's pretty clear that there is paid trolling of comment threads on that issue and, since there is enormous money to be made by GMO corporations, I believe they are funding the suppression of the criticism.  I believe Chris Mooney has entirely more integrity than to push a position for his own profit but I suspect he has been influenced by the AstroTurf propaganda and coersion.  Though it might just be that he has a blind spot when it comes to genetics as popularly understood these days.

**  My comment on Rosenberg's "brain" article.

This article is an example of how as liable what is identified as "the left" is to buy into pseudo-science as "the right" is.  This is junk science at its worst, beginning by coming up with phony definitions of "things" that aren't really things, two alleged political positions and pretending to use that to create "different brains" and some kind of genetic basis for those.  Since the first "thing" produced by those "genes" isn't really a thing but an intentionally manufactured construct, the "genes" aren't really there.  Neither are the "different brains", even easier to debunk because 1. political positioning isn't fixed in any individuals life but is liable to real and effective change, 2. the definition of what is "conservative" and what is "liberal" changes over time.  Free speech absolutism used to be the reserve of liberals who wanted to overturn laws banning pornography, now it's used by the far right on the Supreme Court and by corporate funded lawyers to overturn the largely liberally adopted campaign finance laws.

This is as totally pseudo-scientific as scientific racism, sharing with it many of the same bad habits of thought, and even more so eugenics, two things that are generally believed today are "conservative" attributes, though plenty of those considered "liberal" and "modernistic" explicitly advocated both scientific racism and eugenics.  Such "liberal" icons as Karl Pearson (who certainly should have known better) George Bernard Shaw, D. H. Lawrence (both early advocates of gassing "biologically inferior people",  H. G. Wells (an enthusiast of racial genocide in the name of progress) and up to today with people like Watson and Crick, both of whom were flagrant eugenicists and scientific racists.

It is really troubling how attaching the label "science" to stuff like this that is such obvious pseudo-science, making reference to genetics and made up scenarios under natural selection, the very basis of eugenics that got millions killed in the last century, sells it to people on the alleged left with the same ease similar junk has been sold to the alleged right.  Only, people who have bought that junk aren't nearly as different as they like to believe they are.  As proven by those two alleged political adversaries, representing the imaginary "right" and "left" ends of the imaginary spectrum during their time, Hitler and Stalin both produced what were among the greatest mass murders in history.  Those bodies are what really determines their political positioning, those are real, the stories and alleged biological differences they depended on were entirely imaginary.