I had a friend, now dead, who I met my first year in college who landed at a rural land-grant university in what she believed to be the wilderness from one of the toughest, grimiest, crime ridden inner city neighborhoods in a major Northeastern city in the mid 1960s. A black-belt, not in the more elegant karate, but in the street-fighting sport of jujitsu. She was one tough gal.
She told me that her first day in college, she arrived with her stuff in an old dufflebag from the army surplus store (this was a year or two before that was fashionable) which she dumped on a bed in her assigned dorm room, before her room mate arrived and she decided to explore the campus.
On returning she found the bare walls of half of the room transformed into what would have been a girly, girl's room of the period, all except her side of the room which was untouched. On first meeting her new roommate, her new, prom queen roommate said, "My father's a policeman, he's a Federal Marshall". To which my friend said, "Well, you know the guy your father's looking for? That's my father". Which she told me was true, he was a gangster who a few years later was shot in a gang war. When I gave her my condolences she said, "Don't bother, he was an asshole."
The reason I'm telling you this story is what happened in the early years of students protesting, not only in matters of civil rights and the anti-war movement but for increased liberties on campus for students. She was entirely for the civil rights and anti-war goals but when, in a meeting, demands for abolishing a number of rules were brought up she scoffed. When someone said that "If students are given the opportunity to take responsibility for themselves they'll start thinking and acting like adults" she said, "Bullshit, if they can get away with stuff they'll just get away with being total assholes to people they can do that to." She'd seen what happens when no one is enforcing rules, she'd grown up with it.
She was right, which we found out when the "reforms" went through and dorm life went down hill. I tell that story as an appendix to my last post.
Saturday, November 29, 2014
In Lieu Of A 3000 Word Piece On Obama's Race To The Top Program
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
Lily Tomlin
Lily Tomlin
Friday, November 28, 2014
Whether Or Not You Want To Hear It Sometimes Victims Are Guilty Of Something, Making Themselves Vulnerable To Attack
Post script as an introduction:
Considering the idea of "victim blaming" makes me think it might be time for me to again reconsider the instances in which thinking about human events and life in terms of geometric figures leads away from clarity instead of to it.
The following is about why the currently allowable ways of discussing rape, with even the most relevant issues banned from the discussion, won't get us any closer to finding practical means of preventing rape in the real world we live in, even as the people setting those limits demand something be done.
The issue centers around "victim-blaming" as a demand that the things that victims of crimes do that make them vulnerable to victimization are off-limits for discussion. The motive for that silencing seems to be the misconception that a rape is representable by a pie-chart and that any mention of what a victim did that made them the target of a rapist, somehow, takes a slice out of the guilt of the rapist or rapists (the outrageous crime reported at The University of Virginia is foremost in my mind as I write this). But looking at it that way is both unrealistic and will lead away from realistic ways to deal with the crime of rape. That is true for the ideal universal prevention of rape as it is the right of every person, to avoid their being the victim of attack.
The fact is that rapists look for vulnerable victims and that in venues such as frat parties or pick-up bars, drunks are less likely to put up an effective defense and will be more vulnerable to being convinced into risk-taking. Even if they aren't raped, they can be talked into doing what they would, sober, not do and to generally being convinced to make a fool of themselves, with consent.
Being drunk makes you stupid, physically incapable and less inhibited. That is, currently, an unmentionable fact, something which the children of college age are too innocent and fragile to tolerate. The result is what we see on campuses, all over the place. But the idea of "victim-blaming" as an excuse for not saying it is illogical, wrong and counterproductive.
The rapist is responsible for 100% of their crime but the victim who has made him or herself vulnerable should understand that they are volunteering to be in the most desirable pool from which a rapist will choose who to rape. I have little to no doubt that the people who were raped while being drunk would probably not have been raped if they had been sober. I would certainly rather risk being wrong in telling a kid I knew that they are putting themselves at a high risk of any number of dangers by getting drunk than to pretend to not know that is a fact.
---------
The incredibly shallow, opportunistic and childish thinking in this response by the budding journalists at The Current, the student newspaper at Eckerd College may be a good warning of what some of us suspected, the quality journalism can decline even farther from where it is now. I will only deal with the part of the thing that deals with the contribution getting drunk makes to sexual assaults and rapes on college campuses because how the students deal with that is truly astounding in its illogic and childish slogan twisting.
The Current’s editorial board is addressing this letter because we feel that it is not inclusive and, both through language and important data omissions, runs the risk of victim-blaming. The complexities and consequences of sexual assault cannot be fully understood or mitigated in the 300 words of Eastman’s email. Eckerd claims to be an inclusive, progressive liberal arts college, yet the president’s letter seems to pair a modern-day problem with archaic and ineffective solutions.
The first of these solutions is “limiting your own consumption of alcohol, and encouraging your friends to do the same.” Though both sexual assault and excessive alcohol consumption are important discussions, they should occur separately.
Why? Why discuss them separately?
Tying sexual assault to alcohol consumption runs the risk of victim-blaming, regardless of intentions.
Oh, yes, the all encompassing slogan, "victim-blaming" MUST keep us from fully and realistically addressing a fact that even these students include in their letter. And while the profligate flinging of that phrase is common enough to make it unremarkable, the use of it in this context shows how it can be used to insist that the problem of rape on campus not be addressed.
What the president may be referencing is research from numerous sources, such as the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which estimates that alcohol was involved in 30 to 75 percent of sexual assault cases (exact numbers are difficult for researchers to obtain). Researchers and news sources alike, such as the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and USA Today, have devoted attention to the concept of limiting alcohol consumption as a precautionary measure.
Read USA Today’s full article about alcohol and sexual assault:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/28/alcohol-most-common-drug-in-sexual-assaults/3285139/
And here I'll break in again because THE STUDENT'S OWN CITATION HERE CONTAINS THIS PASSAGE:
Date rape drugs. Roofies. Liquid ecstasy. Special K.
Odorless, colorless, tasteless predators that leave prey weak, confused and vulnerable.
They are part of the standard plotline in many television thrillers, and a mythology has built around their pervasiveness.
But the drugs most frequently associated with drug-facilitated sexual assault — known chemically as Rohypnol, gamma hydroxybutyric (GHB) and ketamine — may not be the most common assailant.
"Quite honestly, alcohol is the No. 1 date rape drug," said Mike Lyttle, regional supervisor for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation's Nashville crime lab. "… Roofies are very rarely — if ever — seen in real life."
Let me point this passage these cub opinion journalists seem to have missed in their own citation.
"alcohol is the No. 1 date rape drug"
Apparently it's not only columnists for Salon who don't bother reading their own citations before making them. Do they teach that in journalism courses these days?
Going on.
Read the National Institute of Justice’s “Campus Sexual Assault Case Study”:
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/221153.pdf
Though precautions are beneficial, we must remember that sober victims also exist. Correlation and causation differ greatly; this correlation between the two factors — alcohol consumption and sexual assault — does not mean that one causes the other.
Anyone who can look at an estimate that, on the high end, alcohol is involved in up to 75% of sexual assaults WITH CITATIONS SUPPORTING THAT and then dismiss it as an important consideration when discussing sexual assault is guilty of insisting on an entirely superficial discussion and a willful refusal to give a very serious problem a complete discussion. INSISTING ON SOLUTIONS THAT WOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT ADDRESS THE EPIDEMIC OF RAPE ON CAMPUSES.
Addressing it alongside sexual misconduct without explicitly underscoring this distinction runs the risk of victim-blaming by insinuating that these atrocities would not have happened had they been sober.
To which I say, do you want to find a way of lessening the incidence of rape or do you want to look for excuses to pretend that getting drunk doesn't play a huge role in rapes happening? Obviously, these student journalists take the later alternative.
-----------
This phrase "victim-blaming" may well have had its origin in the fact of what constitutes a sex crime. Sexual intercourse is one of the most desired activities that human beings engage in, the fact is that most sexual intercourse is consensual, desired by both of the people involved. The crime of rape is defined by the lack of consent by one of the people involved*. It's certain that someone accused of rape will try to either convince authorities or jurors that consent was given, if, perhaps forgotten under the influence of alcohol, or that any reasonable person would understand their confusion through the behavior of the person making the accusation. The extent to which the, mostly, men who have made the decisions of whether or not to pursue a prosecution may have been influenced or more sympathetic to the man who was accused would give him more of a benefit of the doubt than was owed them is worth considering.
But that's, in fact, a different issue. A person who gets drunk at a frat party or at a pick-up bar is not guilty of someone else raping them, they are guilty of making themselves vulnerable to being raped and if they can't stand being told that they are too immature to be drinking or going to parties and bars unsupervised by responsible adults. I know that "journalists" wont' tell them that because journalism has devolved into telling people any stupid thing they want to hear instead of telling them the truth.
------------
It's high time to admit something else, fraternities, sororities, sports teams, are all IN FACT gangs, gangs which are open to and which attract many upper class, white boys and girls and which are based in excluding people who the members look down on. The dynamics of snobbery and self-reinforcement within gangs will always lead to their members acting, singly and in concert to attack and victimize other people. Of course, when the gang members are male, most of them straight, then women will be targeted for use and abuse by the gangsters. That fraternities, sororities and sports teams are a parasite on higher education in the United States is one of the greatest irrationalities in our collective life of the mind. The front of benefits that frats and sports teams bring doesn't change the essential nature of them.
Since those won't be banned from universities and colleges, it's only responsible for us to suspect the members of those things as being potential criminals and that even members of other gangs are at increased danger from them. Going to a frat party and getting drunk while being a woman is about as stupid as going to a biker bar while being a woman. I will risk hurting someone's feelings by saying that because I'm not going to lie about it to spare their tender feelings. I'd rather spare them being violently raped or otherwise attacked.
* That we are to accept even rough or violent sex as swell and good and OK does nothing to lessen the problem of identifying when someone is a victim of rape and when they are not. Fashionable, transgressive violent, degrading, belittiling sex using the most awful of gender roles, sex which moderny people are supposed to support out of some lame brained idea of fairness, has certainly provided more of a shield for rapists. Perhaps we can thank the sexologyand psych industries for that.
Considering the idea of "victim blaming" makes me think it might be time for me to again reconsider the instances in which thinking about human events and life in terms of geometric figures leads away from clarity instead of to it.
The following is about why the currently allowable ways of discussing rape, with even the most relevant issues banned from the discussion, won't get us any closer to finding practical means of preventing rape in the real world we live in, even as the people setting those limits demand something be done.
The issue centers around "victim-blaming" as a demand that the things that victims of crimes do that make them vulnerable to victimization are off-limits for discussion. The motive for that silencing seems to be the misconception that a rape is representable by a pie-chart and that any mention of what a victim did that made them the target of a rapist, somehow, takes a slice out of the guilt of the rapist or rapists (the outrageous crime reported at The University of Virginia is foremost in my mind as I write this). But looking at it that way is both unrealistic and will lead away from realistic ways to deal with the crime of rape. That is true for the ideal universal prevention of rape as it is the right of every person, to avoid their being the victim of attack.
The fact is that rapists look for vulnerable victims and that in venues such as frat parties or pick-up bars, drunks are less likely to put up an effective defense and will be more vulnerable to being convinced into risk-taking. Even if they aren't raped, they can be talked into doing what they would, sober, not do and to generally being convinced to make a fool of themselves, with consent.
Being drunk makes you stupid, physically incapable and less inhibited. That is, currently, an unmentionable fact, something which the children of college age are too innocent and fragile to tolerate. The result is what we see on campuses, all over the place. But the idea of "victim-blaming" as an excuse for not saying it is illogical, wrong and counterproductive.
The rapist is responsible for 100% of their crime but the victim who has made him or herself vulnerable should understand that they are volunteering to be in the most desirable pool from which a rapist will choose who to rape. I have little to no doubt that the people who were raped while being drunk would probably not have been raped if they had been sober. I would certainly rather risk being wrong in telling a kid I knew that they are putting themselves at a high risk of any number of dangers by getting drunk than to pretend to not know that is a fact.
---------
The incredibly shallow, opportunistic and childish thinking in this response by the budding journalists at The Current, the student newspaper at Eckerd College may be a good warning of what some of us suspected, the quality journalism can decline even farther from where it is now. I will only deal with the part of the thing that deals with the contribution getting drunk makes to sexual assaults and rapes on college campuses because how the students deal with that is truly astounding in its illogic and childish slogan twisting.
The Current’s editorial board is addressing this letter because we feel that it is not inclusive and, both through language and important data omissions, runs the risk of victim-blaming. The complexities and consequences of sexual assault cannot be fully understood or mitigated in the 300 words of Eastman’s email. Eckerd claims to be an inclusive, progressive liberal arts college, yet the president’s letter seems to pair a modern-day problem with archaic and ineffective solutions.
The first of these solutions is “limiting your own consumption of alcohol, and encouraging your friends to do the same.” Though both sexual assault and excessive alcohol consumption are important discussions, they should occur separately.
Why? Why discuss them separately?
Tying sexual assault to alcohol consumption runs the risk of victim-blaming, regardless of intentions.
Oh, yes, the all encompassing slogan, "victim-blaming" MUST keep us from fully and realistically addressing a fact that even these students include in their letter. And while the profligate flinging of that phrase is common enough to make it unremarkable, the use of it in this context shows how it can be used to insist that the problem of rape on campus not be addressed.
What the president may be referencing is research from numerous sources, such as the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which estimates that alcohol was involved in 30 to 75 percent of sexual assault cases (exact numbers are difficult for researchers to obtain). Researchers and news sources alike, such as the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and USA Today, have devoted attention to the concept of limiting alcohol consumption as a precautionary measure.
Read USA Today’s full article about alcohol and sexual assault:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/28/alcohol-most-common-drug-in-sexual-assaults/3285139/
And here I'll break in again because THE STUDENT'S OWN CITATION HERE CONTAINS THIS PASSAGE:
Date rape drugs. Roofies. Liquid ecstasy. Special K.
Odorless, colorless, tasteless predators that leave prey weak, confused and vulnerable.
They are part of the standard plotline in many television thrillers, and a mythology has built around their pervasiveness.
But the drugs most frequently associated with drug-facilitated sexual assault — known chemically as Rohypnol, gamma hydroxybutyric (GHB) and ketamine — may not be the most common assailant.
"Quite honestly, alcohol is the No. 1 date rape drug," said Mike Lyttle, regional supervisor for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation's Nashville crime lab. "… Roofies are very rarely — if ever — seen in real life."
Let me point this passage these cub opinion journalists seem to have missed in their own citation.
"alcohol is the No. 1 date rape drug"
Apparently it's not only columnists for Salon who don't bother reading their own citations before making them. Do they teach that in journalism courses these days?
Going on.
Read the National Institute of Justice’s “Campus Sexual Assault Case Study”:
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/221153.pdf
Though precautions are beneficial, we must remember that sober victims also exist. Correlation and causation differ greatly; this correlation between the two factors — alcohol consumption and sexual assault — does not mean that one causes the other.
Anyone who can look at an estimate that, on the high end, alcohol is involved in up to 75% of sexual assaults WITH CITATIONS SUPPORTING THAT and then dismiss it as an important consideration when discussing sexual assault is guilty of insisting on an entirely superficial discussion and a willful refusal to give a very serious problem a complete discussion. INSISTING ON SOLUTIONS THAT WOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT ADDRESS THE EPIDEMIC OF RAPE ON CAMPUSES.
Addressing it alongside sexual misconduct without explicitly underscoring this distinction runs the risk of victim-blaming by insinuating that these atrocities would not have happened had they been sober.
To which I say, do you want to find a way of lessening the incidence of rape or do you want to look for excuses to pretend that getting drunk doesn't play a huge role in rapes happening? Obviously, these student journalists take the later alternative.
-----------
This phrase "victim-blaming" may well have had its origin in the fact of what constitutes a sex crime. Sexual intercourse is one of the most desired activities that human beings engage in, the fact is that most sexual intercourse is consensual, desired by both of the people involved. The crime of rape is defined by the lack of consent by one of the people involved*. It's certain that someone accused of rape will try to either convince authorities or jurors that consent was given, if, perhaps forgotten under the influence of alcohol, or that any reasonable person would understand their confusion through the behavior of the person making the accusation. The extent to which the, mostly, men who have made the decisions of whether or not to pursue a prosecution may have been influenced or more sympathetic to the man who was accused would give him more of a benefit of the doubt than was owed them is worth considering.
But that's, in fact, a different issue. A person who gets drunk at a frat party or at a pick-up bar is not guilty of someone else raping them, they are guilty of making themselves vulnerable to being raped and if they can't stand being told that they are too immature to be drinking or going to parties and bars unsupervised by responsible adults. I know that "journalists" wont' tell them that because journalism has devolved into telling people any stupid thing they want to hear instead of telling them the truth.
------------
It's high time to admit something else, fraternities, sororities, sports teams, are all IN FACT gangs, gangs which are open to and which attract many upper class, white boys and girls and which are based in excluding people who the members look down on. The dynamics of snobbery and self-reinforcement within gangs will always lead to their members acting, singly and in concert to attack and victimize other people. Of course, when the gang members are male, most of them straight, then women will be targeted for use and abuse by the gangsters. That fraternities, sororities and sports teams are a parasite on higher education in the United States is one of the greatest irrationalities in our collective life of the mind. The front of benefits that frats and sports teams bring doesn't change the essential nature of them.
Since those won't be banned from universities and colleges, it's only responsible for us to suspect the members of those things as being potential criminals and that even members of other gangs are at increased danger from them. Going to a frat party and getting drunk while being a woman is about as stupid as going to a biker bar while being a woman. I will risk hurting someone's feelings by saying that because I'm not going to lie about it to spare their tender feelings. I'd rather spare them being violently raped or otherwise attacked.
* That we are to accept even rough or violent sex as swell and good and OK does nothing to lessen the problem of identifying when someone is a victim of rape and when they are not. Fashionable, transgressive violent, degrading, belittiling sex using the most awful of gender roles, sex which moderny people are supposed to support out of some lame brained idea of fairness, has certainly provided more of a shield for rapists. Perhaps we can thank the sexologyand psych industries for that.
Thursday, November 27, 2014
The Last Time Network TV Told The Truth The Borgia Stick 1967
Since I've been going down memory lane, sort of an alternative to the top-40 version most people seem to think of, I remember that even as disillusioned with government as I was that year, this made for TV movie disturbed me. It was prophetic. We're living what it warned about.
Hate Mail File About the Goof That Keeps On Gaffing
most non-insane people would concede that Culp and Cosby in I SPY were the sine qua non of edgy coolness in their day
Oh my word. In 1965, I Spy, the sine qua non of edgy coolness. A friggin' network TV series about spies for the government. Containing routines that made my skin crawl because it reminded me of Amos and Andy. I don't know if I'd figured it out yet but cool and edgy on American TV pretty much ended for a number of years with That Was The Week That Was.
And the original.
Update: HIs gROOvineSS informs the world that " [Lily Tomlin] is the poster child for being a condescending liberal asshole toward the kind of people you constantly tell me liberals have to make nice to.
Uh, huh. And that is as opposed to his typical co-neuron in the "Brain Trust" at
Eschaton.
Update 2: steve simelsNovember 27, 2014 at 8:51 PM
Obtuse on steroids.
Well, now, Simpy, they say that admitting your problem is the first step to recovery but this isn't a 12-step program for you to work on getting some kind of point.
Oh my word. In 1965, I Spy, the sine qua non of edgy coolness. A friggin' network TV series about spies for the government. Containing routines that made my skin crawl because it reminded me of Amos and Andy. I don't know if I'd figured it out yet but cool and edgy on American TV pretty much ended for a number of years with That Was The Week That Was.
And the original.
Update: HIs gROOvineSS informs the world that " [Lily Tomlin] is the poster child for being a condescending liberal asshole toward the kind of people you constantly tell me liberals have to make nice to.
Uh, huh. And that is as opposed to his typical co-neuron in the "Brain Trust" at
Eschaton.
Update 2: steve simelsNovember 27, 2014 at 8:51 PM
Obtuse on steroids.
Well, now, Simpy, they say that admitting your problem is the first step to recovery but this isn't a 12-step program for you to work on getting some kind of point.
Rita Reys and Oliver Nelson - It Could Happen To You
Update: Like Someone In Love and It's All Right with the Pim Jacobs Trio
Consumer Warning
I volunteered to peel some squash for my sister in her kitchen this morning using her paring knife, an Oxo easy grip. The shape of the knife is such that you can't see which side is the cutting side. The cut I got could have been a lot worse. I'm giving her a new one that isn't so dangerous and will confiscate the dangerous one, she's not up yet so it will be news to her.
Also, don't pare when you've forgotten your glasses. Forgetting your glasses is shortsighted.
Also, don't pare when you've forgotten your glasses. Forgetting your glasses is shortsighted.
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Rita Reys & Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers - Taking A Chance On Love
Donald Byrd on trumpet, Hank Mobley on tenor sax, Horace Silver on piano, Doug Watkins on bass and Art Blakey on drums.
Rita Reys & Dutch Swing College Band
Nichols And May - $65 Funeral
Update: Mother and Son
Oh, so now Steve Simels' life work makes total sense. He succeeded, too, in that he even failed to get even this award.
ONLY Because It's The Afternoon Before A Holiday And It's Light Reading
Apparently The King of Kewlity, Simels, thinks he scored a coup when I said I didn't like I Spy or Cosby's first comedy album, the one with the lame Noah's Arc bit on it. He says:
Nah, it couldn't be any of them, since Sparky has already informed us that "stand-up is the lowest form of humor." So who then could he be referring to? Belle Barth? The Hoffnung Festival? Rusty Warren? Henny Youngman? Don Rickles? Redd Foxx? Norman Vincent Peale
Well, to start with, I Spy WASN'T STAND UP IT WAS A SPY "DRAMA" with the lame jive talk routine of Cosby and Culp, mixed in. I think by then I was sufficently anti-establishment that that figured into my complete skepticism about spies as heroes. I'd read about the role of the American Government in the murder of Patrice Lumumba and a host of other crimes against democracy and humanity. I Spy debuted in 1965, also the year of the invasion of the Dominican Republic. Maybe being gay and predisposed to criticism of the establishment on those terms had something to do with it. While my sisters got the vapors over Napoleon Solo and his side kick on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. the one and only spy show I ever watched with any regularity was Get Smart.
Also, apparently it's like trying to parse a page of symbolic logic notation for this member in good standing with The Eschaton Brain Trust In It's Own Mind but for me to say that I didn't like either that or Cosby's stand up is entirely consonant with the idea that stand-up is the lowest form of humor and it's a lot lower now than it was back then. Skit humor is frequently better. If Cosby's 1960s stuff was as edgy as Simels can remember maybe it's his memory that explains what a putz he is.
Nah, it couldn't be any of them, since Sparky has already informed us that "stand-up is the lowest form of humor." So who then could he be referring to? Belle Barth? The Hoffnung Festival? Rusty Warren? Henny Youngman? Don Rickles? Redd Foxx? Norman Vincent Peale
Well, to start with, I Spy WASN'T STAND UP IT WAS A SPY "DRAMA" with the lame jive talk routine of Cosby and Culp, mixed in. I think by then I was sufficently anti-establishment that that figured into my complete skepticism about spies as heroes. I'd read about the role of the American Government in the murder of Patrice Lumumba and a host of other crimes against democracy and humanity. I Spy debuted in 1965, also the year of the invasion of the Dominican Republic. Maybe being gay and predisposed to criticism of the establishment on those terms had something to do with it. While my sisters got the vapors over Napoleon Solo and his side kick on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. the one and only spy show I ever watched with any regularity was Get Smart.
Also, apparently it's like trying to parse a page of symbolic logic notation for this member in good standing with The Eschaton Brain Trust In It's Own Mind but for me to say that I didn't like either that or Cosby's stand up is entirely consonant with the idea that stand-up is the lowest form of humor and it's a lot lower now than it was back then. Skit humor is frequently better. If Cosby's 1960s stuff was as edgy as Simels can remember maybe it's his memory that explains what a putz he is.
Ethel Waters Birmingham Bertha
This is an interesting performance to consider, especially for those who saw many film appearances of Ethel Waters, later in her career, dressed as a maid. Here she's the strong, confident, dominant Birmingham Bertha who is determined to track down a guy who took her money and went to Chicago, dressed in aggressively stylish clothes and asserting her intentions to get her way, warning that if you cross her you'd better watch out. She is miles ahead of Queenie in Show Boat.
Also, in a kind of show business gender bend, the dancer, there for decorative purposes, is a good looking guy as the equivalent of a dancing girl usually found in a similar musical short of the period. Together with Ethel Waters' performance, it gives you a lot to think about.
Forget the white audience, they're not important.
Update: You can contrast her with the pathetic character who sings Surabaya Johnny (begins at 5:19) in Brecht and Weill's Happy End, which premiered the same year as Ethel Water's performance above did, Brecht's play also set in 1929 Chicago.
It's a great performance but, geesh, what a whuss! Interesting, if a bit stilted, commentary from Aaron Copland and the definitive singing of Lotte Lenya, for whom the role was written, I believe.
More on The Anti-Christian Intentions of the Hitler Youth
Looking around the web to see if I could find what I recalled reading of the Hitler Youth chants, I found this translation, quoted from Robert Conot's "Justice at Nuremberg"
We are the rollicking Hitler Youth,
We have no need of Christian truth
No evil old priest these ties can sever
We're Hitler's children now and ever.
As I said, change a few words...
It was from another source that I'm remembering something like that, if I come across it I will post it. The fact is that the Nazis planned on destroying the Christian Churches as one of their first acts and they began dismantling independent churches, replacing them with their phony state church which, increasingly, replaced Christian ideas and symbols with Nazi ideas and symbols. It was easier for them to do with the German protestant churches which had domestic leadership that could be pushed aside and disposed of, to be replaced by Nazi flunkies and stooges. But the complicated history of the pseudo-protestant Reich Church, the troubled Confessing Church and the sometimes quite heroic protestant resistance to the Nazis, including martyrdom and terms in concentration camps, would take books to sort out.
They had a somewhat harder time with the Catholic church and, to the point of yesterdays main post, Catholic youth organizations. The leadership of the Catholic Church were in the Vatican so there had to be a show of cooperation with the pope, though that wasn't a major hurdle for them. The clear plan was to first make it mandatory for all children to join the Hitler Youth, banning all independent children's organizations except protestant and Catholic ones, then to destroy and incorporate the protestant organizations and, despite the pathetic concordat they made with the pope, to ban Hitler Youth from belonging to Catholic youth organizations, effectively making members of Catholic youth organizations criminals.
The Nazis had a pragmatic program of eventual destruction of Christianity by replacing it with a Nazi saturated pantomime and, no doubt, a totally dereligionized thing that reminds me a bit of Auguste Comte's rather nutty, if quite more innocuous, "Religion of Humanity". Some scholars seem to think that the resistance of Christians accelerated the time schedule for that destruction, many in the Nazi hierarchy not bothering with some of the political window dressing they had practiced in the earlier years of their power grab.
It was probably in their plans for the next generation that the Nazis program of destroying religion was, actually, most explicitly expressed. And in that the parallels with the hopes of the neo-atheists couldn't be more striking. Hitler gloated to the adults who opposed him that he already had their children.
We are the rollicking Hitler Youth,
We have no need of Christian truth
No evil old priest these ties can sever
We're Hitler's children now and ever.
As I said, change a few words...
It was from another source that I'm remembering something like that, if I come across it I will post it. The fact is that the Nazis planned on destroying the Christian Churches as one of their first acts and they began dismantling independent churches, replacing them with their phony state church which, increasingly, replaced Christian ideas and symbols with Nazi ideas and symbols. It was easier for them to do with the German protestant churches which had domestic leadership that could be pushed aside and disposed of, to be replaced by Nazi flunkies and stooges. But the complicated history of the pseudo-protestant Reich Church, the troubled Confessing Church and the sometimes quite heroic protestant resistance to the Nazis, including martyrdom and terms in concentration camps, would take books to sort out.
They had a somewhat harder time with the Catholic church and, to the point of yesterdays main post, Catholic youth organizations. The leadership of the Catholic Church were in the Vatican so there had to be a show of cooperation with the pope, though that wasn't a major hurdle for them. The clear plan was to first make it mandatory for all children to join the Hitler Youth, banning all independent children's organizations except protestant and Catholic ones, then to destroy and incorporate the protestant organizations and, despite the pathetic concordat they made with the pope, to ban Hitler Youth from belonging to Catholic youth organizations, effectively making members of Catholic youth organizations criminals.
The Nazis had a pragmatic program of eventual destruction of Christianity by replacing it with a Nazi saturated pantomime and, no doubt, a totally dereligionized thing that reminds me a bit of Auguste Comte's rather nutty, if quite more innocuous, "Religion of Humanity". Some scholars seem to think that the resistance of Christians accelerated the time schedule for that destruction, many in the Nazi hierarchy not bothering with some of the political window dressing they had practiced in the earlier years of their power grab.
It was probably in their plans for the next generation that the Nazis program of destroying religion was, actually, most explicitly expressed. And in that the parallels with the hopes of the neo-atheists couldn't be more striking. Hitler gloated to the adults who opposed him that he already had their children.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Betty Carter - Stardust/ Memories of You
One last one, my favorite jazz singer singing one of my favorite songs, Memories of You after one of my other favorites. There's nothing better.
Ethel Waters - I'm Coming Virginia Bix Beiderbeck - I'm Coming Virginia
I read somewhere that Bix Beiderbeck loved the way Ethel Waters sang this song so much that she inspired what was to become one of his most famous solos.
I'm feeling nostalgic for music I listened to with my parents during the run up to the holiday, mostly from the 20s and 30s.
Hate Mail Corner
- Well, if there's one thing I can be certain of, no one at the playing grounds of E-ton has bothered to actually read anything I wrote before commenting on it. I'm not sorry, not in the least. I write for people who read, not those who don't even skim before they misrepresent. I don't care about the opinion of such people at all. An opinion is all they've got and everyone has one.
- I don't care if Larry Krauss is a perfumed and famous cosmologist, what he said is directly comparable to what Martin Bormann, Alfred Rosenberg and Baldur von Schirach, et al said about how religion was to be eradicated. And that's not an uncommon article of current atheist faith, I may come up with a list of quotations, then and now. If I went for that other champion murderer of that era, Stalin, I could come up with three lists for comparison. Hey, maybe with atheist fans of Stalin back then too and make a chart.
- Like I said, try harder and it will be harder to ignore you.
- Update: You know, I think I may have been the only liberal of my generation who absolutely couldn't stand I Spy? That jive talk between Cosby and Culp? Couldn't abide it. And I didn't like his first album. I liked edgier humor.
Update 2: Well, you see, Simpy, I don't have to like someone or have some fame effing association to them to think that they shouldn't be tried by tabloid. I can even dislike their work and figure they should be held to the same standard as people I like. And I pointed out what I said in the previous update for the benefit of one of your buddies last week.
- I don't care if Larry Krauss is a perfumed and famous cosmologist, what he said is directly comparable to what Martin Bormann, Alfred Rosenberg and Baldur von Schirach, et al said about how religion was to be eradicated. And that's not an uncommon article of current atheist faith, I may come up with a list of quotations, then and now. If I went for that other champion murderer of that era, Stalin, I could come up with three lists for comparison. Hey, maybe with atheist fans of Stalin back then too and make a chart.
- Like I said, try harder and it will be harder to ignore you.
- Update: You know, I think I may have been the only liberal of my generation who absolutely couldn't stand I Spy? That jive talk between Cosby and Culp? Couldn't abide it. And I didn't like his first album. I liked edgier humor.
Update 2: Well, you see, Simpy, I don't have to like someone or have some fame effing association to them to think that they shouldn't be tried by tabloid. I can even dislike their work and figure they should be held to the same standard as people I like. And I pointed out what I said in the previous update for the benefit of one of your buddies last week.
You Won't Be Able To Turn Off and On And Pick And Choose Who The "New Journalism" Pins A Bulls Eye On
And Liberals Will Be Its Primary Target: Your Provocative Idea For Tuesday
Here's an account of one of the accusers of Bill Cosby from People Magazine in a piece cited by Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon as what is now called evidence that Cosby is guilty of being a serial rapist. But, first, since I have come to realize what cabloid TV and the tabloid internet have done to collective reading comprehension I will point out that this is not a comment on any other allegations that have or will be made, this is dealing only with what is alleged here*. And I am assuming that the woman making the accusation is included among the 15 or 17 or who knows how many it is this morning being cited by the media. I have yet to see a clear and consistent list of who is represented by that number.
It was in a hotel in Reno, claims Bowman, that Cosby assaulted her one night in 1986. "He took my hand and his hand over it, and he masturbated with his hand over my hand," says Bowman, who, although terrified, kept quiet about the incident and continued as Cosby's protégé because, she says, "Who's gonna believe this? He was a powerful man. He was like the president." Before long she was alone with Cosby again in his Manhattan townhouse; she was given a glass of red wine, and "the next thing I know, I'm sick and I'm nauseous and I'm delusional and I'm limp and ... I can't think straight.... And I just came to, and I'm wearing a [men's] T-shirt that wasn't mine, and he was in a white robe."
A month or two later, she was in Atlantic City and says she was given another glass of red wine and felt "completely doped up again." Confused, Bowman somehow made it back to her room, but the next day Cosby summoned her to his suite. After she arrived, Bowman says, Cosby "threw me on the bed and braced his arm under my neck so I couldn't move my head, and he started trying to take his clothes off. I remember all the clinking of his belt buckle. And he was trying to take my pants down, and I was trying to keep them on." Bowman says that not long after she resisted the assault, Cosby cut off contact with her and had her escorted to the airport for a flight back to Denver. She didn't tell authorities about what happened, but she did approach an attorney who "wouldn't take it seriously," says Margo Singagliese, 52, the friend who went with her to see the lawyer.
A MONTH OR TWO LATER, SHE WAS IN ATLANTIC CITY AND SAYS SHE WAS GIVEN ANOTHER GLASS OF RED WINE.....! AND THAT'S AFTER WHAT SHE CLAIMS HAPPENED IN MANHATTAN? WHAT THE HELL WAS SHE DOING ALONE IN ANOTHER CITY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CONTINENT WITH A MAN SHE CLAIMS DRUGGED AND SEXUALLY ASSAULTED HER A MONTH OR TWO EARLIER ?!
Is it any surprise that an attorney wouldn't take that story seriously? What the hell was she thinking FLYING to Atlantic City to be with a man she claims drugged and sexually assaulted her in Reno AND MANHATTAN?
Why would anyone think she didn't welcome sexual advances in the scenario she gives perhaps hoping to sleep her way into show biz or just wanting to have sex with Bill Cosby? Why would he think he needed to drug her in either Manhattan or Atlantic City? And why would SHE HAVE NOT BEEN THE ONE TO CUT OFF CONTACT? If it were me, I wouldn't need to be escorted back to the airport, I'd race to the police station and report I'd been drugged and raped before the crime scene could be cleaned up. I wouldn't ever want to see him again except in court, at the defendants table IN A CRIMINAL PROSECUTION.
If she were a gay man who told me that story, I'd ask him why he was so stupid as to put himself in that situation a second time. And by the third incident I'd be certain he was not credible. I can promise you that the police would have never taken that story from a man seriously. Even a Warren Beatty level super-stud, straight guy who had put himself in that room in Atlantic City TO BE DRUGGED AND RAPED A THIRD TIME IN A CITY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COUNTRY would be disbelieved if he told such a tale with positive forensic evidence that penetration had occurred.
And this is cited by Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon to support her contentions that Cosby is guilty of many rapes of many women going back decades, none of whom seems to have given an account which brought a prosecution on the crimes alleged. Given whatever odds that the media scenario would generate in this, it would seem improbable that that number of allegations would not have yielded even one criminal prosecution, if not a conviction. It's not as if "Bill Cosby" was an unknown assailant who couldn't have been positively identified. And it's certain that there is not some unwritten law preventing even a very famous black man, even one with political power, from being prosecuted. We just got reminded of that with the death of Marion Barry.
I'd like there to be at least one indictment, leading to a trial, leading to a conviction on ONE of these accusations against this ONE person before jumping to the conclusion that you can lay on him the collective experience of half of the human population as Mary Elizabeth Williams seems to want to do. Not to mention the enormous online gaggle which believes it just somehow, knows what happened because they read it on some blog or comment thread.
----------------
A media which has had any practical restraint on spreading lies removed, such as ours in the United States, by the Supreme Court, has proven to be a media which will always, always sink to the bottom to feed. It will become a media that doesn't check its facts or even bother to collect them. It will look at what has been typed by other "journalists" or "sources" and regurgitate that. And, as Mary Elizabeth Williams' use of that People article to support her contentions shows, they won't even seem to bother reading what they cite, depending on their readers disinterest in bothering to check facts either. Facts would seem to not matter much to pretty much anyone now in the new media world.
Trial by tabloid has become the law of the land and we aren't the ones who will decide who it destroys. The left should understand that from the way that the media went after Bill Clinton, going after him in a not dissimilar way from what we are seeing in this latest sensation to rock the nation. The rule that the media can lie and spread innuendo and gossip, successfully inserting that into the collective belief of the country will not victimize the corporate elite, it will be their tool. I can guarantee you that if Hillary Clinton decides to run, she will be the target of the very same "standards" of journalism at work this past week.
And it can target and destroy the innocent and powerless as easily as it does the rich and famous. The activities of James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart going after public servants are the norm for a media that is given a carte blanche to lie with impunity. As the twittersphere and those hoary old blogs have also become "media" "social media" whatever crap generated there has also become feed for the "new media". And, let me break this to you, the farthest of the far right and has their social media as well, and it directly feeds the corporate media.
And the grime sweep of the new media targets even the most innocent and even admirably heroic individuals as it did Richard Jewell, whose greatest fault was that he was overweight and out of shape. He wasn't kewl. Jay Leno called him "uni-doofus" and even his mother was viciously and nationally attacked. Eventually, as the real Olympics bomber was revealed to be the neo-fascist, Eric Rudolph, Jewell was entirely cleared. Not everyone whose life is destroyed by the media acting without risk of consequences will eventually get to be exonerated.
I was introduced to this latest new media by reading Media Whores Online, which seemed to me to be written by someone who understood the media, who was appalled at how it operated and the absolutely sleazy way in which it prostituted itself to the oligarchs and plutocrats in order to destroy effective self-government and a decent society. And, as I recall it, "The Horse" fought against that without crossing the line into spreading lies, falling into the slough of dispund that was the cabloid and hate-talk radio media that made the likes of Rush Limbaugh "the de facto leader of the Republican Party", which is probably the only truth he ever told in public.
The media we have, with the Supreme Court's permission for it to lie with impunity. won't generate even a de facto leader of the Democratic Party, not one who is a real Democrat because lies don't serve liberal politics any more than the
truth favors Republican politics. This new media we have, even the pantomime liberal side of it, the side which is pushing this Cosby story, will inevitably end up favoring the worst part of journalism and those served by lies and gossip.
* I will also point out that it's an assumption that those attacking Cosby haven't made, in which one untested allegation is held to support any other untested allegation, apparently even one as problematic as this one.
Here's an account of one of the accusers of Bill Cosby from People Magazine in a piece cited by Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon as what is now called evidence that Cosby is guilty of being a serial rapist. But, first, since I have come to realize what cabloid TV and the tabloid internet have done to collective reading comprehension I will point out that this is not a comment on any other allegations that have or will be made, this is dealing only with what is alleged here*. And I am assuming that the woman making the accusation is included among the 15 or 17 or who knows how many it is this morning being cited by the media. I have yet to see a clear and consistent list of who is represented by that number.
It was in a hotel in Reno, claims Bowman, that Cosby assaulted her one night in 1986. "He took my hand and his hand over it, and he masturbated with his hand over my hand," says Bowman, who, although terrified, kept quiet about the incident and continued as Cosby's protégé because, she says, "Who's gonna believe this? He was a powerful man. He was like the president." Before long she was alone with Cosby again in his Manhattan townhouse; she was given a glass of red wine, and "the next thing I know, I'm sick and I'm nauseous and I'm delusional and I'm limp and ... I can't think straight.... And I just came to, and I'm wearing a [men's] T-shirt that wasn't mine, and he was in a white robe."
A month or two later, she was in Atlantic City and says she was given another glass of red wine and felt "completely doped up again." Confused, Bowman somehow made it back to her room, but the next day Cosby summoned her to his suite. After she arrived, Bowman says, Cosby "threw me on the bed and braced his arm under my neck so I couldn't move my head, and he started trying to take his clothes off. I remember all the clinking of his belt buckle. And he was trying to take my pants down, and I was trying to keep them on." Bowman says that not long after she resisted the assault, Cosby cut off contact with her and had her escorted to the airport for a flight back to Denver. She didn't tell authorities about what happened, but she did approach an attorney who "wouldn't take it seriously," says Margo Singagliese, 52, the friend who went with her to see the lawyer.
A MONTH OR TWO LATER, SHE WAS IN ATLANTIC CITY AND SAYS SHE WAS GIVEN ANOTHER GLASS OF RED WINE.....! AND THAT'S AFTER WHAT SHE CLAIMS HAPPENED IN MANHATTAN? WHAT THE HELL WAS SHE DOING ALONE IN ANOTHER CITY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CONTINENT WITH A MAN SHE CLAIMS DRUGGED AND SEXUALLY ASSAULTED HER A MONTH OR TWO EARLIER ?!
Is it any surprise that an attorney wouldn't take that story seriously? What the hell was she thinking FLYING to Atlantic City to be with a man she claims drugged and sexually assaulted her in Reno AND MANHATTAN?
Why would anyone think she didn't welcome sexual advances in the scenario she gives perhaps hoping to sleep her way into show biz or just wanting to have sex with Bill Cosby? Why would he think he needed to drug her in either Manhattan or Atlantic City? And why would SHE HAVE NOT BEEN THE ONE TO CUT OFF CONTACT? If it were me, I wouldn't need to be escorted back to the airport, I'd race to the police station and report I'd been drugged and raped before the crime scene could be cleaned up. I wouldn't ever want to see him again except in court, at the defendants table IN A CRIMINAL PROSECUTION.
If she were a gay man who told me that story, I'd ask him why he was so stupid as to put himself in that situation a second time. And by the third incident I'd be certain he was not credible. I can promise you that the police would have never taken that story from a man seriously. Even a Warren Beatty level super-stud, straight guy who had put himself in that room in Atlantic City TO BE DRUGGED AND RAPED A THIRD TIME IN A CITY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COUNTRY would be disbelieved if he told such a tale with positive forensic evidence that penetration had occurred.
And this is cited by Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon to support her contentions that Cosby is guilty of many rapes of many women going back decades, none of whom seems to have given an account which brought a prosecution on the crimes alleged. Given whatever odds that the media scenario would generate in this, it would seem improbable that that number of allegations would not have yielded even one criminal prosecution, if not a conviction. It's not as if "Bill Cosby" was an unknown assailant who couldn't have been positively identified. And it's certain that there is not some unwritten law preventing even a very famous black man, even one with political power, from being prosecuted. We just got reminded of that with the death of Marion Barry.
I'd like there to be at least one indictment, leading to a trial, leading to a conviction on ONE of these accusations against this ONE person before jumping to the conclusion that you can lay on him the collective experience of half of the human population as Mary Elizabeth Williams seems to want to do. Not to mention the enormous online gaggle which believes it just somehow, knows what happened because they read it on some blog or comment thread.
----------------
A media which has had any practical restraint on spreading lies removed, such as ours in the United States, by the Supreme Court, has proven to be a media which will always, always sink to the bottom to feed. It will become a media that doesn't check its facts or even bother to collect them. It will look at what has been typed by other "journalists" or "sources" and regurgitate that. And, as Mary Elizabeth Williams' use of that People article to support her contentions shows, they won't even seem to bother reading what they cite, depending on their readers disinterest in bothering to check facts either. Facts would seem to not matter much to pretty much anyone now in the new media world.
Trial by tabloid has become the law of the land and we aren't the ones who will decide who it destroys. The left should understand that from the way that the media went after Bill Clinton, going after him in a not dissimilar way from what we are seeing in this latest sensation to rock the nation. The rule that the media can lie and spread innuendo and gossip, successfully inserting that into the collective belief of the country will not victimize the corporate elite, it will be their tool. I can guarantee you that if Hillary Clinton decides to run, she will be the target of the very same "standards" of journalism at work this past week.
And it can target and destroy the innocent and powerless as easily as it does the rich and famous. The activities of James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart going after public servants are the norm for a media that is given a carte blanche to lie with impunity. As the twittersphere and those hoary old blogs have also become "media" "social media" whatever crap generated there has also become feed for the "new media". And, let me break this to you, the farthest of the far right and has their social media as well, and it directly feeds the corporate media.
And the grime sweep of the new media targets even the most innocent and even admirably heroic individuals as it did Richard Jewell, whose greatest fault was that he was overweight and out of shape. He wasn't kewl. Jay Leno called him "uni-doofus" and even his mother was viciously and nationally attacked. Eventually, as the real Olympics bomber was revealed to be the neo-fascist, Eric Rudolph, Jewell was entirely cleared. Not everyone whose life is destroyed by the media acting without risk of consequences will eventually get to be exonerated.
I was introduced to this latest new media by reading Media Whores Online, which seemed to me to be written by someone who understood the media, who was appalled at how it operated and the absolutely sleazy way in which it prostituted itself to the oligarchs and plutocrats in order to destroy effective self-government and a decent society. And, as I recall it, "The Horse" fought against that without crossing the line into spreading lies, falling into the slough of dispund that was the cabloid and hate-talk radio media that made the likes of Rush Limbaugh "the de facto leader of the Republican Party", which is probably the only truth he ever told in public.
The media we have, with the Supreme Court's permission for it to lie with impunity. won't generate even a de facto leader of the Democratic Party, not one who is a real Democrat because lies don't serve liberal politics any more than the
truth favors Republican politics. This new media we have, even the pantomime liberal side of it, the side which is pushing this Cosby story, will inevitably end up favoring the worst part of journalism and those served by lies and gossip.
* I will also point out that it's an assumption that those attacking Cosby haven't made, in which one untested allegation is held to support any other untested allegation, apparently even one as problematic as this one.
Monday, November 24, 2014
Reading The Hate Mail File
I'm increasingly coming to believe that it's not that the internet doesn't only not do subtle distinctions very well, it doesn't even do obvious distinctions very well.
I laid it out, read it again, slooooooowwwwwly and take the words in. Then look at the links to see I'm not lying about what they said. As for the Nazis being Christians, you come up where they advocated loving your enemies and praying for them, doing unto others as they would have them do unto them, doing justice to the least among them, welcoming the stranger among them and treating the as one of them. Oh, and there was also that little thing about those who lived by the sword dying by it. There's a word for a Christian who does the opposite of all of those, someone who is really lousy at being a Christian.
Other than that, I think the online atheists are some of the stupidest conceited people I've ever encountered and I used to have to go to receptions after concerts, filled with rich people.
Update: Sims, try harder and I'll have a harder time ignoring you.
I laid it out, read it again, slooooooowwwwwly and take the words in. Then look at the links to see I'm not lying about what they said. As for the Nazis being Christians, you come up where they advocated loving your enemies and praying for them, doing unto others as they would have them do unto them, doing justice to the least among them, welcoming the stranger among them and treating the as one of them. Oh, and there was also that little thing about those who lived by the sword dying by it. There's a word for a Christian who does the opposite of all of those, someone who is really lousy at being a Christian.
Other than that, I think the online atheists are some of the stupidest conceited people I've ever encountered and I used to have to go to receptions after concerts, filled with rich people.
Update: Sims, try harder and I'll have a harder time ignoring you.
The Number of Accusers = x such that x equals infinity?
So, during my lunch hour when I should be eating something I look on Salon and I find this:
New Bill Cosby accuser: “We may be looking at America’s greatest serial rapist”
Former model Jewel Allison is the latest woman to accuse the comedian of sexually assaulting her
and I ask myself how, with the number of women who are making these accusations that he molested or raped them increase - all those I've read when the women were adults - how it is plausible that he covered it up this long? The longer this goes on, oddly, the more trouble I'm having with it, in total. There might be something to some of them but I doubt they could all be telling the entire truth.
Really? "America's greatest serial rapist"? In show biz where the casting couch is as common as bad grammar and potboiler plot lines? That would be "potboiler" as in junk produced to have something to sell without consideration of quality or truth.
As I said, the online blog gossip and electronic tabloids are no place to find the truth. I'm finding I have ever more respect for the ideals of the justice system, though not, necessarily, its actual practice of doing justice.
Update: I'd need there to be at least one criminal accusation, leading to one indictment, one prosecution with one conviction of this one person before I would lay on him even the guilt for one rape. Certainly at least two such convictions would be the minimal requirement before he was believed to be guilty of being America's greatest serial rapist. Never mind laying on him the collective guilt for every rape that ever happened or was alleged. About which, more tomorrow.
New Bill Cosby accuser: “We may be looking at America’s greatest serial rapist”
Former model Jewel Allison is the latest woman to accuse the comedian of sexually assaulting her
and I ask myself how, with the number of women who are making these accusations that he molested or raped them increase - all those I've read when the women were adults - how it is plausible that he covered it up this long? The longer this goes on, oddly, the more trouble I'm having with it, in total. There might be something to some of them but I doubt they could all be telling the entire truth.
Really? "America's greatest serial rapist"? In show biz where the casting couch is as common as bad grammar and potboiler plot lines? That would be "potboiler" as in junk produced to have something to sell without consideration of quality or truth.
As I said, the online blog gossip and electronic tabloids are no place to find the truth. I'm finding I have ever more respect for the ideals of the justice system, though not, necessarily, its actual practice of doing justice.
Update: I'd need there to be at least one criminal accusation, leading to one indictment, one prosecution with one conviction of this one person before I would lay on him even the guilt for one rape. Certainly at least two such convictions would be the minimal requirement before he was believed to be guilty of being America's greatest serial rapist. Never mind laying on him the collective guilt for every rape that ever happened or was alleged. About which, more tomorrow.
The First Person Who Says "Godwin's Law" Loses
Dan Arel, at the habitually hate filled Alternet, has up a bit of nonsense, that ties together several things I've written about. Arel Said:
Earlier this month, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss postulated that it could only take a single generation of critical thinkers to wipe out religious belief. Speaking at an event in Australia, Krauss said:
“People say, ‘Well, religion has been around since the dawn of man. You’ll never change that.’ But I point out that… this issue of gay marriage, it is going to go away, because if you have a child, a 13-year-old, they can’t understand what the issue is. It’s gone. One generation is all it takes.”
This caused Ray Comfort, a creationist and host of the online Christian talk show "The Comfort Zone," to go off the rails and compare Krauss to Adolf Hitler.
Comfort’s co-host Emeal Zwayne pointed out that Krauss does not seem to be a big fan of Christianity.
“Just the glee that he got from the thought of eradicating religion — and it’s not religion, he hates Christianity,” Zwayne said. “He hates Christ...."
“Hitler said some similar things. Hitler’s Youth,” Comfort replied.
“And that’s exactly what I was going to say it was reminiscent of,” Zwayne said to viewers. “Very, very terrifying, friends.”
Playing the Hitler card or Godwin’s Law, as it is also called, is usually a sign of a foundering argument. When you are backed against a wall and see no logical way out, playing the Hitler card is an attempt to demonize your opponent. You have to wonder if these radical Christians have finally realized that their back is against a wall and they cannot reason their way back into reality.
I will note that Arel doesn't produce any documentation to refute what they said and he relies on the citation of "Godwin's Law" which is one of the stupidest in the recent fad of creating phony "laws" which are supposed to reign in the boundaries of what is allowed to be said. "Godwin's" is a "law" invented by a rather right-wing libertarian whose main beneficiaries, so far as I can see, are neo-Nazis and ideas that can justifiably be compared to Nazism. And also when there are direct parallels to the beliefs contained in Nazism. That that "law" and some others like it are so frequently cited by those who believe themselves to be of the left, leads to the conclusion that there is something wrong with that kind of "left".
Arel relies on calling "cooties" instead of refuting what they said. Which is a heck of a way to conduct a life of the mind. But such is the life of the mind so often displayed on the internet. As to his whining that they are demonizing their opponent all I can say is Dan Arel? At Alternet? Complaining about people demonizing their opponent! ROFLMAO.
----------
While I think Comfort and Zwayne may have better put it that the Nazi leadership said that to the Hitler Youth, the fact is that Nazism openly intended to replace Christianity with their own "scientific" alternative, and that has been known publicly ever since the Nazis published those views. If they had endured longer than they did, the Nazis did, in fact, plan to replace Christianity with a Nazi system of belief, as I have pointed out the Nazi hierachy didn't hide those intentions. As Martin Borman put it:
National Socialist and Christian concepts are irreconcilable. The Christian churches build upon man's ignorance and endeavor to keep the greatest possible number of people in a state of ignorance. For it is only in this fashion that the churches can maintain their power. National Socialism, on the other hand, rests on scientific foundations....
The OSS report, The Nazi Master Plan, in its annex, The Persecution of the Christian Churches notes:
National Socialism by its very nature was hostile to Christinity and the Christian churches. The purpose of the National Socialist movement was to convert the German people into a homogeneous racial group united in all its energies fro prosecution of aggressive warfare. Innumerable indications as to this fact are to be found in the speeches and writing of Hitler and other responsible Nazi leaders.
In regard to the Hitler Youth:
[Alfred] Rosenberg was editor in chief of the the chief party newspaper the Voelkischer Beobachter, the Reich Leader of Ideological Training and the posessor of other prominent positions under the National Socialist regime, his ideas were not without official significance. Thus in a declaration of 5 November 1934, Baldur von Schirach, German Youth Leader declared in Berlin; "Roesnberg's way is the way of German youth." So far as this sector of the National Socialist party is concerned, the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement.
As it was mandatory German children over the age of 10 to be members of the Hitler Youth, its program of indoctrination was the embodiment of the future that Hitler and his cronies intended.
The OSS and other studies of what the Nazis did and planned noted that their plan was of gradually weakening Christianity and replacing it with a Nazism compatible substitute in the thinking of some "moderates" such as Hans Kerrl but that the ultimate goal as conceived by those who had the most influence in the Nazi hierarchy was its ultimate destruction just as certainly as they intended to destroy Judaism.
You can get an idea of how that plan was thought out from this:
Rosenberg's attitudes on religion were accepted as the only philosophy compatible with National Socialism. In 1940 Bormann, in writing to Rosenberg, made this statement:
"The churches cannot be conquered by a compromise between National Socialism and Christian teachings, but only through a new ideology whose coming you yourself have announced in your writings."
Rosenberg actively participated in the program for elimination of church influence. Bormann frequently wrote Rosenberg in this regard, furnishing him information as to proposed action to be instituted against the churches and, where necessary, requesting that action be taken by Rosenberg's department. See 070-PS dealing with the abolition of religious services in the schools; 072-PS dealing with the confiscation of religious property; 064-PS dealing with the inadequacy of anti-religious material circulated to the soldiers; 089-PS dealing with the curtailment of the publication of Protestant periodicals; and 122-PS dealing with the closing of theological faculties.
And if I had more time this morning for unpaid fact checking and writing I could find tons of material to support the contention that was the ultimate goal of the Nazis, including those who ran the Hitler Youth. I recall reading some of the Hitler Youth anti-Christian chants but don't know where I can find them translated into English on such short notice.
But, as they say, change a few words and it doesn't sound much different from what you will read from atheists online just about any hour of the year. What strikes me is that a so called leftist such as Arel can't take the opportunity to point out the evils of Nazism because noting why Christianity was incompatible with Nazism, you know, things like doing to the least of those what you'd have done to yourself, forgiving your enemy and praying for them, doing unto others that which you'd have done unto you, treating the stranger among you as one of you... wouldn't serve Arel's and Alternet's more basic anti-religious program.
That Comfort and Zwayne (who I've never heard of before this) may be creationists and wrong about science doesn't change that what Arel quoted isn't outside of the bounds of scholarship on the goals of Nazism, among which was to destroy Christianity, the real target of Arel's and Alternet's invective and, I dare say, Larry Krauss's real target in his pipe dream. That even two creationists could get something right isn't out of the realm of the possible, nor is it for hit men in a hate campaign to distort history.
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One of the foundations of the pseudo-left, the same one which is hostile to religion, is that it is intellectually superior to its opponents who are irredeemably stupid, perhaps even on a fixed, biological basis. The near ubiquity of that conceit among those who turn out to be 1. far less liberal than they like to believe they are, 2. class snobs, 3. ballot box poison, guaranteeing the political failure of the left. They share a good part of the responsibility for the political failure of the left due to their addiction to insulting people who they would rather feel superior to than to convince of the rightness of their own political views. I didn't come to realize this was the situation until going online and reading the unedited, stream of consciousness that flows from such "leftists". It explains a lot about how the corporate liars have been able to defeat even that part of the left which has a more practical program of benefit to the very people the pseudo-left loves to diss.
Another thing which I learned from the blogs and their commenting community is that their pretenses of intellectual superiority generally consists of them repeating items in some kind of common received wisdom of "the left", which, despite their scientific pretensions, is not to be fact checked or questioned. And, in a crucial number of those beliefs, when you do fact check them, they turn out to be as credulously wrong as much of the common received wisdom of the less febrile right, as opposed to the right which is an expression of mental illness.
The left also has its limb on which those who are mentally ill reside. Only, when you examine what they really think and intend, that "left" is not that much different from the deranged right. Many of those "leftists" are Marxists, anarchists or utilitarians. I have come to include that last one after reading through some of the literature from the Peter Singer style "ethicists" who advocate murdering children and other such things. To note other areas in which Godwin's Law would try to silence those who notice more than a passing similarity between ideas of supposed ideological opponents.
A common strain in that frequently deranged and always misidentified "left" is that they are obsessively hostile to religion, Christianity most often, that overrides much if not all of their other alleged goals and beliefs.
Update: See also
No human being would know anything of Christianity if it had not been drilled into him in his childhood by pastors. The so-called dear God in no wise gives knowledge of his existence to young people in advance, but in an astonishing manner in spite of his omnipotence leaves this to the efforts of pastors. If therefore in the future our youth learns nothing more of this Christianity, whose doctrines are far below ours, Christinaity will disappear by itself."
D-75, copy of letter dated 12 December 1941from Security Police and Security Service (Sicherheitspolizei und Sicherheitsdienst) Inspector Bierkamp to Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) enclosing copy of the Bormann decree.
Compare that with what Krauss is reported to have said on the occasion mentioned above, from the religion hostile website, Raw Story.
Earlier this month, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss postulated that it could only take a single generation of critical thinkers to wipe out religious belief. Speaking at an event in Australia, Krauss said:
“People say, ‘Well, religion has been around since the dawn of man. You’ll never change that.’ But I point out that… this issue of gay marriage, it is going to go away, because if you have a child, a 13-year-old, they can’t understand what the issue is. It’s gone. One generation is all it takes.”
This caused Ray Comfort, a creationist and host of the online Christian talk show "The Comfort Zone," to go off the rails and compare Krauss to Adolf Hitler.
Comfort’s co-host Emeal Zwayne pointed out that Krauss does not seem to be a big fan of Christianity.
“Just the glee that he got from the thought of eradicating religion — and it’s not religion, he hates Christianity,” Zwayne said. “He hates Christ...."
“Hitler said some similar things. Hitler’s Youth,” Comfort replied.
“And that’s exactly what I was going to say it was reminiscent of,” Zwayne said to viewers. “Very, very terrifying, friends.”
Playing the Hitler card or Godwin’s Law, as it is also called, is usually a sign of a foundering argument. When you are backed against a wall and see no logical way out, playing the Hitler card is an attempt to demonize your opponent. You have to wonder if these radical Christians have finally realized that their back is against a wall and they cannot reason their way back into reality.
I will note that Arel doesn't produce any documentation to refute what they said and he relies on the citation of "Godwin's Law" which is one of the stupidest in the recent fad of creating phony "laws" which are supposed to reign in the boundaries of what is allowed to be said. "Godwin's" is a "law" invented by a rather right-wing libertarian whose main beneficiaries, so far as I can see, are neo-Nazis and ideas that can justifiably be compared to Nazism. And also when there are direct parallels to the beliefs contained in Nazism. That that "law" and some others like it are so frequently cited by those who believe themselves to be of the left, leads to the conclusion that there is something wrong with that kind of "left".
Arel relies on calling "cooties" instead of refuting what they said. Which is a heck of a way to conduct a life of the mind. But such is the life of the mind so often displayed on the internet. As to his whining that they are demonizing their opponent all I can say is Dan Arel? At Alternet? Complaining about people demonizing their opponent! ROFLMAO.
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While I think Comfort and Zwayne may have better put it that the Nazi leadership said that to the Hitler Youth, the fact is that Nazism openly intended to replace Christianity with their own "scientific" alternative, and that has been known publicly ever since the Nazis published those views. If they had endured longer than they did, the Nazis did, in fact, plan to replace Christianity with a Nazi system of belief, as I have pointed out the Nazi hierachy didn't hide those intentions. As Martin Borman put it:
National Socialist and Christian concepts are irreconcilable. The Christian churches build upon man's ignorance and endeavor to keep the greatest possible number of people in a state of ignorance. For it is only in this fashion that the churches can maintain their power. National Socialism, on the other hand, rests on scientific foundations....
The OSS report, The Nazi Master Plan, in its annex, The Persecution of the Christian Churches notes:
National Socialism by its very nature was hostile to Christinity and the Christian churches. The purpose of the National Socialist movement was to convert the German people into a homogeneous racial group united in all its energies fro prosecution of aggressive warfare. Innumerable indications as to this fact are to be found in the speeches and writing of Hitler and other responsible Nazi leaders.
In regard to the Hitler Youth:
[Alfred] Rosenberg was editor in chief of the the chief party newspaper the Voelkischer Beobachter, the Reich Leader of Ideological Training and the posessor of other prominent positions under the National Socialist regime, his ideas were not without official significance. Thus in a declaration of 5 November 1934, Baldur von Schirach, German Youth Leader declared in Berlin; "Roesnberg's way is the way of German youth." So far as this sector of the National Socialist party is concerned, the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement.
As it was mandatory German children over the age of 10 to be members of the Hitler Youth, its program of indoctrination was the embodiment of the future that Hitler and his cronies intended.
The OSS and other studies of what the Nazis did and planned noted that their plan was of gradually weakening Christianity and replacing it with a Nazism compatible substitute in the thinking of some "moderates" such as Hans Kerrl but that the ultimate goal as conceived by those who had the most influence in the Nazi hierarchy was its ultimate destruction just as certainly as they intended to destroy Judaism.
You can get an idea of how that plan was thought out from this:
Rosenberg's attitudes on religion were accepted as the only philosophy compatible with National Socialism. In 1940 Bormann, in writing to Rosenberg, made this statement:
"The churches cannot be conquered by a compromise between National Socialism and Christian teachings, but only through a new ideology whose coming you yourself have announced in your writings."
Rosenberg actively participated in the program for elimination of church influence. Bormann frequently wrote Rosenberg in this regard, furnishing him information as to proposed action to be instituted against the churches and, where necessary, requesting that action be taken by Rosenberg's department. See 070-PS dealing with the abolition of religious services in the schools; 072-PS dealing with the confiscation of religious property; 064-PS dealing with the inadequacy of anti-religious material circulated to the soldiers; 089-PS dealing with the curtailment of the publication of Protestant periodicals; and 122-PS dealing with the closing of theological faculties.
And if I had more time this morning for unpaid fact checking and writing I could find tons of material to support the contention that was the ultimate goal of the Nazis, including those who ran the Hitler Youth. I recall reading some of the Hitler Youth anti-Christian chants but don't know where I can find them translated into English on such short notice.
But, as they say, change a few words and it doesn't sound much different from what you will read from atheists online just about any hour of the year. What strikes me is that a so called leftist such as Arel can't take the opportunity to point out the evils of Nazism because noting why Christianity was incompatible with Nazism, you know, things like doing to the least of those what you'd have done to yourself, forgiving your enemy and praying for them, doing unto others that which you'd have done unto you, treating the stranger among you as one of you... wouldn't serve Arel's and Alternet's more basic anti-religious program.
That Comfort and Zwayne (who I've never heard of before this) may be creationists and wrong about science doesn't change that what Arel quoted isn't outside of the bounds of scholarship on the goals of Nazism, among which was to destroy Christianity, the real target of Arel's and Alternet's invective and, I dare say, Larry Krauss's real target in his pipe dream. That even two creationists could get something right isn't out of the realm of the possible, nor is it for hit men in a hate campaign to distort history.
-------
One of the foundations of the pseudo-left, the same one which is hostile to religion, is that it is intellectually superior to its opponents who are irredeemably stupid, perhaps even on a fixed, biological basis. The near ubiquity of that conceit among those who turn out to be 1. far less liberal than they like to believe they are, 2. class snobs, 3. ballot box poison, guaranteeing the political failure of the left. They share a good part of the responsibility for the political failure of the left due to their addiction to insulting people who they would rather feel superior to than to convince of the rightness of their own political views. I didn't come to realize this was the situation until going online and reading the unedited, stream of consciousness that flows from such "leftists". It explains a lot about how the corporate liars have been able to defeat even that part of the left which has a more practical program of benefit to the very people the pseudo-left loves to diss.
Another thing which I learned from the blogs and their commenting community is that their pretenses of intellectual superiority generally consists of them repeating items in some kind of common received wisdom of "the left", which, despite their scientific pretensions, is not to be fact checked or questioned. And, in a crucial number of those beliefs, when you do fact check them, they turn out to be as credulously wrong as much of the common received wisdom of the less febrile right, as opposed to the right which is an expression of mental illness.
The left also has its limb on which those who are mentally ill reside. Only, when you examine what they really think and intend, that "left" is not that much different from the deranged right. Many of those "leftists" are Marxists, anarchists or utilitarians. I have come to include that last one after reading through some of the literature from the Peter Singer style "ethicists" who advocate murdering children and other such things. To note other areas in which Godwin's Law would try to silence those who notice more than a passing similarity between ideas of supposed ideological opponents.
A common strain in that frequently deranged and always misidentified "left" is that they are obsessively hostile to religion, Christianity most often, that overrides much if not all of their other alleged goals and beliefs.
Update: See also
No human being would know anything of Christianity if it had not been drilled into him in his childhood by pastors. The so-called dear God in no wise gives knowledge of his existence to young people in advance, but in an astonishing manner in spite of his omnipotence leaves this to the efforts of pastors. If therefore in the future our youth learns nothing more of this Christianity, whose doctrines are far below ours, Christinaity will disappear by itself."
D-75, copy of letter dated 12 December 1941from Security Police and Security Service (Sicherheitspolizei und Sicherheitsdienst) Inspector Bierkamp to Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) enclosing copy of the Bormann decree.
Compare that with what Krauss is reported to have said on the occasion mentioned above, from the religion hostile website, Raw Story.
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