Saturday, February 11, 2017
Saturday Night Radio Drama - James W. Nichol - Midnight Cab from the CBC Radio Series The Mystery Project
First, a true confession, I've been relieving my horrified reading and listening to the news in the rise of the Republican-fascist Reich by reading detective and mystery novels. I've read more of them in the past month than I read in the previous two decades. In my defense, I've been avoiding the cosy crap like crap, the genre seems to break the 90% rule by being about 99% crap.
One of the best things I've read was the Canadian playwright James W. Nichol's book Midnight Cab, which is interesting in that it uses the same vivid characters of Walker Devereaux, Krista Papadopoulos, Alphonso Piattelli and Inspector Kiss as his wonderful CBC radio drama series that first got me hooked on radio drama, also called Midnight Cab. Only while the characters and the general outline of the cab company and Walker's apartment above the pawn shop and him coming from "Big River" are the same, the novel and the radio dramas are sufficiently different to take some getting used to. I love them both and wouldn't want either of them any other way.
So, here's another sample of the radio drama. The first in the series
And here's one of the last ones:
Believe me, this is about 100% clearer than they were when I listened to them on the shortwave.
I Never Heard Of Jim Jefferies Before Watching This But, Yes
I was just catching up on the strange new world were GQ and Esquire are the opposition media when I came across the video in this piece where Jim Jefferies says to the emetic Piers Morgan what I think of him. If it were possible to tailor a narrow ban on aliens in the United States that threw out scum like Morgan, scum like Murdoch, scum like Farage, I'd be for it.
Update: Sing it Sister Rowling.
Update: Sing it Sister Rowling.
Trash History Used To Claim Trash Conclusions
Note: The version of this originally posted was an early draft which contained a number of issues, none, except one first name, seriously effecting the information in it. I've posted the later version of it which I'd intended to post this morning. Sorry.
Simps has pulled out a really silly argument that because racism existed before Darwin that that means that the absolute links between Darwinism, that is natural selection, and Nazism aren't there. I'll point out how silly the argument got later.
First I'll point out that the only relevant evidence in determining what the Nazis theory of biological and racial inequality and the decisive idea were based in is what they claimed they were based on.
That theory, that the very existence of those it deemed "inferior" was both a danger to the "superior" and that their elimination would be a benefit to the surviors is what the scientists, quasi-scientists, intellectuals and others in the decades based their scientific claims in, immediately before the formation of the Nazi party in 1919 and the subsequent Nazi reign. It was continually articulated even as, their programmatic and industrial genocide was in operation.
In almost every case those Nazi claims were based in later 19th century and early 20th century biology, most crucially Darwin's natural selection and the developments that arose from that.
Nothing in the Nazi program of genocide would even be thought if Darwin's classification of individuals, class and racial groups on the basis of value - "inferior" and "superior" is the crudest but basic and essential act of ranking people in terms of value - hadn't been inserted into what was considered science. And, also the Darwinian claim that the surviving people benefited when through violent struggle and the superior proved their superiority by killing those whose deaths at their hands proved their inferiority.
There is no possibility of HONESTLY disputing that. Any reading of Darwin, both in the later editions he produced of Origin of Species, most blatantly in The Descent of Man and also in his correspondence will show he promoted those ideas not only as an intellectual argument, but as a scientific fact.
Charles Darwin was credited as the origin of those claims by the foremost German authority on Darwinian natural selection, Ernst Haeckel. Who credited him, through that theory, with the "final triumph" of a wide ranging materialist monism which overturned all previous notions of morality, most crucially the moral stand against killing people who Haeckel and, yes, Darwin, designated as inferior. You can read that in Haeckel's book The History of Creation, a book Charles Darwin endorsed as the highest of biological science.
Anyone who claims that is not the case is lying about what Darwin said, anyone who reviews the literature in both English eugenics and German eugenics would see that the entire thing is based on Darwin's theory of natural selection.
That Germans went back into the classical period to find validation of their historical claims of German superiority in such authors as Tacitus does nothing to shake the apodictic character of the statement that German eugenics was an outgrowth of Darwinist natural selection. In fact, Darwin and his closest German disciple, Ernst Haeckel, reached back into the classical period (the military fascist Spartan state) to support some of their most deadly claims. No honest review of the relevant literature could honestly come to any other conclusion that the claims of the Nazis were scientific in nature and that they were firmly and ultimately based in Darwin's natural selection. As I've pointed out before, one of the foremost Nazis, Rudoph Hess declared to a mass rally of Nazis in 1934, "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology." It was one of the few times when they were fully honest about anything and that was to claim the mantle of science for their racial classification and eugenics. They would not begin to kill people - as formal policy - for five years and the formal "final solution" with the Wannsee conference would come eight years after that admission.
As I have pointed out, some of the most eminent American scientists of the period, such as Charles Davenport, fully supported the scientific claims of the Nazis, and as I've also pointed out, the foremost expert on the thinking of Charles Darwin in the 1930s, his son Leonard, was making that claim as late as April 1939. No one at that time or today can credibly claim to have known the thinking of Charles Darwin better than his own son.
The article Simels sent me starts out with an absurd, entirely a-historical title and subtitle. How Racism Was First Officially Codified in 15th-Century Spain In 1449, a Toledo edict made racial discrimination legal.
The author of the article, Jeffrey Gorsky, is apparently a lawyer, a former functionary in the State Department, who left that to work in finance, he apparently isn't much of an historian. Or someone who has so much as read the second book of the Bible, Exodus. Discrimination on the basis of race and overcoming the legal discrimination they suffered under Egyptian law is the foundation of the entirety of Jewish and, in fact, monotheistic religion and culture. And the Egyptians were hardly alone in doing that. Discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity in Greece, in Rome, in most of the rest of the cultures of the ancient world was nearly ubiquitous. The racial and ethnic discrimination of the systems of caste on the Indian subcontinent are some of the most rigid and enduring in the history of humanity. I could go on and on.
The motive of the article, to blame Catholicism in Spain and Portugal for the existence of racism ignores that such discrimination hardly began in Spain. The first sentence in the article is enough to discredit Gorsky's claims as a serious student of history.
In 1449 rebels in Toledo, Spain, published an edict you’ve probably never heard of, but whose effects still resonate today. It was the first set of discriminatory laws based on race.
That is such a stupid statement that you have to conclude he is so ignorant of the topic that he isn't aware of such laws as Edward I's 1290 edict expelling Jews from England or that even earlier laws discriminated against Jews and others. Jews were not protected under Magna Carta. In 1218 Henry III made England the first place where Jews were required to wear a badge marking their ethnicity. Laws discriminating against Jews in Europe go back far before the Christian period, and they are only one ethnic or racial group who were the subject of legal discrimination.
And, anyone who had studied the situation that led to those awful laws against Jews - specifically against those who had converted to Christianity and who were, so, allowed to stay in Spain after Jews and Muslims were expelled - would know that the official Church didn't endorse the worst of such discrimination. The law discriminating against Jewish converts was a reaction against the equality that such converts had enjoyed because their status, under Catholicism, was based on their religion, not on their ethnic heritage. Converted Jews could be priests, bishops, cardinals.... if you want to press the issue, the first Pope was a Jew, I suspect he was hardly the only one of the early Popes you could say that about. Certainly every one of the Apostles that the entire Catholic clergy claims their authority under apostolic succession through were Jewish converts.
The popular and even some allegedly scholarly literature abounds with such articles and even books that might impress someone who knows even less than their authors but which anyone who has read even a little on the topic would know are junk history. They might contain some accurate information but they also contain basic distortions that are clearly there to serve a non-historical agenda. As an aside, Gorsky might want to wade through the papal encyclicals which both condemned some of those laws, even forbidding them, condemning the blood libel myth (something already extant in the classical Greek period) and other excuses to exclude Jews, kill and discriminate against them and rob them of their property - generally the real reason such things were promoted by kings and nobles and local thugs with the power to steal it.
Bad as the article is, Gorsky isn't so stupid as to claim that the Nazis' program of applied biology had anything to do with the discriminatory laws in Spain and Portugal. To make that case Simels would have to do something he'll never do, look at what the Nazis and their immediate precursors said about it. I've read a fair amount of the literature of Nazism and proto-Nazism and I don't recall even one instance where that was cited as a factual basis of any of their claims of racial inequality, the desirability to wipe out racial groups or that the results of such a slaughter would render the surviving murderers biologically superior.
I can point out that the Catholic Church, obviously Simels and Gorsky's main target, was one of the foremost forces in condemning the racism of the Nazis, their attacks on people based on class, ethnicity, race and religion. I was unaware of a phenomenon in the immediate post-war period of Jews who converted to Christianity out of gratitude for Christians who saved them. One famous example was the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, who converted, taking the baptismal name "Eugenio Maria" because that was the name of Pius XII* who he credited with saving large numbers of Italian Jews from the Nazis, housing many in the Vatican, risking retaliation by the Nazis and the fascists. But I can't go into that very far except to point out that for Catholics and Christians, in general, converted Jews were not considered to have a different status from other members of the church. One such convert, Sr. Edith Stein was murdered as a Jew by the Nazis and was canonized as a Martyr and a Saint and, it would appear to me, is currently a very popular saint among Catholics. I was also unaware until recently that the great scholar and rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, as an adviser to the Vatican Council II was influential enough to get the Vatican to remove the offensive language which had been part of the liturgy for Good Friday for centuries. Obviously, the way that the Catholic Church sees Jews, as human equals and the biological theory of racial valuation that the Nazis practiced are not the same in any way.
* Though he was far from my favorite Pope, Pius XII was the target of a massive slander campaign in the post-war period, much of it, apparently, originated in the Kremlin and spread by play writers and others. One of the most infamous instances, the false play The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth was championed, especially, in anti-Catholic Britain. Hochhuth was as serial liar who was successfully sued for libel when he tried for another sensation with his play Soldiers, on which he accused Winston Churchill (another of my lest favorite figures of the period) was involved in an assassination plot against the Polish Prime Minister, General Władysław Sikorski in 1943. Unfortunately for Hochhuth, he didn't do enough research to know that one of the people he libeled was the pilot and true hero of the anti-Nazi resistance, Eduard Prchal, was alive. Prchal sued the liar and won fifty-thousand pounds. The author took it on the lam to Switzerland to avoid paying the guy he lied about. Oh, and more to the point. Hochhuth is a huge supporter of the Holocaust Denier, Hitler white-washer and fixture in the neo-Nazi movement, the discredited "historian" David Irving. From what I understand, Hochhuth leaned heavily on Irving's "history" and continued to support him even after he was declared in court to be a Holocaust denier, a distorter of history, a supporter of Nazism in the court case he brought against Deborah Lipstadt, a real historian.
Simps has pulled out a really silly argument that because racism existed before Darwin that that means that the absolute links between Darwinism, that is natural selection, and Nazism aren't there. I'll point out how silly the argument got later.
First I'll point out that the only relevant evidence in determining what the Nazis theory of biological and racial inequality and the decisive idea were based in is what they claimed they were based on.
That theory, that the very existence of those it deemed "inferior" was both a danger to the "superior" and that their elimination would be a benefit to the surviors is what the scientists, quasi-scientists, intellectuals and others in the decades based their scientific claims in, immediately before the formation of the Nazi party in 1919 and the subsequent Nazi reign. It was continually articulated even as, their programmatic and industrial genocide was in operation.
In almost every case those Nazi claims were based in later 19th century and early 20th century biology, most crucially Darwin's natural selection and the developments that arose from that.
Nothing in the Nazi program of genocide would even be thought if Darwin's classification of individuals, class and racial groups on the basis of value - "inferior" and "superior" is the crudest but basic and essential act of ranking people in terms of value - hadn't been inserted into what was considered science. And, also the Darwinian claim that the surviving people benefited when through violent struggle and the superior proved their superiority by killing those whose deaths at their hands proved their inferiority.
There is no possibility of HONESTLY disputing that. Any reading of Darwin, both in the later editions he produced of Origin of Species, most blatantly in The Descent of Man and also in his correspondence will show he promoted those ideas not only as an intellectual argument, but as a scientific fact.
Charles Darwin was credited as the origin of those claims by the foremost German authority on Darwinian natural selection, Ernst Haeckel. Who credited him, through that theory, with the "final triumph" of a wide ranging materialist monism which overturned all previous notions of morality, most crucially the moral stand against killing people who Haeckel and, yes, Darwin, designated as inferior. You can read that in Haeckel's book The History of Creation, a book Charles Darwin endorsed as the highest of biological science.
Anyone who claims that is not the case is lying about what Darwin said, anyone who reviews the literature in both English eugenics and German eugenics would see that the entire thing is based on Darwin's theory of natural selection.
That Germans went back into the classical period to find validation of their historical claims of German superiority in such authors as Tacitus does nothing to shake the apodictic character of the statement that German eugenics was an outgrowth of Darwinist natural selection. In fact, Darwin and his closest German disciple, Ernst Haeckel, reached back into the classical period (the military fascist Spartan state) to support some of their most deadly claims. No honest review of the relevant literature could honestly come to any other conclusion that the claims of the Nazis were scientific in nature and that they were firmly and ultimately based in Darwin's natural selection. As I've pointed out before, one of the foremost Nazis, Rudoph Hess declared to a mass rally of Nazis in 1934, "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology." It was one of the few times when they were fully honest about anything and that was to claim the mantle of science for their racial classification and eugenics. They would not begin to kill people - as formal policy - for five years and the formal "final solution" with the Wannsee conference would come eight years after that admission.
As I have pointed out, some of the most eminent American scientists of the period, such as Charles Davenport, fully supported the scientific claims of the Nazis, and as I've also pointed out, the foremost expert on the thinking of Charles Darwin in the 1930s, his son Leonard, was making that claim as late as April 1939. No one at that time or today can credibly claim to have known the thinking of Charles Darwin better than his own son.
The article Simels sent me starts out with an absurd, entirely a-historical title and subtitle. How Racism Was First Officially Codified in 15th-Century Spain In 1449, a Toledo edict made racial discrimination legal.
The author of the article, Jeffrey Gorsky, is apparently a lawyer, a former functionary in the State Department, who left that to work in finance, he apparently isn't much of an historian. Or someone who has so much as read the second book of the Bible, Exodus. Discrimination on the basis of race and overcoming the legal discrimination they suffered under Egyptian law is the foundation of the entirety of Jewish and, in fact, monotheistic religion and culture. And the Egyptians were hardly alone in doing that. Discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity in Greece, in Rome, in most of the rest of the cultures of the ancient world was nearly ubiquitous. The racial and ethnic discrimination of the systems of caste on the Indian subcontinent are some of the most rigid and enduring in the history of humanity. I could go on and on.
The motive of the article, to blame Catholicism in Spain and Portugal for the existence of racism ignores that such discrimination hardly began in Spain. The first sentence in the article is enough to discredit Gorsky's claims as a serious student of history.
In 1449 rebels in Toledo, Spain, published an edict you’ve probably never heard of, but whose effects still resonate today. It was the first set of discriminatory laws based on race.
That is such a stupid statement that you have to conclude he is so ignorant of the topic that he isn't aware of such laws as Edward I's 1290 edict expelling Jews from England or that even earlier laws discriminated against Jews and others. Jews were not protected under Magna Carta. In 1218 Henry III made England the first place where Jews were required to wear a badge marking their ethnicity. Laws discriminating against Jews in Europe go back far before the Christian period, and they are only one ethnic or racial group who were the subject of legal discrimination.
And, anyone who had studied the situation that led to those awful laws against Jews - specifically against those who had converted to Christianity and who were, so, allowed to stay in Spain after Jews and Muslims were expelled - would know that the official Church didn't endorse the worst of such discrimination. The law discriminating against Jewish converts was a reaction against the equality that such converts had enjoyed because their status, under Catholicism, was based on their religion, not on their ethnic heritage. Converted Jews could be priests, bishops, cardinals.... if you want to press the issue, the first Pope was a Jew, I suspect he was hardly the only one of the early Popes you could say that about. Certainly every one of the Apostles that the entire Catholic clergy claims their authority under apostolic succession through were Jewish converts.
The popular and even some allegedly scholarly literature abounds with such articles and even books that might impress someone who knows even less than their authors but which anyone who has read even a little on the topic would know are junk history. They might contain some accurate information but they also contain basic distortions that are clearly there to serve a non-historical agenda. As an aside, Gorsky might want to wade through the papal encyclicals which both condemned some of those laws, even forbidding them, condemning the blood libel myth (something already extant in the classical Greek period) and other excuses to exclude Jews, kill and discriminate against them and rob them of their property - generally the real reason such things were promoted by kings and nobles and local thugs with the power to steal it.
Bad as the article is, Gorsky isn't so stupid as to claim that the Nazis' program of applied biology had anything to do with the discriminatory laws in Spain and Portugal. To make that case Simels would have to do something he'll never do, look at what the Nazis and their immediate precursors said about it. I've read a fair amount of the literature of Nazism and proto-Nazism and I don't recall even one instance where that was cited as a factual basis of any of their claims of racial inequality, the desirability to wipe out racial groups or that the results of such a slaughter would render the surviving murderers biologically superior.
I can point out that the Catholic Church, obviously Simels and Gorsky's main target, was one of the foremost forces in condemning the racism of the Nazis, their attacks on people based on class, ethnicity, race and religion. I was unaware of a phenomenon in the immediate post-war period of Jews who converted to Christianity out of gratitude for Christians who saved them. One famous example was the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, who converted, taking the baptismal name "Eugenio Maria" because that was the name of Pius XII* who he credited with saving large numbers of Italian Jews from the Nazis, housing many in the Vatican, risking retaliation by the Nazis and the fascists. But I can't go into that very far except to point out that for Catholics and Christians, in general, converted Jews were not considered to have a different status from other members of the church. One such convert, Sr. Edith Stein was murdered as a Jew by the Nazis and was canonized as a Martyr and a Saint and, it would appear to me, is currently a very popular saint among Catholics. I was also unaware until recently that the great scholar and rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, as an adviser to the Vatican Council II was influential enough to get the Vatican to remove the offensive language which had been part of the liturgy for Good Friday for centuries. Obviously, the way that the Catholic Church sees Jews, as human equals and the biological theory of racial valuation that the Nazis practiced are not the same in any way.
* Though he was far from my favorite Pope, Pius XII was the target of a massive slander campaign in the post-war period, much of it, apparently, originated in the Kremlin and spread by play writers and others. One of the most infamous instances, the false play The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth was championed, especially, in anti-Catholic Britain. Hochhuth was as serial liar who was successfully sued for libel when he tried for another sensation with his play Soldiers, on which he accused Winston Churchill (another of my lest favorite figures of the period) was involved in an assassination plot against the Polish Prime Minister, General Władysław Sikorski in 1943. Unfortunately for Hochhuth, he didn't do enough research to know that one of the people he libeled was the pilot and true hero of the anti-Nazi resistance, Eduard Prchal, was alive. Prchal sued the liar and won fifty-thousand pounds. The author took it on the lam to Switzerland to avoid paying the guy he lied about. Oh, and more to the point. Hochhuth is a huge supporter of the Holocaust Denier, Hitler white-washer and fixture in the neo-Nazi movement, the discredited "historian" David Irving. From what I understand, Hochhuth leaned heavily on Irving's "history" and continued to support him even after he was declared in court to be a Holocaust denier, a distorter of history, a supporter of Nazism in the court case he brought against Deborah Lipstadt, a real historian.
Friday, February 10, 2017
JONATHAN KREISBERG meets NELSON VERAS --- GOODBYE PORKPIE HAT
For someone who complains I don't post enough standards, Charles Mingus, Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.
Update: Jonathan Orland Quartet - The Seaman
Jonathan Orland: sax and composition
Nelson Veras: guitar
Yoni Zelnik: double bass
Donald Kontomanou: drums
Update 2: Ana Maria by Wayne Shorter
Simels claims to know more about the Holocaust than the staff of the Holocaust Museum. You've got to understand, he's fully qualified. Simels once actually skimmed through Berlin Diary. Or says he did.
Update: Now Simps is saying he don't need none of that book larnin' 'cause he can feel his way into historical knowledge. Really, he did.
Update 2: 'yeah, he said, "Oh, and BTW, having read a book on Kent State does not qualify you to pontificate about it what it felt like to be a student at a liberal arts college the day of the massacre," which, when you take into account that Simps lies about everything and twists the rest to serve his lies means that no matter how many citations you back up what you said that none of it matters because he's filtered reality through his Simelsation of reality. He's got so much more in common with Trump than he'd ever want anyone to notice, but I just did.
Apparently this is fine with Duncan and the Brain Trusters because Simps always knows how to tailor a lie to his audience and pretty much anyone who cares about reality stopped going there about when NTodd, Phila, Tena and a number of the other fact based regulars of the past did. As I said, I wasted time there after that which I regret.
Update: Now Simps is saying he don't need none of that book larnin' 'cause he can feel his way into historical knowledge. Really, he did.
Update 2: 'yeah, he said, "Oh, and BTW, having read a book on Kent State does not qualify you to pontificate about it what it felt like to be a student at a liberal arts college the day of the massacre," which, when you take into account that Simps lies about everything and twists the rest to serve his lies means that no matter how many citations you back up what you said that none of it matters because he's filtered reality through his Simelsation of reality. He's got so much more in common with Trump than he'd ever want anyone to notice, but I just did.
Apparently this is fine with Duncan and the Brain Trusters because Simps always knows how to tailor a lie to his audience and pretty much anyone who cares about reality stopped going there about when NTodd, Phila, Tena and a number of the other fact based regulars of the past did. As I said, I wasted time there after that which I regret.
Hate Mail
I don't feel any hesitation to say what I did about him. Duncan Black is OK with people using his blog to lie about other people. I'm one of the people who gets lied about there. He figures as long as he gets his kickbacks from Amazon.com and other revenue, he couldn't care less. Luckily, it seems that more and more of his once regulars realize it's a stultifying bore. He hardly writes anything anymore and when he does it's generally embarrassing to read. He's the latter day Dave Garroway of lefty blogging, Garroway after he left Today and became a has-been . His taste in music sucks, too.
No, Duncan And His Mendacious Douche Bags Aren't My Favorites
Well, the problem is that unlike Simels and "Skeptic Tank" and several other of Duncan Black's stupider regulars, I'm not a racial supremacist, I'm an equality absolutist. That's why Simps simply cannot understand my point. I refuse to ignore genocide campaigns against people he resents being considered because he doesn't consider them important enough to notice when they get murdered. The others don't because, as is typical of the rump Eschaton community, they don't bother to read anything before they gas on in ignorance. As always, it's a matter of who they figure appertains to them and who it's temporarily stylish to care about.
The Holocaust Museum certainly doesn't have that policy, apparently Simels and his buddies think those guys at the Holocaust Museum are Holocaust deniers for that consideration of the full range of those murdered by Nazism and even extend their concern to other genocides of the past and today. Oh, and, yeah, according to Simps, apparently they don't get what the Holocaust was all about, either.
As I mentioned yesterday morning, that's something that many atheists have a hard time seeing, that it isn't OK for some people to get killed depending on who they are and who does the killing. The Stalinists like Lester Cole who were to Stalin what the American fans of Hitler and his genocide were to Hitler, but because one was a commie and the other a Nazi, is supposed to make Cole a hero. Stalin was murdering lots of people, including Jews, while Cole and others were supporting him, as I pointed out the other day Mao was murdering millions while Sartre and de Beauvoir and many an American lefty were Maoists. As Stalin was torturing and murdering Jews in the early years of his anti-Jewish pogrom the god-less-father of neo-atheism and trust-fund multi-millionaire, Corliss Lamont was scribbling pamphlets encouraging Americans to consider adopting Stalinism here. And since Lester Cole, hack Hollywood writer, got hauled before HUAC as part of the legendary Hollywood 10 we're supposed to ignore that he supported a mass murderer with a higher body count than Hitler's over a longer period of time.
Materialists always, always, when put to the test, will come to the position that some murders are OK as long as it's the right materialist-atheists who are doing the killing for the right atheist-materialist ideology.
Someone a few days back complained that I wanted to see Eschaton disappear. Well, considering it's a place where I'm libeled most days of the year, you might ask yourself just why that might be. I used to think it would be really bad if the baby-blue blog disappeared, before about 2007. Now I don't see how there could be any down side to that happening. Duncan Black is a lazy putz who is milking a quite small and long past glory of sorts. As the great Senator Al Franken said about Ted Cruz when he was asked about him, "I don't like him".
The Holocaust Museum certainly doesn't have that policy, apparently Simels and his buddies think those guys at the Holocaust Museum are Holocaust deniers for that consideration of the full range of those murdered by Nazism and even extend their concern to other genocides of the past and today. Oh, and, yeah, according to Simps, apparently they don't get what the Holocaust was all about, either.
As I mentioned yesterday morning, that's something that many atheists have a hard time seeing, that it isn't OK for some people to get killed depending on who they are and who does the killing. The Stalinists like Lester Cole who were to Stalin what the American fans of Hitler and his genocide were to Hitler, but because one was a commie and the other a Nazi, is supposed to make Cole a hero. Stalin was murdering lots of people, including Jews, while Cole and others were supporting him, as I pointed out the other day Mao was murdering millions while Sartre and de Beauvoir and many an American lefty were Maoists. As Stalin was torturing and murdering Jews in the early years of his anti-Jewish pogrom the god-less-father of neo-atheism and trust-fund multi-millionaire, Corliss Lamont was scribbling pamphlets encouraging Americans to consider adopting Stalinism here. And since Lester Cole, hack Hollywood writer, got hauled before HUAC as part of the legendary Hollywood 10 we're supposed to ignore that he supported a mass murderer with a higher body count than Hitler's over a longer period of time.
Materialists always, always, when put to the test, will come to the position that some murders are OK as long as it's the right materialist-atheists who are doing the killing for the right atheist-materialist ideology.
Someone a few days back complained that I wanted to see Eschaton disappear. Well, considering it's a place where I'm libeled most days of the year, you might ask yourself just why that might be. I used to think it would be really bad if the baby-blue blog disappeared, before about 2007. Now I don't see how there could be any down side to that happening. Duncan Black is a lazy putz who is milking a quite small and long past glory of sorts. As the great Senator Al Franken said about Ted Cruz when he was asked about him, "I don't like him".
Two Comments
Hey Sparkles -- the Republicans refuse to admit that Jews were the reason for the Holocaust.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/02/07/republicans_block_vote_on_resolution_stating_that_holocaust_targeted_jews.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_fb_top
You should run for Congress as a Republican from Maine. You're just as odious as they are.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/02/07/republicans_block_vote_on_resolution_stating_that_holocaust_targeted_jews.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_fb_top
You should run for Congress as a Republican from Maine. You're just as odious as they are.
-
"Jews were the reason for the Holocaust".
No, Jews were NOT the reason for it, Darwinist notions of racial inequality was the reason for it. The Holocaust Museum website says:
What Was the Holocaust?
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.
Classic Darwinian racial classification in terms of value and the classic Darwinian statement that "inferior" races were a danger to the "superior".
Ah, no, asshole, my Congressman is the estimable Chellie Pingree, one of the best people in the House. Where I intend to support her staying as long as possible.
You know, Simps, you're so good at missing things I wonder if you've ever successfully wiped your own ass. - Someone else pointed out to me, some of Duncan Black's Brain Trusters got into it with Simps over at Tiger Beat on the Delaware. No doubt there'll be more of that later.
And, for the record, I have never, in my life, voted for a Republican. So far as I know no one in my family ever has or ever would. Certainly not now when they're the worst they've been so far.
Update: I used to think David Derbes was one of the smart ones, but he's as much a dolt as the rest of them. Apparently the requirements to get a job teaching physics at an elite prep-school doesn't include the knowledge that you have to read something to know what it says. There was a time I didn't think there were lots of guys in even the hard sciences who were that stupid. That was before I ever heard of Eschaton.
Thursday, February 9, 2017
I Didn't Endorse Mad Men Boy-Men When I Posted So Rare
Once, about ten years ago, during a long and lingering illness I did something I seldom did, I turned on cable TV and watched something other than news or the French station out of Sherbrooke, Quebec. The program was one of those sleazy cabloid shows about crime, the kind of stuff that A&E went to when they figured low grade trash appealing to a bigger, stupider audience was more profitable and cheaper to produce and buy than art or subtantial entertainment. I was watching this stuff and I suddenly realized they were going through these really awful crimes and they were pointing out what the murderers did that clued the cops into how to catch them. I was wondering how many people in the audience, aspiring serial murderers (male sex murderers, most of them) could watch those as both inspirations and how-to instruction movies in how to kill people in ways grisly and sadistic enough to make cabloid crap out of and how to not make the same mistake that their heroes made which got them caught. I have no doubt that there is an audience other than the one that is supposed to be watching these things, the audience that sees the role of the killer as desirable and who would love the kind of notoriety or, as they see it, fame, that being a depraved murderer gets some guy. We know that kind of attention is a motive for some murderers, that's been known for centuries. Before my stupidest trolls get going, I'm not the only one who has pointed this out. *
There is always the possibility of another audience than the one the movie and TV reviewers belong to, the one within the normal range of mental health who might be a soft on depravity as entertainment but doesn't make it a main feature of their personality. And it's not just people who aspire to fame as a sadistic sex murderer or serial killer getting their reinforcement and lessons and encouragement from the cabloid sewers, lots of personality disorder short of being criminal is encouraged by entertainment. That lesson got reinforced for me the other day after I posted a music video.
When I posted that recording of the singer Don Cherry singing So Rare the other night, I had no idea that it could be considered an endorsement of sexism and racism. I wasn't aware that one of his major hits, Band of Gold, was an icon of retrograde misogynistic, racist straight-white-male supremacy through its use in the series Mad Men, a series I saw about twenty minutes of before the misogynistic-straight-white-male heroes of it made me glad that we were supposed to have been past that. I'm old enough to remember when the song was on hit-radio, just barely, and I associated it with nothing like the Mad Men mentality. What was called to my attention was the comment threadage at You-tube in which men, most of them far too young to remember the early 1960s, some of whose fathers were probably too young to remember them but who, apparently, learned to yearn for those last years before the civil rights movement, second wave feminism and the LGBT rights movements all too temporarily made it NOT a misogynistic-straight-white-man's world of the kind that so much of the pop music, TV and movies of the time had as their substrate. YOU might not have gotten that from that series but, reading and retching through several comment threads on the topic, it's clear that lots of baby-men did get that from it. I can imagine all of them voted for Trump. And that got me thinking about a number of TV shows that were produced around that period, most of them not as long lasting as Mad Men, the one about Pan Am airlines, the one about Playboy, that presented a really awful period of American culture in terms that could be taken as a glorification of straight-white-male supremacy.
I don't think Don Cherry, who I last noticed working with the estimable Willie Nelson, after all, was that retrograde. At least that's not what I got from his music. Him being a notable golfer, well, that would give me more pause in that way than any of his songs I remember. I looked at his current website (he's still with us in his 90s) and he admits that he was something of an asshole back then, as so many white-straight-good-looking jocks are. I certainly wasn't supporting any of the associations his music got from being featured on Mad Men. I was impressed with the quality of his voice and his way with the song. It's not even my favorite song, I'd listened to the legendary saxophone solo of Jimmy Dorsey in his final recording of his career and noticed Don Cherry's version of it. I almost posted the Mills Brothers' version but I figured Cherry's was probably less known.
My question is what role those retrograde TV shows and other pop culture have played in creating the Trump vote. Reading the sexist, racist, queer bashing assholes on the comment threads surrounding such stuff, anyone who doesn't think those, coming when they did, played a role in that backlash are just plain stupid.
* Note: I wrote about this at the time of the mass murder of the Amish school girls.
There is always the possibility of another audience than the one the movie and TV reviewers belong to, the one within the normal range of mental health who might be a soft on depravity as entertainment but doesn't make it a main feature of their personality. And it's not just people who aspire to fame as a sadistic sex murderer or serial killer getting their reinforcement and lessons and encouragement from the cabloid sewers, lots of personality disorder short of being criminal is encouraged by entertainment. That lesson got reinforced for me the other day after I posted a music video.
When I posted that recording of the singer Don Cherry singing So Rare the other night, I had no idea that it could be considered an endorsement of sexism and racism. I wasn't aware that one of his major hits, Band of Gold, was an icon of retrograde misogynistic, racist straight-white-male supremacy through its use in the series Mad Men, a series I saw about twenty minutes of before the misogynistic-straight-white-male heroes of it made me glad that we were supposed to have been past that. I'm old enough to remember when the song was on hit-radio, just barely, and I associated it with nothing like the Mad Men mentality. What was called to my attention was the comment threadage at You-tube in which men, most of them far too young to remember the early 1960s, some of whose fathers were probably too young to remember them but who, apparently, learned to yearn for those last years before the civil rights movement, second wave feminism and the LGBT rights movements all too temporarily made it NOT a misogynistic-straight-white-man's world of the kind that so much of the pop music, TV and movies of the time had as their substrate. YOU might not have gotten that from that series but, reading and retching through several comment threads on the topic, it's clear that lots of baby-men did get that from it. I can imagine all of them voted for Trump. And that got me thinking about a number of TV shows that were produced around that period, most of them not as long lasting as Mad Men, the one about Pan Am airlines, the one about Playboy, that presented a really awful period of American culture in terms that could be taken as a glorification of straight-white-male supremacy.
I don't think Don Cherry, who I last noticed working with the estimable Willie Nelson, after all, was that retrograde. At least that's not what I got from his music. Him being a notable golfer, well, that would give me more pause in that way than any of his songs I remember. I looked at his current website (he's still with us in his 90s) and he admits that he was something of an asshole back then, as so many white-straight-good-looking jocks are. I certainly wasn't supporting any of the associations his music got from being featured on Mad Men. I was impressed with the quality of his voice and his way with the song. It's not even my favorite song, I'd listened to the legendary saxophone solo of Jimmy Dorsey in his final recording of his career and noticed Don Cherry's version of it. I almost posted the Mills Brothers' version but I figured Cherry's was probably less known.
My question is what role those retrograde TV shows and other pop culture have played in creating the Trump vote. Reading the sexist, racist, queer bashing assholes on the comment threads surrounding such stuff, anyone who doesn't think those, coming when they did, played a role in that backlash are just plain stupid.
* Note: I wrote about this at the time of the mass murder of the Amish school girls.
"You're stupid .... Marxism is the opposite of fascism"
NO! I'm not buying that Marxist bull shit anymore. The most important feature of any political system, of any political theory or any government IS THE READINESS IT HAS TO KILL PEOPLE, ENSLAVE PEOPLE, OPPRESS PEOPLE AND ITS READINESS TO ACCEDE TO THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE THAT IT GIVE UP POWER. Any babble about what they're going to do with the economic system either ideally or as a five-year-plan is just talk, a huge mound of corpses is as real as a huge mound of corpses. Marxism has been given the test of time and it proved itself as capable as Nazism and fascism and capitalism in making that pile enormous. The murders of Marxists and the total willingness of Marxists in the West to cover up or disregard that pile in the scores of millions tells anyone everything they need to know about the reality of Marxism and its moral degeneracy as do those of the Nazis and fascists and capitalists just as it did the old style imperialists.
If you want more proof, look at how the Russian Communist establishment morphed into a white-supremacist, neo-fascist system under the crudest of kleptocratic capitalism and is probably now the strongest force behind the resurgence of white-supremacist, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi attacks on egalitarian democracy in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Look at how easy it was for a Trotskyite like Christopher Hitchens to go hard-core neo-con following a long and well traveled road from pseudo-left to far right, a trail broken by Marxists, both Trot and Stalinist starting in the 1930s if not earlier. You can look at the Hitler-Stalin pact and the abrut U-turn that many a putative lefty hero of the time did from vehement anti-Hitlerite to sounding like a Republican businessman more than willing to do business with Hitler to returning anti-Hitler after Hitler invaded Russian territory. I don't think even Pearl Harbor with the Nazis declaring war on the United States would have gotten them to make that turn if he and Stalin were still making nice with each other.
No, Marxism was a huge con-job, American liberals, too many of them insecure about the American tradition of liberalism bought it and the complete burden of the Marxists. The dead weight of Marxism is still on us in the writing class that still gets printed in the lefty press. Out of curiosity, as I was deciding to answer you, I went to In These Times, The Nation, etc. and saw that in many cases the same writers who spent the election cycle attacking and undercutting the chances of Hillary Clinton are now lecturing Democrats on how it's their fault that they can't stop Trump. Marxists can all go to hell as far as I'm concerned, any left that is going to work will dump them right now.
Update: If the price of honesty about the real nature of Marxism is that it would make someone who remembers who the hell Lester Cole was and who pretends he was a great instead of a hack Hollywood writer unhappy, I'm more than willing to pay that price to be honest. If the price is for you to try to associate myself with my distant cousin from the part of my family we never mentioned or talked to, Joseph McCarthy, it's not going to keep me from telling the truth, either.
Anyone who was OK with Stalin murdering Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Mongolians (he killed lots and lots of them) etc. they're the equivalent of Nazi lovers who are OK with Hitler killing Jews as well as many of the same groups Stalin did. Including Jews, no matter what people like Alexander Cockburn claimed. I've mentioned the "Doctor's Plot", I haven't gone far into "The night of the murdered poets" but I will someday. I don't overlook genocides based on economic theories mouthed by the mass murderers .
Update 2: You know, I could write a long list of Communists from the early ones like Max Eastman and the total shit head Benjamin Gitlow who went from being the reddest of the red to being full blown crypto-fascists who were some of the most opportunistic and fiercest Red Scare figures of the 1950s and beyond, it's funny but I can't remember the names of any prominent commies who abandoned Marxism for egalitarian democracy. No doubt there may have been a few but the ones I know about went right from Marxism to fascism with one tiny little baby step. You'd think if democracy were somewhere in the middle some of them might have at least temporarily put a toe in it for a while. If you want to chart political identity on a line egalitarian democracy is at the polar opposite and is the most radical as opposed to non-democratic, non-egalitarian systems which aren't based on the consent of the governed. That egalitarian democracy, NOT the aristocratic republican system the original Constitution laid out is the real alternative to the fascist-Nazi-Marxist end of that chart. Containing both aristocratic privilege, slavery, excluding women, Black and other people of color and the unpropertied majority it is closer to fascism than the egalitarian democracy that today's Republican-fascists are trying to destroy.
Update 3: No, dopey, the United States originally declared war on Japan December 8, 1941, after Pearl Harbor. Fascist Japan and the Nazis had a pact that led to the Nazis declaring war on the United States on December 11. The Nazis put Germany in a state of war against the United States as a result of that, The United States declaring war on Germany several hours after the Nazi Reichstag declared war on us.
I'd suggest that looking stuff up works but only if you do. But that would clearly be a waste of my time.
If you want more proof, look at how the Russian Communist establishment morphed into a white-supremacist, neo-fascist system under the crudest of kleptocratic capitalism and is probably now the strongest force behind the resurgence of white-supremacist, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi attacks on egalitarian democracy in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Look at how easy it was for a Trotskyite like Christopher Hitchens to go hard-core neo-con following a long and well traveled road from pseudo-left to far right, a trail broken by Marxists, both Trot and Stalinist starting in the 1930s if not earlier. You can look at the Hitler-Stalin pact and the abrut U-turn that many a putative lefty hero of the time did from vehement anti-Hitlerite to sounding like a Republican businessman more than willing to do business with Hitler to returning anti-Hitler after Hitler invaded Russian territory. I don't think even Pearl Harbor with the Nazis declaring war on the United States would have gotten them to make that turn if he and Stalin were still making nice with each other.
No, Marxism was a huge con-job, American liberals, too many of them insecure about the American tradition of liberalism bought it and the complete burden of the Marxists. The dead weight of Marxism is still on us in the writing class that still gets printed in the lefty press. Out of curiosity, as I was deciding to answer you, I went to In These Times, The Nation, etc. and saw that in many cases the same writers who spent the election cycle attacking and undercutting the chances of Hillary Clinton are now lecturing Democrats on how it's their fault that they can't stop Trump. Marxists can all go to hell as far as I'm concerned, any left that is going to work will dump them right now.
Update: If the price of honesty about the real nature of Marxism is that it would make someone who remembers who the hell Lester Cole was and who pretends he was a great instead of a hack Hollywood writer unhappy, I'm more than willing to pay that price to be honest. If the price is for you to try to associate myself with my distant cousin from the part of my family we never mentioned or talked to, Joseph McCarthy, it's not going to keep me from telling the truth, either.
Anyone who was OK with Stalin murdering Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Mongolians (he killed lots and lots of them) etc. they're the equivalent of Nazi lovers who are OK with Hitler killing Jews as well as many of the same groups Stalin did. Including Jews, no matter what people like Alexander Cockburn claimed. I've mentioned the "Doctor's Plot", I haven't gone far into "The night of the murdered poets" but I will someday. I don't overlook genocides based on economic theories mouthed by the mass murderers .
Update 2: You know, I could write a long list of Communists from the early ones like Max Eastman and the total shit head Benjamin Gitlow who went from being the reddest of the red to being full blown crypto-fascists who were some of the most opportunistic and fiercest Red Scare figures of the 1950s and beyond, it's funny but I can't remember the names of any prominent commies who abandoned Marxism for egalitarian democracy. No doubt there may have been a few but the ones I know about went right from Marxism to fascism with one tiny little baby step. You'd think if democracy were somewhere in the middle some of them might have at least temporarily put a toe in it for a while. If you want to chart political identity on a line egalitarian democracy is at the polar opposite and is the most radical as opposed to non-democratic, non-egalitarian systems which aren't based on the consent of the governed. That egalitarian democracy, NOT the aristocratic republican system the original Constitution laid out is the real alternative to the fascist-Nazi-Marxist end of that chart. Containing both aristocratic privilege, slavery, excluding women, Black and other people of color and the unpropertied majority it is closer to fascism than the egalitarian democracy that today's Republican-fascists are trying to destroy.
Update 3: No, dopey, the United States originally declared war on Japan December 8, 1941, after Pearl Harbor. Fascist Japan and the Nazis had a pact that led to the Nazis declaring war on the United States on December 11. The Nazis put Germany in a state of war against the United States as a result of that, The United States declaring war on Germany several hours after the Nazi Reichstag declared war on us.
I'd suggest that looking stuff up works but only if you do. But that would clearly be a waste of my time.
Fascist America Five Weeks And Counting - And Why The Green Party Must Die
Anyone who thinks the first person to say "fascist" loses after watching the past month and more of Republican rule under the current Congress and Pretender Trump is a fatheaded quisling. The Republican Party today, from the phony "moderate" Susan Collins to the most entirely degenerate member of a state legislature or county or local government and even lower to the internet trolls is a full-blown fascist party which is in the process of consolidating fascist rule in the United States, right now, in full view of the allegedly free press.
Only the press is free, as in every fascist regime, from Marxist-fascist to Nazi-fascist, the media has always been free to lie on behalf of those in power and our media created Trump and promoted the neo-confederate party allied with Mad Men corporatism which is installed in power, now.
Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence and the entire ship of Republican-fascist thugs are in the process of destroying equality and with it egalitarian democracy. None of this is news - its not news to most of our media because they decide what is news and they're not putting those inconvenient truths into the news anywhere near as much as it needs to be there.
I pointed out yesterday that the moronic Greens under the Republican enabling and obviously innumerate Dr. Jill Stein are still working their little corner of the racket, pretending to be the left when there's no left left, roping in enough rubes who, with the number of hard lessons given them in the hard school of the Bush II and now Trump regimes have to be considered ineducable. The Greens are and have been enablers of installing the two entirely illegitimate Republican presidents given to us by their voter suppression, election rigging and the anti-democratic features embedded like poison needles in the Constitution. Mix in the idiocies of such allegedly liberal reforms of the late 20th century such as easy ballot access by candidates who will never win an election but will be useful to Republicans in almost every case, and we have what brought us here today. The opponents of fascism must destroy the Green Party which has enabled those two installations of a horrible and now a terrifying regime as the executive of the United States.
We are well on our way to a police state, with his assembly of the kind of fascist thugs that get elected to be sheriff in way too many places and his casual remark that he would destroy a state senator who one of the thugs complained was threatening their legalized theft under civil forfeiture was not Putinesque. Putin would do it without saying he would. which might count as class among murderous dictators. It's Stalinesque. Luckily, the sheriff must have realized the political consequences of him naming the guy he whined about could be bad for him, he didn't name him. Or maybe some vestigial moral impulses kicked in at that point and he didn't want the guys blood on him. One thing we can be certain of, there are Trump youth and volunteer brownshirts who are an actual concern, who can be expected to actually target and kill people at worst, terrorize them and their families, certainly.
I think the first person I heard say "The first person to say 'fascist' loses" was on NPR it was one of the clever things that one of their old time regulars from the early days used to say to feel au courant in the milieu of the DC establishment they were part of. I can remember thinking how convenient that would be for actual fascists, no doubt it was what the smart set were saying. It would have been sometime in the 70s or early 80s as I stopped listening to All Things Considered after that.
Only the press is free, as in every fascist regime, from Marxist-fascist to Nazi-fascist, the media has always been free to lie on behalf of those in power and our media created Trump and promoted the neo-confederate party allied with Mad Men corporatism which is installed in power, now.
Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence and the entire ship of Republican-fascist thugs are in the process of destroying equality and with it egalitarian democracy. None of this is news - its not news to most of our media because they decide what is news and they're not putting those inconvenient truths into the news anywhere near as much as it needs to be there.
I pointed out yesterday that the moronic Greens under the Republican enabling and obviously innumerate Dr. Jill Stein are still working their little corner of the racket, pretending to be the left when there's no left left, roping in enough rubes who, with the number of hard lessons given them in the hard school of the Bush II and now Trump regimes have to be considered ineducable. The Greens are and have been enablers of installing the two entirely illegitimate Republican presidents given to us by their voter suppression, election rigging and the anti-democratic features embedded like poison needles in the Constitution. Mix in the idiocies of such allegedly liberal reforms of the late 20th century such as easy ballot access by candidates who will never win an election but will be useful to Republicans in almost every case, and we have what brought us here today. The opponents of fascism must destroy the Green Party which has enabled those two installations of a horrible and now a terrifying regime as the executive of the United States.
We are well on our way to a police state, with his assembly of the kind of fascist thugs that get elected to be sheriff in way too many places and his casual remark that he would destroy a state senator who one of the thugs complained was threatening their legalized theft under civil forfeiture was not Putinesque. Putin would do it without saying he would. which might count as class among murderous dictators. It's Stalinesque. Luckily, the sheriff must have realized the political consequences of him naming the guy he whined about could be bad for him, he didn't name him. Or maybe some vestigial moral impulses kicked in at that point and he didn't want the guys blood on him. One thing we can be certain of, there are Trump youth and volunteer brownshirts who are an actual concern, who can be expected to actually target and kill people at worst, terrorize them and their families, certainly.
I think the first person I heard say "The first person to say 'fascist' loses" was on NPR it was one of the clever things that one of their old time regulars from the early days used to say to feel au courant in the milieu of the DC establishment they were part of. I can remember thinking how convenient that would be for actual fascists, no doubt it was what the smart set were saying. It would have been sometime in the 70s or early 80s as I stopped listening to All Things Considered after that.
Wednesday, February 8, 2017
No Better Time Than Now To Kill The Republican-Enabling Greens
I don't follow Twitter because Twitter promotes inattention and stupidity ... and speaking of that, someone sent me a link to Jill Stein's Twitter account which I don't believe I ever looked at before. If you want to see why Democrats should move now to destroy the Republican-enabling, serial-spoiler campaign running, best friend of Republican-fascism Green Party look at this.
Apparently Dr. Stein can't count to 51.
The Green Party deserves to die and it won't die without being killed and they've given Democrats more than enough reason to kill it. Democrats should switch their party affiliation for the purposes of taking it over and shutting it down once and for all.
Dr. Jill Stein
My 2012 running mate @CheriHonkala won't let anyone go homeless or get deported. Help her win a Pennsylvania seat! http://cheri197.com
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Green Party US @GreenPartyUS 23h23 hours ago
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Don't wait around for the Democrats to grow a spine. The Greens are the real opposition to Trump, join us: http://www.gp.org/volunteer ✊🏾🤜🏼🤛🏿✌️
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Why would we have a tie on such an egregious nominee? Because Democrats serve corporate interests.
In The Past Year I've Come To Understand This Is The Real Alternative To Corporate-Consumer Fascism
“Breaking the Silence”. We live in a world in which market forces and the socio-political structures they create present themselves as the only viable system, silencing all alternative conversations. Dr. Brueggemann analyzes how the prophets broke through the domineering structures of their day to bring a message of judgment and hope. Dr. Brueggemann applies the lessons of the prophets to the challenges of our day.
My Fellow Mainers Make Susan Collins Eat This
Senator Elizabeth Warren was shut down by the racist Mitch McConnell and his racist fellow Republicans when she sought to read a letter written by Coretta Scott King to the Judiciary Committee when they were considering the flagrantly racist Jeff Sessions to be a federal judge.
Silenced by the Republicans in the Senate for the most obviously illegitimate reasons she went outside the Senate Chamber and read it.
Susan Collins, phony "moderate" Republican has said she intends to vote for the flagrantly racist Jeff Sessions, which isn't a surprise as she endorsed the flagrantly racist Paul LePage when he ran for governor of Maine, becoming the Shame of Maine.
Collins disgraceful two-step on such things is regularly covered up by the Maine media, most of which is owned or controlled by Republicans. We need to let her know we don't buy her song and dance, anymore.
Update: This letter in today's Portland Press Herald lays out how Susan Collins has pretended to be an opponent of extremism while acting to move it forward.
Your Feb. 1 headline and story claiming that Sen. Susan Collins will not support Betsy DeVos as the nominee for secretary of education is terribly misleading and perpetuates the nonsense that Ms. Collins is somehow independent.
The facts are that, on Jan. 31, Susan Collins, as a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, voted to allow the DeVos nomination to go forward.
Had Sen. Collins voted “no” while the matter was before the committee, the nomination would have stopped. Sen. Collins voted “yes” at the committee level, knowing that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would let her and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, vote “no” on the nomination on the Senate floor to allow them to continue on with their misleading impression of “independence” because he already had the votes to ensure passage of the nomination.
As is so often the case with Sen. Collins – when it made a difference, Sen. Collins didn’t make a difference.
John Lambert
Silenced by the Republicans in the Senate for the most obviously illegitimate reasons she went outside the Senate Chamber and read it.
Susan Collins, phony "moderate" Republican has said she intends to vote for the flagrantly racist Jeff Sessions, which isn't a surprise as she endorsed the flagrantly racist Paul LePage when he ran for governor of Maine, becoming the Shame of Maine.
Collins disgraceful two-step on such things is regularly covered up by the Maine media, most of which is owned or controlled by Republicans. We need to let her know we don't buy her song and dance, anymore.
Update: This letter in today's Portland Press Herald lays out how Susan Collins has pretended to be an opponent of extremism while acting to move it forward.
Your Feb. 1 headline and story claiming that Sen. Susan Collins will not support Betsy DeVos as the nominee for secretary of education is terribly misleading and perpetuates the nonsense that Ms. Collins is somehow independent.
The facts are that, on Jan. 31, Susan Collins, as a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, voted to allow the DeVos nomination to go forward.
Had Sen. Collins voted “no” while the matter was before the committee, the nomination would have stopped. Sen. Collins voted “yes” at the committee level, knowing that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would let her and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, vote “no” on the nomination on the Senate floor to allow them to continue on with their misleading impression of “independence” because he already had the votes to ensure passage of the nomination.
As is so often the case with Sen. Collins – when it made a difference, Sen. Collins didn’t make a difference.
John Lambert
IT IS RADIO, AFTER ALL!
Susan Stamberg aka the woman who can't open her mouth without a cliché coming out of it has one of her reports about famous art by famous artists on the Radio as I start to type this. I wish there were some way to test to see if someone who had never seen anything by the artist she reported on [I decided to not name the painter to make my point] had any idea what his pictures were like from her kulcha vulcha reporting but her descriptions of his pictures wouldn't lead me to think they'd have any idea of them. Here's what he said:
[The artist has] plenty of joyous pictures left to paint. He still sees the world in the colors of Oz — hues so vibrant and alive that they look back-lit
Inside [a book of his pictures] you'll see..., palm trees, flowers, his dachshunds, the Grand Canyon, portraits of rich and not rich friends, landscapes in the U.S. and Yorkshire, designs for opera sets. He won't linger over any of them and doesn't pause to answer questions. He keeps turning, leafing through a life's worth of works in vivid blues, greens, oranges and fuchsias.
If you'd never seen the artists work you wouldn't have any idea what his pictures look like - IT IS RADIO, AFTER ALL - I think, since I removed one dead giveaway subject from that description, even someone familiar with their work would have trouble figuring out who she was talking about from just her description of his art. ON THE RADIO, for Pete's sake.
Considering that everything she says is a cliché, it could lead them to think it's like the art of someone else whose pictures are described in exactly the same terms. From what she said I can think of many a painting on black velvet or as seen reproduced at the dollar store or on a drug store calendar that would fit those descriptions. I don't agree with her qualitative description of it, I don't find his work "joyous" at all. I think he's an iconographer of banality whose method seems to be to remove meaning and significance from whatever he paints, often choosing to paint banal subjects and to make them more banal by choice. In that I don't remember having ever seen one of his pictures without feeling more depressed. But, maybe I expect more of the emotion of joy than she does.
The radio piece was full of Susan Stamberg's signature celebrity name-dropping both movie and kulcha stars and locations. Why they even put them on the radio is about the most interesting thing about her stuff and that's not interesting, either. What a waste of air.
Update: Looking at a range of his pictures as seen on Google Images, I don't see a single one that looks like he used back-lighting effects, those with enough depth to discern the direction of light. Lots of them look dead flat. I think she might have mixed that up with another scribbler's description of another artist.
Update: Looking at a range of his pictures as seen on Google Images, I don't see a single one that looks like he used back-lighting effects, those with enough depth to discern the direction of light. Lots of them look dead flat. I think she might have mixed that up with another scribbler's description of another artist.
There Is A Direct Line From The Permissive Relativizing Of Lies To Trumpian Fascism
For crying out loud, what is the Trump regime getting power except a massive, real life demonstration that there is a complete difference between lies and the truth, that lies often win through deception - the entire purpose of telling lies is to deceive - and that when a society has degenerated morally to the point where even the friggin' Supreme Court pretends that difference isn't consequential and that in most practical cases it is entirely possible to discern the difference the results are terrible. And that the society that buys lies will NOT BE FREE. Such stuff is obviously what they teach you at elite law schools since that's where those black-robed moral relativists come from. Is it any wonder that their relativism favors their own class, as such pretense generally does.
Even the liars can't rely on each other, as Jack Holmes pointed out, Trump's professional master liar, Kellyanne Conway, in her career of lying for which the press is just beginning to call her on, she can't be certain that her lying boss won't undercut her at any time. And that, at this point, her job is just to tell her own lies.
None of what Conway said was a defense of the president's position, because she is never really sure what the president's position is—or will be 10 minutes from now. None of his surrogates know. He might tweet tomorrow that the murder rate is the highest it's been since the Civil War. He might say there were 10 million illegal votes.
The real question is, if Conway is not speaking on behalf of the president and Trump might just as easily contradict what she says in words and action, what is the purpose of having Conway on TV? As it is, she's just sitting there spinning—or creating falsehoods of her own.
Only everyone should stop calling what they're doing "falsehoods" WHEN IT'S THE MOST POWERFUL OFFICE IN THE COUNTRY IF NOT THE WORLD, THEY SHOULD NEVER BE ALLOWED TO HIDE BEHIND THE DICTIONARY, A LIE TOLD BY A PRESIDENT AND HIS PEOPLE SHOULD ALWAYS BE ASSUMED TO BE A LIE BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO RIGHT TO NOT KNOW THE FACTS. AND THEIR POWER MAKES GIVING THEM THE BENEFIT OF THE DICTIONARY DOUBT EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.
Jake Tapper is doing a far better job of calling Kellyanne Conway on her transparent, run-the-clock-out method of non-stop lying than virtually all of the the electronic media has in years. It might be useful as long as her lies are pointed out for a while, after a while there isn't any reason to have the liar on except to note that she has the credibility of Baghdad Bob, Axis Annie and Lord Haw Haw. But the real focus should be her lying boss and the lying Republican-fascist party which is the primary vehicle of lying and beneficiary of lies in this Age of Lies.
I don't have any faith that the media will find its moral center without force being applied to it but until that can be done, anything to make the liars pay for their lies is good. But the lying, stream of consciousness of Kellyanne Conway was brought through the decision of the Supreme Court to privilege lies over the truth. The pose of even-handedness of judges in the contest between lies and the truth FAVORS LIES WHICH CAN TAKE ANY FORM THE LIAR CHOOSES. Telling the truth doesn't permit the freedom to distort it into a form for quick and easy sale. We can't rely on cabloid-talk-radio or even broadcast news operations to be any more responsible than the editors of the New York Times, who have printed some of the lies most congenial to getting the political results we live with now.
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
McCoy Tyner Quintet 1983: Habana Sol
JOE FORD, tenor sax
John Blake, violin
McCoy Tyner, piano
AVERY SHARPE, bass
RONNIE BURRAGE, drums
I Think You've Had Entirely Too Much Whine Already So This Is My Final Word For Now
The exemption from considerations of morality granted to themselves by scientists may point out one of the more unfortunate aspects of a specialization in science among English language scientists in the post-war period. That so many of today's scientists, unlike those of the past, are totally deficient in the disciplines of the parent of science, philosophy and the once queen of the sciences, theology, is obvious. The list of arrogant, conceited scientists who have mocked and disregarded the need for philosophy now that they've got the golden key to knowledge is long and rather shocking.*
More shocking is that the claim that science can be separated from considerations of morality even of absolute standards of morality such that even philosophy have largely ceded to theology. Considering that the entire enterprise of science relies, absolutely on such morality, the claim is stunningly clueless.
Science, itself, relies absolutely, its status as a reliable method of finding the truth about what it studies, ultimately and completely on the honesty of scientists, on the moral integrity of those credentialed and paid to be scientists. Science is only as reliable as it is rigorous in enforcing the moral stand that it is a sin to tell a lie and that lies must be rooted out and habitual liars distanced from science or science, itself, fails and its reputation for reliability must, therefore, suffer. The ultimate reputation of science relies on the moral integrity of its priesthood as much as any religious denomination does. It, having a later development, has yet to fully suffer the consequences of that failure in so many cases with the body of scientists exacting consequences from those who violate that morality, in so many cases. Given its structure, it is more likely that religion will be able to punish violators than scientists whose violations are often profitable for equally amoral businessmen, the military and governments. The likelihood that such violators will be exposed and punished effectively by their colleagues so as to result in a great reformation of science is proving to be not likely at all.
When scientists violate the moral stand NOT CONTAINED IN SCIENCE that they must tell the truth and not lie, they, rightly, bring the entire thing down. They might rely on the habit of people holding science and scientists in high regard, they might, even more so, rely on the credulous belief of the public, the vast majority of who have to take scientists word for things because even other scientists have to do that** but, eventually, the reputation of science and peoples' belief in it will rightly fail when scientists, themselves, take advantage of the exemption from morality that they have made for themselves. And if there is one thing that is obvious, the willingness of amoral people with science degrees and holding positions of scientists is at a crisis level of failure now. You can read the results in Retraction Watch, in blogs and other sites that monitor both the petty failures in honesty and the outright fraud which science contains to an alarming degree now. The biggest question is if that much of it is discovered and exposed, how much of the rest of it is reliable. Much of that fraud was in place as science, being used and cited by other scientists, taught as science on the undergraduate and high-school levels and distributed through popular science journalism and the adulatory mechanisms of sci-blogs.
Scientists who insist that science has no room or need to consider the morality of what they do find the results of that exemption very comfortable and useful and convenient when someone like me brings this topic up but they are so clueless of the philosophical and moral basis of how science exists at all that they should be the subject of complete skepticism instead of being given the benefit of the doubt on which virtually all public understanding of science ultimately rests. Only in a few cases are the consequences made uncomfortable for the offender. If nothing else, the flexible, convenient and ultimately discrediting norms of academic freedom will protect them. They probably won't lose tenure and may gain emeritus status when they stop publishing and teaching.
* I strongly suspect this is due primarily to the British positivist dictatorship that has held sway in the culture of science for some time now, especially as adopted by scientists around New York, Cambridge Mass. and LA in the pre-war and post-war periods. It has gotten so bad that atheist philosophers, hankering after the repute of science have been junking the standards of their own field to claim a Darwinian or other sciency authority for their publications.
** Anticipating your next bottled whine, here's one of the most honest statements ever made about the reality that even scientists must rely on the honesty and rigorous practice of their own colleagues, bolding and underlining are mine.
"Third, it is said that there is no place for an argument from authority in science. The community of science is constantly self-critical, as evidenced by the experience of university colloquia "in which the speaker has hardly gotten 30 seconds into the talk before there are devastating questions and comments from the audience." If Sagan really wants to hear serious disputation about the nature of the universe, he should leave the academic precincts in Ithaca and spend a few minutes in an Orthodox study house in Brooklyn. It is certainly true that within each narrowly defined scientific field there is a constant challenge to new technical claims and to old wisdom. In what my wife calls the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral Syndrome, young scientists on the make will challenge a graybeard, and this adversarial atmosphere for the most part serves the truth. But when scientists transgress the bounds of their own specialty they have no choice but to accept the claims of authority, even though they do not know how solid the grounds of those claims may be. Who am I to believe about quantum physics if not Steven Weinberg, or about the solar system if not Carl Sagan? What worries me is that they may believe what Dawkins and Wilson tell them about evolution."
Richard Lewontin: Billions and Billions of Demons
He went even farther than that earlier in the essay in exposing the extent to which even the most eminent of science professionals have to take things on faith within their own field.
"First, no one can know and understand everything. Even individual scientists are ignorant about most of the body of scientific knowledge, and it is not simply that biologists do not understand quantum mechanics. If I were to ask my colleagues in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to explain the evolutionary importance of RNA editing in trypanosomes, they would be just as mystified by the question as the typical well-educated reader of this review."
Update: Now you're claiming what you've been claiming isn't an article of faith among the scientistic, materialist atheists, especially of the English speaking peoples. I had one of you whining at me when I pointed out that not only not much is understandable through reductionist practices such as work, to a very limited extent in physics and chemistry, but even that methodology doesn't go far.
I've pointed to this quote on the rapid decrease in effectiveness of the reductionist method par excellence as admitted by some eminent scientists such as the French mathematician 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.
It is exactly that claim made far past the point where it can actually be effectively used in the biological sciences, even the merely physical part of those, nevermind in the far more attenuated alleged science dealing with unseeable mental processes and the impossibility of the rigorous observation, description and quantification of "behaviors". When it is proposed to do that in the unrecorded past, the claim reaches its ultimate absurdity. And with that failure, the dishonesty of those claiming to apply reductionistic methods and finding truth rises, perhaps even exponentially, though that magnitude can't be honestly measured. We can have some faith that it would be a very large number if that were possible.
More shocking is that the claim that science can be separated from considerations of morality even of absolute standards of morality such that even philosophy have largely ceded to theology. Considering that the entire enterprise of science relies, absolutely on such morality, the claim is stunningly clueless.
Science, itself, relies absolutely, its status as a reliable method of finding the truth about what it studies, ultimately and completely on the honesty of scientists, on the moral integrity of those credentialed and paid to be scientists. Science is only as reliable as it is rigorous in enforcing the moral stand that it is a sin to tell a lie and that lies must be rooted out and habitual liars distanced from science or science, itself, fails and its reputation for reliability must, therefore, suffer. The ultimate reputation of science relies on the moral integrity of its priesthood as much as any religious denomination does. It, having a later development, has yet to fully suffer the consequences of that failure in so many cases with the body of scientists exacting consequences from those who violate that morality, in so many cases. Given its structure, it is more likely that religion will be able to punish violators than scientists whose violations are often profitable for equally amoral businessmen, the military and governments. The likelihood that such violators will be exposed and punished effectively by their colleagues so as to result in a great reformation of science is proving to be not likely at all.
When scientists violate the moral stand NOT CONTAINED IN SCIENCE that they must tell the truth and not lie, they, rightly, bring the entire thing down. They might rely on the habit of people holding science and scientists in high regard, they might, even more so, rely on the credulous belief of the public, the vast majority of who have to take scientists word for things because even other scientists have to do that** but, eventually, the reputation of science and peoples' belief in it will rightly fail when scientists, themselves, take advantage of the exemption from morality that they have made for themselves. And if there is one thing that is obvious, the willingness of amoral people with science degrees and holding positions of scientists is at a crisis level of failure now. You can read the results in Retraction Watch, in blogs and other sites that monitor both the petty failures in honesty and the outright fraud which science contains to an alarming degree now. The biggest question is if that much of it is discovered and exposed, how much of the rest of it is reliable. Much of that fraud was in place as science, being used and cited by other scientists, taught as science on the undergraduate and high-school levels and distributed through popular science journalism and the adulatory mechanisms of sci-blogs.
Scientists who insist that science has no room or need to consider the morality of what they do find the results of that exemption very comfortable and useful and convenient when someone like me brings this topic up but they are so clueless of the philosophical and moral basis of how science exists at all that they should be the subject of complete skepticism instead of being given the benefit of the doubt on which virtually all public understanding of science ultimately rests. Only in a few cases are the consequences made uncomfortable for the offender. If nothing else, the flexible, convenient and ultimately discrediting norms of academic freedom will protect them. They probably won't lose tenure and may gain emeritus status when they stop publishing and teaching.
* I strongly suspect this is due primarily to the British positivist dictatorship that has held sway in the culture of science for some time now, especially as adopted by scientists around New York, Cambridge Mass. and LA in the pre-war and post-war periods. It has gotten so bad that atheist philosophers, hankering after the repute of science have been junking the standards of their own field to claim a Darwinian or other sciency authority for their publications.
** Anticipating your next bottled whine, here's one of the most honest statements ever made about the reality that even scientists must rely on the honesty and rigorous practice of their own colleagues, bolding and underlining are mine.
"Third, it is said that there is no place for an argument from authority in science. The community of science is constantly self-critical, as evidenced by the experience of university colloquia "in which the speaker has hardly gotten 30 seconds into the talk before there are devastating questions and comments from the audience." If Sagan really wants to hear serious disputation about the nature of the universe, he should leave the academic precincts in Ithaca and spend a few minutes in an Orthodox study house in Brooklyn. It is certainly true that within each narrowly defined scientific field there is a constant challenge to new technical claims and to old wisdom. In what my wife calls the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral Syndrome, young scientists on the make will challenge a graybeard, and this adversarial atmosphere for the most part serves the truth. But when scientists transgress the bounds of their own specialty they have no choice but to accept the claims of authority, even though they do not know how solid the grounds of those claims may be. Who am I to believe about quantum physics if not Steven Weinberg, or about the solar system if not Carl Sagan? What worries me is that they may believe what Dawkins and Wilson tell them about evolution."
Richard Lewontin: Billions and Billions of Demons
He went even farther than that earlier in the essay in exposing the extent to which even the most eminent of science professionals have to take things on faith within their own field.
"First, no one can know and understand everything. Even individual scientists are ignorant about most of the body of scientific knowledge, and it is not simply that biologists do not understand quantum mechanics. If I were to ask my colleagues in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to explain the evolutionary importance of RNA editing in trypanosomes, they would be just as mystified by the question as the typical well-educated reader of this review."
Update: Now you're claiming what you've been claiming isn't an article of faith among the scientistic, materialist atheists, especially of the English speaking peoples. I had one of you whining at me when I pointed out that not only not much is understandable through reductionist practices such as work, to a very limited extent in physics and chemistry, but even that methodology doesn't go far.
I've pointed to this quote on the rapid decrease in effectiveness of the reductionist method par excellence as admitted by some eminent scientists such as the French mathematician 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.
It is exactly that claim made far past the point where it can actually be effectively used in the biological sciences, even the merely physical part of those, nevermind in the far more attenuated alleged science dealing with unseeable mental processes and the impossibility of the rigorous observation, description and quantification of "behaviors". When it is proposed to do that in the unrecorded past, the claim reaches its ultimate absurdity. And with that failure, the dishonesty of those claiming to apply reductionistic methods and finding truth rises, perhaps even exponentially, though that magnitude can't be honestly measured. We can have some faith that it would be a very large number if that were possible.
Monday, February 6, 2017
Hate Mail
Why would you think I'd feel anything but smug about some Eschatot displaying the hypocrisy of Duncan making money off of the Amazon slave labor plantation?
And, yeah, Frank Sinatra was such a notable authority on things moral, wasn't he. I mean
Update: See Also:
And, yeah, Frank Sinatra was such a notable authority on things moral, wasn't he. I mean
Update: See Also:
With the great moral authority, Frank Sinatra are Tommy 'Fatso' Marson, Don Carlo Gambino 'The Godfather', and Jimmy 'The Weasel' Fratianno
You Reality Guys Really Can't Face Reality, Can You
On the contrary, I can give you an example where the deadly results of scientific amorality are in the news and of concern to even the most ga-ga of science worshiping atheists. The scandals in the science establishment involved in drug, food and product testing for safety, the fraudulent results which allow the political establishment to license their marketing of extremely, even deadly drugs and products which, when people die, is as much science as anything else that gets that name. And it is generally done with the full knowledge and intention of scientists whose greatest concern is their own well paid work, their position in the company or in the profession which is about as reliable at policing itself as any other profession. Which is not reliable, at all. The scientists who do that work have degrees granted by the most secular of science departments at the most secular of universities, you can't possibly get out of it by claiming the are "pseudo-scientists" doing "pseudo-science" as it is the one and only entity which defines what is science and what isn't, the peer-review and alleged peer-review of their fellow scientists which has the power to make that distinction. Bad science, accepted as science by scientists is science as much as bad religion, accepted as religion, can be rightly blamed on religion. Only religion, not being in any sense monolithic, is more likely to include the criticism and rejection of those things than science does. Much really bad science goes on to be applied in the real world for years or decades before any real review of it is done.
I think the pushing of GMO foods by the atheist-pseudo-skeptics cult in the United States and other English language countries is likely an example where someone is getting their palms greased to push untested science which is worth billions to some of our worst corporations. That's something in which the objection is against the alleged methodology of science in real replication and review of claims, which the GMO pushers pooh-pooh as not needed because the order of scientists have given it their imprimatur already.
I think the pushing of GMO foods by the atheist-pseudo-skeptics cult in the United States and other English language countries is likely an example where someone is getting their palms greased to push untested science which is worth billions to some of our worst corporations. That's something in which the objection is against the alleged methodology of science in real replication and review of claims, which the GMO pushers pooh-pooh as not needed because the order of scientists have given it their imprimatur already.
The Enormous Stupidity of Giving Invented gods Impunity From Morality
"Science isn't about morals"That was the crux of a tantrum that someone sent me in response to what I said yesterday. Given the tone of it I should have put it in caps with six or seven exclamation points after it.
And that declaration is supposed to exempt scientists and science from any kind of moral criticism of the kind that is universally used to slam religion when it fails to uniformly convince people to, at the very least, not do evil. And that means that their failure to do what Duncan Black slammed religion for is A #1, OK.
The idea that there is some thing, "science," that is apart from the people who get credentials to call themselves scientists and who get their research and, in many cases, alleged research published in the journals that comprise the literature that is science is nonsense on its face. Science exists only through the invention of science by people.
Science is not something apart from people, it is the invention of people, it is something which is defined by people and the scope of which is defined by people. That definition is a formalistic artifice, it would be quite possible for those who define it to include the consideration of moral consequences flowing from the activities of science, for convenience, out of ideology and, I would contend most of all, for monetary profit, moral considerations are ignored and that refusal to consider them is an intentional act by scientists because, as in all aspects of life, taking moral consequences seriously quite often impinges on the accumulation of wealth for the powerful and their untrammeled enjoyment of it at the cost to other people, to other animals and the environment. The decision to exempt scientists from the full consideration of the moral consequences of their action is really not different from the exemption granted to do the same thing to businessmen, bankers, industrialists, etc. And those exemptions are largely given for the same reason. The exemption is not different from that given to emperors and kings in the previous political-economics of the medieval and classical period, it's just granted to other people manning other establishments.
In the case of science, that exemption from the consequential consideration of the morality of their results is especially stupid as science is often quite potent in its results. Science is a means of accessing natural power to magnify human intentions, intentions not different, in many of the most morally exigent cases, at all different from the whims and greed of ancient emperors. And even when the science isn't exactly science and is likely a pile of crap, as so often in the social sciences and in such artificial entities as natural selection, the repute that science is held in can lead to the most horrific of consequences. Discrimination, oppression and genocidal murder.
So, the artificial exemption granted to scientists and their professional personification of their work "science" from considerations of morality aren't an example of great intelligence and wisdom, given the powers scientists have discovered and tapped, it might be among the stupidest things that people with university degrees have ever done. You can put it alongside the equally stupid exemption granted to businessmen, bankers and those who apply science and technology in that category, I don't think those two exemptions from moral consideration of consequences, given at roughly the same time as part of the "enlightenment" are unrelated nor do I believe they are separable from the program of secularism which, though necessary for egalitarian democracy, was also damaged by the same intellectual movement of materialists.
And that declaration is supposed to exempt scientists and science from any kind of moral criticism of the kind that is universally used to slam religion when it fails to uniformly convince people to, at the very least, not do evil. And that means that their failure to do what Duncan Black slammed religion for is A #1, OK.
The idea that there is some thing, "science," that is apart from the people who get credentials to call themselves scientists and who get their research and, in many cases, alleged research published in the journals that comprise the literature that is science is nonsense on its face. Science exists only through the invention of science by people.
Science is not something apart from people, it is the invention of people, it is something which is defined by people and the scope of which is defined by people. That definition is a formalistic artifice, it would be quite possible for those who define it to include the consideration of moral consequences flowing from the activities of science, for convenience, out of ideology and, I would contend most of all, for monetary profit, moral considerations are ignored and that refusal to consider them is an intentional act by scientists because, as in all aspects of life, taking moral consequences seriously quite often impinges on the accumulation of wealth for the powerful and their untrammeled enjoyment of it at the cost to other people, to other animals and the environment. The decision to exempt scientists from the full consideration of the moral consequences of their action is really not different from the exemption granted to do the same thing to businessmen, bankers, industrialists, etc. And those exemptions are largely given for the same reason. The exemption is not different from that given to emperors and kings in the previous political-economics of the medieval and classical period, it's just granted to other people manning other establishments.
In the case of science, that exemption from the consequential consideration of the morality of their results is especially stupid as science is often quite potent in its results. Science is a means of accessing natural power to magnify human intentions, intentions not different, in many of the most morally exigent cases, at all different from the whims and greed of ancient emperors. And even when the science isn't exactly science and is likely a pile of crap, as so often in the social sciences and in such artificial entities as natural selection, the repute that science is held in can lead to the most horrific of consequences. Discrimination, oppression and genocidal murder.
So, the artificial exemption granted to scientists and their professional personification of their work "science" from considerations of morality aren't an example of great intelligence and wisdom, given the powers scientists have discovered and tapped, it might be among the stupidest things that people with university degrees have ever done. You can put it alongside the equally stupid exemption granted to businessmen, bankers and those who apply science and technology in that category, I don't think those two exemptions from moral consideration of consequences, given at roughly the same time as part of the "enlightenment" are unrelated nor do I believe they are separable from the program of secularism which, though necessary for egalitarian democracy, was also damaged by the same intellectual movement of materialists.
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Bertrand Russell
Only Russell apparently assumed his stupid man could, at least, read, which you obviously can't.
Let me guess, Simps, your elementary school was one of the early ones to institute automatic social promotion. Apparently literacy wasn't a requirement at C. W. Post in your time, either.