I'm having a busy day so I don't have time to look up the credits. Luckily they're given at the end of each episode.
There's one more story that's related. I'll post it later.
"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
Saturday, October 21, 2017
he felt as if Darrow had been arguing all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt,sparring with a dummy of his own mental making
You might want to consider this passage from an account of a debate Clarence Darrow had against G. K. Chesterton at New York City’s Mecca Temple on the topic, “Will the World Return to Religion?" It's hardly likely to have been biased in favor of Chesterton over Darrow, it was in The Nation magazine, hardly a Catholic friendly media venue.
In the ballot that followed, the audience voted more than two to one for the defender of the faith, Mr. Chesterton of course, and if the vote was on the relative merits of the two debaters, and not on the question itself, it was surely a very just one. Mr. Chesterton’s argument was like Mr. Chesterton, amiable, courteous, jolly; it was always clever, it was full of nice turns of expression, and altogether a very adroit exhibition by one of the world’s ablest intellectual fencing masters and one of its most charming gentlemen.
Mr. Darrow’s personality, by contrast, seemed rather colorless and certainly very dour. His attitude seemed almost surly; he slurred his words; the rise and fall of his voice was sometimes heavily melodramatic, and his argument was conducted on an amazingly low intellectual level.
Ostensibly the defender of science against Mr. Chesterton, he obviously knew much less about science than Mr. Chesterton did; when he essayed to answer his opponent on the views of Eddington and Jeans, it was patent that he did not have the remotest conception of what the new physics was all about. His victory over Mr. Byran at Dayton had been too cheap and easy; he remembered it not wisely but too well. His arguments are still the arguments of the village atheist of the Ingersoll period; at Mecca Temple he still seemed to be trying to shock and convince yokels.
Mr. Chesterton’s deportment was irreproachable, but I am sure that he was secretly unhappy. He had been on the platform many times against George Bernard Shaw. This opponent could not extend his powers. He was not getting his exercise.
Another account of the debate by Joseph J. Reilly
It was a Sunday afternoon and the Temple was packed. At the conclusion of the debate everybody was asked to express his opinion as to the victor and slips of paper were passed around for that purpose. The award went directly to Chesterton. Darrow in comparison, seemed heavy, uninspired, slow of mind, while G.K.C. was joyous, sparkling and witty …. quite the Chesterton one had come to expect from his books. The affair was like a race between a lumbering sailing vessel and a modern steamer. Mrs. Frances Taylor Patterson also heard the Chesterton-Darrow debate, but went to the meeting with some misgivings because she was a trifle afraid that Chesterton’s “gifts might seem somewhat literary in comparison with the trained scientific mind and rapier tongue of the famous trial lawyer. Instead, the trained scientific mind, the clear thinking, the lightning quickness in getting a point and hurling back an answer, turned out to belong to Chesterton. I have never heard Mr. Darrow alone, but taken relatively, when that relativity is to Chesterton, he appears positively muddle-headed.”
Although the terms of the debate were determined at the outset, Darrow either could not or would not stick to the definitions, but kept going off at illogical tangents and becoming choleric over points that were not in dispute. He seemed to have an idea that all religion was a matter of accepting Jonah’s whale as a sort of luxury-liner. As Chesterton summed it up, he felt as if Darrow had been arguing all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, sparring with a dummy of his own mental making. When something went wrong with the microphone, Darrow sat back until it could be fixed. Whereupon G.K.C. jumped up and carried on in his natural voice, “Science you see is not infallible!” Whatever brilliance Darrow had in his own right, it was completely eclipsed.
"... as if Darrow had been arguing all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, sparring with a dummy of his own mental making." You can say the same thing about most of the popular atheists in debate against an able opponent, today. They can't deal with anything but the most cartoonish of fundamentalists because the God they don't believe in is that God. And that's the best of them, the typical online atheist is even more dependent on setting up dummies of their own mental making because they can't argue against anything but that.
In the ballot that followed, the audience voted more than two to one for the defender of the faith, Mr. Chesterton of course, and if the vote was on the relative merits of the two debaters, and not on the question itself, it was surely a very just one. Mr. Chesterton’s argument was like Mr. Chesterton, amiable, courteous, jolly; it was always clever, it was full of nice turns of expression, and altogether a very adroit exhibition by one of the world’s ablest intellectual fencing masters and one of its most charming gentlemen.
Mr. Darrow’s personality, by contrast, seemed rather colorless and certainly very dour. His attitude seemed almost surly; he slurred his words; the rise and fall of his voice was sometimes heavily melodramatic, and his argument was conducted on an amazingly low intellectual level.
Ostensibly the defender of science against Mr. Chesterton, he obviously knew much less about science than Mr. Chesterton did; when he essayed to answer his opponent on the views of Eddington and Jeans, it was patent that he did not have the remotest conception of what the new physics was all about. His victory over Mr. Byran at Dayton had been too cheap and easy; he remembered it not wisely but too well. His arguments are still the arguments of the village atheist of the Ingersoll period; at Mecca Temple he still seemed to be trying to shock and convince yokels.
Mr. Chesterton’s deportment was irreproachable, but I am sure that he was secretly unhappy. He had been on the platform many times against George Bernard Shaw. This opponent could not extend his powers. He was not getting his exercise.
Another account of the debate by Joseph J. Reilly
It was a Sunday afternoon and the Temple was packed. At the conclusion of the debate everybody was asked to express his opinion as to the victor and slips of paper were passed around for that purpose. The award went directly to Chesterton. Darrow in comparison, seemed heavy, uninspired, slow of mind, while G.K.C. was joyous, sparkling and witty …. quite the Chesterton one had come to expect from his books. The affair was like a race between a lumbering sailing vessel and a modern steamer. Mrs. Frances Taylor Patterson also heard the Chesterton-Darrow debate, but went to the meeting with some misgivings because she was a trifle afraid that Chesterton’s “gifts might seem somewhat literary in comparison with the trained scientific mind and rapier tongue of the famous trial lawyer. Instead, the trained scientific mind, the clear thinking, the lightning quickness in getting a point and hurling back an answer, turned out to belong to Chesterton. I have never heard Mr. Darrow alone, but taken relatively, when that relativity is to Chesterton, he appears positively muddle-headed.”
Although the terms of the debate were determined at the outset, Darrow either could not or would not stick to the definitions, but kept going off at illogical tangents and becoming choleric over points that were not in dispute. He seemed to have an idea that all religion was a matter of accepting Jonah’s whale as a sort of luxury-liner. As Chesterton summed it up, he felt as if Darrow had been arguing all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, sparring with a dummy of his own mental making. When something went wrong with the microphone, Darrow sat back until it could be fixed. Whereupon G.K.C. jumped up and carried on in his natural voice, “Science you see is not infallible!” Whatever brilliance Darrow had in his own right, it was completely eclipsed.
"... as if Darrow had been arguing all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, sparring with a dummy of his own mental making." You can say the same thing about most of the popular atheists in debate against an able opponent, today. They can't deal with anything but the most cartoonish of fundamentalists because the God they don't believe in is that God. And that's the best of them, the typical online atheist is even more dependent on setting up dummies of their own mental making because they can't argue against anything but that.
Hate Mail - Wind Is All It Is
Oh, geesh, not that stupid movie again. It is one of the most pious and stupid of ideas of college educated atheists that the movie and play Inherit the Wind is an historically accurate or nearly accurate account of the Scopes trial of 1925. It is not, it gets most of the basic facts of the background of the trial wrong. The trial wasn't a product of fundamentalist persecution of science, it was a publicity stunt by the Chamber of Commerce to drum up business in the town of Dayton, Tennessee to take advantage of the relatively new American Civil Liberties Union's stunt to get someone to break the law against teaching evolution in public schools passed by fundamentalists in the Tennessee legislature.
No rocks were ever thrown at John T. Scopes, the local math and science teacher. He had volunteered to be the one charges were brought against, he coached his "accusers" in what to accuse him of as his part in the charade - as I recall some of the students later said he'd not taught him the things he was supposedly accused of teaching them. As the Biology text Scopes was accused of teaching evolution from, A Civic Biology, taught, in addition to what passed as evolutionary theory of the time, a rather primitive Darwinism, on the basis of that, scientific racism and eugenics. Personally, Scopes benefitted from his part in the publicity stunt, the notoriety and support he got allowed him to go to the University of Chicago to gain a degree in geology and get well paid work as a oil and gas geologist. He was later baptized into the Catholic Church - which was one of the strongest opponents of eugenics and scientific racism but which had no position against the theory of evolution.
Scopes didn't have a romance with the daughter of a fundamentalist preacher, he never had rocks thrown at him, he didn't spend a minute, nevermind an hour in jail, his life and safety and liberty were never in jeopardy. He often went swimming with people involved with the prosecution during the hot afternoons of the circus that, as the Chamber of Commerce hoped for, developed around the trial. He wasn't even in danger of having to pay the fine for having supposedly broken the law, William Jennings Bryan (no doubt knowing the young man was playing a role in a farce) offered to pay the fine. The matter of the fine not being set led to the case being thrown out by the Tennessee Supreme Court, though they upheld the constitutionality of the Butler Act, which was the law being tested. I'm not a lawyer but I believe that kept the case from becoming the U.S. Supreme Court test case that, no doubt, the ACLU had wanted.
As I've noted before, the fact is that the real William Jennings Bryan that Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (yeah, that was the name of one of the playwrights) fictionalized into Matthew Harrison Brady showed considerably more insight into the real nature of Darwinism as both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Nazis would soon make obvious than Clarence Darrow, fictionalized into Henry Drummond. Bryan's summation wasn't a fundamentalist rant, it was a well reasoned, well informed and far fuller consideration of what Darwinism had already produced by way of the negation of morality in the sixty six years since the publication of On the Origin of Species. His predictions of catastrophic consequences coming from Darwinian biological determinism was already happening in the rise of fascism and Nazism, in that he showed considerably more foresight than Darrow or such figures as Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The play as history is sheer, show biz, button pushing Broadway, Hollywood fiction of an especially cheesy variety. The legal patter is absurd, the interplay of the two "lawyers" especially so. The cartoon presentations of all of the stand-ins for the real life figures are a product of rote bias and an attempt to arouse cheap emotions on that basis. The real testimony of Bryan at the trial proved, among other things, that he was probably more familiar with the theory of Darwin and the intellectual results of it than Darrow or the other defense lawyers. It also proved he was hardly a fundamentalist. Darrow knew that in his summation Bryan could have used his own words defending Leopold and Loeb, especially his enormously long plea against them being given the death penalty.* In that he not only made the argument that the murder had been motivated by Richard Loeb reading detective novels, but that it was also due to Leopold's reading Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, which was one long response to the moral consequences of Darwinism. Darrow had made that argument less than a year before the Scopes trial and, no doubt, he knew William Jennings Bryan knew about it. That point is something that Darrow certainly knew could be raised in Bryan's summation so he strategically prevented Bryan giving it. That part of Bryan's unpresented summation, as published, was quite well argued. At the link it gives Darrow's brief response to Bryan's summation which shows he knew that Bryan had him on those points. Darrow's response, dismissing Bryan's argument as "a Lawyer's argumentative statement" while talking about the many people who read Nietzsche without murdering people was what was lawyerly. You can't dismiss the effectiveness of a motive you argued produced an effect in one case by citing the times it didn't have the effect you argued for. I have to say that though I certainly agreed with Darrow on the death penalty** and even on the unconstitutionality of the Butler Act and I wouldn't make many of the arguments Bryan made - though some of his points were the best made in the case - but I think the record of the trial leaves me thinking Bryan was the more informed, the wiser and the more honest of the two. That the two playwrights, no doubt, had read Bryan's unpresented summation, especially in light of the history of the next twenty years, reveals that their motives were far from honest.
The stupidity of people who believe that Inherit the Wind has anything to do with anything that happened is all too common, it's no less true of those with even the highest of academic credentials than it is to the most ignorant of movie and TV miseducated functional illiterates who never read anything about the Scopes Trial, nevermind actually looked at the actual records of it. In that both William Jennings Bryan would certainly agree with his somewhat friend Clarence Darrow - at least the Darrow who argued that his murderous clients were the victims of their biological inheritance and the crime novels and Nietzschean philosophy that were really what made them murder - what informs people has an effect on what they think and what they do. In the case of history, getting that from plays and movies is more likely to give you a Trumpian view of the past than anything real or likely to produce good results.
The pious line, pious in an especially cheap, Broadway-Hollywood way, put into Drummond's mouth about it being more sacred for children to recite the multiplication table than to say amen and hosannah is especially stupid, considering that there is nothing preventing any child from doing both or religion preventing people from being good at math. The other day, I happened to hear a video of a lecture by one of today's most popular Christian apologists, the Oxford mathematician John Lennox, given at Cambridge, in which he said something about the best mathematics student Cambridge had ever had, Issac Newton, who was not only a Christian but who was a very deep scholar of the scriptures. Among the great mathematicians alive when that silly play was written was the Christian, Kurt Godel, of whom Einstein had said that the greatest benefit of being at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study was that he got to walk home with him every afternoon. That line and the idiotic atheist conceit it represents is one of the stupidest bigotries common to so many ignorant college degree holders today. While I would never make a comparison between a selective private school and public schools open to all, the fact is that Catholic school students, as a group, are hardly harmed in their knowledge of mathematics by the religion also taught to them. It's my experience of atheists that their atheism seems to be more likely positively associated with such idiotic ideas. There was a time I'd be surprised to have come to that conclusion, but that was before I read the unedited, unfiltered thinking of lots of atheists online. I think the general trend of atheism is anti-intellectual.
* I was a bit shocked to find that a significant part of the court record in Leopold and Loeb is missing because Darrow borrowed it from the court clerk and never returned it. As it would seem to contain some rather important information, you have to wonder what Darrow's motives in disappearing it might have been. I have come to think that Darrow was not above grooming his own PR to turn himself into more of an unmitigated hero than reality would have produced. The dramatic, cinematic Clarence Darrow (as played by people like Henry Fonda) is no more real than the "history" in the fiction of Inherit the Wind. Show biz is pretty well fatal to accurate history. It's generally sound and fury signifying nothing.
** It is more than interesting that many a Darwinist considered capital punishment to be somewhat eugenically beneficial, including Charles and Leonard Darwin and Heinrich Fick (mentioned here the other day), to my knowledge.
No rocks were ever thrown at John T. Scopes, the local math and science teacher. He had volunteered to be the one charges were brought against, he coached his "accusers" in what to accuse him of as his part in the charade - as I recall some of the students later said he'd not taught him the things he was supposedly accused of teaching them. As the Biology text Scopes was accused of teaching evolution from, A Civic Biology, taught, in addition to what passed as evolutionary theory of the time, a rather primitive Darwinism, on the basis of that, scientific racism and eugenics. Personally, Scopes benefitted from his part in the publicity stunt, the notoriety and support he got allowed him to go to the University of Chicago to gain a degree in geology and get well paid work as a oil and gas geologist. He was later baptized into the Catholic Church - which was one of the strongest opponents of eugenics and scientific racism but which had no position against the theory of evolution.
Scopes didn't have a romance with the daughter of a fundamentalist preacher, he never had rocks thrown at him, he didn't spend a minute, nevermind an hour in jail, his life and safety and liberty were never in jeopardy. He often went swimming with people involved with the prosecution during the hot afternoons of the circus that, as the Chamber of Commerce hoped for, developed around the trial. He wasn't even in danger of having to pay the fine for having supposedly broken the law, William Jennings Bryan (no doubt knowing the young man was playing a role in a farce) offered to pay the fine. The matter of the fine not being set led to the case being thrown out by the Tennessee Supreme Court, though they upheld the constitutionality of the Butler Act, which was the law being tested. I'm not a lawyer but I believe that kept the case from becoming the U.S. Supreme Court test case that, no doubt, the ACLU had wanted.
As I've noted before, the fact is that the real William Jennings Bryan that Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (yeah, that was the name of one of the playwrights) fictionalized into Matthew Harrison Brady showed considerably more insight into the real nature of Darwinism as both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Nazis would soon make obvious than Clarence Darrow, fictionalized into Henry Drummond. Bryan's summation wasn't a fundamentalist rant, it was a well reasoned, well informed and far fuller consideration of what Darwinism had already produced by way of the negation of morality in the sixty six years since the publication of On the Origin of Species. His predictions of catastrophic consequences coming from Darwinian biological determinism was already happening in the rise of fascism and Nazism, in that he showed considerably more foresight than Darrow or such figures as Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The play as history is sheer, show biz, button pushing Broadway, Hollywood fiction of an especially cheesy variety. The legal patter is absurd, the interplay of the two "lawyers" especially so. The cartoon presentations of all of the stand-ins for the real life figures are a product of rote bias and an attempt to arouse cheap emotions on that basis. The real testimony of Bryan at the trial proved, among other things, that he was probably more familiar with the theory of Darwin and the intellectual results of it than Darrow or the other defense lawyers. It also proved he was hardly a fundamentalist. Darrow knew that in his summation Bryan could have used his own words defending Leopold and Loeb, especially his enormously long plea against them being given the death penalty.* In that he not only made the argument that the murder had been motivated by Richard Loeb reading detective novels, but that it was also due to Leopold's reading Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, which was one long response to the moral consequences of Darwinism. Darrow had made that argument less than a year before the Scopes trial and, no doubt, he knew William Jennings Bryan knew about it. That point is something that Darrow certainly knew could be raised in Bryan's summation so he strategically prevented Bryan giving it. That part of Bryan's unpresented summation, as published, was quite well argued. At the link it gives Darrow's brief response to Bryan's summation which shows he knew that Bryan had him on those points. Darrow's response, dismissing Bryan's argument as "a Lawyer's argumentative statement" while talking about the many people who read Nietzsche without murdering people was what was lawyerly. You can't dismiss the effectiveness of a motive you argued produced an effect in one case by citing the times it didn't have the effect you argued for. I have to say that though I certainly agreed with Darrow on the death penalty** and even on the unconstitutionality of the Butler Act and I wouldn't make many of the arguments Bryan made - though some of his points were the best made in the case - but I think the record of the trial leaves me thinking Bryan was the more informed, the wiser and the more honest of the two. That the two playwrights, no doubt, had read Bryan's unpresented summation, especially in light of the history of the next twenty years, reveals that their motives were far from honest.
The stupidity of people who believe that Inherit the Wind has anything to do with anything that happened is all too common, it's no less true of those with even the highest of academic credentials than it is to the most ignorant of movie and TV miseducated functional illiterates who never read anything about the Scopes Trial, nevermind actually looked at the actual records of it. In that both William Jennings Bryan would certainly agree with his somewhat friend Clarence Darrow - at least the Darrow who argued that his murderous clients were the victims of their biological inheritance and the crime novels and Nietzschean philosophy that were really what made them murder - what informs people has an effect on what they think and what they do. In the case of history, getting that from plays and movies is more likely to give you a Trumpian view of the past than anything real or likely to produce good results.
The pious line, pious in an especially cheap, Broadway-Hollywood way, put into Drummond's mouth about it being more sacred for children to recite the multiplication table than to say amen and hosannah is especially stupid, considering that there is nothing preventing any child from doing both or religion preventing people from being good at math. The other day, I happened to hear a video of a lecture by one of today's most popular Christian apologists, the Oxford mathematician John Lennox, given at Cambridge, in which he said something about the best mathematics student Cambridge had ever had, Issac Newton, who was not only a Christian but who was a very deep scholar of the scriptures. Among the great mathematicians alive when that silly play was written was the Christian, Kurt Godel, of whom Einstein had said that the greatest benefit of being at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study was that he got to walk home with him every afternoon. That line and the idiotic atheist conceit it represents is one of the stupidest bigotries common to so many ignorant college degree holders today. While I would never make a comparison between a selective private school and public schools open to all, the fact is that Catholic school students, as a group, are hardly harmed in their knowledge of mathematics by the religion also taught to them. It's my experience of atheists that their atheism seems to be more likely positively associated with such idiotic ideas. There was a time I'd be surprised to have come to that conclusion, but that was before I read the unedited, unfiltered thinking of lots of atheists online. I think the general trend of atheism is anti-intellectual.
* I was a bit shocked to find that a significant part of the court record in Leopold and Loeb is missing because Darrow borrowed it from the court clerk and never returned it. As it would seem to contain some rather important information, you have to wonder what Darrow's motives in disappearing it might have been. I have come to think that Darrow was not above grooming his own PR to turn himself into more of an unmitigated hero than reality would have produced. The dramatic, cinematic Clarence Darrow (as played by people like Henry Fonda) is no more real than the "history" in the fiction of Inherit the Wind. Show biz is pretty well fatal to accurate history. It's generally sound and fury signifying nothing.
** It is more than interesting that many a Darwinist considered capital punishment to be somewhat eugenically beneficial, including Charles and Leonard Darwin and Heinrich Fick (mentioned here the other day), to my knowledge.
Friday, October 20, 2017
Patrick Cornelius - Echoes Of Summer
Patrick Cornelius, saxophone
Gerald Clayton, piano
Miles Okazaki, guitar
Peter Slavov, Bass
Kendrick Scott, drums
Brother Gabriel
Gerald Clayton - Shadamanthem
Gerald Clayton . piano
Joe Sanders . bass,
Justin Brown . drums
Logan Richardson . saxophonist
Dayna Stephens . saxophonist
Ambrose Akinmusire . trumpet
Some Always
Question: Are You Giving Up Blogging?
No, I've just been sick the past week and a half. I will be back on my regular schedule of trying to get a piece posted by 9:00 AM Eastern Daylight-Standard Time. They tell me to expect a full recovery. Which I was afraid of.
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Charles Ives - Harvest Home Chorales
Robert Shaw Chorale,
Robert Shaw, director
Harvest Home
The harvest dawn is near,
the year delays not long,
and he who sows with many a tear
shall reap with many a song.
Sad to his toil he goes,
his seed with weeping leaves,
and he shall come at twilight close
and bring his golden sheaves.
Rev. George Burgess
Lord of the Harvest
Lord of the harvest, Thee we hail.
Thine ancient promise doth not fail.
The varying seasons haste their round,
with goodness all our years are crown'd.
Our thanks we pray this Holy Day;
let our hearts in tune be found.
When They liberal hand
scatters plenty o'er the land,
when sounds of music fill the air,
as homeward all their treasures bear;
we too will raise our hymns of prise,
for we Thy common bounties share.
Lord of the harvest, all is Thine,
the rains that fall, the suns that shine,
the seed once hidden in the ground,
the skill that makes our fruit abound.
New praises from our lips shall sound.
Lord of the harvest, Thee we hail.
John Hampton Gurney
Harvest Home
Come ye thankful people, come,
raise a song of harvest home.
All is safely gathered in
ere the winter storms begin.
God our Maker doth provide
for our wants to be supplied.
Come to God's own temple, come,
raise the song of harvest home.
Rev. Henry Alford
Even one of Charles Ives' severest, even most unfair critics, Virgil Thomson, called these pieces perfect. I can't understand why they haven't been performed or recorded more often. Robert Shaw, thankfully, worked during a time when record companies would allow an artist of his stature to record pieces that weren't going to be best sellers. Shaw was one of the most significant conductors of the past century due to his desire to perform and record lots of repertoire that would have otherwise been unheard and unrecorded.
I just got the last of my field corn in. Thought of these as I was doing that.
Thoughts on The Liar, Jeff Sessions Before The Senate Judiciary Committee
Like so many others, I was so enraged on listening to Jeff Sessions, the so-called Attorney General of the United States lie and perjure himself through several hours before the Senate Judiciary Committee that I couldn't address it, right away. His performance, lying through his teeth by double-talk about Trump campaign surrogates, himself included, meeting with representatives of the Russian government, lying about his previous lies to the same committee that are known to be lies should be enough to ensure his removal from office and prosecution but the rule of law doesn't apply to Republicans who lie and collude and betray the United States. It was clear from Chuck Grassley's actions as the chairman of the committee that he's got Sessions' back no matter what lies he tells to the committee and that he will do his best to enable the lies, the collusion and the betrayal of the United States.
In 2017, it is clear that a fifth column exists in the United States and it is in control of the Congress, the Executive and the Supreme Court, it has, is and will sell the country down the rive to the billionaire oligarchs, domestic and foreign, it will betray and sell out and destroy the American People. The media which has played the biggest role in getting Trump into office, FOX, Sinclair, etc. are a part of this betrayal, they are the enemies of the American People and democracy.
I used the term "cold civil war" several weeks back to describe what's happening in the United States now, only it's a civil war against the large majority of the American people by concerted effort by billionaire oligarchs domestic, making common cause with foreign billionaire oligarchs who have successfully corrupted their own countries. They and their hireling Federalist lawyers and scholars have found every weakness in the current Constitution of the United States in order to blow gaping holes in our defenses against such attacks at their weakest points. The revelation under the excellent questioning by Senator Whitehouse that Jeff Session's Department of Justice has done nothing to address the de facto invasion of the United States by the Putin crime regime should carry a charge of treason against anyone in the government who is guilty of such nonfeasance. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions should be imprisoned as a traitor to the American People, the United States and democracy but he won't be because our Constitution doesn't call that kind of attack by the servant of even foreign enemies treason. I have not heard Jeff Sessions on the penalty for such crimes but since the crimes of Richard Nixon were revealed, I have held that any politician, especially in the highest reaches of the government who have campaigned on law and order but who breaks the law, should have written their own penalty. I wouldn't put it past Sessions to have called for the death penalty for his crimes or to do so in the future, if that's the case what he proposed for others should be done to him. I would make him liable to the same forms of forfeiture that he is bringing back for far lesser crimes than his.
If Democrats don't win the election next year, if they don't take control of the Congress back, what I have called a cold civil war will certainly turn into a hot one, if it hasn't already. For members of the minority groups which Jeff Sessions hates and has sought to damage and destroy for his entire public life I think it's reaching that point now. One thing I think a lot of white Americans are discovering is that what was a racial and ethnic targeting is ultimately and inevitably bound to expand to include them on the basis of economic class. That is inevitable under this regime of billionaire attack on American democracy. I think among other things that are inevitably concluded is that democracy is incompatible with severe inequality in wealth. Despite the possibility of pointing to this or that billionaire who isn't a fascist oligarch, as a class such people will dominate and take an active part in destroying democracy for their own advantage and for ideological satisfaction. I don't think American democracy can survive with the billionaire class remaining so rich and having so much power because of their enormous wealth.
The United States Supreme Court has been the foremost organ of government exacerbating that power through its interpretation of the First and Fourteenth amendments as well as others. It is not a shock that the most undemocratic and the branch most remote from The People will have done that, it is predictable. With whatever benefits that come from having an appointed instead of an elected Supreme Court - and various states have shown that those can be as much of a problem - those come with this problem of remoteness and detachment from accountability. There should be a term limit of ten years on Supreme Court positions. But, ultimately, things such as corporate personhood, money = speech, corporate civil rights, and other corruptions of the United States through lawyers, law school scholars, judges and justices have to be abolished. And some of the worst of that was a product of allegedly liberal court advocated by allegedly liberal lawyers, legal associations and legal scholars whose liberalism is either stupid or corrupt. When you have such liberals who needs conservatives?
Jeff Sessions is just the latest poisonous fungus that has grown to rot out American democracy. That he is a lawyer who has played the role he has is not shocking, it is typical. The change will have to be with the Constitution, including the Bill or Rights and other amendments which have been used to mount this attack on us. The first step is to admit what has and is happening, the second one is to remove the traitors and their enablers from office and from power.
In 2017, it is clear that a fifth column exists in the United States and it is in control of the Congress, the Executive and the Supreme Court, it has, is and will sell the country down the rive to the billionaire oligarchs, domestic and foreign, it will betray and sell out and destroy the American People. The media which has played the biggest role in getting Trump into office, FOX, Sinclair, etc. are a part of this betrayal, they are the enemies of the American People and democracy.
I used the term "cold civil war" several weeks back to describe what's happening in the United States now, only it's a civil war against the large majority of the American people by concerted effort by billionaire oligarchs domestic, making common cause with foreign billionaire oligarchs who have successfully corrupted their own countries. They and their hireling Federalist lawyers and scholars have found every weakness in the current Constitution of the United States in order to blow gaping holes in our defenses against such attacks at their weakest points. The revelation under the excellent questioning by Senator Whitehouse that Jeff Session's Department of Justice has done nothing to address the de facto invasion of the United States by the Putin crime regime should carry a charge of treason against anyone in the government who is guilty of such nonfeasance. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions should be imprisoned as a traitor to the American People, the United States and democracy but he won't be because our Constitution doesn't call that kind of attack by the servant of even foreign enemies treason. I have not heard Jeff Sessions on the penalty for such crimes but since the crimes of Richard Nixon were revealed, I have held that any politician, especially in the highest reaches of the government who have campaigned on law and order but who breaks the law, should have written their own penalty. I wouldn't put it past Sessions to have called for the death penalty for his crimes or to do so in the future, if that's the case what he proposed for others should be done to him. I would make him liable to the same forms of forfeiture that he is bringing back for far lesser crimes than his.
If Democrats don't win the election next year, if they don't take control of the Congress back, what I have called a cold civil war will certainly turn into a hot one, if it hasn't already. For members of the minority groups which Jeff Sessions hates and has sought to damage and destroy for his entire public life I think it's reaching that point now. One thing I think a lot of white Americans are discovering is that what was a racial and ethnic targeting is ultimately and inevitably bound to expand to include them on the basis of economic class. That is inevitable under this regime of billionaire attack on American democracy. I think among other things that are inevitably concluded is that democracy is incompatible with severe inequality in wealth. Despite the possibility of pointing to this or that billionaire who isn't a fascist oligarch, as a class such people will dominate and take an active part in destroying democracy for their own advantage and for ideological satisfaction. I don't think American democracy can survive with the billionaire class remaining so rich and having so much power because of their enormous wealth.
The United States Supreme Court has been the foremost organ of government exacerbating that power through its interpretation of the First and Fourteenth amendments as well as others. It is not a shock that the most undemocratic and the branch most remote from The People will have done that, it is predictable. With whatever benefits that come from having an appointed instead of an elected Supreme Court - and various states have shown that those can be as much of a problem - those come with this problem of remoteness and detachment from accountability. There should be a term limit of ten years on Supreme Court positions. But, ultimately, things such as corporate personhood, money = speech, corporate civil rights, and other corruptions of the United States through lawyers, law school scholars, judges and justices have to be abolished. And some of the worst of that was a product of allegedly liberal court advocated by allegedly liberal lawyers, legal associations and legal scholars whose liberalism is either stupid or corrupt. When you have such liberals who needs conservatives?
Jeff Sessions is just the latest poisonous fungus that has grown to rot out American democracy. That he is a lawyer who has played the role he has is not shocking, it is typical. The change will have to be with the Constitution, including the Bill or Rights and other amendments which have been used to mount this attack on us. The first step is to admit what has and is happening, the second one is to remove the traitors and their enablers from office and from power.
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Hate Mail - The Ploy of Mounting Richard Weikart As The Darwinists' Boogey Man
The accusation that I'm just parroting the historian, Richard Weikart has been made, and that is something I share in common with the late Daniel Gasman, against whom Robert Richards mounted the same dishonest tactic of argument by association*, a subset that falls within the classic definition of the ad hominem fallacy - a term so abused that it has lost much of its meaning largely at the hands of the fan boys of such pop-atheists as Carl Sagan in the last forty years.
Well, I've talked about Richard Weikart the last time that happened and noted that I had used exactly one thing from him, a letter that Darwin sent to Heinrich Fick and that was only because the online Darwin Correspondence site, part of the academic wing of the St. Darwin industry, had, for some reason, failed to post the text of it.**
I have read things by Richard Weikart and find that as long as he doesn't express his opinions about evolutionary science, proper, he's what you'd expect from a prominent academic historian writing for reviewed journals, careful to be able to document and back up what he says in the historical record and in the literature he deals with. But I noted that even that doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to accept what he concludes nor that I'd trust what he says without looking at the documentation he relies on to say it. In the places I've done that about history and the historical record, I haven't caught him in any misrepresentations, something which I have, by the way, found in Darwin twice on rather important issues.
Nothing I have written on the topic has been based on secondary scholarship without checking the primary documents, in so far as those are available. Most of my initial conclusions came from reading a. The Decent of Man and On the Origin of Species, especially the last two editions of it that Darwin, himself, prepared and those scientific and other works that Darwin had cited in his scientific writings b. the correspondence of Charles Darwin, c. the testimony of his closest scientific colleagues, Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, etc. and the testimony of those closest to him, especially his sons Leonard, Francis and George Darwin. I have found that even respectable secondary sources, some of them with valuable clues of what to look at in that primary documentation, are seriously limited due to the ideological or academic side the author is trying to promote. That is especially troubling when the lapses and, at times, blatant dishonesty, fall well within the area in which the credibility of the scholar is supposed to reside.
In endorsing Daniel Gasman's arguments about the relationship of Ernst Haeckel to Nazism, last week, I noted that I disagreed with his desire to distance Haeckel from Charles Darwin, which has the considerable problem of the many, repeated and glowing endorsements of Charles Darwin made to Haeckel, himself, that he was one of the few who really got Darwin's theories and the fact that Darwin repeatedly, till the end of his life, endorsed books and articles in which Haeckel made many of the most obvious proto-Nazi statements as reliable science, even fact, directly attributing those to Charles Darwin and his theories. It is impossible for an honest scholar of Haeckel and his all important relationship with the thinking of Charles Darwin to avoid such things as the early attribution by Haeckel to Darwin of the the triumph of Haeckel's monism, one of the things which has earned him the reputation as a direct precursor of Nazism.
This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature constitutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin.
He made that statement early in the book Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte, which Darwin endorsed, in the strongest possible terms, as reliable science in The Descent of Man, an endorsement that Darwin never mitigated nor retracted in anything I've looked for and I looked hard at the evidence. I never found anywhere in which Darwin disavowed that attribution.
In that, the direct and inseparable relationship of Haeckel and Charles Darwin, oddly, it might seem, I agree with Robert Richards who, of the three, I've been the most critical. I am most critical of Richards because his project is the most blatantly dishonest, the rehabilitation of Ernst Haeckel who was a scientific racist, a proponent of the theory that genocide was necessary and would lead to salubrious results for the surviving murderers, a man who advocated the genocide of entire races, American Indians, Australians, other named ethnicities who he had placed as practically having the same status as animals in his infamous ranking of human groups. He also advocated the murder of those deemed unfit due to their disabilities and illnesses. In virtually every way, Ernst Haeckel advocated what the Nazis did, starting about 14 years after Haeckel's death.
No one who read Ernst Haeckel could honestly come to the view of him advocated by Robert Richards because, as with Darwin, he advocated exactly what he did in books presented as having the reliability of science. I think the post-war academic and journalistic effort to turn Charles Darwin into a figure at odds with his scientific writing is one of the most obviously tawdry frauds in modern intellectual life.
So, to sum up, from what I've read and tested, I would trust Richard Weikart's academic presentation of the relationship of Darwinism to Nazism, I would trust Daniel Gasman's presentation relating Haeckel to Nazism and I would trust Robert Richards' on the close relationship of Darwin and Haeckel. I would not trust any of them on other issues, Weikart on the general facts of evolution having happened and common descent (which, notably, is not within his area of academic expertise). I would not trust Gasman on the issue of Darwin's complete endorsement of Haeckel's interpretation of Darwin's theories, and I would not trust Robert Richards' on the nature of Haeckel's proto-Nazi scientific racism, social Darwinism and homicidal eugenics. I think of the three that Gasman's and Richards' lapses in their academic areas are the most serious.
* Richards' article assumes a malevolent, intemperate style and he chooses his words with intentional malice. There are instances where Ricahrds employs scarcely veiled mockery to get his questionable revisionist ideas across. He juxtaposes my writings together with those of Richard Weikart, even though Weikart and I disagree on almost all basic interpretations of Haeckel, Darwin and evolution and Richards must be well aware of the fact that I certainly do not lump Haeckel and Darwin together, as does Weikart. Richards' attempted synthesis of the two works is an apparent desire to introduce elements of confusion and even derision into the general academic discussion about Haeckel.
** It is curious to me that there are a number of such letters from Darwin, presumably all written in English in that I am unaware of him ever writing in any other language, many of them to Ernst Haeckel, held by the Haeckel Haus at the University of Jena and not needing translation before they can be published in that easy to research and read form. Weikart included the text of the letter in a short article he posted on Darwin promoting some pretty extreme positions of social Darwinism. If the Darwin establishment has found fault with his transmission of that one letter, I'd like to see where.
Well, I've talked about Richard Weikart the last time that happened and noted that I had used exactly one thing from him, a letter that Darwin sent to Heinrich Fick and that was only because the online Darwin Correspondence site, part of the academic wing of the St. Darwin industry, had, for some reason, failed to post the text of it.**
I have read things by Richard Weikart and find that as long as he doesn't express his opinions about evolutionary science, proper, he's what you'd expect from a prominent academic historian writing for reviewed journals, careful to be able to document and back up what he says in the historical record and in the literature he deals with. But I noted that even that doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to accept what he concludes nor that I'd trust what he says without looking at the documentation he relies on to say it. In the places I've done that about history and the historical record, I haven't caught him in any misrepresentations, something which I have, by the way, found in Darwin twice on rather important issues.
Nothing I have written on the topic has been based on secondary scholarship without checking the primary documents, in so far as those are available. Most of my initial conclusions came from reading a. The Decent of Man and On the Origin of Species, especially the last two editions of it that Darwin, himself, prepared and those scientific and other works that Darwin had cited in his scientific writings b. the correspondence of Charles Darwin, c. the testimony of his closest scientific colleagues, Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, etc. and the testimony of those closest to him, especially his sons Leonard, Francis and George Darwin. I have found that even respectable secondary sources, some of them with valuable clues of what to look at in that primary documentation, are seriously limited due to the ideological or academic side the author is trying to promote. That is especially troubling when the lapses and, at times, blatant dishonesty, fall well within the area in which the credibility of the scholar is supposed to reside.
In endorsing Daniel Gasman's arguments about the relationship of Ernst Haeckel to Nazism, last week, I noted that I disagreed with his desire to distance Haeckel from Charles Darwin, which has the considerable problem of the many, repeated and glowing endorsements of Charles Darwin made to Haeckel, himself, that he was one of the few who really got Darwin's theories and the fact that Darwin repeatedly, till the end of his life, endorsed books and articles in which Haeckel made many of the most obvious proto-Nazi statements as reliable science, even fact, directly attributing those to Charles Darwin and his theories. It is impossible for an honest scholar of Haeckel and his all important relationship with the thinking of Charles Darwin to avoid such things as the early attribution by Haeckel to Darwin of the the triumph of Haeckel's monism, one of the things which has earned him the reputation as a direct precursor of Nazism.
This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature constitutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin.
He made that statement early in the book Natürliche schöpfungsgeschichte, which Darwin endorsed, in the strongest possible terms, as reliable science in The Descent of Man, an endorsement that Darwin never mitigated nor retracted in anything I've looked for and I looked hard at the evidence. I never found anywhere in which Darwin disavowed that attribution.
In that, the direct and inseparable relationship of Haeckel and Charles Darwin, oddly, it might seem, I agree with Robert Richards who, of the three, I've been the most critical. I am most critical of Richards because his project is the most blatantly dishonest, the rehabilitation of Ernst Haeckel who was a scientific racist, a proponent of the theory that genocide was necessary and would lead to salubrious results for the surviving murderers, a man who advocated the genocide of entire races, American Indians, Australians, other named ethnicities who he had placed as practically having the same status as animals in his infamous ranking of human groups. He also advocated the murder of those deemed unfit due to their disabilities and illnesses. In virtually every way, Ernst Haeckel advocated what the Nazis did, starting about 14 years after Haeckel's death.
No one who read Ernst Haeckel could honestly come to the view of him advocated by Robert Richards because, as with Darwin, he advocated exactly what he did in books presented as having the reliability of science. I think the post-war academic and journalistic effort to turn Charles Darwin into a figure at odds with his scientific writing is one of the most obviously tawdry frauds in modern intellectual life.
So, to sum up, from what I've read and tested, I would trust Richard Weikart's academic presentation of the relationship of Darwinism to Nazism, I would trust Daniel Gasman's presentation relating Haeckel to Nazism and I would trust Robert Richards' on the close relationship of Darwin and Haeckel. I would not trust any of them on other issues, Weikart on the general facts of evolution having happened and common descent (which, notably, is not within his area of academic expertise). I would not trust Gasman on the issue of Darwin's complete endorsement of Haeckel's interpretation of Darwin's theories, and I would not trust Robert Richards' on the nature of Haeckel's proto-Nazi scientific racism, social Darwinism and homicidal eugenics. I think of the three that Gasman's and Richards' lapses in their academic areas are the most serious.
* Richards' article assumes a malevolent, intemperate style and he chooses his words with intentional malice. There are instances where Ricahrds employs scarcely veiled mockery to get his questionable revisionist ideas across. He juxtaposes my writings together with those of Richard Weikart, even though Weikart and I disagree on almost all basic interpretations of Haeckel, Darwin and evolution and Richards must be well aware of the fact that I certainly do not lump Haeckel and Darwin together, as does Weikart. Richards' attempted synthesis of the two works is an apparent desire to introduce elements of confusion and even derision into the general academic discussion about Haeckel.
** It is curious to me that there are a number of such letters from Darwin, presumably all written in English in that I am unaware of him ever writing in any other language, many of them to Ernst Haeckel, held by the Haeckel Haus at the University of Jena and not needing translation before they can be published in that easy to research and read form. Weikart included the text of the letter in a short article he posted on Darwin promoting some pretty extreme positions of social Darwinism. If the Darwin establishment has found fault with his transmission of that one letter, I'd like to see where.
No True Atheist - or When A Show Biz Atheist Does It That Makes It OK
Maybe the idiots at the company got the really disgusting and stupid idea from watching that really disgusting and stupid show.
I don't do American Halloween just like I don't do American Christmas or American Thanksgiving or American anything these days because I don't like holidays that involve buying crap and corporate commercialism and all things excessive. Especially holidays that are based on adding to the caloric load of simple carbohydrates and fat among America's children who are super-saturated with both.
I don't do American Halloween just like I don't do American Christmas or American Thanksgiving or American anything these days because I don't like holidays that involve buying crap and corporate commercialism and all things excessive. Especially holidays that are based on adding to the caloric load of simple carbohydrates and fat among America's children who are super-saturated with both.
Anyway, dopey is snarking about the repulsive Anne Frank halloween costume that was offered by Halloween Costume.com until the complaints forced them to remove what I hope is the low point of disgusting depravity outside of the Republican-fascist government and its emanations in the American Nazi movement. Apparently he's attributing the costume to Christians, how he knows this, I don't know. I was unable to find that information online and I would match my research skills against his total lack of research skills any day. How does he know it wasn't what it appears to be, the decision of devout, distasteful and not to bright Mammonists.
I do, though, have to ask if the disgusting act of turning Anne Frank into a Halloween Costume is any worse than pop-atheist Seth MacFarlane's Family Guy Holocaust jokes. One episode featured some really disgusting use of Anne Frank, her family and others who were hiding from the Nazis. Maybe the idiots at the company got the really disgusting idea from watching that really disgusting show. One thing we know, it didn't come from anything intelligent and respectful, thus the FOX series that my most obsessive troll loves put out by someone I've called a total piece of slime since I first heard him on the radio with Terry Gross and who has steadily reaffirmed my initial impression of him. Simps hasn't broken with him.
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Donald Trump is F*cking Crazy
I don't know how Youtubes are playing on the computer of anyone else but the past day commercials have been getting through my ad blocker, if you're getting commercials, I apologize but it's not my fault.
I may have to rethink posting Youtubes if they are going to carry commercials. Some of the ones I've gotten are really awful.
Question I Haven't Heard Anyone Answer Or Ask
Why isn't anyone slamming any of the conservatives in Hollywood and show biz for not outing Harvey Weinstein? It doesn't seem to have been a secret among them.
Citations of Natural Selection - A response
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
NATURAL SELECTION. KILL all retards, people w/ brain fuck ups, drug adics, people cant figure out to use a fucking lighter. GEEEAWD! people spend millions of dollars on saving the lives of retards, and why. I don't buy that shit like "oh hes my son though!" so the fuck what, he aint normal, kill him, put him out his misery. he is only a waste of time and money, then people say "But he is worth the time, he is human too" no he isnt, if he was then he would swalow a bullet cause he would realize what a fucking waste and burden he was. -- Eric Harris's Journal 4/10/98
Isnt america supposed to be the land of the free? how come, If im free, I cant deprive a stupid fucking dumbshit from his possessions If he leaves then sitting in the front seat of his fucking van out in plain sight and in the middle fucking nowhere on a Fri fucking day night. NATURAL SELECTION. Ibid. -- 4/12/98
Harris was wearing a white T-shirt with the words "Natural Selection'' on the front, black combat boots and a black glove on his right hand with the "fingers cut away.'' Denver Post on the release of the coroners report on Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
I chose that Darwin quote out of many others amounting to the same thing because it's possible it was as much as someone like Harris understands about natural selection. It certainly would seem to be what even college credentialed comment tread commentators understand about it and its role in the human species. People dying and getting killed. That's what Darwin said it was about, confirmed by his most scientifically qualified successors, people such as Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, Karl Pearson.... Eric Harris just put the same thing in cruder language. If anyone but the sacred Darwin had said it they would be considered a Nazi.
It wasn't reading that Eric Harris's psychopathological thinking was inspired by the idea of natural selection that led me to doubt it was anything but a British aristocrat's imposition of the homicidal British class system on nature, though it should have led me to wonder about it. When you read the statements of Darwin, including the idea of huge numbers, the disabled, the poor, many races and ethnic groups being murdered through natural selection and that the results would be good for the survivors, it's really just what Harris said in academic and scientific language. If you google "Eric Harris shirt," you can find shirts saying "Natural Selection" on sale to their fans, even today.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
NATURAL SELECTION. KILL all retards, people w/ brain fuck ups, drug adics, people cant figure out to use a fucking lighter. GEEEAWD! people spend millions of dollars on saving the lives of retards, and why. I don't buy that shit like "oh hes my son though!" so the fuck what, he aint normal, kill him, put him out his misery. he is only a waste of time and money, then people say "But he is worth the time, he is human too" no he isnt, if he was then he would swalow a bullet cause he would realize what a fucking waste and burden he was. -- Eric Harris's Journal 4/10/98
Isnt america supposed to be the land of the free? how come, If im free, I cant deprive a stupid fucking dumbshit from his possessions If he leaves then sitting in the front seat of his fucking van out in plain sight and in the middle fucking nowhere on a Fri fucking day night. NATURAL SELECTION. Ibid. -- 4/12/98
Harris was wearing a white T-shirt with the words "Natural Selection'' on the front, black combat boots and a black glove on his right hand with the "fingers cut away.'' Denver Post on the release of the coroners report on Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
I chose that Darwin quote out of many others amounting to the same thing because it's possible it was as much as someone like Harris understands about natural selection. It certainly would seem to be what even college credentialed comment tread commentators understand about it and its role in the human species. People dying and getting killed. That's what Darwin said it was about, confirmed by his most scientifically qualified successors, people such as Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, Karl Pearson.... Eric Harris just put the same thing in cruder language. If anyone but the sacred Darwin had said it they would be considered a Nazi.
It wasn't reading that Eric Harris's psychopathological thinking was inspired by the idea of natural selection that led me to doubt it was anything but a British aristocrat's imposition of the homicidal British class system on nature, though it should have led me to wonder about it. When you read the statements of Darwin, including the idea of huge numbers, the disabled, the poor, many races and ethnic groups being murdered through natural selection and that the results would be good for the survivors, it's really just what Harris said in academic and scientific language. If you google "Eric Harris shirt," you can find shirts saying "Natural Selection" on sale to their fans, even today.
Monday, October 16, 2017
Sunday, October 15, 2017
Hate Mail
I don't care what Duncan's blog rats say about anything. They spew old, worn out, predigested attitudes, they never challenge their prejudices or assertions they took on in conformity to the milieu they chose to be a part of, some as long as a half century ago. They never test their ideas. They're just a different flavor of bigots, they're the failed past that pissed away the progress made by real radicals like Diane Nash, the Reverend Martin Luther King jr. and so many others. As people wedded to the millstone that sank the left, they're less than undeserving of attention. As persistent and insistent agents of futility, they are best ignored.
Insisting on doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result. Nothing will ever come out of that but more failure.
Insisting on doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result. Nothing will ever come out of that but more failure.
Ralph Vaughan Williams - Symphony No.9
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Malcolm Sargent, conductor
Vaughan William's last symphony, completed shortly before his sudden death. Not bad for an 85 year old man. It's a work of someone in full control of musical materials, especially the very large orchestra he chose to write it for.
I was dared to post something by RVW. Why the dare? No idea.
When Darwinists Call Darwin A Liar
The claim is made that the infamously proto-Nazi assertion of Darwinism by Darwinism's foremost proponent in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, is a complete distortion of the theory of Charles Darwin and its consequences for the world and, most relevantly to my posts on it, human, their societies and their countries. That claim is obviously a lie, it can be known to be a lie because Charles Darwin endorsed Ernst Haeckel's interpretation of his theory of Natural Selection and common ancestry* in letters written to him in the 1860s and, in fact, for the rest of Charles Darwin's life, his son Francis attests to the agreement of his father and Haeckel on these things from his first person witness accounts of Haeckel's visits with his father, and, most of all, Darwin's citations of Haeckel, especially his glowing, complete endorsement of one of his most extreme, racist and homicidal volume published during Darwin's life, Haeckel's The History of Creation.
That he agreed with Haeckel' social Darwinism is also known by the letter Darwin wrote to Haeckel on reading what was Haeckel's most overt statement of that published during Darwin's life, His "Freedom in Teaching and Science," in which Haeckel said that Darwinism didn't support socialism or democracy but supported the inequality of an aristocratic system. His idea of such a Darwinian aristocracy included those he regarded as superior murdering huge numbers of those he regarded as inferior, that's something he had asserted in his scientific books and would, in fact, continue to assert during the rest of his life, ending the very year Nazism was first organized 1919. That is especially true of what was probably his best seller, The Riddle of the Universe, which went through many editions in German during the formative years of the boys and girls who would become the Nazi leadership and the true believers in it. Of that book, the scholar of the rise of Nazism, Daniel Gasman said:
The common understanding among historians about the connection between Haeckel and Hitler is this: Adolf Hitler (b. 1889) came of age during the decade and a half following the publication in 1899 of Ernst Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe, a runaway best seller that over the next two or three decades sold more copies internationally than the Bible and profoundly shaped the consciousness of the modern world. Haeckel’s book imparted a rigid Social Darwinist message purportedly derived from science: politics is applied biology, the Jews were an inferior race compared with the Aryans, Christianity was a religion of weakness, and that eugenic action was necessary to protect the racial composition of society.
That reading of Haeckel will be confirmed by that rarest of events in the life of any true-believing Darwinist, honestly reading Darwin and those people he cites, especially Haeckel. Though Darwin was reluctant to be specific about which races he believed were bound for extinction, though he named a number of smaller groups in the South Pacific and a few others, Haeckel, in books Darwin promoted as reliable science, was not so shy about starting an extermination list.
For anyone, especially today, who wants to deny that Haeckel's thinking was genuinely Darwinian, he could, if he were still around, point to numerous letters from Charles Darwin endorsing his excellence in articulating Darwin's theories, praise for his boldness and appreciation for the promotion of Haeckel of Darwin's theories in Germany. He could also cite Darwin's second in command, Thomas Huxley naming him the "chorus leader" of Darwinism on the Continent and, as mentioned, Francis Darwin's first hand testimony about his father's agreement with Haeckel. No one today has the authority to deny that all of the evidence, up to and including Charles Darwin's own assertions, is that he accepted Haeckel's view of Darwinism and his assertion of its logical consequences for human, individually, in societies and between racial groupings, including that it was supportive of salubrious and progressive violent struggle, murder and genocides.
I, from time to time, look closer at the English language and German phenomenon of Darwinism and, over and over again, find confirmation of that characteristic of it, producing ideas and theories and ideological assertions that produced anti-democratic movements and, yes, Nazism. When I started writing on this nine years ago, I was hesitant to make that connection but every year since then has only confirmed that connection and that it is obvious.
Note: I think Robert J. Richards attempt to rehabilitate Haeckel so as to exonerate Darwin is one of the most blatantly dishonest things I've ever looked into. It is blown up by doing what I've always advocated, reading the primary documentation and looking up the primary documents cited in those. I think it is truly stunning that someone who has done what he has is accepted as a legitimate scholar, who can work at a major university. While I think Gasman was too reluctant or unwilling to note that Darwin endorsed pretty much everything Haeckel said up to the time of his death - and, in fact, most of the worst things he said he'd already said in one form or another by that time - his take down of Richards is quite convincing.
* I believe in the latter, with the caveat that the ultimate nature of that is unknowable for the earliest life on Earth, I have become ever more skeptical of the former.
Update: Unlike you, unlike Robert Richards, unlike all of Darwin's post-war hagiographers who want to disassociate them, Ernst Haeckel knew Darwin, met him, conversed with him, first-hand as Darwin's honored guest at his home, he corresponded with Darwin and had letters from him endorsing his understanding and articulation of Darwin's theories and ideas. He had the confirmation of his understanding of that from Darwin's closest British colleagues and, in fact, Darwin's children, as well.
Your claims in that matter, separating Haeckel and Darwin and, in fact, even Daniel Gasman's has to give way to the superior claims that Haeckel could make in that regard. Richards is right in so far as he associates Haeckel and Darwin, he is not merely wrong but dishonest in asserting that both men didn't assert some of the most putrid of racist, elitist and violent assertions ever to be taken up as legitimate science and acted on politically and legally by politicians and jurists and military figures on the strength of those ideas identification as having the reliability of scientific knowledge. That couldn't possibly be clearer from reading the primary documentary evidence.
That he agreed with Haeckel' social Darwinism is also known by the letter Darwin wrote to Haeckel on reading what was Haeckel's most overt statement of that published during Darwin's life, His "Freedom in Teaching and Science," in which Haeckel said that Darwinism didn't support socialism or democracy but supported the inequality of an aristocratic system. His idea of such a Darwinian aristocracy included those he regarded as superior murdering huge numbers of those he regarded as inferior, that's something he had asserted in his scientific books and would, in fact, continue to assert during the rest of his life, ending the very year Nazism was first organized 1919. That is especially true of what was probably his best seller, The Riddle of the Universe, which went through many editions in German during the formative years of the boys and girls who would become the Nazi leadership and the true believers in it. Of that book, the scholar of the rise of Nazism, Daniel Gasman said:
The common understanding among historians about the connection between Haeckel and Hitler is this: Adolf Hitler (b. 1889) came of age during the decade and a half following the publication in 1899 of Ernst Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe, a runaway best seller that over the next two or three decades sold more copies internationally than the Bible and profoundly shaped the consciousness of the modern world. Haeckel’s book imparted a rigid Social Darwinist message purportedly derived from science: politics is applied biology, the Jews were an inferior race compared with the Aryans, Christianity was a religion of weakness, and that eugenic action was necessary to protect the racial composition of society.
That reading of Haeckel will be confirmed by that rarest of events in the life of any true-believing Darwinist, honestly reading Darwin and those people he cites, especially Haeckel. Though Darwin was reluctant to be specific about which races he believed were bound for extinction, though he named a number of smaller groups in the South Pacific and a few others, Haeckel, in books Darwin promoted as reliable science, was not so shy about starting an extermination list.
For anyone, especially today, who wants to deny that Haeckel's thinking was genuinely Darwinian, he could, if he were still around, point to numerous letters from Charles Darwin endorsing his excellence in articulating Darwin's theories, praise for his boldness and appreciation for the promotion of Haeckel of Darwin's theories in Germany. He could also cite Darwin's second in command, Thomas Huxley naming him the "chorus leader" of Darwinism on the Continent and, as mentioned, Francis Darwin's first hand testimony about his father's agreement with Haeckel. No one today has the authority to deny that all of the evidence, up to and including Charles Darwin's own assertions, is that he accepted Haeckel's view of Darwinism and his assertion of its logical consequences for human, individually, in societies and between racial groupings, including that it was supportive of salubrious and progressive violent struggle, murder and genocides.
I, from time to time, look closer at the English language and German phenomenon of Darwinism and, over and over again, find confirmation of that characteristic of it, producing ideas and theories and ideological assertions that produced anti-democratic movements and, yes, Nazism. When I started writing on this nine years ago, I was hesitant to make that connection but every year since then has only confirmed that connection and that it is obvious.
Note: I think Robert J. Richards attempt to rehabilitate Haeckel so as to exonerate Darwin is one of the most blatantly dishonest things I've ever looked into. It is blown up by doing what I've always advocated, reading the primary documentation and looking up the primary documents cited in those. I think it is truly stunning that someone who has done what he has is accepted as a legitimate scholar, who can work at a major university. While I think Gasman was too reluctant or unwilling to note that Darwin endorsed pretty much everything Haeckel said up to the time of his death - and, in fact, most of the worst things he said he'd already said in one form or another by that time - his take down of Richards is quite convincing.
* I believe in the latter, with the caveat that the ultimate nature of that is unknowable for the earliest life on Earth, I have become ever more skeptical of the former.
Update: Unlike you, unlike Robert Richards, unlike all of Darwin's post-war hagiographers who want to disassociate them, Ernst Haeckel knew Darwin, met him, conversed with him, first-hand as Darwin's honored guest at his home, he corresponded with Darwin and had letters from him endorsing his understanding and articulation of Darwin's theories and ideas. He had the confirmation of his understanding of that from Darwin's closest British colleagues and, in fact, Darwin's children, as well.
Your claims in that matter, separating Haeckel and Darwin and, in fact, even Daniel Gasman's has to give way to the superior claims that Haeckel could make in that regard. Richards is right in so far as he associates Haeckel and Darwin, he is not merely wrong but dishonest in asserting that both men didn't assert some of the most putrid of racist, elitist and violent assertions ever to be taken up as legitimate science and acted on politically and legally by politicians and jurists and military figures on the strength of those ideas identification as having the reliability of scientific knowledge. That couldn't possibly be clearer from reading the primary documentary evidence.