"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
Saturday, January 30, 2016
Not Exactly A Many World's Interpretation But....
From now on, every troll comment generates a new filter, not a response. Barring the extreme unlikelihood that they come up with anything new or worth responding to. I ain't holding my breath or waiting up nights.
Alcohol As A Higher Power Among Secular Peoples
The great cause célèbre and heroic stand of the French President François Hollande choosing to not serve lunch to his guest, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, is silly. While Rouhani may have slightly overstepped in requesting that no alcohol be served during any state meal it is rather gauche for a host to not accede to a not outrageous request from a guest. I strongly suspect that the domestic political consequences of having wine served would, potentially, be greater for the Iranian, Rouhani, than many people might suspect.
The, apparently, widely condemned accommodation of Rouhani when he was a guest of the Italian government while he was in Rome, re wine at table and covering up some nudes, would show that the Italians are better hosts. What the hell difference does any of it make? I could point out that it isn't, as I would imagine will be asserted, the same thing as John Ashcroft covering up some artwork while he was Attorney General or Maine's stinking governor, Paul LePage removing the mural depicting the rights of workers. they were acting as a public servant, not the guest of the government. Those actions were entirely out of order, especially what LePage did.
The national mythology of France is all wound up in such gestures, especially around secularism, the state and, obviously, the wine industry. Considering that, especially in the case of France, what people have to cover up in order to maintain their national mythology, making any kind of deal about such petty aspects of it is just stupid.
If the French government wanted to have better relations with Iran sacrificing wine at table in one lunch or dinner would have been worth a lot more than presenting alcohol as some kind of higher value. But, then, I've got a lot of experience observing the consequences of those who make alcohol into their higher power, it seems to be quite widespread, perhaps more so among secularists. I am considering going into more detail about that, when I have time. Considering that French culture also maintains an obsession with the condition of the liver - perhaps a result of the status wine and liquor have in their culture - they might want to think on a more adult level about that.
The, apparently, widely condemned accommodation of Rouhani when he was a guest of the Italian government while he was in Rome, re wine at table and covering up some nudes, would show that the Italians are better hosts. What the hell difference does any of it make? I could point out that it isn't, as I would imagine will be asserted, the same thing as John Ashcroft covering up some artwork while he was Attorney General or Maine's stinking governor, Paul LePage removing the mural depicting the rights of workers. they were acting as a public servant, not the guest of the government. Those actions were entirely out of order, especially what LePage did.
The national mythology of France is all wound up in such gestures, especially around secularism, the state and, obviously, the wine industry. Considering that, especially in the case of France, what people have to cover up in order to maintain their national mythology, making any kind of deal about such petty aspects of it is just stupid.
If the French government wanted to have better relations with Iran sacrificing wine at table in one lunch or dinner would have been worth a lot more than presenting alcohol as some kind of higher value. But, then, I've got a lot of experience observing the consequences of those who make alcohol into their higher power, it seems to be quite widespread, perhaps more so among secularists. I am considering going into more detail about that, when I have time. Considering that French culture also maintains an obsession with the condition of the liver - perhaps a result of the status wine and liquor have in their culture - they might want to think on a more adult level about that.
Is Current Physics An Atheist Tower of Babel?
John Horgan has a post at Scientific American about what even some physicists are beginning to wonder isn't the decadent state theoretical physics is in. For those who think I'm over the top in stating the same thing. For me I think the tipping point came with Hugh Everett's first of many "many world interpretations" of quantum mechanics. I'll forego any discussion of, from what I've read of him, Everett's pretty obnoxious and self-centered atheism and its implication in his invention of universes. * His idea that, because a photon can be expressed in a perhaps infinite number of ways, mathematically, means that, not only must there be an actual universe in which that state of that photon has an actual existence. His faith in the creative potency of mathematics was so extreme that he believed that every single action in the actual universe, so much as the flickering of every fluorescent tube light creates universes in which the opposite (and I would guess every possible variation on that) happens. Instead of being considered at least the extreme eccentricity of someone who has spent too much time in the theoretical instead of actual life, Everett's "Many World Interpretation" set off more than half a century of physicists and cosmologists inventing many, many world interpretations of quantum mechanics, the invention and "study" of such stuff has driven much of theoretical physics during the entire lifetimes of most of the people living, today. Instead of people wondering if theoretical physics, in lieu of actually making predictions that could have actual verification in nature, has been living on the enormous repute that the generation working at the beginning of the last century earned by actually producing knowledge instead of speculation, this stuff is the very hottest of hot stuff among the sci-ranger set.
I happened to read Horgan's post after I posted that quote of Christian Afinsens in Rupert Sheldrake's book Science Set Free. Not three pages later, there is another quote, from the eminent French mathematican, René Thom
The excellent beginning made by quantum mechanics with the hydrogen atom peters out slowly in the sands of approximations in as much as we move toward more complex situations…. This decline in the efficiency of mathematical algorithms accelerates when we go into chemistry. The interactions between two molecules of any degree of complexity evades precise mathematical description … In biology, if we make exceptions of the theory of population and of formal genetics, the use of mathematics is confined to modeling a few local situations (transmission of nerve impulses, blood flow in the arteries, etc.) of slight theoretical interest and limited practical value… The relatively rapid degeneration of the possible use of mathematics when one moves from physics to biology is certainly known among specialists, but there is a reluctance to reveal it to the public at large … The feeling of security given by the reductionist approach is in fact illusory.
My question after considering what Thom said about the sharp drop off in the efficiency of mathematical algorithms being "certainly known among specialists" and the "reductionist approach is in fact illusory" isn't at work in all of this wheel spinning and tail chasing in physics and cosmology. The idea that because the mathematical description of the tiniest things (not even objects, really) that quantum physics studies CAN BE made to perform in many different ways MUST MEAN that there are jillions of actual, real universes which, by the way, no one knows how to verify in nature, and that that should be what physics does would certainly need to be considered in light of his declaration. Have these physicists even considered that what they are doing is just playing around with equations and that the equations don't have creative power? The Oxford based mathematician and Christian apologist, John Lennox, has pointed out that even many scientists have a totally irrational belief in the creative power of mathematics and the equations of physics that rational mathematicians would never claim in the modern period. Yet even the biggest names in this physics-cosmology game fully believe that they do.**
I mean, IS THIS "REALLY KNOWN AMONG SPECIALISTS"? AND IF IT IS, WHEN WERE THEY GOING TO LET THEIR BIGGEST FAN BOYS IN ON THAT TRADE SECRET? I can absolutely guarantee you that the common received wisdom does insist that numbers have that creative power, something which, in my youth, we were taught had been given up not long after Euclid wrote down his geometric axioms and the rest of it. The common superstition in such matters in the college educated population in 2016 is rather mind boggling, unless you believe, as I'm reluctantly coming to conclude that we are in a new dark age. I'm afraid that this one is going to make the alleged darkness of the last one look brilliant by comparison. In unawareness but, more so, in violence and the destruction it generates. Thanks to science.
Some real, basic clarification of what science is and what it does needs to be done. In the review of Richard Lewontin that I quoted from earlier in the week, he directly attributes the intellectual environment in which the skepticism of creationists has flourished to be in part self-created by scientists who have promoted half-baked ideas and claims that have not turned out to be true. Considering the ignorant faith of so many that science has infinite power to reveal the truth and that we must all genuflect and accept, on faith and believe what a scientist says - no matter what the status of its verification in natures is - the capacity for bait and switches, once exceeded, the backlash will be fierce. As I've also recently mentioned, science is going through a self-generated scandal in the failure to test its claims in many life-threatening ways, much to the surprise, obviously, of many of the greatest fans of science, who never seem to even read such prominent journals as Nature.
Back to Horgan who is obviously disappointed in the state of physics and who yearns for some new spark that will set things going in reality instead of the neo-medieval state that it seems to be stuck in. It looks to me like the ambitions of physicists and cosmologists may have been led astray by their own superficial grasp of the nature of what they do. Applied science, ideally, is forced to face the nature of what they do through valid experiment and the process of attempted replication, but theoretical science, relieved of the necessity of backing up their publications with actually showing what they are claiming is true, looks, ever increasingly, as if it's gone on the ultimate snark hunt but which no one is allowed to question because Einstein, Planck, Bell, etc. I wonder if the problem doesn't boil down to the philosophical ignorance or just the plain dishonesty that is a result of scientists having no real belief in morality at work.
Modern physics of this kind demands enormous public resources to operate, the CERN project is, I'm sure, hardly the end of what these Lords of Creation are going to dream up and demand be built at public expense as their right, using their repute to gull completely ignorant politicians to build ever bigger colliders and other toys for them. In the wake of the much touted verification of the Higgs boson (something which Horgan, correctly, states was mere verification of the so-called completed standard model of physics, nothing really new) I found out that asking what practical use such multi-billion dollar discoveries were in real life would get a furious reaction. But we don't really owe these guys that level of blind faith. There are certainly more pressing needs for physics and other sciences than in allowing atheist-cosmologists to claim they have a complete theory that means that, in their favorite interpretation, God isn't needed to create the universe. Of course, if they had enough philosophy, they would know that even if they knew every last fact about the physical universe, they would still not be able to refute a belief that God was the origin of that universe. The first sentence of Genesis is quite able to contain anything they discover about the universe.
We should tell physicists and cosmologists and the rest of scientists that that's nothing they have to worry about, it's not in their syllabus. Maybe they can get something done once they realize that. I'm sorry, philosophy will be required. It might keep them from wasting decades and decades. I'm really convinced that most of this stuff is, really, motivated by atheism, not curiosity about the real universe.
* Though I think any consideration of his career as a Pentagon nuclear weaponeer in reference to his atheism would be an interesting one.
** For example, in this essay.
The laws of physics can explain how the jet engine works, but not how it came to exist in the first place. It is self-evident that a jet engine could have not have been created by the laws of physics on their own – that task needed the intelligence and creative engineering work of Whittle. Indeed, come to think of it, the laws of physics plus Frank Whittle could not on their own produce a jet engine – there needs additionally to be some material around the place that is subject to those laws and that can be worked on by Whittle.
For, not only did scientists not put the universe there, neither did science or the laws of mathematical physics. Yet Hawking seems to think they did. In A Brief History of Time he hinted at this kind of explanation in suggesting that a theory might bring the universe into existence: ‘The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe?’5
The idea of a theory or physical laws bringing the universe into existence strikes me as a serious misunderstanding of the nature of such laws – or am I missing something? Scientists expect to develop theories involving mathematical laws that describe natural phenomena, and have done so with spectacular success. However, the laws that we find cannot themselves even cause anything, let alone create it.
Note: Sorry for the screwed up HTML in this post earlier in the morning. It took some time to track it down and fix it.
I happened to read Horgan's post after I posted that quote of Christian Afinsens in Rupert Sheldrake's book Science Set Free. Not three pages later, there is another quote, from the eminent French mathematican, René Thom
The excellent beginning made by quantum mechanics with the hydrogen atom peters out slowly in the sands of approximations in as much as we move toward more complex situations…. This decline in the efficiency of mathematical algorithms accelerates when we go into chemistry. The interactions between two molecules of any degree of complexity evades precise mathematical description … In biology, if we make exceptions of the theory of population and of formal genetics, the use of mathematics is confined to modeling a few local situations (transmission of nerve impulses, blood flow in the arteries, etc.) of slight theoretical interest and limited practical value… The relatively rapid degeneration of the possible use of mathematics when one moves from physics to biology is certainly known among specialists, but there is a reluctance to reveal it to the public at large … The feeling of security given by the reductionist approach is in fact illusory.
My question after considering what Thom said about the sharp drop off in the efficiency of mathematical algorithms being "certainly known among specialists" and the "reductionist approach is in fact illusory" isn't at work in all of this wheel spinning and tail chasing in physics and cosmology. The idea that because the mathematical description of the tiniest things (not even objects, really) that quantum physics studies CAN BE made to perform in many different ways MUST MEAN that there are jillions of actual, real universes which, by the way, no one knows how to verify in nature, and that that should be what physics does would certainly need to be considered in light of his declaration. Have these physicists even considered that what they are doing is just playing around with equations and that the equations don't have creative power? The Oxford based mathematician and Christian apologist, John Lennox, has pointed out that even many scientists have a totally irrational belief in the creative power of mathematics and the equations of physics that rational mathematicians would never claim in the modern period. Yet even the biggest names in this physics-cosmology game fully believe that they do.**
I mean, IS THIS "REALLY KNOWN AMONG SPECIALISTS"? AND IF IT IS, WHEN WERE THEY GOING TO LET THEIR BIGGEST FAN BOYS IN ON THAT TRADE SECRET? I can absolutely guarantee you that the common received wisdom does insist that numbers have that creative power, something which, in my youth, we were taught had been given up not long after Euclid wrote down his geometric axioms and the rest of it. The common superstition in such matters in the college educated population in 2016 is rather mind boggling, unless you believe, as I'm reluctantly coming to conclude that we are in a new dark age. I'm afraid that this one is going to make the alleged darkness of the last one look brilliant by comparison. In unawareness but, more so, in violence and the destruction it generates. Thanks to science.
Some real, basic clarification of what science is and what it does needs to be done. In the review of Richard Lewontin that I quoted from earlier in the week, he directly attributes the intellectual environment in which the skepticism of creationists has flourished to be in part self-created by scientists who have promoted half-baked ideas and claims that have not turned out to be true. Considering the ignorant faith of so many that science has infinite power to reveal the truth and that we must all genuflect and accept, on faith and believe what a scientist says - no matter what the status of its verification in natures is - the capacity for bait and switches, once exceeded, the backlash will be fierce. As I've also recently mentioned, science is going through a self-generated scandal in the failure to test its claims in many life-threatening ways, much to the surprise, obviously, of many of the greatest fans of science, who never seem to even read such prominent journals as Nature.
Back to Horgan who is obviously disappointed in the state of physics and who yearns for some new spark that will set things going in reality instead of the neo-medieval state that it seems to be stuck in. It looks to me like the ambitions of physicists and cosmologists may have been led astray by their own superficial grasp of the nature of what they do. Applied science, ideally, is forced to face the nature of what they do through valid experiment and the process of attempted replication, but theoretical science, relieved of the necessity of backing up their publications with actually showing what they are claiming is true, looks, ever increasingly, as if it's gone on the ultimate snark hunt but which no one is allowed to question because Einstein, Planck, Bell, etc. I wonder if the problem doesn't boil down to the philosophical ignorance or just the plain dishonesty that is a result of scientists having no real belief in morality at work.
Modern physics of this kind demands enormous public resources to operate, the CERN project is, I'm sure, hardly the end of what these Lords of Creation are going to dream up and demand be built at public expense as their right, using their repute to gull completely ignorant politicians to build ever bigger colliders and other toys for them. In the wake of the much touted verification of the Higgs boson (something which Horgan, correctly, states was mere verification of the so-called completed standard model of physics, nothing really new) I found out that asking what practical use such multi-billion dollar discoveries were in real life would get a furious reaction. But we don't really owe these guys that level of blind faith. There are certainly more pressing needs for physics and other sciences than in allowing atheist-cosmologists to claim they have a complete theory that means that, in their favorite interpretation, God isn't needed to create the universe. Of course, if they had enough philosophy, they would know that even if they knew every last fact about the physical universe, they would still not be able to refute a belief that God was the origin of that universe. The first sentence of Genesis is quite able to contain anything they discover about the universe.
We should tell physicists and cosmologists and the rest of scientists that that's nothing they have to worry about, it's not in their syllabus. Maybe they can get something done once they realize that. I'm sorry, philosophy will be required. It might keep them from wasting decades and decades. I'm really convinced that most of this stuff is, really, motivated by atheism, not curiosity about the real universe.
* Though I think any consideration of his career as a Pentagon nuclear weaponeer in reference to his atheism would be an interesting one.
** For example, in this essay.
The laws of physics can explain how the jet engine works, but not how it came to exist in the first place. It is self-evident that a jet engine could have not have been created by the laws of physics on their own – that task needed the intelligence and creative engineering work of Whittle. Indeed, come to think of it, the laws of physics plus Frank Whittle could not on their own produce a jet engine – there needs additionally to be some material around the place that is subject to those laws and that can be worked on by Whittle.
For, not only did scientists not put the universe there, neither did science or the laws of mathematical physics. Yet Hawking seems to think they did. In A Brief History of Time he hinted at this kind of explanation in suggesting that a theory might bring the universe into existence: ‘The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe?’5
The idea of a theory or physical laws bringing the universe into existence strikes me as a serious misunderstanding of the nature of such laws – or am I missing something? Scientists expect to develop theories involving mathematical laws that describe natural phenomena, and have done so with spectacular success. However, the laws that we find cannot themselves even cause anything, let alone create it.
Note: Sorry for the screwed up HTML in this post earlier in the morning. It took some time to track it down and fix it.
Friday, January 29, 2016
Consider Yourselves Filtered
Materialism is a faith held by people in such ignorance of the nature of their ideology or in your kind of sheer, shallow stupidity and emotional denial of reality that you can't admit it. That's one thing that most religious folks have over almost all atheists, they admit that they believe, that they take things on faith. Religious folk are mostly more realistic than you guys, it is a minority who aren't. Perhaps there is a logical fallacy to be named that atheists widely share with many fundamentalists, the stand that they know what they hold as a matter of faith on the basis of emotional desire. Only among atheists, there is the pretense that it is a truth of science when it is no such thing.
I've got too much to deal with in real life now to keep on going over the same stuff I've presented in exhaustive detail to refute the errors of such idiots as you and the rest of the kiddies in places like Duncan Blacks play pen for superannuated atheists. You never read anything you don't agree with, anyway and you are an ever diminishing clique of conceited dolts that he maintains for his own profit. I suspect his age demographic is older than that of any of the cabloid "news" outlets. Look at his archive, after a promising start he's contented himself with going through the motions for about the past decade, any mentions of his two or so neologisms by the like of Glenn Greenwald or Paul Krugman is an elegy to the ruins of the baby blue blog. His major efforts these days, his vaunted two sentence posts, are not even as clever as most tweets you hear about. If I were an Atriot I'd baselessly accuse him of being a lush, at least.
Update: Are you so illiterate that you can't understand that last sentence? It wasn't an accusation that Atrios is an alchy (or however that's spelled) it's noting that if I followed the same standards of evidence that his online community practice, virtually every day since he started up his blog, I'd make that accusation. I have no idea why the golden boy of Media Whores Online got lazy and stopped doing anything other than going through the motions. If it was a result of too much "Drinking Liberally" one of his former favorite quick post topics, or "Happy Hour" another of his favorite automatic posts, I have no idea. Though I hope it's not the case. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
Update: Are you so illiterate that you can't understand that last sentence? It wasn't an accusation that Atrios is an alchy (or however that's spelled) it's noting that if I followed the same standards of evidence that his online community practice, virtually every day since he started up his blog, I'd make that accusation. I have no idea why the golden boy of Media Whores Online got lazy and stopped doing anything other than going through the motions. If it was a result of too much "Drinking Liberally" one of his former favorite quick post topics, or "Happy Hour" another of his favorite automatic posts, I have no idea. Though I hope it's not the case. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
Thursday, January 28, 2016
"the ugly political environment in 2016 has an ominous precedent in Weimar Germany" Footnote To My Morning Post
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is always a somber time for Auschwitz survivor Irene Weiss. But this year's observance had an additional layer of grief: For the first time, Weiss is worried about her adopted homeland.
"I am exceptionally concerned about demagogues," the 85-year-old Weiss told me at Wednesday's commemoration at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. "They touch me in a place that I remember. I know their influence and, unfortunately, I know how receptive audiences are to demagogues and what it leads to."
[...]
Now, when she hears about plans to register Muslims and to ban Muslims from entering the United States, "I'm worried about the tone of this country," she said.
To Weiss, the ugly political environment in 2016 has an ominous precedent in Weimar Germany. "It has echoes, and maybe more so to me than to native-born Americans," she said after lighting a candle for Hitler's victims. "I'm scared. I don't like the trend. I don't like how many people are applauding when they hear these demagogues. It can turn."
Just read about this at Media Matters.
"I am exceptionally concerned about demagogues," the 85-year-old Weiss told me at Wednesday's commemoration at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. "They touch me in a place that I remember. I know their influence and, unfortunately, I know how receptive audiences are to demagogues and what it leads to."
[...]
Now, when she hears about plans to register Muslims and to ban Muslims from entering the United States, "I'm worried about the tone of this country," she said.
To Weiss, the ugly political environment in 2016 has an ominous precedent in Weimar Germany. "It has echoes, and maybe more so to me than to native-born Americans," she said after lighting a candle for Hitler's victims. "I'm scared. I don't like the trend. I don't like how many people are applauding when they hear these demagogues. It can turn."
Just read about this at Media Matters.
Hate Mail - Continual Failure To Do Anything But Whine
There is nothing difficult about my statement of the problem. If you believe that our minds are the epiphenomenon of physical structures in our brain, those would have to have been constructed by the brain or they wouldn't be there and there would be no ideas in such a brain. Now, I can't account for your mind but mine contains a few ideas about things I have no reason to believe are inside my head. Those ideas, the information contained in those ideas had to have entered into my mind before my brain could do the first thing about them, assuming the brain does do something about them, which I haven't conceded.
The problem that has to be solved is how the information instructing the brain on what it was to build got into the brain before the physical structures that are the basis of them had been made, how did the brain know that it had to make something, what it had to make and how to construct what it was to make. It would also have the problem of how to decide it had made the right thing because at that point whatever it had made would be the only representation of the idea contained in the brain.
I don't see how you can do it without negating your materialist mind model. Tell me how you could. If you can't then it means your model can't be right.
Your definition of ideas as physical structures made by the brain are what cause the problem. If ideas are not physical there are other problems as to what they are but that does nothing to change the problem your claims create for your claims. I don't have to propose anything else in order to point out the problems you've made for yourself. I'm under no obligation to present an alternative in order to raise these problems. That isn't a requirement of logic or reason or science, that it is demanded by atheist-materialists as a requirement only shows that they have to insist on having everything their way in order for their ideology to pass itself off as rational.
I think what you mean is "THAT'S NOT FAIR!" said like you'd have said it when you were 12.
The problem that has to be solved is how the information instructing the brain on what it was to build got into the brain before the physical structures that are the basis of them had been made, how did the brain know that it had to make something, what it had to make and how to construct what it was to make. It would also have the problem of how to decide it had made the right thing because at that point whatever it had made would be the only representation of the idea contained in the brain.
I don't see how you can do it without negating your materialist mind model. Tell me how you could. If you can't then it means your model can't be right.
Your definition of ideas as physical structures made by the brain are what cause the problem. If ideas are not physical there are other problems as to what they are but that does nothing to change the problem your claims create for your claims. I don't have to propose anything else in order to point out the problems you've made for yourself. I'm under no obligation to present an alternative in order to raise these problems. That isn't a requirement of logic or reason or science, that it is demanded by atheist-materialists as a requirement only shows that they have to insist on having everything their way in order for their ideology to pass itself off as rational.
I think what you mean is "THAT'S NOT FAIR!" said like you'd have said it when you were 12.
What If Cruz Wins?
Just a quick post, for now. Heather Digby Parton's post Yet more Republicans in disarray, takes proper glee in the frantic response of establishment Republicans, the money and power Republicans, to the insane party they have nurtured since the ascendancy of Nixon escaping their control. The prospect of Donald Trump being the nominee has a number of them holding their noses to the prospect of trying to get the repugnant Ted Cruz to knock him out of contention. How desperate are the wise men of the Republican establishment to avoid the Trump of doom? She quotes a Buzzfeed article:
Some of the hawkish figures who Ted Cruz recently dismissed as “crazy neo-con invade-every-country-on-earth and send our kids to die in the Middle East” … say they’d consider supporting Cruz anyway if he’s the last man between Donald Trump and the Republican presidential nomination.
Cruz, it turns out, hasn’t fully burned his bridges with that set of advisers and supporters of George W. Bush — figures like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and former National Security Council official Elliott Abrams, who aren’t closed off to Cruz, especially in the case of Abrams. Indeed, despite some lingering resentment and suspicion, there are even glimmers of rapprochement as the Republican primary looks like it could become a two-man race.
“I would not hesitate to back Cruz as the nominee,” Abrams — who not long ago told National Review that Cruz’s use of the word neocon invoked “warmongering Jewish advisers” — told BuzzFeed News. “If it’s a two man race, it’s really extraordinary to see Republican office holders in some cases or former office holders saying they don’t like Cruz or they would go for Trump, who is from my perspective not a Republican, not a conservative, has no policy views on anything that you can actually describe or get a handle on.”
Digby's conclusion is:
They might be saying that. But I'm going to guess they have just recognized that this pompadoured billionaire Bond villain might just pull it off. They may be bloodthirsty imperialists but they aren't stupid.
The problem is that a whole lot of GOP voters don't give a damn about their intellectual blather about "American hegemony" and would rather trust their authoritarian gut. They don't think trump is an isolationist. How can he be? He promises so many victories they'll be coming out of our ears. He says the military will be so strong nobody will ever mess with us again. He says he'll take their oil and bomb the shit out of 'em.
What more do they need to know?
Yes, there is much to enjoy about watching the Republican establishment frantic to prevent the worst of the Wild Bunch who are at the top of the polls getting the nomination, that they are reduced to considering supporting one of the most repulsive members of the Congress, perhaps the Senator most hated by his fellow Senators FROM HIS HOW PARTY! is a spectacle to enjoy. Digby asks, "What more do they need to know?" about the Republican rabble who have taken the "pompadoured billionaire Bond villian" to their bosom?
Well, fun aside, what if they elect Trump or Cruz? What will that say about the weakness of the opposition to the Republican-fascist party?
I have watched the left mired in its basic premises which have lost it election after election, the middle class and blue collar class, where most of the votes are, repeatedly talked into voting against even moderate Democrats whose policies were far better for them than the Republicans who get elected. I look around the blogs and see the same lines that have been in use for half a century being dutifully parroted by the would-be left. I see little to no willingness to ask ourselves why things have gotten as bad as they have. I have seen even less willingness to ask how such ideas as "more speech" and "free press" have resulted in our degraded politics which are lie driven, the very free press, from the top on down, the movers of those lies to the exclusion of an effective level of truth sufficient for a people to install an effective representative government.
I have watched as people on the left figured all they had to do is wait for things to get bad enough and then things would gloriously turn around. Even those who are realistic enough or, more likely, too ignorant to have ever heard of the dialectic seem to believe some magical force is going to suddenly make things ripe for their fairy tale revolution. I'm reading that kind of nonsense this season as I have ever single season of my adult life. I've watched as it didn't happen under Nixon, under Reagan, under Bush I, under Bush II and I strongly suspect I may live long enough to see it not happen under a Trump or a Cruz or what even more insane horror the Republican fascists have in store. It took the economic crises of the two Bushes to get the two moderate-Republican-Democrats, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama elected, we can't count on that kind of catastrophe every four years. And the reaction to their election in the off year crippled both of them with ever more insane Republican congresses.
The basic premises of neo-Jeffersonian ideology have been ineffect for quite a while now and the result is the politics we have. That's the test of those assumptions in real life instead of in legal theory. You explain to me how "more speech" has not been in effect. "More speech" was a slogan introduced by such guys as Nat Hentoff who went from The Village Voice and The Progressive to the Cato Institute. My fellow lefties, we were had by them and such legal servants of the corporate media as Joel Gora. Them and the media which pushed those lines.
It is clear there is no bottom beneath which the right in American will reach, I mean, Trump, Cruz, Rubio....? And, as the current crop of Republican governors and legislative leaders on the state level show, not to mention the popular figures in the media, outright fascism as a part of real politics has become a reality under the framing put into place a half a century ago.
For more on the half-century of delusion of the "left" read The Madonna of the Future. For how far things could go under the present regime, I don't know. Look at how the free wheeling culture of the Weimar Republic led, by law, not by sudden revolution, to Nazism taking power.
Update: We Have a Volunteer Specimen
Some of the hawkish figures who Ted Cruz recently dismissed as “crazy neo-con invade-every-country-on-earth and send our kids to die in the Middle East” … say they’d consider supporting Cruz anyway if he’s the last man between Donald Trump and the Republican presidential nomination.
Cruz, it turns out, hasn’t fully burned his bridges with that set of advisers and supporters of George W. Bush — figures like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and former National Security Council official Elliott Abrams, who aren’t closed off to Cruz, especially in the case of Abrams. Indeed, despite some lingering resentment and suspicion, there are even glimmers of rapprochement as the Republican primary looks like it could become a two-man race.
“I would not hesitate to back Cruz as the nominee,” Abrams — who not long ago told National Review that Cruz’s use of the word neocon invoked “warmongering Jewish advisers” — told BuzzFeed News. “If it’s a two man race, it’s really extraordinary to see Republican office holders in some cases or former office holders saying they don’t like Cruz or they would go for Trump, who is from my perspective not a Republican, not a conservative, has no policy views on anything that you can actually describe or get a handle on.”
Digby's conclusion is:
They might be saying that. But I'm going to guess they have just recognized that this pompadoured billionaire Bond villain might just pull it off. They may be bloodthirsty imperialists but they aren't stupid.
The problem is that a whole lot of GOP voters don't give a damn about their intellectual blather about "American hegemony" and would rather trust their authoritarian gut. They don't think trump is an isolationist. How can he be? He promises so many victories they'll be coming out of our ears. He says the military will be so strong nobody will ever mess with us again. He says he'll take their oil and bomb the shit out of 'em.
What more do they need to know?
Yes, there is much to enjoy about watching the Republican establishment frantic to prevent the worst of the Wild Bunch who are at the top of the polls getting the nomination, that they are reduced to considering supporting one of the most repulsive members of the Congress, perhaps the Senator most hated by his fellow Senators FROM HIS HOW PARTY! is a spectacle to enjoy. Digby asks, "What more do they need to know?" about the Republican rabble who have taken the "pompadoured billionaire Bond villian" to their bosom?
Well, fun aside, what if they elect Trump or Cruz? What will that say about the weakness of the opposition to the Republican-fascist party?
I have watched the left mired in its basic premises which have lost it election after election, the middle class and blue collar class, where most of the votes are, repeatedly talked into voting against even moderate Democrats whose policies were far better for them than the Republicans who get elected. I look around the blogs and see the same lines that have been in use for half a century being dutifully parroted by the would-be left. I see little to no willingness to ask ourselves why things have gotten as bad as they have. I have seen even less willingness to ask how such ideas as "more speech" and "free press" have resulted in our degraded politics which are lie driven, the very free press, from the top on down, the movers of those lies to the exclusion of an effective level of truth sufficient for a people to install an effective representative government.
I have watched as people on the left figured all they had to do is wait for things to get bad enough and then things would gloriously turn around. Even those who are realistic enough or, more likely, too ignorant to have ever heard of the dialectic seem to believe some magical force is going to suddenly make things ripe for their fairy tale revolution. I'm reading that kind of nonsense this season as I have ever single season of my adult life. I've watched as it didn't happen under Nixon, under Reagan, under Bush I, under Bush II and I strongly suspect I may live long enough to see it not happen under a Trump or a Cruz or what even more insane horror the Republican fascists have in store. It took the economic crises of the two Bushes to get the two moderate-Republican-Democrats, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama elected, we can't count on that kind of catastrophe every four years. And the reaction to their election in the off year crippled both of them with ever more insane Republican congresses.
The basic premises of neo-Jeffersonian ideology have been ineffect for quite a while now and the result is the politics we have. That's the test of those assumptions in real life instead of in legal theory. You explain to me how "more speech" has not been in effect. "More speech" was a slogan introduced by such guys as Nat Hentoff who went from The Village Voice and The Progressive to the Cato Institute. My fellow lefties, we were had by them and such legal servants of the corporate media as Joel Gora. Them and the media which pushed those lines.
It is clear there is no bottom beneath which the right in American will reach, I mean, Trump, Cruz, Rubio....? And, as the current crop of Republican governors and legislative leaders on the state level show, not to mention the popular figures in the media, outright fascism as a part of real politics has become a reality under the framing put into place a half a century ago.
For more on the half-century of delusion of the "left" read The Madonna of the Future. For how far things could go under the present regime, I don't know. Look at how the free wheeling culture of the Weimar Republic led, by law, not by sudden revolution, to Nazism taking power.
Update: We Have a Volunteer Specimen
2 comments:
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Hate Mail
I'm a lot less surprised than should be that apparently the Science department at the U. of C. Lab School has a senior faculty member who thinks you can understand things without reading them. He obviously didn't and hasn't.
But, then, it's also kind of surprising how a faculty member there would have so much time during the school day to gossip online. My family members who teach in a public school don't have that kind of leisure during the school day.
In so far as what was said, he can bite me.
But, then, it's also kind of surprising how a faculty member there would have so much time during the school day to gossip online. My family members who teach in a public school don't have that kind of leisure during the school day.
In so far as what was said, he can bite me.
Hate Mail
Oh, yeah, you can tell how Brueggemann is a reactionary in that lecture when he says things like this.
We now live in a world that is dominated by market ideology in which the only thing that counts is to produce, consume and to get your hands on lots of commodities and keep them for yourselves.
The ideology of commodity is fundamentally hostile to the Christian virtues of hospitality, forgiveness and generosity.
I take as a sign of that our diminishment of food stamps recently and our sense that the poor are not entitled to anything in our economy because they are not contributors.
Perhaps I'll get around to transcribing more of what he said later.
We now live in a world that is dominated by market ideology in which the only thing that counts is to produce, consume and to get your hands on lots of commodities and keep them for yourselves.
The ideology of commodity is fundamentally hostile to the Christian virtues of hospitality, forgiveness and generosity.
I take as a sign of that our diminishment of food stamps recently and our sense that the poor are not entitled to anything in our economy because they are not contributors.
Perhaps I'll get around to transcribing more of what he said later.
Getting Back To Something Important Brueggemann on Exile Today
I had intended to post this teaching lecture by Walter Brueggemann yesterday. It concerns something I'd mentioned a few days back, about how people are forced to live a life of exile in materialistic society, how we are all held under a Babylonian exile and we need to learn how to do that while not compromising our morality and its practice. That compromise is what the negative history of religion is written in, Christian history, Jewish history. I would say Muslim history but I haven't read nearly as much of that religion and culture as I should to really be able to make that claim reliably.
In some ways, some parts of the Christian population have faithfully practiced the moral requirements of their religion, I would argue that there are probably more Christians aware of that requirement today than there had been in much of the preceding 2000 years.
Anyway, I don't have the time, today, to do the necessary transcription of what he said, I hope to get to that later in the week.
In some ways, some parts of the Christian population have faithfully practiced the moral requirements of their religion, I would argue that there are probably more Christians aware of that requirement today than there had been in much of the preceding 2000 years.
Anyway, I don't have the time, today, to do the necessary transcription of what he said, I hope to get to that later in the week.
Epic Ignorance Is The Basis of The Common Received View of Ideological Science
One of the dolts whose comments you generally don't read here because I moderate comments, skimming what I wrote yesterday, has made the massively ignorant accusation that I "sound like David Brooks". Now, I'm sure the boy as a skimmer of the New York Times and other such organs of the media knows that David Brooks has written some stuff about neuro-sci. What the dolt doesn't realize is that David Brooks is a huge fan of exactly the kind of so-called science I unambiguously reject. For example, in this interview where he advocates five books.
Two books to go.
Yes, so these are two gigantic books, both very famous, which really should be read by anyone interested in this world. And the first is called The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker and the second is called Consilience by Edward O Wilson. And these books are both landmarks of our time.
Stephen Pinker is a psychologist at Harvard, though until 2003 he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.
Yes. Blank Slate is an argument against the old view that there is no such thing as human nature, that we’re all culturally determined. He brings together a ton of evidence that that’s wrong. Some of it involves brain structure, a lot of it involves genetics. He doesn’t really think of it this way, but a lot of it is about the unique qualities that guide behaviour that we’re not aware of. I would say that he is overly reliant on genetic explanations, but it’s still a very important book.
So, although the book is called Blank Slate, he’s actually arguing the opposite. Would you say it’s accessible to a non-scientist?
Yes, all of these books I’ve chosen are very accessible.
Finally, Consilience, which was published in 1998 and is by the Harvard biologist and twice Pulitzer Prize-winning Edward Wilson.
Wilson makes the argument – or rather the prediction – that a lot of the disciplines we have separated human behaviour into are obsolete, and that we are on the verge of unifying knowledge in an inter-disciplinary way. And that’s important because if you look around at various fields, what Wilson predicted a decade ago is actually happening with neuroscience. There’s a field of neural economics, which is a combination of economics and neuroscience, there’s neural this and that, basically neural everything: literary critics, historians. People in many different disciplines are using this work on the brain to illuminate their thinking. And in this way, I think what they’re finding in our unconscious mind will have the same sort of influence that Marx had, and that Sigmund Freud had, namely an entire new vocabulary, that will help define a lot of different fields.
So this belief in the unity of knowledge, that there is one theory that will explain all we know and don’t know. Is this the return of the Renaissance man?
Well, except that in the Renaissance we thought we were masters of our destiny, and the whole idea was ‘what a glorious thing man is, with limitless capacities’. But here, each individual is not so special, we are shaped by genes, by social trends; individual decision-making is bounded. There are severe limits on free will.
Anyone who read and understood what I've said on this would know that what Brooks thinks is just nifty I see as a complete disaster, the general acceptance, as science of something which is not only baseless but an illogical and therefore impossible assertion of ideology as science. What Brooks promotes is exactly what I noted was epic intellectual decadence.
And in line with that intellectual decadence the middle-brow, college educated audience can't be bothered to know enough about what they numbly and noddingly accept to understand when someone is criticizing and rejecting those ideas, making substantial, evidence based refutations of them and someone else is promoting them for ideological reasons.
The idiotic belief that materialism is compatible with liberalism, in its traditional American sense of the word, a belief in equality and a moral responsibility to care for the least among us liberally, is total nonsense. There is no more degraded view of human beings than that they are physical objects. When you take that position and the logical consequences of it, that there is no endowment with equal rights by God, no endowment with moral obligations, you come out with a position that sees that liberalism as unrealistic at best, a delusion, most likely. The substitution of Marxist style management of "the masses" was tested in the field in the 20th century and proved to be just another total horror. Brook's button-down wonkery ruled population will, unsurprisingly, look like something from one of the dystopian novels that were imagined science-based futures, only worse. What is proposed will be presented as being hygienic, like Brave New World. But it will probably devolve into something closer to 1984 with a capitalist slant and far more chaotic and bloody.
Two books to go.
Yes, so these are two gigantic books, both very famous, which really should be read by anyone interested in this world. And the first is called The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker and the second is called Consilience by Edward O Wilson. And these books are both landmarks of our time.
Stephen Pinker is a psychologist at Harvard, though until 2003 he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.
Yes. Blank Slate is an argument against the old view that there is no such thing as human nature, that we’re all culturally determined. He brings together a ton of evidence that that’s wrong. Some of it involves brain structure, a lot of it involves genetics. He doesn’t really think of it this way, but a lot of it is about the unique qualities that guide behaviour that we’re not aware of. I would say that he is overly reliant on genetic explanations, but it’s still a very important book.
So, although the book is called Blank Slate, he’s actually arguing the opposite. Would you say it’s accessible to a non-scientist?
Yes, all of these books I’ve chosen are very accessible.
Finally, Consilience, which was published in 1998 and is by the Harvard biologist and twice Pulitzer Prize-winning Edward Wilson.
Wilson makes the argument – or rather the prediction – that a lot of the disciplines we have separated human behaviour into are obsolete, and that we are on the verge of unifying knowledge in an inter-disciplinary way. And that’s important because if you look around at various fields, what Wilson predicted a decade ago is actually happening with neuroscience. There’s a field of neural economics, which is a combination of economics and neuroscience, there’s neural this and that, basically neural everything: literary critics, historians. People in many different disciplines are using this work on the brain to illuminate their thinking. And in this way, I think what they’re finding in our unconscious mind will have the same sort of influence that Marx had, and that Sigmund Freud had, namely an entire new vocabulary, that will help define a lot of different fields.
So this belief in the unity of knowledge, that there is one theory that will explain all we know and don’t know. Is this the return of the Renaissance man?
Well, except that in the Renaissance we thought we were masters of our destiny, and the whole idea was ‘what a glorious thing man is, with limitless capacities’. But here, each individual is not so special, we are shaped by genes, by social trends; individual decision-making is bounded. There are severe limits on free will.
Anyone who read and understood what I've said on this would know that what Brooks thinks is just nifty I see as a complete disaster, the general acceptance, as science of something which is not only baseless but an illogical and therefore impossible assertion of ideology as science. What Brooks promotes is exactly what I noted was epic intellectual decadence.
And in line with that intellectual decadence the middle-brow, college educated audience can't be bothered to know enough about what they numbly and noddingly accept to understand when someone is criticizing and rejecting those ideas, making substantial, evidence based refutations of them and someone else is promoting them for ideological reasons.
The idiotic belief that materialism is compatible with liberalism, in its traditional American sense of the word, a belief in equality and a moral responsibility to care for the least among us liberally, is total nonsense. There is no more degraded view of human beings than that they are physical objects. When you take that position and the logical consequences of it, that there is no endowment with equal rights by God, no endowment with moral obligations, you come out with a position that sees that liberalism as unrealistic at best, a delusion, most likely. The substitution of Marxist style management of "the masses" was tested in the field in the 20th century and proved to be just another total horror. Brook's button-down wonkery ruled population will, unsurprisingly, look like something from one of the dystopian novels that were imagined science-based futures, only worse. What is proposed will be presented as being hygienic, like Brave New World. But it will probably devolve into something closer to 1984 with a capitalist slant and far more chaotic and bloody.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Materialism As One Long Intellectual Tantrum
I have unexpectedly got the morning off, something to do with testing. Testing has killed public education in the United States, another ironic result of the religion of scientism as held by the middle-brow college educated population.
It being late in the month I'll once again bring up the fact that the materialists haven't given any answer to that test I gave to one of their pet ideas, the "brain only" claim, the claim that our ideas are the mere epiphenomena of physical structures and chemistry in our brains.
For anyone who wasn't here for previous sessions, my question is how any one human brain would know how to make exactly the right structure to represent an idea of an external thing or reality BEFORE any structure containing the information of that idea existed, physically, in the brain. There would be no way for the brain to know a. that it needed to make a new structure, b. what that structure would have to be to produce the correct epiphenomenon to be the required idea. c. that it had produced the right and not the wrong structure to produce that idea. There would be no way for the brain to do that because, under the materialist framing of minds, the idea would not be there to inform it of what to make.
The most popular materialist answer to that was to magically incant the words "DNA" and "natural selection" as if nothing further were needed by way of explanation. The other was just to make the claim that "the brain does it", as if the question were the answer to it. Read what I said in my earlier post about the rhetorical incompetence of materialists.
My response to that was that it only made things worse because all DNA does is, through the action of very complex cellular chemistry, make chains of amino acids which aren't even biologically active until they are folded in the right way in order to be introduced into the physical structure of our bodies. It complicates the problem, it doesn't even stand up when put against our experience.
Christian Afinsens, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on protein folding said:
If the chain explored all possible configurations at random by rotations about the various single bonds of the structure, it would take too long to reach the native configuration. For example, if the individual residues of an unfolded polypeptide chain can exist in only two states, which is a gross understatement, then the number of possible randomly generated conformations is 1045 for a chain of 150 amino acid residues ( although, of course, most of these would probably be sterically [spacially] impossible ones If each conformation could be explored with a frequency of molecular rotation (1012 sec.-1) , which is an overestimate, it would take approximately 1026 years to examine all possible conformations. Since the syntnesis and folding of a protein chain such as that of ribonuclease or lysozyme can be accomplished in about 2 minutes, it is clear that all conformations are not traversed in the folding process. Instead, it appears to us that, in response to local interactions, the peptide chain is directed along a variety of possible low-energy pathways (relatively small in number), possibly passing through unique intermediate states, toward the confirmation of lowest free energy.
Quoted by Rupert Sheldrake in Science Set Free: Is Nature Purposeful
That was a description of just the known problems of explaining how a short amino acid chain could form into the right shape to be biologically active. Clearly the ultimate atheist resort of random trial and error can't explain it in even its most basic and banal function. I would love to know how they would explain the process of DNA creating the exact form to embody the semoitic content of just the right idea to produce anything like any truth, especially one to be deemed "objective" truth. Especially as, by their own claims, that information could not be present to inform the action of the brain.
Two minutes. I don't know how fast the minds of materialists work but my experience of thinking couldn't be accounted for that way, remembering that every, single idea that is involved, those we keep and the many more we discount or use in a different modified and unique form would have to be being produced, in real time, by the mechanism proposed. Citing DNA or, by extension, "natural selection" does nothing to make the claimed mechanism more plausible, it makes it stupendously less plausible.
Materialism, far from being an objective truth, is an obviously incoherent and incompetently framed ideology that can't even account for the thing that invented it, human minds. I have said that it leads to the ultimate act of intellectual decadence, of materialists having to impeach everything about minds, ideas, etc. and claiming that the product of those degraded, dismissed minds and ideas, science, then provides the proof of that impeachment. It's worse than trying to build a sand castle on sand, it's like trying to build one on water. It is so incredibly decadent that it doesn't even understand that it is a problem. Materialism is probably most comprehensively understood as being one long atheist intellectual tantrum in which anything that is said loudly is asserted to be the truth. No one else, though, has to get caught up in it, which only makes the rage of the one having the tantrum even worse.
It being late in the month I'll once again bring up the fact that the materialists haven't given any answer to that test I gave to one of their pet ideas, the "brain only" claim, the claim that our ideas are the mere epiphenomena of physical structures and chemistry in our brains.
For anyone who wasn't here for previous sessions, my question is how any one human brain would know how to make exactly the right structure to represent an idea of an external thing or reality BEFORE any structure containing the information of that idea existed, physically, in the brain. There would be no way for the brain to know a. that it needed to make a new structure, b. what that structure would have to be to produce the correct epiphenomenon to be the required idea. c. that it had produced the right and not the wrong structure to produce that idea. There would be no way for the brain to do that because, under the materialist framing of minds, the idea would not be there to inform it of what to make.
The most popular materialist answer to that was to magically incant the words "DNA" and "natural selection" as if nothing further were needed by way of explanation. The other was just to make the claim that "the brain does it", as if the question were the answer to it. Read what I said in my earlier post about the rhetorical incompetence of materialists.
My response to that was that it only made things worse because all DNA does is, through the action of very complex cellular chemistry, make chains of amino acids which aren't even biologically active until they are folded in the right way in order to be introduced into the physical structure of our bodies. It complicates the problem, it doesn't even stand up when put against our experience.
Christian Afinsens, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on protein folding said:
If the chain explored all possible configurations at random by rotations about the various single bonds of the structure, it would take too long to reach the native configuration. For example, if the individual residues of an unfolded polypeptide chain can exist in only two states, which is a gross understatement, then the number of possible randomly generated conformations is 1045 for a chain of 150 amino acid residues ( although, of course, most of these would probably be sterically [spacially] impossible ones If each conformation could be explored with a frequency of molecular rotation (1012 sec.-1) , which is an overestimate, it would take approximately 1026 years to examine all possible conformations. Since the syntnesis and folding of a protein chain such as that of ribonuclease or lysozyme can be accomplished in about 2 minutes, it is clear that all conformations are not traversed in the folding process. Instead, it appears to us that, in response to local interactions, the peptide chain is directed along a variety of possible low-energy pathways (relatively small in number), possibly passing through unique intermediate states, toward the confirmation of lowest free energy.
Quoted by Rupert Sheldrake in Science Set Free: Is Nature Purposeful
That was a description of just the known problems of explaining how a short amino acid chain could form into the right shape to be biologically active. Clearly the ultimate atheist resort of random trial and error can't explain it in even its most basic and banal function. I would love to know how they would explain the process of DNA creating the exact form to embody the semoitic content of just the right idea to produce anything like any truth, especially one to be deemed "objective" truth. Especially as, by their own claims, that information could not be present to inform the action of the brain.
Two minutes. I don't know how fast the minds of materialists work but my experience of thinking couldn't be accounted for that way, remembering that every, single idea that is involved, those we keep and the many more we discount or use in a different modified and unique form would have to be being produced, in real time, by the mechanism proposed. Citing DNA or, by extension, "natural selection" does nothing to make the claimed mechanism more plausible, it makes it stupendously less plausible.
Materialism, far from being an objective truth, is an obviously incoherent and incompetently framed ideology that can't even account for the thing that invented it, human minds. I have said that it leads to the ultimate act of intellectual decadence, of materialists having to impeach everything about minds, ideas, etc. and claiming that the product of those degraded, dismissed minds and ideas, science, then provides the proof of that impeachment. It's worse than trying to build a sand castle on sand, it's like trying to build one on water. It is so incredibly decadent that it doesn't even understand that it is a problem. Materialism is probably most comprehensively understood as being one long atheist intellectual tantrum in which anything that is said loudly is asserted to be the truth. No one else, though, has to get caught up in it, which only makes the rage of the one having the tantrum even worse.
"Materialism is an objective fact"
One of my dimmer trolls who works in some science lab on the West coast has, or so I'm told, declared that "materialism is an objective fact". Now, that's probably a succinct statement of the common view of materialism held by a large number, if not a majority of college educated folk in the English speaking peoples and those who would like to be mistaken as educated but it is as pig-ignorant a statement of what materialism is as could be made. In someone with pretensions of being a scientist, it is an exhibition of a common and disturbing unawareness of even the most basic of objective facts in the matter.
Materialism was never "an objective fact" it was a metaphysical and ideological dogma that began as abstract thought problems about cutting things in half over and over again, continued on the basis of preferred ways of looking at human experience - primarily as a denial, at times somewhat sophisticated but mostly quite naive, of the existence of gods and, eventually, God - and hardened into the kind of rigid scientistic materialism which became the dominant ideology of Western education in the late 19th century and which survived, even though science demolished its basic framing in the early 20th century.
The statement also supports my contention that people granted degrees in science, these days, are generally so unaware of philosophy of any rigor that they not only can't make coherent philosophical arguments but that they are even unaware of having strayed into making philosophical statements even as they are making them. It was a sad day when they stopped calling it "natural philosophy" and acknowledging that philosophy was inseparable from what they were doing and partitioned off the mere methodology and application into "science". It was a sadder day when, for reasons of economy and fitting complex topics into a 4-year degree program that they dropped requirements in teaching students the basics of rigorous thought and philosophy. I suspect that my generation was about the last to have mandatory Freshman Rhetoric classes which consisted of the rudiments of those topics. Or, maybe I was just lucky in my Frosh Rhetoric teacher.
I don't know but that the rigid faith in 19th century materialism isn't strongest in those who work in biology and the too-often pseudo-social-sciences, though it has certainly not sunk in with a lot of those who work in physics. I have, before, quoted the eminent geneticist, Richard Lewontin as honestly stating that the materialism of scientists is not a conclusion reached on the basis of science but a personal preference based on their desire that science, that the subject matter of science, be the sine qua non of existence.
Or willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
I suspect that as any materialist who nods in agreement with the paraphrase of Lewis Beck will have missed the point of what Lewontin confessed
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
What Lewontin gave as the reason atheists, like himself, cling to materialism isn't science, it is their "a priori adherence to material causes" and, though he didn't admit as much, in the context of his paragraph, it is clear that is the product of their dislike of religion. It is a personal preference because of what they don't like. It isn't even a purely positive preference for materialism, it is an emotional compulsion based in their often angry, and even in his case, derisive dislike of religion. And Lewontin is one of the most generous and amiable of the lot.
His citation of Lewis Beck* rings ever more hollow due to what materialists in the more fashionable guise of "naturalists" and "physicalists" demand we take on faith.
Considering that the range of those unsubstantiated things which scientists, especially cosmologists, were pushing at that time and continue to push today, including the obviously desperate invention of jillions of universes so that they can pretend that physics has disposed of God the creator, even as honest and rational a materialist as Lewontin is demands that people pretend to not see how ridiculous the faith in materialism is. I say that anyone who can pretend that muti-verse theory is a reasonable conjecture, especially in some of its more outlandish versions which have been published as science, then its obvious that materialists can believe in anything and, in fact, they allow those to be introduced into published science, no matter how baseless they are and how outlandish they are.
Much as I respect Lewontin when he is dealing with the substance of his specialty, itself prone to the most outrageous abuse by his fellow materialists, and due to his general honesty and rigorous thinking, what he presents as a reason to accept materialism has become entirely unreasonable due to the demands that they make on peoples' credulity. He, himself, must know that the 19th century materialism of his fellow scientists and, even more so the ignorant sci-groupies, was demolished about the time he was born. Materialism is the ultimate Just-so story, it is the ideology of Lewontin's scientific opponents that he intended his readers to understand he was referring to when he made that provocative statement. It has become, ever more a Just-so story as atheist-materialists in science push it ever more into the formal literature of science.
No serious theologian would demand that a religious view of creation or a miraculous explanation be introduced into a scientific paper but materialists, especially those working in cosmology, have glutted the pages of scientific journals and books with their materialist a-theology in the form of such conjecture. Theologians generally have a rigorous training in philosophy which cosmologists seem to generally lack, these days. As I've heard a number of theologians, philosophers and scientists who have a background in those point out, the most eminent of them, Stephen Hawking, for example, don't even realize that as they dismiss philosophy, they do so in philosophical terms making tissue thin arguments that fall to pieces under the slightest stress of testing.
Update: * I wrote this about four o'clock AM, I'm not going to get too worked up over a mistyped name, especially as I understood the problem of what was said. I typed it out the right way, as well.
You, on the other hand, say stupid stuff 24 hours a day.
Materialism was never "an objective fact" it was a metaphysical and ideological dogma that began as abstract thought problems about cutting things in half over and over again, continued on the basis of preferred ways of looking at human experience - primarily as a denial, at times somewhat sophisticated but mostly quite naive, of the existence of gods and, eventually, God - and hardened into the kind of rigid scientistic materialism which became the dominant ideology of Western education in the late 19th century and which survived, even though science demolished its basic framing in the early 20th century.
The statement also supports my contention that people granted degrees in science, these days, are generally so unaware of philosophy of any rigor that they not only can't make coherent philosophical arguments but that they are even unaware of having strayed into making philosophical statements even as they are making them. It was a sad day when they stopped calling it "natural philosophy" and acknowledging that philosophy was inseparable from what they were doing and partitioned off the mere methodology and application into "science". It was a sadder day when, for reasons of economy and fitting complex topics into a 4-year degree program that they dropped requirements in teaching students the basics of rigorous thought and philosophy. I suspect that my generation was about the last to have mandatory Freshman Rhetoric classes which consisted of the rudiments of those topics. Or, maybe I was just lucky in my Frosh Rhetoric teacher.
I don't know but that the rigid faith in 19th century materialism isn't strongest in those who work in biology and the too-often pseudo-social-sciences, though it has certainly not sunk in with a lot of those who work in physics. I have, before, quoted the eminent geneticist, Richard Lewontin as honestly stating that the materialism of scientists is not a conclusion reached on the basis of science but a personal preference based on their desire that science, that the subject matter of science, be the sine qua non of existence.
Or willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
I suspect that as any materialist who nods in agreement with the paraphrase of Lewis Beck will have missed the point of what Lewontin confessed
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
What Lewontin gave as the reason atheists, like himself, cling to materialism isn't science, it is their "a priori adherence to material causes" and, though he didn't admit as much, in the context of his paragraph, it is clear that is the product of their dislike of religion. It is a personal preference because of what they don't like. It isn't even a purely positive preference for materialism, it is an emotional compulsion based in their often angry, and even in his case, derisive dislike of religion. And Lewontin is one of the most generous and amiable of the lot.
His citation of Lewis Beck* rings ever more hollow due to what materialists in the more fashionable guise of "naturalists" and "physicalists" demand we take on faith.
Considering that the range of those unsubstantiated things which scientists, especially cosmologists, were pushing at that time and continue to push today, including the obviously desperate invention of jillions of universes so that they can pretend that physics has disposed of God the creator, even as honest and rational a materialist as Lewontin is demands that people pretend to not see how ridiculous the faith in materialism is. I say that anyone who can pretend that muti-verse theory is a reasonable conjecture, especially in some of its more outlandish versions which have been published as science, then its obvious that materialists can believe in anything and, in fact, they allow those to be introduced into published science, no matter how baseless they are and how outlandish they are.
Much as I respect Lewontin when he is dealing with the substance of his specialty, itself prone to the most outrageous abuse by his fellow materialists, and due to his general honesty and rigorous thinking, what he presents as a reason to accept materialism has become entirely unreasonable due to the demands that they make on peoples' credulity. He, himself, must know that the 19th century materialism of his fellow scientists and, even more so the ignorant sci-groupies, was demolished about the time he was born. Materialism is the ultimate Just-so story, it is the ideology of Lewontin's scientific opponents that he intended his readers to understand he was referring to when he made that provocative statement. It has become, ever more a Just-so story as atheist-materialists in science push it ever more into the formal literature of science.
No serious theologian would demand that a religious view of creation or a miraculous explanation be introduced into a scientific paper but materialists, especially those working in cosmology, have glutted the pages of scientific journals and books with their materialist a-theology in the form of such conjecture. Theologians generally have a rigorous training in philosophy which cosmologists seem to generally lack, these days. As I've heard a number of theologians, philosophers and scientists who have a background in those point out, the most eminent of them, Stephen Hawking, for example, don't even realize that as they dismiss philosophy, they do so in philosophical terms making tissue thin arguments that fall to pieces under the slightest stress of testing.
Update: * I wrote this about four o'clock AM, I'm not going to get too worked up over a mistyped name, especially as I understood the problem of what was said. I typed it out the right way, as well.
You, on the other hand, say stupid stuff 24 hours a day.
Monday, January 25, 2016
Hate Mail
I don't care what people at a blog of little brain who don't bother reading what I wrote say about what they imagine I said.
If they wanted me to worry, they'd point out what I said that was wrong.
Intellectual incest, I didn't really understand there was such a thing until I saw what happens to an interbreeding blog community after a dozen or more years.
Update: Everything that stupid bint says only proves my point.
Update 2: That's not thinking, it's eschatautology: endless repetition of the common received and ineffective POV combined with self-congratulation over that repetition.
Update 3:
Elegy On A Kewl Kid
He's spittle drenched, outraged and peeved,
“He's flouted the wisdom, received”
It's simply too easy,
To make the boy queasy,
Just question what must be believed.
If they wanted me to worry, they'd point out what I said that was wrong.
Intellectual incest, I didn't really understand there was such a thing until I saw what happens to an interbreeding blog community after a dozen or more years.
Update: Everything that stupid bint says only proves my point.
Update 2: That's not thinking, it's eschatautology: endless repetition of the common received and ineffective POV combined with self-congratulation over that repetition.
Update 3:
Elegy On A Kewl Kid
He's spittle drenched, outraged and peeved,
“He's flouted the wisdom, received”
It's simply too easy,
To make the boy queasy,
Just question what must be believed.
Reading the Bad Plays - You Know How Bad It Is When King John Reminds You of Contemporary Politics - or Nous Sommes Angiers
I have revived a project that an old friend of mine and I started, twice, of reading all of those plays by x* that most people don't get around to reading. We read several of them together before she died, Love's Labours Lost, Pericles, Measure for Measure and a few of the more often read ones.
I read King John over the weekend and have to say that it is an incredibly frustrating play in many ways, containing some extremely beautiful verse that you can't help but regret is so wasted on such a messed up play filled to the top with such horrible characters, The quote that is most famous put in the mouth of the putrid King John's son as he was about to become Henry III,
I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan,
Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death,
And from the organ-pipe of frailty sings
His soul and body to their lasting rest.
Considering what a total piece of slime his father was from the start of the play (and in history) it is extremely frustrating to have such such beauty said on his behalf.
The play, itself, was probably doomed to be ineffective due to the scope of complexity of the subject matter. The Plantagenet/Angevin crime families, their crimes, their infighting, etc. couldn't be dealt with in a years long TV series. Heck, you'd need a long TV series just go get through the public life of King John and his equally putrid brother, Richard. Trying to do it in a single play is bound to falsify the real history of it by having to leave most of it out. It is futile to try to find anyone involved who deserves our sympathy. What with the various governments, all of them ruthless crime families who could give our worst Eastern European, South Asian or American Republican crime families something to recognize.
Every dramatic presentation of the figures in those intrigues has falsified them. The Lion in Winter, with the benefit of James Goldman not having to placate members of the crime family which ruled England several centuries later, written when modern history of the period had laid out how truly awful those folks were, still presents them as romanticized cartoons. The movie with Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn is absurd. There were simply no good guys to be had, not even when you have Katherine Hepburn play one of them, turning Eleanor into a Connecticut aristocrat - as she did every character she ever played that I'm aware of. I dread to think that there are probably large segments of the allegedly educated population who believe Eleanor of Aquitaine was Hepburn. The presentation of them as some kind of enlightened rulers with any sympathy to the people they tyrannized and bled for money in their petty attempts to keep territory and steal it only shows how thoroughly Americans have bought into the bull shit pageantry of English kings and queens.
George Orwell made the most interesting point about the play that I've ever seen, in the context a truly wonderful essay about how literature goes in and out of relevance depending on current events.
The obvious explanation of this sharp difference between the dominant writers before and after the war of 1914-18 is the war itself. Some such development would have happened in any case as the insufficiency of modern materialistic civilization revealed itself, but the war speeded that process, partly by showing how very shallow the veneer of civilization is, partly by making England less prosperous and therefore less isolated. After 1918 you couldn't live in such a narrow and padded world as you did when Britannia ruled not only the waves but also the markets. One effect of the ghastly history of the last twenty years has been to make a great deal of ancient literature seem much more modern. A lot that has happened in Germany since the rise of Hitler might have come straight out of the later volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Recently I saw Shakespeare's [sic.] King John acted — the first time I had seen it, because it is a play which isn't acted very often. When I had read it as a boy it seemed to me archaic, something dug out of a history book and not having anything to do with our own time. Well, when I saw it acted, what with its intrigues and doublecrossings, non-aggression pacts, quislings, people changing sides in the middle of a battle, and what-not, it seemed to me extraordinarily up to date. And it was rather the same thing that happened in the literary development between 1910 and 1920. The prevailing temper of the time gave a new reality to all sorts of themes which had seemed out of date and puerile when Bernard Shaw and his Fabians were — so they thought — turning the world into a sort of super garden city. Themes like revenge, patriotism, exile, persecution, race hatred, religious faith, loyalty, leader worship, suddenly seemed real again. Tamerlane and Genghis Khan seem credible figures now, and Machiavelli seems a serious thinker, as they didn't in 1910. We have got out of a backwater and back into history. I haven't any unqualified admiration for the writers of the early nineteen-twenties, the writers among whom Eliot and Joyce are chief names. Those followed them have to undo a great deal of what they did. Their revulsion from a shallow conception of progress drove them politically in t he wrong direction, and it isn't an accident that Ezra Pound, for instance, is now shouting antisemitism on the Rome radio. But one must concede that their writings are more grown-up, and have a wider scope, than what went immediately before them. They broke the cultural circle in which England had existed for something like a century. They re-established contact with Europe, and they brought back the sense of history and the possibility of tragedy. On that basis all subsequent English literature that matters twopence has rested, and the development that Eliot and the others started back in the closing years of the last war, has not yet run its course.
For me the best part of the play, the most revealing and intellectually honest is the second act, when the competing armies of Austria on behalf of prince Arthur, John's nephew and a claimant to the throne, Phillip of France, King John, his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine and various others are poised to pillage the city of Angiers, When they demand that the Citizens of Angiers declare which of the various factions they recognize as the legitimate ruler, John or Arthur (who John is often believed to have mutilated and murdered - perhaps with his own hand, not fell off a wall as the play says) or whoever, they essentially say they don't want any part of the royal intrigues. In the whole play, the brief appearance of the representatives of the people of that beleaguered city are the only ones with any real claim to our allegiance because they are the ones who are most like us in the hands of our ruling elite.
I would describe how the poor Citizens of Angiers try to get out of the royal cross-hairs by getting John's niece Blanche married off to King Phillip's son, Louis, but the intrigues involved are better read than described. They're far from obvious if you haven't reviewed the background information.
The author was biting off way more than an honest person could turn into a play. It's doubtful anyone could have done it. If x couldn't, who could? The overall meaning of the play is the corruption of power, the insanity of it. It is regrettable that he included the death of John - you feel like giving a medal to the monk who allegedly poisoned him. I am afraid it is a lot more relevant to contemporary politics in the United States than it should be. The Republican pack, the Republicans in congress and the triangulating establishment Democrats aren't much more rational or honest.
* I'm inclined to think X was Bacon. I will not pretend that that illiterate guy who couldn't spell his own name as he drew out the letters wrote the plays, especially as I'm sure this will infuriate the usual fly-specks.
Note: From what I know of Henry III, in addition to voluntarily reissuing Magna Carta, he spent a lot of his early reign trying to prove he wasn't as awful as his father. The pattern for screwed up English politics, though, had been cast and they still haven't gotten over it. The great insight into history by William Faulkner is true.
I read King John over the weekend and have to say that it is an incredibly frustrating play in many ways, containing some extremely beautiful verse that you can't help but regret is so wasted on such a messed up play filled to the top with such horrible characters, The quote that is most famous put in the mouth of the putrid King John's son as he was about to become Henry III,
I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan,
Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death,
And from the organ-pipe of frailty sings
His soul and body to their lasting rest.
Considering what a total piece of slime his father was from the start of the play (and in history) it is extremely frustrating to have such such beauty said on his behalf.
The play, itself, was probably doomed to be ineffective due to the scope of complexity of the subject matter. The Plantagenet/Angevin crime families, their crimes, their infighting, etc. couldn't be dealt with in a years long TV series. Heck, you'd need a long TV series just go get through the public life of King John and his equally putrid brother, Richard. Trying to do it in a single play is bound to falsify the real history of it by having to leave most of it out. It is futile to try to find anyone involved who deserves our sympathy. What with the various governments, all of them ruthless crime families who could give our worst Eastern European, South Asian or American Republican crime families something to recognize.
Every dramatic presentation of the figures in those intrigues has falsified them. The Lion in Winter, with the benefit of James Goldman not having to placate members of the crime family which ruled England several centuries later, written when modern history of the period had laid out how truly awful those folks were, still presents them as romanticized cartoons. The movie with Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn is absurd. There were simply no good guys to be had, not even when you have Katherine Hepburn play one of them, turning Eleanor into a Connecticut aristocrat - as she did every character she ever played that I'm aware of. I dread to think that there are probably large segments of the allegedly educated population who believe Eleanor of Aquitaine was Hepburn. The presentation of them as some kind of enlightened rulers with any sympathy to the people they tyrannized and bled for money in their petty attempts to keep territory and steal it only shows how thoroughly Americans have bought into the bull shit pageantry of English kings and queens.
George Orwell made the most interesting point about the play that I've ever seen, in the context a truly wonderful essay about how literature goes in and out of relevance depending on current events.
The obvious explanation of this sharp difference between the dominant writers before and after the war of 1914-18 is the war itself. Some such development would have happened in any case as the insufficiency of modern materialistic civilization revealed itself, but the war speeded that process, partly by showing how very shallow the veneer of civilization is, partly by making England less prosperous and therefore less isolated. After 1918 you couldn't live in such a narrow and padded world as you did when Britannia ruled not only the waves but also the markets. One effect of the ghastly history of the last twenty years has been to make a great deal of ancient literature seem much more modern. A lot that has happened in Germany since the rise of Hitler might have come straight out of the later volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Recently I saw Shakespeare's [sic.] King John acted — the first time I had seen it, because it is a play which isn't acted very often. When I had read it as a boy it seemed to me archaic, something dug out of a history book and not having anything to do with our own time. Well, when I saw it acted, what with its intrigues and doublecrossings, non-aggression pacts, quislings, people changing sides in the middle of a battle, and what-not, it seemed to me extraordinarily up to date. And it was rather the same thing that happened in the literary development between 1910 and 1920. The prevailing temper of the time gave a new reality to all sorts of themes which had seemed out of date and puerile when Bernard Shaw and his Fabians were — so they thought — turning the world into a sort of super garden city. Themes like revenge, patriotism, exile, persecution, race hatred, religious faith, loyalty, leader worship, suddenly seemed real again. Tamerlane and Genghis Khan seem credible figures now, and Machiavelli seems a serious thinker, as they didn't in 1910. We have got out of a backwater and back into history. I haven't any unqualified admiration for the writers of the early nineteen-twenties, the writers among whom Eliot and Joyce are chief names. Those followed them have to undo a great deal of what they did. Their revulsion from a shallow conception of progress drove them politically in t he wrong direction, and it isn't an accident that Ezra Pound, for instance, is now shouting antisemitism on the Rome radio. But one must concede that their writings are more grown-up, and have a wider scope, than what went immediately before them. They broke the cultural circle in which England had existed for something like a century. They re-established contact with Europe, and they brought back the sense of history and the possibility of tragedy. On that basis all subsequent English literature that matters twopence has rested, and the development that Eliot and the others started back in the closing years of the last war, has not yet run its course.
For me the best part of the play, the most revealing and intellectually honest is the second act, when the competing armies of Austria on behalf of prince Arthur, John's nephew and a claimant to the throne, Phillip of France, King John, his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine and various others are poised to pillage the city of Angiers, When they demand that the Citizens of Angiers declare which of the various factions they recognize as the legitimate ruler, John or Arthur (who John is often believed to have mutilated and murdered - perhaps with his own hand, not fell off a wall as the play says) or whoever, they essentially say they don't want any part of the royal intrigues. In the whole play, the brief appearance of the representatives of the people of that beleaguered city are the only ones with any real claim to our allegiance because they are the ones who are most like us in the hands of our ruling elite.
I would describe how the poor Citizens of Angiers try to get out of the royal cross-hairs by getting John's niece Blanche married off to King Phillip's son, Louis, but the intrigues involved are better read than described. They're far from obvious if you haven't reviewed the background information.
The author was biting off way more than an honest person could turn into a play. It's doubtful anyone could have done it. If x couldn't, who could? The overall meaning of the play is the corruption of power, the insanity of it. It is regrettable that he included the death of John - you feel like giving a medal to the monk who allegedly poisoned him. I am afraid it is a lot more relevant to contemporary politics in the United States than it should be. The Republican pack, the Republicans in congress and the triangulating establishment Democrats aren't much more rational or honest.
* I'm inclined to think X was Bacon. I will not pretend that that illiterate guy who couldn't spell his own name as he drew out the letters wrote the plays, especially as I'm sure this will infuriate the usual fly-specks.
Note: From what I know of Henry III, in addition to voluntarily reissuing Magna Carta, he spent a lot of his early reign trying to prove he wasn't as awful as his father. The pattern for screwed up English politics, though, had been cast and they still haven't gotten over it. The great insight into history by William Faulkner is true.
Elizabeth Warren on the Sixth Anniversary of Citizen's United
The Supreme Court using the slogans handed to them by the professional free speech industry isn't just dismantling representative democracy, they have bombed it like ISIS demolishes historical artifacts.
Cog-Neuro-Sci Is Mired In The Wired And So Are We All In The Pooh Bear Fallacy
I came across it again, that prevalent and idiotic framing of minds that is so stupid and so clueless that its only value is in showing how far the materialist framing of reality has damaged modern discourse. It accounts for the idiocy of such philosophers as Daniel Dennett, the Churchlands, etc. who don't seem to understand the first thing about the mistake of using an artificially constructed and metaphorical analogy for our minds as if it can, then, serve to give us knowledge about the thing it is merely a model of. Such an intellectual program is fraught with dangers of exactly the kind that the breezy discussion of our "brains being hard-wired" shows. Though one has come to expect such mistakes in basic logic from professional scientists, that philosophy is in on that act is as much of, if not more of a scandal.
As I've pointed out before, using computers as a model of the human minds they were constructed to mimic is about as stupid as believing you have learned something decisive about the operation of a living human body by studying a department store manikin. But not only such "science" as is all the rage these days but virtually everything from economics and politics to peoples' concepts of their personal identity is through the school-boy level logical fallacies involved.
Reification is the least of it, though it is a part of it. William James' Psycholgist's Fallacy by proxy would seem to also be involved. And even that is inadequate to show how stupid the idea is, the cog-sci-neuro-sci guys not only assume their own conception of a mental state is the actual "thing" they are talking about, they believe the bits of coding contained in a machine is the same thing as peoples' conception of it. They impart a human quality of consciousness to the very machines which they, then, believe reveal something about human minds.
William James, at the advent of psychology, understood the potential problem of doing that, he rather brilliantly understood that such thinking had been promoted by Darwin and Galton in their claims of finding things about human minds from the minds of animals as remotely related to us and our experience of life as ants. His critique of the "comparative method" of psychology shows that as early as 1890, he saw the perils of such assumptions and metaphors. From his Principles of Psychology.
The comparative method, finally, supplements the introspective and experimental methods. This method presupposes a normal psychology of introspection to be established in its main features. But where the origin of these features, or their dependence upon one another, is in question , it is of the utmost importance to trace the phenomenon considered through all its possible variations of types and combination. So it has come to pass that instincts of animals are ransacked to throw light on or own; and that the reasoning faculties of bees and ants, the minds of savages [I think Williams is assuming that his readers have read Darwin who used that word, invariably to describe human populations.] infants, madmen, idiots, the deaf and blind, criminals, and eccentrics, are all invoked in support of this or that special theory about some part of our own mental life. The history of sciences, moral and political institutions, and languages, as types of mental product, are pressed into the same service. Messrs. Darwin and Galton have set the example of circulars of questions sent out by the hundred to those supposed able to reply. The custom has spread, and it will be well for us in the next generation if such circulars are not ranked among the common pests of life. Meanwhile information grows, and results emerge. There are great sources of error in the comparative method. The interpretations of the "psychoses" of animals, savages, and infants is necessarily wild work, in which the personal equation of the investigator has things very much its own way. A savage will be reported to have no moral or religious feeling if his actions shock the observer unduly. A child will be assumed without self-consciousness because he talks of himself in the third person, etc., etc. No rules can be laid down in advance. Comparative observations, to be definite, must usually be made to test some pre-existing hypothesis; and the only thing then is to use as much sagacity as you possess, and to be as candid as you can.
That passage, in the chapter, "The Methods and Snares of Psychology" comes right before the invaluable discussion, "The Sources of Error in Psychology", where (in a general discussion of problems that arise through language and use of words) he elucidates
"The Psychologist's Fallacy." The great snare of the psychologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report. I shall hereafter call this the 'psychologist's fallacy' par excellence. For some of the mischief, here too language is to blame. The psychologist, as we remarked above (p. 183), stands outside of the mental state he speaks of. Both itself and its object are objects for him. Now when it is a cognitive state (precept, thought, concept, etc.), he ordinarily has no other way of naming it than as the thought, precept, etc. of that object. He himself, meanwhile, knowing the self-same object in his way, gets easily led to suppose that the thought, which is of it, knows it in the same way in which he knows it, although this is often very far from being the case. The most fictitious puzzles have been introduced into our science by this means. The so-called question of presentative or representative perception, of whether an object is present to the thought that thinks it by some counterfeit image of itself, or directly and without any intervening image at all; the question of nominalism and conceptualism, of the shape in which things are present when only a general notion of them is before the mind; are comparatively easy questions when once the psychologist's fallacy is eliminated from their treatment, - as we shall ere long see (in Chapter XII).
There is some reason to pardon William James from naively believing that just identifying and introducing the name, "The Psychologist's Fallacy" into his infant science would help it avoid falling into those errors. Though, throughout the massive work in which he notes the incredibly daunting problems of turning psychology into a science, his misgivings of its habits and practices are already documenting a situation that was out of hand. Things would only get worse as psychology metastasized into yet other "sciences" and all hell broke loose. Some have noted that James stopped writing a lot about psychology in the next two decades, I think that just as he imagined the forest of polls we see around us today, perhaps he could see it was hopeless.
As it is, today, people believe that human made machines are are adequate models from which we can derive metaphors that accurately and sufficiently describe human minds. What such scientists and philosophers are doing today is exponentially more clueless and illogical than what James described.
It took the invention of computers based in even more naive and schematic concepts of minds by geeks who were predisposed to present their metaphors as biological and psychological truths to amplify the Psychologist's Fallacy to rock concert levels of stupidity and into the common unwisdom that pervades Western culture, today. The decline in the requirement of scientists to study philosophy in the 20th century and the stultification of philosophy as it hankered after the repute of science has made things far worse than they should have been. I'll point out again that James saw these problems developing in the 1890s and tried to warn people in both professions against them.
The best mathematical modeling of human thinking is and will never be anything but a rough estimate of and primitive mimicry of the real thing in its enormous range of variability and creative potential as found in billions of minds, and like in the far simpler phenomenon of snowflakes, unlikely to ever be exactly alike. There, I made a metaphor, why not claim that the variety in both snowflakes and human minds means that the crystalization potential of water under variable conditions is an adequate metaphor of human minds? It has the virtue of not mistaking a human machine for the thing it mimics. If I were a philosopher, I might call doing that the Pygmalion fallacy or, considering the incredibly childish thinking involved, the Pooh Bear Fallacy. Considering the professional, financial and personal investment of huge numbers of scientists, university-based philosophers, the naive and ignorant college-educated classes and those they influence through the media, producing our common received unwisdom about this, I don't expect but things will get worse. And it will have real and catastrophic consequences.
Since when is the Democratic party establishment The Left?
I'm not interested in fantasy politics, I'm only interested in reality.
Your play left is a total failure in practical politics, it handed the Rehnquists and Roberts the language they needed to finish off self-government by people who haven't been fed a diet of lies.