There was a time I associated atheism with sophistication of thought, but that was before the explosion of atheist babbling on pseudo-lefty blogs and, reading that, I realized it was anything but. Which led to me reading the old atheists more critically and finding out that it was never what it claimed to be. One of the things I found out is that atheists so often have to misrepresent things that are said into something that is more congenial to their ideological preferences. Only, since they've got to lie about what was said, it only proves they've got nothin'.
Saturday, October 28, 2017
Hate Mail
Freki and Simps, the artificial flowers of post-literacy are in full spume at Duncan's Drool Along.
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Halloween Mood Music - One Rerun And Some Others
James W. Nichol - Midnight Cab - The Mystery of the Silver Rings
Alf Silver - Clean Sweep - The Face On The Wall
And since posting series has gotten such an enthusiastic response, here's
There are some areas of the human mind, and indeed of the world we live in, that were never meant for investigation. There are always those who delve into the darker worlds of knowledge, and many pay with their sanity for their interest. Some of these unfortunates are taken in by the Hayward Foundation, an organization that studies paranormal experiences and their effects on humanity. It is cases such as these that are sent to a restored mansion in a small coastal town in Maine, a center for the care and study of the insane. Since the 1920s this place has been known as the Hayward Sanitarium.
In case anyone thinks I'd end up in a place like that, that kind of stuff is strictly for people from away, the indigenous criminally insane of my state run for office and get elected governor. But that's a real horror story.
Friday, October 27, 2017
Hate Mail - The Fat Is Between Their Ears, Mixed In With The Shit
I'm reaching the point where I don't care what the assholes of Eschaton say about me most days. Simps, Skeptic Tank (or whatever the stinking hole is calling himself these days) Tlaz, the rest.
The ones who aren't assholes apparently have a defective olfactory sense.
Stupy repeated his misrepresentation of what I said about Fats Domino yesterday and now the idiots are accusing me of "fat shaming" for noting that a fat guy who went by the name of "Fats" was quite fat for a large part of his career and that being obese is a health hazard. And the guy saying it plays a scientist on Eschaton. My guess is his specialty is something largely bogus, soc-sci or something to do with computers.
Apparently everyone who ever made reference to his weight since his colleagues gave him his nickname because he was, what, fat, were "fat shaming" him all these years. If I'd noted that someone who goes by the name of "Slim" was slim would that have been "slim shaming"?
The ones who aren't assholes apparently have a defective olfactory sense.
Stupy repeated his misrepresentation of what I said about Fats Domino yesterday and now the idiots are accusing me of "fat shaming" for noting that a fat guy who went by the name of "Fats" was quite fat for a large part of his career and that being obese is a health hazard. And the guy saying it plays a scientist on Eschaton. My guess is his specialty is something largely bogus, soc-sci or something to do with computers.
Apparently everyone who ever made reference to his weight since his colleagues gave him his nickname because he was, what, fat, were "fat shaming" him all these years. If I'd noted that someone who goes by the name of "Slim" was slim would that have been "slim shaming"?
Thursday, October 26, 2017
Response To A Question: Who's Mulgrew Miller - Mulgrew Miller solo concert at The Felicja Blumental Music Center
You mean who was Mulgrew Miller. A very fine jazz pianist and composer.
Pollution Of The Imagination To Permit Abuse And Discrimination
The important thing to remember is that it's about power, and the idea that you have to dominate in order to be sexual.
Gloria Steinem last night speaking about the fall out of the Harvey Weinstein scandal on Chris Hayes' "All In"
An all too pervasive American template for thinking about sex, and it's hardly exclusive to the United States, is in terms of male dominance and submission by whoever he wants to penetrate. Essentially sex as presented in the media is frequently, perhaps mostly not unrelated to the act of rape. That is certainly the dominant messaging of pronography, it is largely a promotion of rape in all of it forms, a man dominating and penetrating a woman or another man or a child or an animal. Porn is an ad campaign for inequality and rape, one which is championed by pseudo-liberalism and which is just another venue of media fascists like Rupert Murdoch to make money in.
That is also the predominant dynamic of the sex industry in its other forms, pornography being merely prostitution for filming sale to voyeurs.
I have come to believe that that issue is really what is behind the association of sex with sin in the Bible, that it is so frequently attached to abuse and the equivalent of rape. You get the feeling that what you read in the several passages trotted out by gay bashers is written by straight men who are entirely ignorant of the full range of possible same-sex relations but who have seen the worst kind and figure that's all there is to it. They couldn't imagine faithful, devoted same sex relationships which weren't based in sexual practices of dominance that was an expression of injustice. One of the more interesting complexes of such statements is in Paul's First Letter to Timothy
8. We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. 9 We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, 10 for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine 11 that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me. 1 Timothy 1:8-11
Set into a series of crimes against other people, murder, unspecified sexual immorality, slave trading, lying and those who bear false witness is the one they use as a money shot in their case against LGBT rights and equality. Susannah Heschel, in another of her talks carried online and in her brilliantly different take on Paul pretty much wonders if the reason he was unmarried was because he was such a difficult person, but we can be pretty well assured that he was almost certainly a virgin. So there is no way for Paul to have had first-hand, personal knowledge about moral marital relationships based on mutual love and respect and not on the practice of someone being raped by a man in an act of domination. He seems to be able to imagine such a thing in a heterosexual marriage, he seems unable to imagine it between two men. Paul we know something about, the other passages so used, we know little to nothing about the people who wrote those. In other places the mention of sex between men is imagined in terms of temple prostitution, the near ubiquitous practice among pagans of making slave children of both genders available to men to rape associated with pagan religion, the use of one man by another, reducing him to the status of a raped child - a practice which was, itself, forbidden by the Jewish religion.
Today it's an obvious truth to anyone who has seen the wide range of expressions of LBGT equality that there is a part of male gay expression which is based on such inequality and, as I've mentioned over and over again, that is most seen in gay porn, especially that on the Tumblr platform though also in the direct marketing of online porn. I would have to say that most of what I've seen promoted in porn is either dangerously unhygenic, bareback - unprotected anal sex, oral-anal contact, other exchanges of bodily fluid the dominance of a bigger, stronger, older or otherwise imagined empowered man over one presented as disempowered, the exploitation of younger men and boys by older men, the rape, torture, abuse, enslavement and destruction of those presented as weaker, the proliferation of "alpha male" - "fag" abuse and torture themes, simulated if not actual incest in which "fathers, older brothers, uncles" rape "sons" or, heaven help us, "grandsons" the rise of white supremacist and overt Nazi gay porn sites on Tumblr and elsewhere are the predominant media presence of gay men in the United States and, I'm sure, many other places. And yet people wonder about what fuels the backlash against LGBT rights, what provides so many straight people with their imagined concepts of gay men - especially, which for many straight people is going to be the only place they get an imagined concept of gay men.
I don't remember who said it, maybe Ann Landers, who said that the brain was the primary sex organ, but it's certainly true that other than your own life experience that everything you think about other people and their lives is a product of your imagination, the images you see and create of what their lives are. Obviously Harvey Weinstein has some particularly sick images of women and heterosexual sex as part of his background, Donald Trump as well and all of it mixed in with the sexualiation of male supremacy over women, a subset of, no doubt, their thinking about how to succeed in business as well as life And they aren't alone. A large part of those in control of the American media obviously share their ideas and even those who don't market stuff to those they have good reason to believe do like that kind of thing - straight porn is saturated with much of the same kind of thing, so much so that there are gay porn sites that are dedicated to carrying straight porn of men abusing women.
It is the easiest thing in the world for someone to associate sex with injustice, with cruelty, to exploitation, coercion rape and willful destruction of someone because you can do that and get away with it because that is so pervasive in the media presentation of sex. And that's as true of straight sex as it is for gay sex. Only it's more acceptable among straight people when it's a male doing it to a female. The largest part, the large majority of the sexual immorality that happens in the world is done in the context of straight sex. If LGBT people want to disassociate ourselves with immoral sex, we're going to have to reject that because it might take what it did to out Weinstein to do it for rich, white, straight men, we're not going to be able to avoid it unless we reject it.
Gloria Steinem last night speaking about the fall out of the Harvey Weinstein scandal on Chris Hayes' "All In"
An all too pervasive American template for thinking about sex, and it's hardly exclusive to the United States, is in terms of male dominance and submission by whoever he wants to penetrate. Essentially sex as presented in the media is frequently, perhaps mostly not unrelated to the act of rape. That is certainly the dominant messaging of pronography, it is largely a promotion of rape in all of it forms, a man dominating and penetrating a woman or another man or a child or an animal. Porn is an ad campaign for inequality and rape, one which is championed by pseudo-liberalism and which is just another venue of media fascists like Rupert Murdoch to make money in.
That is also the predominant dynamic of the sex industry in its other forms, pornography being merely prostitution for filming sale to voyeurs.
I have come to believe that that issue is really what is behind the association of sex with sin in the Bible, that it is so frequently attached to abuse and the equivalent of rape. You get the feeling that what you read in the several passages trotted out by gay bashers is written by straight men who are entirely ignorant of the full range of possible same-sex relations but who have seen the worst kind and figure that's all there is to it. They couldn't imagine faithful, devoted same sex relationships which weren't based in sexual practices of dominance that was an expression of injustice. One of the more interesting complexes of such statements is in Paul's First Letter to Timothy
8. We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. 9 We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, 10 for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine 11 that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me. 1 Timothy 1:8-11
Set into a series of crimes against other people, murder, unspecified sexual immorality, slave trading, lying and those who bear false witness is the one they use as a money shot in their case against LGBT rights and equality. Susannah Heschel, in another of her talks carried online and in her brilliantly different take on Paul pretty much wonders if the reason he was unmarried was because he was such a difficult person, but we can be pretty well assured that he was almost certainly a virgin. So there is no way for Paul to have had first-hand, personal knowledge about moral marital relationships based on mutual love and respect and not on the practice of someone being raped by a man in an act of domination. He seems to be able to imagine such a thing in a heterosexual marriage, he seems unable to imagine it between two men. Paul we know something about, the other passages so used, we know little to nothing about the people who wrote those. In other places the mention of sex between men is imagined in terms of temple prostitution, the near ubiquitous practice among pagans of making slave children of both genders available to men to rape associated with pagan religion, the use of one man by another, reducing him to the status of a raped child - a practice which was, itself, forbidden by the Jewish religion.
Today it's an obvious truth to anyone who has seen the wide range of expressions of LBGT equality that there is a part of male gay expression which is based on such inequality and, as I've mentioned over and over again, that is most seen in gay porn, especially that on the Tumblr platform though also in the direct marketing of online porn. I would have to say that most of what I've seen promoted in porn is either dangerously unhygenic, bareback - unprotected anal sex, oral-anal contact, other exchanges of bodily fluid the dominance of a bigger, stronger, older or otherwise imagined empowered man over one presented as disempowered, the exploitation of younger men and boys by older men, the rape, torture, abuse, enslavement and destruction of those presented as weaker, the proliferation of "alpha male" - "fag" abuse and torture themes, simulated if not actual incest in which "fathers, older brothers, uncles" rape "sons" or, heaven help us, "grandsons" the rise of white supremacist and overt Nazi gay porn sites on Tumblr and elsewhere are the predominant media presence of gay men in the United States and, I'm sure, many other places. And yet people wonder about what fuels the backlash against LGBT rights, what provides so many straight people with their imagined concepts of gay men - especially, which for many straight people is going to be the only place they get an imagined concept of gay men.
I don't remember who said it, maybe Ann Landers, who said that the brain was the primary sex organ, but it's certainly true that other than your own life experience that everything you think about other people and their lives is a product of your imagination, the images you see and create of what their lives are. Obviously Harvey Weinstein has some particularly sick images of women and heterosexual sex as part of his background, Donald Trump as well and all of it mixed in with the sexualiation of male supremacy over women, a subset of, no doubt, their thinking about how to succeed in business as well as life And they aren't alone. A large part of those in control of the American media obviously share their ideas and even those who don't market stuff to those they have good reason to believe do like that kind of thing - straight porn is saturated with much of the same kind of thing, so much so that there are gay porn sites that are dedicated to carrying straight porn of men abusing women.
It is the easiest thing in the world for someone to associate sex with injustice, with cruelty, to exploitation, coercion rape and willful destruction of someone because you can do that and get away with it because that is so pervasive in the media presentation of sex. And that's as true of straight sex as it is for gay sex. Only it's more acceptable among straight people when it's a male doing it to a female. The largest part, the large majority of the sexual immorality that happens in the world is done in the context of straight sex. If LGBT people want to disassociate ourselves with immoral sex, we're going to have to reject that because it might take what it did to out Weinstein to do it for rich, white, straight men, we're not going to be able to avoid it unless we reject it.
Contrary To What Has Been Claimed
Fats Domino was, from everything I've ever seen about him, a good husband and father, a good family man, a good member of his community and from everything I've heard from him, he was a very talented musician, piano player and songwriter. I'm happy for him that he had 89 years of life and hope he's gone on to his place in The Kingdom of God. Whatever else you may have read.
I'm not going to pretend to hold the kind of grief for him that I would someone I knew, personally, someone much younger who died too young or of preventable or treatable disease or illness or unnatural causes. That kind of mawkish display is way too common and way too phony and way too cheap and entirely revolting. It's not about the person who died but about the person who's making the phony display. There's way too much phoniness in the world, as it is, without me adding more to it.
I'm not going to pretend to hold the kind of grief for him that I would someone I knew, personally, someone much younger who died too young or of preventable or treatable disease or illness or unnatural causes. That kind of mawkish display is way too common and way too phony and way too cheap and entirely revolting. It's not about the person who died but about the person who's making the phony display. There's way too much phoniness in the world, as it is, without me adding more to it.
Wednesday, October 25, 2017
Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish - Hosea Explained It All A Few Words Changed
Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel [America]
for the Lord has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land.
There is no faithfulness or loyalty,
and no knowledge of God in the land.
Swearing, lying, and murder,
and stealing and adultery break out;
bloodshed follows bloodshed.
Therefore the land mourns,
and all who live in it languish;
together with the wild animals
and the birds of the air,
even the fish of the sea are perishing.
Yet let no one contend,
and let none accuse,
for with you is my contention, O priest [professor or Supreme Court Justice or TV pundit....works here]
You shall stumble by day;
the prophet [pundit] also shall stumble with you by night,
and I will destroy your mother [family]
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge;
because you have rejected knowledge,
I reject you from being a priest to me.
And since you have forgotten the law of your God,
I also will forget your children.
The more they increased [prospered],
the more they sinned against me;
they changed their glory [freedom] into shame.
They feed on the sin of my people;
they are greedy for their iniquity.
And it shall be like people, like priest;
I will punish them for their ways,
and repay them for their deeds.
They shall eat, but not be satisfied;
they shall play the whore [you can take your pick of vices, Trump can provide a long list as can the men of FOX], but not multiply;
because they have forsaken the Lord
to devote themselves to whoredom.
Wine and new wine [big Pharma]
take away the understanding.
My people consult a piece of wood [screen]
and their divining rod [polls] gives them oracles.
For a spirit of whoredom [pretty much all commerce] has led them astray,
and they have played the whore, forsaking their God.
They sacrifice on the tops of the mountains [they sacrifice the whole mountain top]
and make offerings upon the hills,
under oak, poplar, and terebinth [change this to clear cutting]
because their shade is good [air conditioning replaced that]
Therefore your daughters play the whore,
and your daughters-in-law commit adultery. [make that gender neutral and it's spot on]
I will not punish your daughters when they play the whore,
nor your daughters-in-law when they commit adultery;
for the men themselves go aside with whores,
and sacrifice with temple prostitutes [read "Hollywood" "the NFL" and the other actual venues of corporate Mammonism]
thus a people without understanding comes to ruin.
Though you play the whore, O Israel,
do not let Judah become guilty.
Do not enter into Gilgal,
or go up to Beth-aven,
and do not swear, “As the Lord lives.”
Like a stubborn heifer,
Israel is stubborn;
can the Lord now feed them
like a lamb in a broad pasture?
Ephraim is joined to idols—
let him alone.
When their drinking is ended, they indulge in sexual orgies;
they love lewdness more than their glory.
A wind has wrapped them in its wings,
and they shall be ashamed because of their altars.
I was exposed to FOX TV in a waiting room and all I can think of is Hosea 4. For "Israel" read "America", for "priest" read TV, for "sacrifice" read "indulge" for "wood" think "screen", and make a few other updates and it works to explain us quite well. Especially if you think of "priest" as "TV preacher, or in the current media use of the word "evangelical" (they never mean the liberal ones), or "Values Voters". You update the language to match our contemporary fetishizing of the kind of "freedom" that enslaves and it's a perfect match.You can come up with all kinds of equivalents for what Hosea was talking about in the context of Israel gone bad in the 8th century, BCE and it works just as well for the United States in 2017.
Speaking of Israel, Susannah Heschel on morality, vision, and corruption
I love Susannah Heschel. What she said about Israel goes a thousand times for the United States.
for the Lord has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land.
There is no faithfulness or loyalty,
and no knowledge of God in the land.
Swearing, lying, and murder,
and stealing and adultery break out;
bloodshed follows bloodshed.
Therefore the land mourns,
and all who live in it languish;
together with the wild animals
and the birds of the air,
even the fish of the sea are perishing.
Yet let no one contend,
and let none accuse,
for with you is my contention, O priest [professor or Supreme Court Justice or TV pundit....works here]
You shall stumble by day;
the prophet [pundit] also shall stumble with you by night,
and I will destroy your mother [family]
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge;
because you have rejected knowledge,
I reject you from being a priest to me.
And since you have forgotten the law of your God,
I also will forget your children.
The more they increased [prospered],
the more they sinned against me;
they changed their glory [freedom] into shame.
They feed on the sin of my people;
they are greedy for their iniquity.
And it shall be like people, like priest;
I will punish them for their ways,
and repay them for their deeds.
They shall eat, but not be satisfied;
they shall play the whore [you can take your pick of vices, Trump can provide a long list as can the men of FOX], but not multiply;
because they have forsaken the Lord
to devote themselves to whoredom.
Wine and new wine [big Pharma]
take away the understanding.
My people consult a piece of wood [screen]
and their divining rod [polls] gives them oracles.
For a spirit of whoredom [pretty much all commerce] has led them astray,
and they have played the whore, forsaking their God.
They sacrifice on the tops of the mountains [they sacrifice the whole mountain top]
and make offerings upon the hills,
under oak, poplar, and terebinth [change this to clear cutting]
because their shade is good [air conditioning replaced that]
Therefore your daughters play the whore,
and your daughters-in-law commit adultery. [make that gender neutral and it's spot on]
I will not punish your daughters when they play the whore,
nor your daughters-in-law when they commit adultery;
for the men themselves go aside with whores,
and sacrifice with temple prostitutes [read "Hollywood" "the NFL" and the other actual venues of corporate Mammonism]
thus a people without understanding comes to ruin.
Though you play the whore, O Israel,
do not let Judah become guilty.
Do not enter into Gilgal,
or go up to Beth-aven,
and do not swear, “As the Lord lives.”
Like a stubborn heifer,
Israel is stubborn;
can the Lord now feed them
like a lamb in a broad pasture?
Ephraim is joined to idols—
let him alone.
When their drinking is ended, they indulge in sexual orgies;
they love lewdness more than their glory.
A wind has wrapped them in its wings,
and they shall be ashamed because of their altars.
I was exposed to FOX TV in a waiting room and all I can think of is Hosea 4. For "Israel" read "America", for "priest" read TV, for "sacrifice" read "indulge" for "wood" think "screen", and make a few other updates and it works to explain us quite well. Especially if you think of "priest" as "TV preacher, or in the current media use of the word "evangelical" (they never mean the liberal ones), or "Values Voters". You update the language to match our contemporary fetishizing of the kind of "freedom" that enslaves and it's a perfect match.You can come up with all kinds of equivalents for what Hosea was talking about in the context of Israel gone bad in the 8th century, BCE and it works just as well for the United States in 2017.
Speaking of Israel, Susannah Heschel on morality, vision, and corruption
I love Susannah Heschel. What she said about Israel goes a thousand times for the United States.
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Monday, October 23, 2017
Response To A Question. Who is this Simps and Why Do You Hate Each Other So Much?
I didn't claim everything he's ever said is a lie. He's known to often say "words fail me" which is true but in all fairness to words, he failed them first.
As to why I address him. He has been a smearing me at Duncan Black's blog for more than five years as an anti-Semite, when I've challenged him to quote what I said that is anti-Semitic he can't come up with any actual quotes, he just repeats the lies. There isn't anything he's ever said that is interesting or important so if it weren't for that or other lesser lies he tells about me I'd probably never acknowledge his existence. Or Duncan's. I wasted a lot of time there, though never as much after 2006 as before then. Lots of people had noted that he was going through the motions and the comments were a waste of time even before then. I guess Duncan likes it that way, as long as he makes money off of it.
As to why Simps hates me, don't know, don't care.
Update: I don't know who he was and I don't care. I don't remember Simps going into histrionic paroxysms of feigned grief when Mulgrew Miller died, and he was a lot younger. Not to mention such people as Geri Allen.
Update 2: He's gone all Margaret Dumont over me not knowing some pop musician who died at the age of 68. He's such a cheap ham
Apparently it's not sunk in to Simps that people die. You'd think he might want to think about that at his age. It's pretty funny how the atheists of Eschaton go on about people dying at even extremely old ages as well as those which fall well within the average life span, they're the ones who say we can't face mortality. I learned, when my second nephew died in his thirties that at my age I've got nothing to complain about if I die tonight, this close to three score and ten.
Hey, Simps, people die. I faced that fact when I was 16, sitting in a study hall and I suddenly started laughing because I realized that nothing I did was going to prevent me from dying someday and I should just accept it. Face it. You won't get so bummed out about it when people die from natural causes. It's the ones who don't die of natural causes that are worth getting bummed out over.
Update 3: He's stunned and outraged that I got his age wrong, he died at 71, not 68. The outrage is feigned, the stunned is his natural state.
Update 4: Simps is whining about this non-exchange at Duncan's blog. He was asked why I call him "Simps" by someone who said it was the equivalent of calling Bruce Springsteen "The Boss" - obviously Simps isn't the only simp at Eschaton. Simps answered that I think it makes him look stupid. Oh dear, with a set up like that how can I keep myself from pointing out that he makes himself look stupid by saying stupid stuff. Hey, Simps, when I said you'd gone all Dumont I didn't expect you to prove it by giving me a line like that. Only she understood the comedy she played that role in, you don't
Some of Duncan's regulars call his regular commentators "the brain trust". Yes, they really do. "Brain trust".
As to why I address him. He has been a smearing me at Duncan Black's blog for more than five years as an anti-Semite, when I've challenged him to quote what I said that is anti-Semitic he can't come up with any actual quotes, he just repeats the lies. There isn't anything he's ever said that is interesting or important so if it weren't for that or other lesser lies he tells about me I'd probably never acknowledge his existence. Or Duncan's. I wasted a lot of time there, though never as much after 2006 as before then. Lots of people had noted that he was going through the motions and the comments were a waste of time even before then. I guess Duncan likes it that way, as long as he makes money off of it.
As to why Simps hates me, don't know, don't care.
Update: I don't know who he was and I don't care. I don't remember Simps going into histrionic paroxysms of feigned grief when Mulgrew Miller died, and he was a lot younger. Not to mention such people as Geri Allen.
Update 2: He's gone all Margaret Dumont over me not knowing some pop musician who died at the age of 68. He's such a cheap ham
Apparently it's not sunk in to Simps that people die. You'd think he might want to think about that at his age. It's pretty funny how the atheists of Eschaton go on about people dying at even extremely old ages as well as those which fall well within the average life span, they're the ones who say we can't face mortality. I learned, when my second nephew died in his thirties that at my age I've got nothing to complain about if I die tonight, this close to three score and ten.
Hey, Simps, people die. I faced that fact when I was 16, sitting in a study hall and I suddenly started laughing because I realized that nothing I did was going to prevent me from dying someday and I should just accept it. Face it. You won't get so bummed out about it when people die from natural causes. It's the ones who don't die of natural causes that are worth getting bummed out over.
Update 3: He's stunned and outraged that I got his age wrong, he died at 71, not 68. The outrage is feigned, the stunned is his natural state.
Update 4: Simps is whining about this non-exchange at Duncan's blog. He was asked why I call him "Simps" by someone who said it was the equivalent of calling Bruce Springsteen "The Boss" - obviously Simps isn't the only simp at Eschaton. Simps answered that I think it makes him look stupid. Oh dear, with a set up like that how can I keep myself from pointing out that he makes himself look stupid by saying stupid stuff. Hey, Simps, when I said you'd gone all Dumont I didn't expect you to prove it by giving me a line like that. Only she understood the comedy she played that role in, you don't
Some of Duncan's regulars call his regular commentators "the brain trust". Yes, they really do. "Brain trust".
Danny Grissett Trio - Heard's Word
Danny Grissett - Piano
Joe Martin - bass
Jonathan Barber - drums
From Day To Day
Natterings Of Ignorance As Common Received Knowledge - or Movies As Education
For anyone who wants to read more about the real trial that they mistakenly think they know about from the movie and made for TV iterations of Inherit the Wind or the only somewhat less fictionalized accounts of the trial or Clarence Darrow, here is a website dedicated to the topic from a British student of it which someone pointed me to Saturday. Unfortunately many of the links to other sites are no longer operational but many still are. I was especially interested on his take on the legal career of Clarence Darrow and how the facts of it are more likely than not a refutation of the various legends about him. He was not a great thinker and a student of science and reason - as the accounts of his debate with Chesterton and a real reading of the record of his questioning of William Jennings Bryan and a reading of his 12 hour long plea against executing Leopold and Loeb indicate. That the various authors who did that easiest and cheapest of feats, duping people, especially, it would seem, talking college educated people into believing that a movie was an easy route into accurate historical knowledge, couldn't rely on accurately presenting him to get the effect desired could stand as an important lesson in why making that assumption about "bio pics" and "historical" drama is really, really stupid. That the self-designated thinkers among us are so often duped by their habits and laziness, falling for the cheapest of show biz and PR persuasion techniques should lead to skepticism about that huge industrial effort in credentialing.
I present the links above not because you should take what is said at face value but as a motivation to either test the claims made or to at least persuade you that what we were sold in such movies and TV shows and, less importantly, for any political or moral effect, plays and novels, stands a high chance of being a lie.
In my going on two decades of online brawling with such people I've come to see that the quality of thought among even many of those with the most impressive degrees, some of them from the most supposedly impressive universities in the English speaking world has more to do with the rote learning and incorporation of claims than it does the testing of ideas through skeptical consideration or the or even the most banal level of intellectual activity in fact checking, exactly the things that RMJ called out on the issue in the comments Saturday. I have found that little to nothing of the common received "knowledge" of popular or even much of elite atheism and scientism and modernism and the loosely bound aggregate of social signifiers held to make someone a member in good standing of the kewl kids stands up better to that than many of the beliefs of their rival cliques, the designated dopes.
No one can know everything, it was supposed to be the case that such people as couldn't know everything but who were to be considered educated learned how to think critically about the things they didn't know - in so far as that is possible.* But it turns out that education in critical thinking skills only goes so far, if it goes at all. The credentialing of people with degrees is no guarantee of that. The idea that modern, up to date, media savviness was going to be a replacement for doing that is a flop. What it has done is provide people with a means of extending the worst aspects of high school into old age, adolescence into senescence.
Politically, they've earned American liberalism the hostility that snobbery is bound to generate while undermining and hollowing out the moral foundation that liberalism must rest on. And that's something that goes back into the 19th if not 18th century, it is one of the most self defeating aspects of alleged enlightenment, alleged modernism. As I've tested the common received wisdom of both I've found it is generally not as labeled and sold as. It's got more in common with Donald Trump and Steve Bannon than they'd ever want to believe possible. What I'm finding is that it's hardly productive of a durable liberalism that can avoid adopting self-defeating attitudes of the stupidest kind, such as enabling lies and greed.
Plays, movies, TV movies, popular novels, those are about as bad a replacement for critical thinking about the record of reality as they could be expected to be. In the Trump phenomenon, in the cabloidization of journalism, in the rise of American Nazism, we're seeing what happens when entertainment is relied upon to educate a population. Hollywood might just turn out to be our Nuremberg, and I'm not talking about the post-war trials, I'm talking about the stuff recorded and edited on film by Riefenstahl. Only the real thing, not the lies she sold through movies.
* It's entirely loony, how people with no knowledge of a topic or even the technical knowledge or training in an area, science, for example, are expected to have a meaningful opinion about it. But what's more remarkable is when you're expected to hold a certain opinion and to defend it even when its refutation is easily found and depends on something such as the mere act of reading with comprehension to refute its falseness. That's hardly an erroneous habit that is banished from the allegedly educated population, especially now when so much of the time of it is taken up with entertainment media and things like cable TV polemics.
I present the links above not because you should take what is said at face value but as a motivation to either test the claims made or to at least persuade you that what we were sold in such movies and TV shows and, less importantly, for any political or moral effect, plays and novels, stands a high chance of being a lie.
In my going on two decades of online brawling with such people I've come to see that the quality of thought among even many of those with the most impressive degrees, some of them from the most supposedly impressive universities in the English speaking world has more to do with the rote learning and incorporation of claims than it does the testing of ideas through skeptical consideration or the or even the most banal level of intellectual activity in fact checking, exactly the things that RMJ called out on the issue in the comments Saturday. I have found that little to nothing of the common received "knowledge" of popular or even much of elite atheism and scientism and modernism and the loosely bound aggregate of social signifiers held to make someone a member in good standing of the kewl kids stands up better to that than many of the beliefs of their rival cliques, the designated dopes.
No one can know everything, it was supposed to be the case that such people as couldn't know everything but who were to be considered educated learned how to think critically about the things they didn't know - in so far as that is possible.* But it turns out that education in critical thinking skills only goes so far, if it goes at all. The credentialing of people with degrees is no guarantee of that. The idea that modern, up to date, media savviness was going to be a replacement for doing that is a flop. What it has done is provide people with a means of extending the worst aspects of high school into old age, adolescence into senescence.
Politically, they've earned American liberalism the hostility that snobbery is bound to generate while undermining and hollowing out the moral foundation that liberalism must rest on. And that's something that goes back into the 19th if not 18th century, it is one of the most self defeating aspects of alleged enlightenment, alleged modernism. As I've tested the common received wisdom of both I've found it is generally not as labeled and sold as. It's got more in common with Donald Trump and Steve Bannon than they'd ever want to believe possible. What I'm finding is that it's hardly productive of a durable liberalism that can avoid adopting self-defeating attitudes of the stupidest kind, such as enabling lies and greed.
Plays, movies, TV movies, popular novels, those are about as bad a replacement for critical thinking about the record of reality as they could be expected to be. In the Trump phenomenon, in the cabloidization of journalism, in the rise of American Nazism, we're seeing what happens when entertainment is relied upon to educate a population. Hollywood might just turn out to be our Nuremberg, and I'm not talking about the post-war trials, I'm talking about the stuff recorded and edited on film by Riefenstahl. Only the real thing, not the lies she sold through movies.
* It's entirely loony, how people with no knowledge of a topic or even the technical knowledge or training in an area, science, for example, are expected to have a meaningful opinion about it. But what's more remarkable is when you're expected to hold a certain opinion and to defend it even when its refutation is easily found and depends on something such as the mere act of reading with comprehension to refute its falseness. That's hardly an erroneous habit that is banished from the allegedly educated population, especially now when so much of the time of it is taken up with entertainment media and things like cable TV polemics.
Sunday, October 22, 2017
Danny Grissett - Hopscotch
Danny Grissett, piano
Vicente Archer, bass
Kendrick Scott, drums
It Could Happen To You
A Question of Honesty As A Question of Honor And Democratic Morality
It occurred to me this morning that if I'd been at John Kelly's repulsive press conference the other day I'd have been qualified, by his rules, to have asked him questions. I do know Gold Star families, I'm related rather closely to a couple of them. I'm old enough to have known a number of families who lost members in WWII, Korea, Vietnam and the more recent wars. I don't know but suspect that the probability of knowing families of those who died in the military service to the United States rises sharply in inverse proportion to the wealth of the family you grew up in. I would like to know how many of the members of the Trump regime would have been qualified by John Kelly to have the honor of asking him a question at that press conference. If he'd limited it to Gold Star families, his own boss wouldn't be qualified.
If the repulsive Sarah Huckabee Sanders' rule for questioning someone of Kelly's military rank were to prevail, practically no one in the Trump regime or the Republican caucus in the House and Senate would be qualified to question him. I would like to know what Sarah Huckabee Sanders qualifications would have been both under Kelly's rules of who was good enough to ask him questions and under her own even more repulsive use of his status for political ends.
My parents were both veterans of WWII, my father was permanently disabled from the wounds he got in battle, if the VA doctors are correct about what killed him, he died, almost fifty years later, as a result of his battlefield wounds. He was a marine, though not an officer but he was a marine who believed, absolutely that marines were not some kind of special order of creation. He liked to joke that the reason he was a marine was because the Army had turned him down after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
While both of them had some military officers they respected, highly, both of my parents were quite skeptical of career officers in general and both of them were absolutely dedicated to civilian rule. My father, in particular, had a deep loathing for the way that Oliver North dressed in his uniform to give his lying testimony to the Senate Committee and hid behind it. He thought that any marine who lied while wearing the uniform was a disgrace to the uniform and to the Marine Corps. John Kelly wasn't wearing the uniform while he lied about Congresswoman Frederica Wilson but he might as well have been. If he has the sense of honor he presented himself as having he would apologize to her and to clarify that his behavior the other day was not some kind of assertion of superiority due to his rank in the Marines. He was presenting himself as a military officer but he was acting as a representative of Donald Trump, a draft dodger who has never served anyone but himself. A lot of people have bemoaned the diminution of John Kelly, in whom many in the elite media have placed some ridiculous hopes that he was going to turn the ultimate self-server into a public servant. But the man who diminished John Kelly was himself. I might honor the sacrifice of his family in the loss of his son in battle but ultimately the American military only deserves any honor in so far as it serves The People, the democratic order of the United States and morality. It's up to John Kelly to regain his status by setting what he did right. If he doesn't publicly retract his lies, he is the author of his own diminution.
If the repulsive Sarah Huckabee Sanders' rule for questioning someone of Kelly's military rank were to prevail, practically no one in the Trump regime or the Republican caucus in the House and Senate would be qualified to question him. I would like to know what Sarah Huckabee Sanders qualifications would have been both under Kelly's rules of who was good enough to ask him questions and under her own even more repulsive use of his status for political ends.
My parents were both veterans of WWII, my father was permanently disabled from the wounds he got in battle, if the VA doctors are correct about what killed him, he died, almost fifty years later, as a result of his battlefield wounds. He was a marine, though not an officer but he was a marine who believed, absolutely that marines were not some kind of special order of creation. He liked to joke that the reason he was a marine was because the Army had turned him down after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
While both of them had some military officers they respected, highly, both of my parents were quite skeptical of career officers in general and both of them were absolutely dedicated to civilian rule. My father, in particular, had a deep loathing for the way that Oliver North dressed in his uniform to give his lying testimony to the Senate Committee and hid behind it. He thought that any marine who lied while wearing the uniform was a disgrace to the uniform and to the Marine Corps. John Kelly wasn't wearing the uniform while he lied about Congresswoman Frederica Wilson but he might as well have been. If he has the sense of honor he presented himself as having he would apologize to her and to clarify that his behavior the other day was not some kind of assertion of superiority due to his rank in the Marines. He was presenting himself as a military officer but he was acting as a representative of Donald Trump, a draft dodger who has never served anyone but himself. A lot of people have bemoaned the diminution of John Kelly, in whom many in the elite media have placed some ridiculous hopes that he was going to turn the ultimate self-server into a public servant. But the man who diminished John Kelly was himself. I might honor the sacrifice of his family in the loss of his son in battle but ultimately the American military only deserves any honor in so far as it serves The People, the democratic order of the United States and morality. It's up to John Kelly to regain his status by setting what he did right. If he doesn't publicly retract his lies, he is the author of his own diminution.
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