Kate Aronoff is a product of the Ivy-equivalent, Swarthmore College and has been published a lot in both the lefty and the leftish media. I don't usually click on videos at online magazine sites but I couldn't believe I was reading the title to her prattling list of demands of what Hillary Clinton must do to "maybe, maybe" get Aronoff's pure and pristine vote. If the idiocy that they've been putting out hadn't already convinced me that most of the lefty magazines were entirely more of a problem than part of the solution, her smug, uninformed, largely irrelevant and just plain stupid video and the decision of those who run In These Times to put it up epoxy-cemented that conclusion into place.
I'd love to see the educational and economic profile of these socialists and radicals at In These Times who figure risking having Donald Trump as president isn't worth the cost of their smug purity posturing. How bad does it have to get for them to take that kind of danger seriously? What an asshole.
Saturday, September 24, 2016
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Stefanie Preissne - Solpadeine is My Boyfriend
Solpadeine is My Boyfriend
I'm not sure how much of an adaptation this is. To hear it you'll have to open it at the website.
And if you're in a mood for a drama about old people instead of young'uns:
The Quiet Land
by Malachy McKenna
And here's an article from American Theater about how actors and others are using audio drama podcasts to produce theater in the absence of expensive, formal, traditional productions. I'm glad to see that the idea is taking root because I don't see much hope for new ideas otherwise. It would be good if there were lots of local companies all over doing this. Lots of garbage would be produced but some good things would get done, too.
Bad As It Is Neo-Eugenics Is The Soft Edge Of Neo-Nazism
My looking at the resurgence of neo-eugenics is an outgrowth of my original investigation of the biological determinism I was rather shocked to see on blogs of the alleged left more than a decade ago. All forms of determinism are obviously incompatible with democracy, in any form which is combined with the promotion of biological inequality they are a serious danger to it. Any informed, rational left would reject all forms of biological determinism as demonstrably leading to horrific inequality and violence, but all too many would-be lefties buy into it as either "science" or as not dangerous since we are assumed to be protected by the U.S. Constitution or whatever other English language constitution which leads to our being lulled into not taking it seriously. I seriously believe a lot of people assume the English language is some kind of protection against that, that we're safe as long as people aren't saying things with a bad Hollywood German accent.
The time I've spent on the history and nature of eugenics, before, during and after the second world war led me to the conclusion that whenever the Darwinian theory of natural selection is assumed to be a real and understood force of nature it will lead to a belief that our lives are determined by the physical facts of genetic inheritance and that there is a real, natural hierarchy of human valuation, ultimately in terms of economic value and social and political utility. That is inevitable, at least in a dangerously large number of scientists and those who hold similar beliefs. The absolute proof of that is found in the history of Darwinism, of which eugenics was an immediate result and a continuing feature of biological and genetic science as the continued eugenics beliefs of such eminent scientists as R. A Fisher, Francis Crick, Arthur Jensen (social sciences are especially prone to holding eugenics beliefs), Richard Dawkins, and even in the outrageous promotion of eugenics policy by a host of other eminent scientists such as the overt racist and Nobel Laureate William Shockley on the right and the double Nobel recipient Linus Pauling on the would-be left.
Even the most absolutely stunning events of the 1930s and 40s when the Nazis and others demonstrated how seriously dangerous a belief in eugenics and a scientifically conducted imposition of the assumptions of natural selection in political, legal, medical and social life could become didn't lead such men of science to look hard at either the assumptions of eugenics or the theory on which all of it is based, Darwinian Natural Selection. In fact, with the neo-Darwinian synthesis of Natural Selection with the pre-war conception of geneticss, I would think their belief in the real efficacy of eugenics as science was probably far stronger and assumed to be a settled fact.
At the same time I was looking into that clean-nailed, academic form of turning people into biological units to be assigned economic and social value and utility I have also looked at the dirty, grimy show-biz, media practice of doing the same thing in pornography. I've come to see that pornography is, also a promotion of the opposite of egalitarian democracy. In its straight form that inequality is along the most accustomed of all lines, devaluing women and turning them into objects for the use of men. That form of inequality is so ingrained in societies around the world, from the extreme theocracies of places such as Saudi Arabia to the most materialist-atheist of all countries such as North Korea and liberal democracy has not nearly eradicated it. The most extreme expressions of male entitlement to use women as disposable objects or who they have a right to damage or destroy is rampant in the pornographied cultures of Europe and North America. It has definitely gotten worse in the past fifty years, in the backlash to the brief period when "second-wave feminism" had some influence and, especially as access to the libertarian internet and Supreme Court rulings have allowed the distribution of pornography to explode.
As a gay man I have concentrated on the fact that online gay porn is the foremost venue of expressing and promoting sadistic hatred of gay men, watching over the past decade as that hatred has become ever more extreme and, with the proliferation of such "social media" as Tumblr blogs ever worse and more hateful. In the past years I've become shocked at how the combination of the two forms of objectification, the eugenic and the porographic have come together in many an overtly neo-Nazi, racist, porn blog asserted to be by a "country boy" a "red-neck" a "master" or other such entity. I have been monitoring those and am alarmed enough about how dangerous they are becoming and how they are proliferating and how the hatred they are expressing has deepened for black people, for women, for gay men viewed as weaker than the "master" class of gay men and how some of them have taken on overtly right-wing, Trumpian and neo-Nazi identities that I have decided to change my policy of not posting links to some of the worst of them. I hope that pressure can be brought to bear to shut it down.
1488 is a neo-Nazi symbol, the "88" to "Heil Hitler" H being the eighth letter of the alphabet, "14" referring to the Nazi slogan "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." The Tumblr features neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate, white supremacist content and promotion of what, in the age of Trump is mainstream Republican content, for example a promotion of Patrick Buchanan earlier this week. And, of course, hate filled gay porn.
If that seems to be irrational, mixed up and incomprehensible, that's hardly my fault. I can guarantee you that it is far, far from the only Tumblr blog of the kind. Being a Tumblr, its "social media" method includes lists of like minded bloggers who liked what they saw. And by clicking on the origin of the neo-Nazi, white-supremacist, hate content you can find scores, probably hundreds if not thousands of similar Tumblrs and other websites.
I will call your attention to many of those blogs which assert the privileges of "alpha males" which show how close to biological thinking this phenomenon is. While I am sure I will have to explain that to some of the people who won't understand that statement, I will leave with this, for now. The gay-porn promotion of neo-Nazism and our domestic forms of white supremacy, especially white-violent-male supremacy is the bottom end of the lily white iceberg. The Trump campaign and its promotion in the mainstream media is tip of it. And it could be in power as soon as next January. If you think that, with political control, appointing members of the Supreme Court, the American Constitution will keep it from happening here, you are deluded.
I am sure this will develop.
Update: Sorry, I posted a draft of this post. I'll edit it right now.
Update: Sorry, I posted a draft of this post. I'll edit it right now.
Friday, September 23, 2016
Opening Some Scores
After the past month of listening to his music, never having heard it before, I'm looking at some of the scores to some of Dusan Bogdanovic's easier music, "7 Little Secrets" "7 Easier Polymetric Studies" and am impressed that he has written some of the most interesting student repertoire I've encountered. Of course I'm reduced to reading it on piano, I'm not that much of a guitarist, though some of the "Little Secrets" don't look like they're that hard, merely that tricky. Perhaps the easiest of them, #4 is quite elusively beautiful.
#7 Is also beautiful and a bit harder, I guess.
These are definitely not on the same level of difficulty as even the "Easier Polymetric Studies" though they aren't musically lightweight. There are polymetric and contrapuntal features in most of them. #3 has a time signature 3/4/6/8 and it's not just an exercise in hemiola rhythms. Most of them dispense with a time-signature, all together, which forces you to really think hard about how you're going to count the music, and, so, how you're going to think about it and even how you're going to hear it. You couldn't play the 7 short pages of this without learning a lot about many aspects of music. They are quite wonderful student pieces and quite listenable even if you haven't been a student for a long time. It makes me wish he'd written about fifty or a hundred more of them.
Among his few compositions for piano are the 6 Illuminations, also short pieces, though I'm having a harder time tracking down the score. Though they are very good, the ones I've managed to hear seem a bit more conventional than the guitar music. Here are #1 and 6.
In some way they remind me of the music that pianists have composed for guitar, though I can't say exactly why. Maybe it's just feeling more at home on your own instrument, knowing where to stretch the technique and abilities of the player.
Bogdanovic is one of the most important of living composers from what I've been able to hear and read through at the end of summer. His music deserves to be more widely known.
#7 Is also beautiful and a bit harder, I guess.
These are definitely not on the same level of difficulty as even the "Easier Polymetric Studies" though they aren't musically lightweight. There are polymetric and contrapuntal features in most of them. #3 has a time signature 3/4/6/8 and it's not just an exercise in hemiola rhythms. Most of them dispense with a time-signature, all together, which forces you to really think hard about how you're going to count the music, and, so, how you're going to think about it and even how you're going to hear it. You couldn't play the 7 short pages of this without learning a lot about many aspects of music. They are quite wonderful student pieces and quite listenable even if you haven't been a student for a long time. It makes me wish he'd written about fifty or a hundred more of them.
Among his few compositions for piano are the 6 Illuminations, also short pieces, though I'm having a harder time tracking down the score. Though they are very good, the ones I've managed to hear seem a bit more conventional than the guitar music. Here are #1 and 6.
In some way they remind me of the music that pianists have composed for guitar, though I can't say exactly why. Maybe it's just feeling more at home on your own instrument, knowing where to stretch the technique and abilities of the player.
Bogdanovic is one of the most important of living composers from what I've been able to hear and read through at the end of summer. His music deserves to be more widely known.
Thursday, September 22, 2016
An Answer: You Guys Are The Origin of Ultimate Decadence
I very strongly suspect that if human beings survive much into the future in a state in which both science but, especially, philosophy continue, that our time will be seen as one in which atheism led science into some seriously scandalous misdirections.
Everything from the present state of cosmology to biology to the so-called social sciences presently have serious aspects of decadence which are motivated by the desire to use science to refute the possibility of the existence of God. Multiverse theory*, abiogenesis, neo-eugenics, various neo-determinisms .... everything up and to the inclusion of people alleged to be scientists and philosophers impeaching the existence of consciousness is an expression of the most extravagant state of decadence that western thought has ever been led to seriously consider serious. Personally, I think it is possible only through the widespread belief that science is a species of magic by people who don't have the mathematical or logical equipment to understand it.
At the bottom of all of those is ideological atheist hijacking of science, turning it into a tool of atheist polemic instead of a search for accurate or even logically plausible information or hypotheses.
That isn't something that all atheists have responsibility for or which even enjoys the universal support of atheists but those who have brought us into this state of affairs have made their atheist-materialist ideology the dominant, practically required framing of, literally, everything. It isn't sustainable, the need for atheist-materialist monism to impeach the validity and existence of consciousness, alone, renders it an unsustainable intellectual framing. When your ideology needs to impeach the very means through which it could attain validity or the status of being the truth, it can't be sustained and it must lose credibility over time. To point it out one more time, atheist-materialism is the only influential ideology which has to be false in order for it to be true.
* The physicists and others who take seriously such notions that every one of our actions brings entire universes in which the opposite or even every possible variation of that action happen are certainly among the more decadent. If we, unintentionally, have such creative power (and why not when we fail to do something, does that create the universe in which we do do it?) it is certainly far more parsimonious to believe that God had the power to create this universe that we know. I wonder where the power to power such cosmology is supposed to come from or the power to enforce those schemes in which every possible probabilistic universe must exist. What is the origin of that law, how would you ever, possibly, confirm that? I think what they've actually done is, in their scientific naivete, is mistake motivated imagination for reality. And those imagined schemes of multiverses seem to come into being in a remarkable number of variations, which their inventors don't seem to want to believe could all be true in their infinity of universes.
Everything from the present state of cosmology to biology to the so-called social sciences presently have serious aspects of decadence which are motivated by the desire to use science to refute the possibility of the existence of God. Multiverse theory*, abiogenesis, neo-eugenics, various neo-determinisms .... everything up and to the inclusion of people alleged to be scientists and philosophers impeaching the existence of consciousness is an expression of the most extravagant state of decadence that western thought has ever been led to seriously consider serious. Personally, I think it is possible only through the widespread belief that science is a species of magic by people who don't have the mathematical or logical equipment to understand it.
At the bottom of all of those is ideological atheist hijacking of science, turning it into a tool of atheist polemic instead of a search for accurate or even logically plausible information or hypotheses.
That isn't something that all atheists have responsibility for or which even enjoys the universal support of atheists but those who have brought us into this state of affairs have made their atheist-materialist ideology the dominant, practically required framing of, literally, everything. It isn't sustainable, the need for atheist-materialist monism to impeach the validity and existence of consciousness, alone, renders it an unsustainable intellectual framing. When your ideology needs to impeach the very means through which it could attain validity or the status of being the truth, it can't be sustained and it must lose credibility over time. To point it out one more time, atheist-materialism is the only influential ideology which has to be false in order for it to be true.
* The physicists and others who take seriously such notions that every one of our actions brings entire universes in which the opposite or even every possible variation of that action happen are certainly among the more decadent. If we, unintentionally, have such creative power (and why not when we fail to do something, does that create the universe in which we do do it?) it is certainly far more parsimonious to believe that God had the power to create this universe that we know. I wonder where the power to power such cosmology is supposed to come from or the power to enforce those schemes in which every possible probabilistic universe must exist. What is the origin of that law, how would you ever, possibly, confirm that? I think what they've actually done is, in their scientific naivete, is mistake motivated imagination for reality. And those imagined schemes of multiverses seem to come into being in a remarkable number of variations, which their inventors don't seem to want to believe could all be true in their infinity of universes.
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
From Earlier In The Hate Mail File
No, I don't intend to go see "Sully", as you probably well suspect I wouldn't. To start with, I'm allergic to Tom Hanks* (the first thing I saw him in was by being reluctantly exposed to "Sleepless in Seattle") and, your motive in asking, you know I loathe the Republican-fascist Clint Eastwood.
The only thing I saw about the movie notes that Eastwood, in line with his Republican-fascism, lacking the villain necessary for the intellectual and artistic vapidity of Hollywood film making invented one in where it didn't exist.
The real-life story of Capt. Chesley Sullenberger doesn’t come with a villain (well, unless you count the geese), so of course Clint Eastwood’s hit movie Sully had to invent one. And that’s fine. There’s no problem with using artistic license to inject a true story with the kind of conflict you need to fuel a feature-length Hollywood drama. And as Slate’s Dana Stevens put it in her review, “Isn’t Sully, of all the lionized male figures in recent American history, among the most … unsullied?”
But the conflict Sully invents is a fantasy that aligns itself with some of the dumbest and most dangerous ideas of our era. By making an enemy of bureaucrats, experts, and “facts,” Eastwood has made the perfect movie for the year of the Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump.
Well, I don't think the peddling of lies about even recent history and even such relatively minor events is fine, especially when the lies come in a movie and other venues of mass media. And, especially, when they are the product of the imagination of the ideological motivation of someone like Eastwood.
Really, pitch me a harder ball to hit, next time.
* Literally allergic. I was watching Ken Burns' movie, Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip, and kept getting more and more annoyed by it only to realize it was because it was Tom Hanks reading the part of Horatio Nelson. And I will never forgive Hanks for his own role in dangerously falsifying important recent history in Charlie Wilson's War so as to remove his and other real life political figures' culpability for one of the more disastrous foreign and military policies. Reportedly Hanks didn't want his character to come off as flawed. Though he was certainly not single-handedly responsible for peddling a falsified history that was to the benefit of Republican-fascists. Hollywood almost always lies about historical events. Hollywood is a lie factory.
The only thing I saw about the movie notes that Eastwood, in line with his Republican-fascism, lacking the villain necessary for the intellectual and artistic vapidity of Hollywood film making invented one in where it didn't exist.
The real-life story of Capt. Chesley Sullenberger doesn’t come with a villain (well, unless you count the geese), so of course Clint Eastwood’s hit movie Sully had to invent one. And that’s fine. There’s no problem with using artistic license to inject a true story with the kind of conflict you need to fuel a feature-length Hollywood drama. And as Slate’s Dana Stevens put it in her review, “Isn’t Sully, of all the lionized male figures in recent American history, among the most … unsullied?”
But the conflict Sully invents is a fantasy that aligns itself with some of the dumbest and most dangerous ideas of our era. By making an enemy of bureaucrats, experts, and “facts,” Eastwood has made the perfect movie for the year of the Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump.
Well, I don't think the peddling of lies about even recent history and even such relatively minor events is fine, especially when the lies come in a movie and other venues of mass media. And, especially, when they are the product of the imagination of the ideological motivation of someone like Eastwood.
Really, pitch me a harder ball to hit, next time.
* Literally allergic. I was watching Ken Burns' movie, Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip, and kept getting more and more annoyed by it only to realize it was because it was Tom Hanks reading the part of Horatio Nelson. And I will never forgive Hanks for his own role in dangerously falsifying important recent history in Charlie Wilson's War so as to remove his and other real life political figures' culpability for one of the more disastrous foreign and military policies. Reportedly Hanks didn't want his character to come off as flawed. Though he was certainly not single-handedly responsible for peddling a falsified history that was to the benefit of Republican-fascists. Hollywood almost always lies about historical events. Hollywood is a lie factory.
The Time Wasted On St. Chuck Would Be Better Spent Overturning The Belief in The FOX Peddled Lies Of the Oil and Coal Industries
I don't see any significant difference in substance between what Darwin did and what Donald Trump does in peddling racist hatred. Donald Trump might, actually, be the less dangerous because he doesn't pretend his racist prattling carries the reliability of science, pretending that has a more proven potency in modern history than mere racism minus such assertions of reliable knowledge.
For most people even a superstitious disbelief in evolution is probably less demonstrably dangerous than a faith in the ultimate explanatory power of natural selection. The history of Darwinism as applied in the real world makes it one of the most dangerous of all 19th century hypotheses, perhaps only rivaled by Marxism and capitalism. You can hear echos of that faith in all forms of biological determinism, even in what some of the most evolution denying fundamentalist-racists and sexists assert. Though it is not the only form of biological determinism, it has been the most pervasive and powerful one.
The importance of evolution as the focus of a Kulturkampf is primarily due to its Darwinian interpretation, natural selection, being believed to be of utility to promote atheist materialism. It was largely in reaction to that use of Darwinism from the weeks after the publication of On the Origin of Species by atheist-materialists that the Fundamentalists rose up in opposition to it. And if you doubt that use of Darwinism from its inception, I invite you to read what such early readers of Origin of Species said on that count, people such as Darwin's cousin, the renowned British scientist, Francis Galton said as well as early reviewers such as Thomas Huxley (AKA Darwin's Bulldog) and, yes, Ernst Haeckel said on that count.
I can say that there is a major irony in Fundamentalism as it developed because as a boon to white supremacy, it shared in some of the worst aspects of Darwinism. The various streams of development of both had considerable sharing of sewage.
For most people a knowledge of evolution is about as useful as a knowledge of the ancient Etruscan language, of which there is also only very partial and incomplete knowledge of, though, considering the vast time range and size of the problem of evolution, that percentage of fragmentary knowledge of Etruscan is enormous by comparison.
The time spent on lying Darwin into a plaster saint for atheism would be far better spent on, first and foremost, countering the oil and coal industry lies about the hardest of facts, THAT WE ARE DESTROYING OUR BIOSPHERE WITH MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING. I will point out that it is the media freed by the same dolts who deify Darwin who have sold that lie even as they carry water for the hardcore fundmentalists who do, actually, have the goods on St. Chuck, they've done their homework even as so many of his cult refuse to.
The sins and massive stupidity of such people is as great as that of the Republican-fascists who have so benefited from all of the various threads of atheist-materialist promotion in all of their dishonesty and stupidity. I say a curse on all their houses. I'm against both groups, the atheist-materialists of pseudo-liberalism and the vulgar materialists of the Republican-fascists, the British Tories, etc.
I think the ability of the cabloids and others in the corporate media to lie us into the state we are in are as much a product of the ideology of atheist-materialism as the greed of capitalism. Neither of those groups really believe it is a sin to tell a lie so they unleashed the liars to lie us into our doom.
And if an absolutely accurate knowledge of that vast, always to be undiscovered country, evolution is of such vital importance as you claim, then no one in human history can honestly claim to have it.
If people think the present day conceptions of evolution are the last word in it, they are incredibly credulous dupes. Evolution is such an enormous phenomenon, most of which will never be known, that the best that can be achieved is extremely fragmentary knowledge of it. Scientists who claim to have pinned it down to anything like general laws are more useful to the deniers than they are to science. If you doubt that go look at the hay the anti-evolutionists make of virtually every lapse in previously held ideas in the area.
Evolution is a fact, how it happened, if it is the product of one force or thousands or trillions of disparate events is not a matter of factual knowledge, it is ideological speculation and wishful thinking.
For most people even a superstitious disbelief in evolution is probably less demonstrably dangerous than a faith in the ultimate explanatory power of natural selection. The history of Darwinism as applied in the real world makes it one of the most dangerous of all 19th century hypotheses, perhaps only rivaled by Marxism and capitalism. You can hear echos of that faith in all forms of biological determinism, even in what some of the most evolution denying fundamentalist-racists and sexists assert. Though it is not the only form of biological determinism, it has been the most pervasive and powerful one.
The importance of evolution as the focus of a Kulturkampf is primarily due to its Darwinian interpretation, natural selection, being believed to be of utility to promote atheist materialism. It was largely in reaction to that use of Darwinism from the weeks after the publication of On the Origin of Species by atheist-materialists that the Fundamentalists rose up in opposition to it. And if you doubt that use of Darwinism from its inception, I invite you to read what such early readers of Origin of Species said on that count, people such as Darwin's cousin, the renowned British scientist, Francis Galton said as well as early reviewers such as Thomas Huxley (AKA Darwin's Bulldog) and, yes, Ernst Haeckel said on that count.
I can say that there is a major irony in Fundamentalism as it developed because as a boon to white supremacy, it shared in some of the worst aspects of Darwinism. The various streams of development of both had considerable sharing of sewage.
For most people a knowledge of evolution is about as useful as a knowledge of the ancient Etruscan language, of which there is also only very partial and incomplete knowledge of, though, considering the vast time range and size of the problem of evolution, that percentage of fragmentary knowledge of Etruscan is enormous by comparison.
The time spent on lying Darwin into a plaster saint for atheism would be far better spent on, first and foremost, countering the oil and coal industry lies about the hardest of facts, THAT WE ARE DESTROYING OUR BIOSPHERE WITH MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING. I will point out that it is the media freed by the same dolts who deify Darwin who have sold that lie even as they carry water for the hardcore fundmentalists who do, actually, have the goods on St. Chuck, they've done their homework even as so many of his cult refuse to.
The sins and massive stupidity of such people is as great as that of the Republican-fascists who have so benefited from all of the various threads of atheist-materialist promotion in all of their dishonesty and stupidity. I say a curse on all their houses. I'm against both groups, the atheist-materialists of pseudo-liberalism and the vulgar materialists of the Republican-fascists, the British Tories, etc.
I think the ability of the cabloids and others in the corporate media to lie us into the state we are in are as much a product of the ideology of atheist-materialism as the greed of capitalism. Neither of those groups really believe it is a sin to tell a lie so they unleashed the liars to lie us into our doom.
And if an absolutely accurate knowledge of that vast, always to be undiscovered country, evolution is of such vital importance as you claim, then no one in human history can honestly claim to have it.
If people think the present day conceptions of evolution are the last word in it, they are incredibly credulous dupes. Evolution is such an enormous phenomenon, most of which will never be known, that the best that can be achieved is extremely fragmentary knowledge of it. Scientists who claim to have pinned it down to anything like general laws are more useful to the deniers than they are to science. If you doubt that go look at the hay the anti-evolutionists make of virtually every lapse in previously held ideas in the area.
Evolution is a fact, how it happened, if it is the product of one force or thousands or trillions of disparate events is not a matter of factual knowledge, it is ideological speculation and wishful thinking.
"That link is race branding, whereby it became possible not only to set a group apart as an enemy, but also to exterminate it with an easy conscience."
There is nothing easier to do or more guaranteed to win, maintain or establish esteem among the college educated elite than to parrot the common received wisdom concerning its idols. Charles Darwin is highest among them. Doing that is far easier than the far less done exercise of reading what he said. I have found that the reading program of those who have deified Darwin is generally limited to reading perhaps, Voyage of the Beagle and, maybe, selected sections of the first edition of On the Origin of Species - though generally as found clipped and curried in secondary sources. And that's the high end of the effort of the faithful. A lot of them couldn't even correctly state the title of even those two most often mentioned books by their hero.
It is far more likely that those who are prepared to judge the case on the facts of what he said, and most of them are far more likely to be those who already have doubts about him are the ones who will read what he said and go into depth as to why he said such horrible things as:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18. 'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Anyone who, for a second, doesn't understand that the people whose extinction Darwin was enthusiastic for were definitely not white, Northern Europeans of Anglo Saxon ethnicity - you would think his reference to "Caucasian" would clue them off as to who he believed the victors would NOT be - and that Darwin knew his audience of educated Western white men and, to some extent, women would know he meant black people they are plainly lying about just what he's saying. He explicitly, as science, advocated that the extinction of entire races "throughout the world" and their replacement by "the civilised races of man" would be a wonderful thing. He clearly mean that it was a good thing that white Europeans would commit genocide against dark skinned people in Africa and elsewhere (he's explicitly hardest on those who live in South America, the Pacific islands and Australia).
I looked hard at that, rightly, infamous passage and found that he not only explicitly advocated genocide as a boon to "civilised races of man" he also likely lied about what Schaaffhausen said **to say it. The agreement between himself and his esteemed friend and colleague Ernst Haeckel, saying the same kinds of things in German for a German scientific and popular audience, is complete and expansive in asserting the desirability of genocide.
Darwin wrote that passage in 1871, Victor Carus issued his German translation not long after that. Darwin was already a major force in German biology due to the enthusiastic promotion of his writing by, most importantly, Victor Carus and Ernst Haeckel. Just 33 years later a young German professor of medicine, anthropology and eugenics, Eugen Fischer was conducting biological experiments on children in a German concentration camp in German South-West Africa, Namibia, today and shipping skulls of those killed there to German universities. I posted on that last year:
Fischer being employed as a scientist at the Kaisar Wilhelm Institute is especially eye-opening because he had participated, scientifically, in an earlier, pre-Nazi era genocide by the German government in German South-West Africa, Namibia, today from 1904-1907. He worked at the University of Freiberg at the time, where he continued and advanced in the science faculty, no doubt the hundreds of skulls he'd sent from that genocide were considered in his favor. More than 100,000 people were believed to have been killed in it. Fischer conducted experiments on children held in the concentration camps where native Herero and Nama peoples and African-Germans were held in horrendous conditions and often killed, outright. The descriptions I've read of the practices and conditions there sound like a dress rehearsal for the death camps of the 1940s. He and other scientists collected body parts, notably skulls from "freshly dead" bodies for scientific purposes.
Fischer was born in 1874 and was, beyond doubt, one of key figures linking the generation of Darwin, those educated under the influence of Darwinism in science and the genocides in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. There is absolutely no question that his activities in the genocide of the first years of the last century were exactly in line with what Darwin said in that passage. The "civilised" even, perhaps "enlightened" scientist from the Kaisar Wilhelm Institute scientifically studying the members of "the savage races" being killed by members of "the civilised races of man" who were fulfilling Darwin's prophesy that they would "almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. Or, as Eugen Fischer may have reflected on the evolutionary character of his work:
In irgend einer künftigen Zeit, welche nach Jahrhunderten gemessen nicht einmal sehr entfernt ist, werden die civilisirten Rassen der Menschheit beinahe mit Bestimmtheit auf der ganzen Erde die wilden Rassen ausgerottet und ersetzt haben. Wie Professor Schaaffhausen bemerkt hat, werden zu derselben Zeit ohne Zweifel auch die anthropomorphen Affen ausgerottet sein. Der Abstand zwischen dem Menschen und seinen nächsten Verwandten wird dann noch weiter sein; denn er tritt dann zwischen dem Menschen in einem noch civilisirteren Zustande als dem kaukasischen, wie wir hoffen können, und irgend einem so tief in der Reihe stehenden Affen wie einem Pavian auf, statt dass er sich gegenwärtig zwischen dem Neger oder Australier und dem Gorilla findet.
As I mentioned before, with the work Eugen Fischer co-authored with Fritz Lenz and Erwin Baur on eugenic science about 18 years after his participation in that first genocide of the 20th century had advanced his position in science, the thinking of Charles Darwin - cited throughout the book which rests solely and ultimately on the theory of natural selection - is indisputably tied to the thinking of Adolph Hitler***. He was given the book in 1924 while he was in Landsberg prison by someone who thought it would help him develop his political theories. It was while in prison he also wrote Mein Kampf, his own theory of "Lebensraum" was essentially the same idea as what Darwin articulated as hard science, merely being more specific about who were the "wilden Rassen" ["savage races"] were to be exterminated and replaced by which of "die civilisirten Rassen der Menschheit"[the civilised races of man].
Of the three authors who gave Hitler his formal and developed idea of natural selection, Eugen Fischer survived the war and continued as a professional scientist. He never suffered much from his direct participation in both of the genocides, the mostly forgotten one, hardly ever mentioned, in 1904 and the one in the 1930s and 40s. He devoted his science to finding reasons for the Nazis to murder Jews but, as a man of science, he wasn't ever made to answer much for it. He published a memoir after the war whitewashing his activities and can be said to have gotten away with it. I can't help but wonder if a "civilised" scientific community had not, internationally, bought into the idea of natural selection, more or less with all of its racist - not to mention class - bigotry if the first one might not have been the one too many for such "civilised" men to tolerate. As it was, you have to wonder how many of those who might, might have learned of the mass murder in Africa might not have thought they were witnessing what Darwin prophesied as an inevitable working out of a force of nature.
* As he so often was, Darwin was even more explicit in who he believed were the superior races in his correspondence, and, wouldn't you know it, the Brits were way up their in the hierarchy. His letter to G. A. Gaskell left little room for doubt on that count and that he was far more enthusiastic for the prospect of violent extermination than he was for the less violent forms of eugenics.
** As far as I was able to find Darwin not only lied about what Schaaffhausen said, what Schaaffhausen said in what Darwin was almost certainly referring to would have refuted what Darwin was claiming about the evolutionary significance of such a genocide. I have to wonder how closely anyone ever checked Darwin's citations of other authors, it wasn't the only lapse in citation I found.
*** Fischer's importance in establishing the link between the theory of natural selection and the Nazi's mass murders can't be understated. As Mahmood Mamdani pointed out:
The genocide of the Herero was the first genocide of the twentieth century. The links between it and the Holocaust go beyond the building of concentration camps and the execution of an annihilation policy and are worth exploring. It is surely of significance that when General Trotha wrote, as above, of destroying "African tribes with streams of blood," he saw this as some kind of a Social Darwinist "cleansing" after which "something new" would "emerge." It is also relevant that, when the general sought to distribute responsibility for the genocide, he accused the missions of inciting the Herero with images "of the bloodcurdling Jewish history of the Old Testament." It was also among the Herero in the concentration camps that the German geneticist, Eugen Fischer, first came to do his medical experiments on race, for which he used both Herero and mulatto offspring of Herero women and German men. Fischer later became chancellor of the University of Berlin, where he taught medicine to Nazi physicians. One of his prominent students was Josef Mengele, the notorious doctor who did unsavory genetic experiments on Jewish children at Auschwitz. It seems to me that Hannah Arendt erred when she presumed a relatively uncomplicated relationship between settlers' genocide in the colonies and the Nazi Holocaust at home: When Nazis set out to annihilate Jews, it is far more likely that they thought of themselves as natives, and Jews as settlers. Yet, there is a link that connects the genocide of the Herero and the Nazi Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide. That link is race branding, whereby it became possible not only to set a group apart as an enemy, but also to exterminate it with an easy conscience.
It is far more likely that those who are prepared to judge the case on the facts of what he said, and most of them are far more likely to be those who already have doubts about him are the ones who will read what he said and go into depth as to why he said such horrible things as:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18. 'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Anyone who, for a second, doesn't understand that the people whose extinction Darwin was enthusiastic for were definitely not white, Northern Europeans of Anglo Saxon ethnicity - you would think his reference to "Caucasian" would clue them off as to who he believed the victors would NOT be - and that Darwin knew his audience of educated Western white men and, to some extent, women would know he meant black people they are plainly lying about just what he's saying. He explicitly, as science, advocated that the extinction of entire races "throughout the world" and their replacement by "the civilised races of man" would be a wonderful thing. He clearly mean that it was a good thing that white Europeans would commit genocide against dark skinned people in Africa and elsewhere (he's explicitly hardest on those who live in South America, the Pacific islands and Australia).
I looked hard at that, rightly, infamous passage and found that he not only explicitly advocated genocide as a boon to "civilised races of man" he also likely lied about what Schaaffhausen said **to say it. The agreement between himself and his esteemed friend and colleague Ernst Haeckel, saying the same kinds of things in German for a German scientific and popular audience, is complete and expansive in asserting the desirability of genocide.
Darwin wrote that passage in 1871, Victor Carus issued his German translation not long after that. Darwin was already a major force in German biology due to the enthusiastic promotion of his writing by, most importantly, Victor Carus and Ernst Haeckel. Just 33 years later a young German professor of medicine, anthropology and eugenics, Eugen Fischer was conducting biological experiments on children in a German concentration camp in German South-West Africa, Namibia, today and shipping skulls of those killed there to German universities. I posted on that last year:
Fischer being employed as a scientist at the Kaisar Wilhelm Institute is especially eye-opening because he had participated, scientifically, in an earlier, pre-Nazi era genocide by the German government in German South-West Africa, Namibia, today from 1904-1907. He worked at the University of Freiberg at the time, where he continued and advanced in the science faculty, no doubt the hundreds of skulls he'd sent from that genocide were considered in his favor. More than 100,000 people were believed to have been killed in it. Fischer conducted experiments on children held in the concentration camps where native Herero and Nama peoples and African-Germans were held in horrendous conditions and often killed, outright. The descriptions I've read of the practices and conditions there sound like a dress rehearsal for the death camps of the 1940s. He and other scientists collected body parts, notably skulls from "freshly dead" bodies for scientific purposes.
Fischer was born in 1874 and was, beyond doubt, one of key figures linking the generation of Darwin, those educated under the influence of Darwinism in science and the genocides in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. There is absolutely no question that his activities in the genocide of the first years of the last century were exactly in line with what Darwin said in that passage. The "civilised" even, perhaps "enlightened" scientist from the Kaisar Wilhelm Institute scientifically studying the members of "the savage races" being killed by members of "the civilised races of man" who were fulfilling Darwin's prophesy that they would "almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. Or, as Eugen Fischer may have reflected on the evolutionary character of his work:
In irgend einer künftigen Zeit, welche nach Jahrhunderten gemessen nicht einmal sehr entfernt ist, werden die civilisirten Rassen der Menschheit beinahe mit Bestimmtheit auf der ganzen Erde die wilden Rassen ausgerottet und ersetzt haben. Wie Professor Schaaffhausen bemerkt hat, werden zu derselben Zeit ohne Zweifel auch die anthropomorphen Affen ausgerottet sein. Der Abstand zwischen dem Menschen und seinen nächsten Verwandten wird dann noch weiter sein; denn er tritt dann zwischen dem Menschen in einem noch civilisirteren Zustande als dem kaukasischen, wie wir hoffen können, und irgend einem so tief in der Reihe stehenden Affen wie einem Pavian auf, statt dass er sich gegenwärtig zwischen dem Neger oder Australier und dem Gorilla findet.
As I mentioned before, with the work Eugen Fischer co-authored with Fritz Lenz and Erwin Baur on eugenic science about 18 years after his participation in that first genocide of the 20th century had advanced his position in science, the thinking of Charles Darwin - cited throughout the book which rests solely and ultimately on the theory of natural selection - is indisputably tied to the thinking of Adolph Hitler***. He was given the book in 1924 while he was in Landsberg prison by someone who thought it would help him develop his political theories. It was while in prison he also wrote Mein Kampf, his own theory of "Lebensraum" was essentially the same idea as what Darwin articulated as hard science, merely being more specific about who were the "wilden Rassen" ["savage races"] were to be exterminated and replaced by which of "die civilisirten Rassen der Menschheit"[the civilised races of man].
Of the three authors who gave Hitler his formal and developed idea of natural selection, Eugen Fischer survived the war and continued as a professional scientist. He never suffered much from his direct participation in both of the genocides, the mostly forgotten one, hardly ever mentioned, in 1904 and the one in the 1930s and 40s. He devoted his science to finding reasons for the Nazis to murder Jews but, as a man of science, he wasn't ever made to answer much for it. He published a memoir after the war whitewashing his activities and can be said to have gotten away with it. I can't help but wonder if a "civilised" scientific community had not, internationally, bought into the idea of natural selection, more or less with all of its racist - not to mention class - bigotry if the first one might not have been the one too many for such "civilised" men to tolerate. As it was, you have to wonder how many of those who might, might have learned of the mass murder in Africa might not have thought they were witnessing what Darwin prophesied as an inevitable working out of a force of nature.
* As he so often was, Darwin was even more explicit in who he believed were the superior races in his correspondence, and, wouldn't you know it, the Brits were way up their in the hierarchy. His letter to G. A. Gaskell left little room for doubt on that count and that he was far more enthusiastic for the prospect of violent extermination than he was for the less violent forms of eugenics.
** As far as I was able to find Darwin not only lied about what Schaaffhausen said, what Schaaffhausen said in what Darwin was almost certainly referring to would have refuted what Darwin was claiming about the evolutionary significance of such a genocide. I have to wonder how closely anyone ever checked Darwin's citations of other authors, it wasn't the only lapse in citation I found.
*** Fischer's importance in establishing the link between the theory of natural selection and the Nazi's mass murders can't be understated. As Mahmood Mamdani pointed out:
The genocide of the Herero was the first genocide of the twentieth century. The links between it and the Holocaust go beyond the building of concentration camps and the execution of an annihilation policy and are worth exploring. It is surely of significance that when General Trotha wrote, as above, of destroying "African tribes with streams of blood," he saw this as some kind of a Social Darwinist "cleansing" after which "something new" would "emerge." It is also relevant that, when the general sought to distribute responsibility for the genocide, he accused the missions of inciting the Herero with images "of the bloodcurdling Jewish history of the Old Testament." It was also among the Herero in the concentration camps that the German geneticist, Eugen Fischer, first came to do his medical experiments on race, for which he used both Herero and mulatto offspring of Herero women and German men. Fischer later became chancellor of the University of Berlin, where he taught medicine to Nazi physicians. One of his prominent students was Josef Mengele, the notorious doctor who did unsavory genetic experiments on Jewish children at Auschwitz. It seems to me that Hannah Arendt erred when she presumed a relatively uncomplicated relationship between settlers' genocide in the colonies and the Nazi Holocaust at home: When Nazis set out to annihilate Jews, it is far more likely that they thought of themselves as natives, and Jews as settlers. Yet, there is a link that connects the genocide of the Herero and the Nazi Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide. That link is race branding, whereby it became possible not only to set a group apart as an enemy, but also to exterminate it with an easy conscience.
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
Carla Bley - Romantic notions 1. 3. 4 and 6
Emanuele Arciuli, piano
These are composed concert pieces, not improvisational compositions. I believe they were commissioned by Ursula Oppens to whom they are dedicated but my eyes hurt too much to look it up right now. They remind me a bit of the pieces of Ben Weber for cello and piano but it's probable Carla Bley hadn't heard those, they're very seldom performed and I'm not sure they've ever been recorded. The only of Carla Bley's set I'd heard before was #3 which Carla Bley played as a kind of prelude in a concert with Steve Swallow on a Youtube which I took to be a really marvelous piece of improvisation but which turns out to be a marvelous piece of composing of concert music. I am looking for the music, I want to play them.
Note On The Worse Than Usual Editing
Yikes, I just finished breakfast and looked over my earlier post. Two sentences, at least, got pasted together, one of them losing a lot.
There is an excuse, I am arranging some music which has put considerable strain on my eyes. Much as I love being able to enter it into music printing software (Finale) it has taken a toll on my eye-sight. I'll rest them and re-edit later today. For right now, I've got to go close my eyes for a while.
There is an excuse, I am arranging some music which has put considerable strain on my eyes. Much as I love being able to enter it into music printing software (Finale) it has taken a toll on my eye-sight. I'll rest them and re-edit later today. For right now, I've got to go close my eyes for a while.
Hate Mail - I Wasn't Planning On Writing About This This Week
Uh, no, I didn't misrepresent Charles Darwin, as anyone who bothered to read what he said would know. Darwin was a firm believer in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, he was far more Lamarckian than anyone taught from many if not all English language biology textbooks in the post-war era would have been led to believe. He repeatedly advanced a belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, something which those studying the relatively recent advances in the study of epigenetic inheritance are both coming to realize and to promote. In his The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication Darwin, later editions of Origin of Species, The Descent of man, he expanded, greatly on his promotion of the idea of inherited characteristics. He made no secret of that belief. So many of his major promoters and their dupes, today, believe firmly that he shared their post-1930s faith in the neo-Darwinian synthesis that, among other things, depends on knowledge that Darwin never had or probably could imagine. A reading of him which included more than the first edition of On the Origin of Species and Voyage of the Beagle would have disabused them of their foolish belief in a neo-synthesis Darwin as well as a eugenics-free Darwin. I strongly suspect that at least a few of Darwin's greatest popular promoters among academics may not have even read that much of his work, including at least one or two names that would be on the tongue of virtually every one of you true believers in the cult of St. Charles Darwin.
The extreme view of the universal explanatory power of the natural selection of genetically inherited traits that is the common currency in the college educated American and, I would imagine Brit, Canadian, Australian... and which also is the common belief of journalism, is a product of ideological faith and wishful thinking in the completeness of their knowledge among some rapidly aging scientists and the power of the popular presentation of science by the publishing industry and science journalism. It's not something that even someone as critical of ol' Chuck and as skeptical of his version of natural selection as I am would honestly blame on him.
The truth is that Charles Darwin not only didn't hold with the current commonly held model of natural selection, the latest model of the neo-Darwinian synthesis of natural selection with genetics, he couldn't have because he didn't have major portions of the substance of it. No one did during his lifetime, that is the product of the information available to later generations of Darwinists. Natural selection - which is his real claim to fame - not as some of you seem to believe as "the discoverer of evolution" - has had to be propped up continually and modified into forms which I doubt he could recognize.
Natural Selection is really not much like the laws of physics or even chemistry, I don't think it is a good idea to promote it as if it were. At best it is a conventional and agreed to framing of phenomena that don't fit into it without constantly bending the theory to fit them in. Quite often, and worst of all, it has been a rule for the creation of stories and lore and even myths to promote both the theory and the desires of those making up those fictions. That is why as conventional a Darwinist Stephen Jay Gould called what they produced "Just-so stories". The fact is that is what virtually all of natural selection is, the invention of scenarios of past events which not only haven't been but never will be observed at even the crudest levels of resolution.
As I noted in the series of pieces I wrote, previous generations of Darwinists, including his closest scientific colleagues, his children, etc. who actually knew the man had a far different view of him than that which is permitted to be articulated among the college educated English speaking people. Their view of him included his eugenics promotion and advocacy, the only difference between those who knew him and many of us, today, was their full belief in and liking of the ideas of class, ethnic and racial superiority which he incorporated into his science and which are, in fact, the basis of his adoption of Malthusian explanations of life and death and their effects on the changes in species over time. Eugenics was a product of class prejudice far more than it was a dispassionate and disinterested investigation into possible means by which species evolved. I believe the reason it was so extensively adopted was because it was the product of a shared faith in the merited superiority of the rich and privileged as a natural instead of an entirely artificial phenomenon. That is the class which has had control of science, the law, government and virtually every other organ of power in even quasi-democratic countries. That is the class which determines which ideas will be supported and made reputable, no matter how ill-considered or ill-founded or not.
Science, no more than most other human institutions, has not been removed from that fact of life. You have to go to the few institutions and entities which resist those class based economic interests to even begin to escape that kind of control and they are not the ones held to be estimable by those who enjoy the results of inequality. And they will be found more among individual entities than among institutions, most of them quite free of the burden of high esteem among the rich, the powerful and those who aspire after that status. But I'm trying to limit the number of posts relying on Walter Brueggemann, James Cone, etc. and the prophetic tradition to no more than three a week. As I've also learned in the past ten years, a radical-liberal political blogger could post about them seven days a week and never run out of relevant material. It's no wonder that the most dishonest and extreme of neo-Darwinists have played such a major role in lying about religion and it's got a whole lot more to do with class and social ranking than it does with science.
The extreme view of the universal explanatory power of the natural selection of genetically inherited traits that is the common currency in the college educated American and, I would imagine Brit, Canadian, Australian... and which also is the common belief of journalism, is a product of ideological faith and wishful thinking in the completeness of their knowledge among some rapidly aging scientists and the power of the popular presentation of science by the publishing industry and science journalism. It's not something that even someone as critical of ol' Chuck and as skeptical of his version of natural selection as I am would honestly blame on him.
The truth is that Charles Darwin not only didn't hold with the current commonly held model of natural selection, the latest model of the neo-Darwinian synthesis of natural selection with genetics, he couldn't have because he didn't have major portions of the substance of it. No one did during his lifetime, that is the product of the information available to later generations of Darwinists. Natural selection - which is his real claim to fame - not as some of you seem to believe as "the discoverer of evolution" - has had to be propped up continually and modified into forms which I doubt he could recognize.
Natural Selection is really not much like the laws of physics or even chemistry, I don't think it is a good idea to promote it as if it were. At best it is a conventional and agreed to framing of phenomena that don't fit into it without constantly bending the theory to fit them in. Quite often, and worst of all, it has been a rule for the creation of stories and lore and even myths to promote both the theory and the desires of those making up those fictions. That is why as conventional a Darwinist Stephen Jay Gould called what they produced "Just-so stories". The fact is that is what virtually all of natural selection is, the invention of scenarios of past events which not only haven't been but never will be observed at even the crudest levels of resolution.
As I noted in the series of pieces I wrote, previous generations of Darwinists, including his closest scientific colleagues, his children, etc. who actually knew the man had a far different view of him than that which is permitted to be articulated among the college educated English speaking people. Their view of him included his eugenics promotion and advocacy, the only difference between those who knew him and many of us, today, was their full belief in and liking of the ideas of class, ethnic and racial superiority which he incorporated into his science and which are, in fact, the basis of his adoption of Malthusian explanations of life and death and their effects on the changes in species over time. Eugenics was a product of class prejudice far more than it was a dispassionate and disinterested investigation into possible means by which species evolved. I believe the reason it was so extensively adopted was because it was the product of a shared faith in the merited superiority of the rich and privileged as a natural instead of an entirely artificial phenomenon. That is the class which has had control of science, the law, government and virtually every other organ of power in even quasi-democratic countries. That is the class which determines which ideas will be supported and made reputable, no matter how ill-considered or ill-founded or not.
Science, no more than most other human institutions, has not been removed from that fact of life. You have to go to the few institutions and entities which resist those class based economic interests to even begin to escape that kind of control and they are not the ones held to be estimable by those who enjoy the results of inequality. And they will be found more among individual entities than among institutions, most of them quite free of the burden of high esteem among the rich, the powerful and those who aspire after that status. But I'm trying to limit the number of posts relying on Walter Brueggemann, James Cone, etc. and the prophetic tradition to no more than three a week. As I've also learned in the past ten years, a radical-liberal political blogger could post about them seven days a week and never run out of relevant material. It's no wonder that the most dishonest and extreme of neo-Darwinists have played such a major role in lying about religion and it's got a whole lot more to do with class and social ranking than it does with science.
Monday, September 19, 2016
There Is No Rational Argument That Separates Darwin From German Eugenics That Case Is Settled Fact
I am not going to dip into my unused research into the Darwinian nature of eugenics, including Nazi eugenics and write on that topic right now. I wrote huge amounts of stuff about that which gave citations of everything I said. I didn't "claim" anything, I exposed what Darwin, Galton, Haeckel, Schallmeyer, Ploetz,.... and most crucial to confirming the link of Darwinism to the strain of German eugenics from which Hitler adopted his policy of mass murder, the German scientists Fritz Lenz (a student of Alfred Ploetz), Erwin Baur and Eugen Fischer whose massive book on eugenics, full of citations of Darwin and conventional Darwinists, Hitler was reading in prison as he was writing his book, the central work of Nazi ideology, Mein Kampf. Literally everything held by the Nazis as biological fact is a product of a totally conventional Darwinian definition of natural selection. The only difference is in the list of who was to die and there was considerable overlap, especially in the case of the disabled and many racial and ethnic identities.
You can read not only what Darwin, himself, said in his second major work on his theory, The Descent of Man in which he presents the early deaths of those he deemed unfit due to their economic class and, explicitly, their racial and ethnic identity as a boon for the survivors, you can read the even more explicit calls for murder in the work of Ernst Haeckel, whose Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte explicitly ranks human races in order of "fitness" and enthusiastically anticipates the extinction of the "less fit" by the "most fit." That is a view which Charles Darwin explicitly endorsed in Descent of Man saying that if he had known his friend and esteemed colleague Haeckel was writing it he wouldn't have written The Descent of Man because he agreed with what Haeckel said. In that book Haeckel praised Darwin, Darwinism and his natural selection as giving the "final triumph" to his depraved, amoral vision of material monism. Darwin read the book, he cited it repeatedly with the highest praise, he knew what Haeckel advocated on the basis of natural selection, he endorsed Haeckel's views. That alone makes the connection between Darwinism and mass murder based on their shared view of natural selection an absolute fact and there is far more than that to cement the case.
Read the things in the two indexes I linked to the other day. Since the case is made in the words of Darwin, Galton - the inventor of eugenics, Schallmeyer - the independent "inventor" of German eugenics - Darwin's children, especially Leonard Darwin and a host of others, I'm afraid my point has to be considered as proved beyond a reasonable doubt. It doesn't much matter if creationists found some of that before, they weren't the first to discover it, all that means is that the conventional post-war Darwin hagiographic effort has been one big lie from its start to today and it was a lie that can only be believed as long as you don't go to the effort of reading what Darwin and his inner circle, his children and virtually every conventional Darwinist up to 1940 knew he had said.
The Darwin industry is still peddling that crap* that can only be believed by people on the basis of ignorance of what he said. It's no surprise that it's popular with the post-literate, even such as those who are alleged to be educated. You wonder why they don't feel ashamed of lying about it but they don't seem to much care about the truth or even in that evidence they're always claiming to be the champions of.
* An example I would go into if I had the time is a website from a major American university I came across this weekend. It claims there were major differences between Darwin and Haeckel, claiming that Haeckel's belief in a form of Lamarkian inheritance as its proof. Well, the fact is that Darwin and Haeckel both believed in the inheritance of acquired traits, as both Galton and Haeckel (as well as Darwin's sons) noted on different occasions. Whoever wrote that thing had to have either done so in complete ignorance of Darwin's claims and citations in The Descent of Man and Haeckel's highest praise for Darwin's theory in Die Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, the book which Darwin cited with as extravagant praise, or through the intentional misrepresentation of both. And that's hardly the only university based, clearly ideologically motivated falsification of the record I've run into.
There is both a major effort to rehabilitate Haeckel, distancing him from his own, repeated statements about the desirability of mass murder even as there is one to separate Haeckel and Darwin, something Darwin, himself, never did during his lifetime.
Update: The usual dunces are making the usual, content free claims against what I've said here. There isn't any way to force them to read their St. Darwin or I'd force them to read what he said, something that seems to most often happen in inverse proportion to the esteem he's held in.
I will note, yet again, that when I started doing the research that resulted in these posts, I fully believed I would find the statements in Darwin that refuted the accusation that he supported eugenics. I hadn't read ten pages of The Descent of Man and the sources he supported his views with before my entirely conventional faith in the post-war plaster St. Charles Darwin was shattered. Every subsequent step in looking at the evidence did nothing but smash up the pieces into dust.
I can only challenge people to read the primary record instead of the huge volume of lies written on this topic after the Second World War. The secondary, tertiary, etc. record is so corrupted with ideological lies that it is virtually useless.
Update 2: Simps is, yet again, verifying what I said about him making an accusation of antisemitism on those frequent occasions when he's got nuthin'. He's mostly got nuthin' and when he's got something it's something someone else said before he did.
He will not, of course, read the primary documentary record. That's not unusual, it's my experience that the Darwin fan club will not even as they make false claims about it. Many of them college and university faculty, some full professors.
You can read not only what Darwin, himself, said in his second major work on his theory, The Descent of Man in which he presents the early deaths of those he deemed unfit due to their economic class and, explicitly, their racial and ethnic identity as a boon for the survivors, you can read the even more explicit calls for murder in the work of Ernst Haeckel, whose Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte explicitly ranks human races in order of "fitness" and enthusiastically anticipates the extinction of the "less fit" by the "most fit." That is a view which Charles Darwin explicitly endorsed in Descent of Man saying that if he had known his friend and esteemed colleague Haeckel was writing it he wouldn't have written The Descent of Man because he agreed with what Haeckel said. In that book Haeckel praised Darwin, Darwinism and his natural selection as giving the "final triumph" to his depraved, amoral vision of material monism. Darwin read the book, he cited it repeatedly with the highest praise, he knew what Haeckel advocated on the basis of natural selection, he endorsed Haeckel's views. That alone makes the connection between Darwinism and mass murder based on their shared view of natural selection an absolute fact and there is far more than that to cement the case.
Read the things in the two indexes I linked to the other day. Since the case is made in the words of Darwin, Galton - the inventor of eugenics, Schallmeyer - the independent "inventor" of German eugenics - Darwin's children, especially Leonard Darwin and a host of others, I'm afraid my point has to be considered as proved beyond a reasonable doubt. It doesn't much matter if creationists found some of that before, they weren't the first to discover it, all that means is that the conventional post-war Darwin hagiographic effort has been one big lie from its start to today and it was a lie that can only be believed as long as you don't go to the effort of reading what Darwin and his inner circle, his children and virtually every conventional Darwinist up to 1940 knew he had said.
The Darwin industry is still peddling that crap* that can only be believed by people on the basis of ignorance of what he said. It's no surprise that it's popular with the post-literate, even such as those who are alleged to be educated. You wonder why they don't feel ashamed of lying about it but they don't seem to much care about the truth or even in that evidence they're always claiming to be the champions of.
* An example I would go into if I had the time is a website from a major American university I came across this weekend. It claims there were major differences between Darwin and Haeckel, claiming that Haeckel's belief in a form of Lamarkian inheritance as its proof. Well, the fact is that Darwin and Haeckel both believed in the inheritance of acquired traits, as both Galton and Haeckel (as well as Darwin's sons) noted on different occasions. Whoever wrote that thing had to have either done so in complete ignorance of Darwin's claims and citations in The Descent of Man and Haeckel's highest praise for Darwin's theory in Die Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, the book which Darwin cited with as extravagant praise, or through the intentional misrepresentation of both. And that's hardly the only university based, clearly ideologically motivated falsification of the record I've run into.
There is both a major effort to rehabilitate Haeckel, distancing him from his own, repeated statements about the desirability of mass murder even as there is one to separate Haeckel and Darwin, something Darwin, himself, never did during his lifetime.
Update: The usual dunces are making the usual, content free claims against what I've said here. There isn't any way to force them to read their St. Darwin or I'd force them to read what he said, something that seems to most often happen in inverse proportion to the esteem he's held in.
I will note, yet again, that when I started doing the research that resulted in these posts, I fully believed I would find the statements in Darwin that refuted the accusation that he supported eugenics. I hadn't read ten pages of The Descent of Man and the sources he supported his views with before my entirely conventional faith in the post-war plaster St. Charles Darwin was shattered. Every subsequent step in looking at the evidence did nothing but smash up the pieces into dust.
I can only challenge people to read the primary record instead of the huge volume of lies written on this topic after the Second World War. The secondary, tertiary, etc. record is so corrupted with ideological lies that it is virtually useless.
Update 2: Simps is, yet again, verifying what I said about him making an accusation of antisemitism on those frequent occasions when he's got nuthin'. He's mostly got nuthin' and when he's got something it's something someone else said before he did.
He will not, of course, read the primary documentary record. That's not unusual, it's my experience that the Darwin fan club will not even as they make false claims about it. Many of them college and university faculty, some full professors.
Sunday, September 18, 2016
Dušan Bogdanović - Lyric Quartet
The Miscelanea Guitar Quartet
The members aren't listed anywhere I can find.
Introduction And Dance
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