Donaldson
Further Cast for King Eddie Cast: Valerie-Ann Pearson; Douglas McCleod; Paul Coeur; Joe Norman Shaw
Wendell Smith; Jack Ackroyd; Barbara GatesWilson
Saturday, July 21, 2018
Saturday Night Audio Drama - Gordon Pengilly - Bailey's Way Two Episodes
Donaldson
Further Cast for King Eddie Cast: Valerie-Ann Pearson; Douglas McCleod; Paul Coeur; Joe Norman Shaw
Wendell Smith; Jack Ackroyd; Barbara GatesWilson
How dare you not find that funny! - The idiot is still going on about this.
Is there anything funnier than the pearl-bedecked matronly shock and horror that the pop kulcha vulcha kew-el kats mount when you violate the proper decorum surrounding the adoration of commercial culture?
I have to admit eliciting their automatically inflatable outrage is something I do find to be great fun. And it's a riot to watch, that and their mutually expressed moral indignation (to be seen by all kew-el kats) over such violations of pop propriety. Beside that the Nairobi Trio is downright tedious. There, I said it without Ernie and Edie striking me dead. Maybe they've moved on.
Update: Stupy claims that I exposed myself as a sexist for having the nerve to say that after her husband died, Edie Adams didn't do much work other than make cigar commercials and one extended cameo appearance as Mae West in a made for TV movie about her first husband, Ernie Kovacs.
It's kind of embarrassing, me knowing more about that little corner of show-biz legend than La Simels (embarrassing to him, not to me)but I happen to have read Edie Adams' obit in which this passage appeared.
Of her husband, Ms. Adams later said, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it — Women's Lib be damned!"
I said nothing about her that wasn't true.
Update 2: And now Simps wants to reopen the Lenny B war again, Bernstein, not Bruce. A wind-up monkey has more of an attention span than Simps.
I have to admit eliciting their automatically inflatable outrage is something I do find to be great fun. And it's a riot to watch, that and their mutually expressed moral indignation (to be seen by all kew-el kats) over such violations of pop propriety. Beside that the Nairobi Trio is downright tedious. There, I said it without Ernie and Edie striking me dead. Maybe they've moved on.
Update: Stupy claims that I exposed myself as a sexist for having the nerve to say that after her husband died, Edie Adams didn't do much work other than make cigar commercials and one extended cameo appearance as Mae West in a made for TV movie about her first husband, Ernie Kovacs.
It's kind of embarrassing, me knowing more about that little corner of show-biz legend than La Simels (embarrassing to him, not to me)but I happen to have read Edie Adams' obit in which this passage appeared.
Of her husband, Ms. Adams later said, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it — Women's Lib be damned!"
I said nothing about her that wasn't true.
Update 2: And now Simps wants to reopen the Lenny B war again, Bernstein, not Bruce. A wind-up monkey has more of an attention span than Simps.
Someone Roll a Clothespin, See If He Giggles Like A Little Girl
I have a niece. One afternoon, when she was about the age of 16 months we found by accident she would laugh and giggle uncontrollably whenever you tipped a cutting board and rolled a round clothespin down it. We entertained her with that trick that one afternoon many, many years ago. As I recall when someone tried to entertain her with that a few weeks later, she apparently found it had gotten old.
Geesh, Simps, the last time the Nairobi Trio skit was on TV was sometime in the early 60s before Ernie Kovacs died while Kennedy was still president. There was never much to the skit, three people in gorilla suits pretending to play instruments in imitation of a mechanical toy while a really tacky piece of music, "Solfeggio" played in the background. I don't think Kovacs would have kept it up much longer than that if he hadn't died and had gone on with his career. What was great about Ernie Kovacs wasn't him repeating the same-old-same-old, it was that he tried new things all the time. If he stopped doing that, he'd have gotten old along with the bits.
Yeah, I got over it almost sixty years ago, Simps. It's mildly amusing to recall in a way that nostalgia might be but that's no way to keep learning. I don't think I'd go looking for Youtubes, as I pointed out last night, I prefer to find stuff that hadn't gone stale for me in my teenage-young-adult years. It wasn't even one of his more inventive pieces, the same kind of thing had been a gimmick going back before Vaudeville. It couldn't hold a candle to one of Señor Wences routines. I've always preferred stuff with text over pantomime. There's some there, there.
The parts of Kovac's show I really remember were the ones like with the guy imitating a college professor modern poet reciting his meaningless drivel, the various ones with Edie Adams spoofing sexy stars. I'd rather watch a good plate spinner than the Nairobi Trio skit, again.
Update: Stupy, when his widow, Edie Adams was marketing the videotaped legacy of his shows, that was a repeat of old material. That counts as a repeat, not new material.
Ernie Kovacs knew enough about comedy to know if you repeat the same gag over and over, it stops being funny. He'd have dropped it if he'd lived. You, knowing nothing, do nothing but repeat stuff, mostly what you've copied from other people. Edie didn't have much of a career after Ernie died, as I recall. I do remember she did some White Owl Cigar commercials and was in a made for TV movie about Kovacs where she played Mae West, other than that, if she was working, I don't remember it.
Update: Stupy, when his widow, Edie Adams was marketing the videotaped legacy of his shows, that was a repeat of old material. That counts as a repeat, not new material.
Ernie Kovacs knew enough about comedy to know if you repeat the same gag over and over, it stops being funny. He'd have dropped it if he'd lived. You, knowing nothing, do nothing but repeat stuff, mostly what you've copied from other people. Edie didn't have much of a career after Ernie died, as I recall. I do remember she did some White Owl Cigar commercials and was in a made for TV movie about Kovacs where she played Mae West, other than that, if she was working, I don't remember it.
Friday, July 20, 2018
Hristo Vitchev Quartet - "It May Backfire"
Hristo Vitchev - guitar,
Weber Iago - piano,
Dan Robbins - bass,
Mike Shannon - drums
Update: Never heard of the musician or group before but thought I'd try it when it just showed up in the side bar at Youtube.
Zhivago - OJM + KURT ROSENWINKEL
Kurt Rosenwinkel Partners With Portugal's Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos for Our Secret World, Releasing on September 7, 2010
That's what I like Youtube for most of all, finding new stuff I'd never find otherwise. Not like the guys who just go there to relisten to stuff that they listened to a googleplex times when it was on Top 40 in the 60s. That's you, Simps.
Update 2: Just scrolled down, they list the musicians.
Created in 1999 with the support of Câmara Municipal de Matosinhos (Matosinhos Town Hall), Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos has gradually gained its place among the most dynamic orchestras in the jazz panorama.
Direction & arrangement: Carlos Azevedo
Saxophones:
José Luis Rego
João Pedro Brandão
Mário Santos
José Pedro Coelho
Rui Teixeira
Trumpets:
Nick Marchione
Erick Poirrier
Susana Santos Silva
Rogério Ribeiro
Trombones:
Michael Joussein
Álvaro Pinto
Daniel Dias
Gonçalo Dias
Abe Rabade, Piano
Demian Cabaud, Double Bass
Marcos Cavaleiro, Drums
Update 2: Just scrolled down, they list the musicians.
Created in 1999 with the support of Câmara Municipal de Matosinhos (Matosinhos Town Hall), Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos has gradually gained its place among the most dynamic orchestras in the jazz panorama.
Direction & arrangement: Carlos Azevedo
Saxophones:
José Luis Rego
João Pedro Brandão
Mário Santos
José Pedro Coelho
Rui Teixeira
Trumpets:
Nick Marchione
Erick Poirrier
Susana Santos Silva
Rogério Ribeiro
Trombones:
Michael Joussein
Álvaro Pinto
Daniel Dias
Gonçalo Dias
Abe Rabade, Piano
Demian Cabaud, Double Bass
Marcos Cavaleiro, Drums
Stupid Mail - Stupy Lies, The Toast Falls On The Butter Side And Water Is Found To Still Be Wet
I don't think I've ever said anything bad about The Byrds, I certainly haven't ever said anything bad about them here because they never interested me enough to say anything about them.
One of the few times* I can recall that the work of any of its members impinged on my attention was when The Staple Singers recorded For What It's Worth and that was by Stephen Stills and he wasn't even in The Byrds that I can recall, he worked with one or so of them in other acts after The Byrds more or less dispersed. I'm not even interested enough to care about those kinds of things.
I ADORE The Staple Singers and have since they recorded for Vee-Jay.
* I think Bonnie Raitt recorded Bluebird on her first album, too. Though I'll have to fact check on that one.
Update: Yep, but that was a Stephen Stills song, too.
One of the few times* I can recall that the work of any of its members impinged on my attention was when The Staple Singers recorded For What It's Worth and that was by Stephen Stills and he wasn't even in The Byrds that I can recall, he worked with one or so of them in other acts after The Byrds more or less dispersed. I'm not even interested enough to care about those kinds of things.
I ADORE The Staple Singers and have since they recorded for Vee-Jay.
* I think Bonnie Raitt recorded Bluebird on her first album, too. Though I'll have to fact check on that one.
Update: Yep, but that was a Stephen Stills song, too.
Hate Mail
So, let me sum up what you're saying, you're saying, if, in the course of a thousand or two thousand years, science arrives at the necessity of renewing its points of view, that will not mean that science is a liar. Science cannot lie, for it’s always striving, according to the momentary state of knowledge, to deduce what is true. When it makes a mistake, it does so in good faith. It’s Christianity that’s the liar.
You know who agreed with you? Adolph Hitler, because everything after the word "saying" is a quote of something he said.
You know who agreed with you? Adolph Hitler, because everything after the word "saying" is a quote of something he said.
A Little Fun With Some Science Reporting
I don't know how much I would make of this study that shows that of announced political affiliations in the United States, Democrats are the ones who would seem to be best at keeping their promises, at least in so far as wedding vows are concerned. Ah, hell, I might not believe in this kind of thing but why not make hay of such a ubiquitous belief among the secular and sciency? Here it is from the Guardian with my comments.
Democrats are less inclined than Republicans to cheat on their spouses, according to researchers who matched voter records to accounts hacked from a US website that specialises in extramarital affairs.
The study of 80,000 voters in five US states found that Democrats used the Ashley Madison adultery website substantially less than Republicans, Libertarians, Greens and unaffiliated voters. Libertarians consistently ranked as the site’s most frequent clients.
The results highlight an apparent paradox where those with more conservative views and supposedly stricter attitudes towards sex seem happier to hop into bed with someone outside their relationship than more liberal types.
“Our results are perhaps the strongest evidence yet that people with more sexually conservative values, although they claim to act accordingly, are more sexually deviant in practice than their more sexually liberal peers,” the researchers write in Archives of Sexual Behaviour.
Well, as that "apparent paradox" rests on the self-reported morality of such people and they are obviously lying about their moral standards, what's paradoxical is that anyone would believe any science that depends on such self reporting. I would point out that if the conclusion of the study is true and Democrats (standing in for traditional American style liberals) are more honest when it comes to keeping their promises than Republicans (crooks and liars), Libertarians (egomanical baby-men) and Greens (Quislings) then wouldn't that entirely impeach any answers they gave on other questions? And why do the scientists who conduct such science never figure that's a problem with their reported results?
Me, I'm happy to have people believe that Republicans, Libertarians and Greens are undependable liars but that's not science, it's politics.
The equation of adultery with liberalism is kind of disgusting, when did breaking promises and risking all of the associated suffering for other people involved in adultery become "liberal"? Oh, yeah, when genuine liberalism was corrupted by the amorality of "enlightenment" liberalism. Real liberals don't do things that hurt other people or at least they know they shouldn't, which might well account for those who successfully keep their promises and don't wreck their families, infecting their loved ones with STDs, etc.
Kodi Arfer, a behavioural scientist at the University of California in Los Angeles, and Jason Jones, a sociologist at Stony Brook University in New York, linked the 2012 voter registration records for California, Florida, Kansas, New York and Oklahoma to credit card payments made by people living in those states to Ashley Madison between 2008 and 2015. The payment details were released in 2015 when a group called the Impact Team hacked millions of Ashley Madison accounts.
Of the five states looked at in the study, California had the greatest proportion of Ashley Madison users, with one in 560 voters holding an account. But in this state, political allegiance was only marginally linked to who signed up, with Libertarians making up one in 250 account holders and Democrats making up about one in 700. The rest all fell in between.
According to the study, the smallest percentage of the website’s clients lived in Oklahoma, where only one in 943 voters had made payments to the site. But the state, which has backed a Republican in every presidential election since 1968, boasted the greatest political split in users, with fewer than one in 1,500 Democrats holding an Ashley Madison account compared with one in 700 Republicans.
Across the board, Libertarians made up the greatest proportion of Ashley Madison clients. In the four states that had Libertarians, namely California, Florida, Kansas and New York, about one in 250 of the site’s clients had registered as Libertarians.
Anyone who watched footage from the Libertarian Party's national convention will find this not at all surprising. Libertarians are mostly the worst cases of arrested 12-year-old boy development with raging issues of assholishness that you're likely to find outside of the trolling of this blog and the blogs where such boy-men congregate. Apparently, according to the study findings here, those who congregate at "liberal" blogs are atypical of American liberalism or at least of the opposition to Republican-fascism. Which is not surprising to me but it may have been twelve-years back in observing that phenomenon.
The study does not shed light on why Republicans might be more likely to have affairs than Democrats, but Arfer has a couple of theories. The first is that, thanks to more restricted sex education and discussion, right-leaning people may be less well-informed about sex and sexuality, and so have poorer sexual self-control. The second is that people who are more interested in taboo activities declare themselves Republicans, and profess to have stricter attitudes, to deflect suspicion.
But another explanation is possible. Political party allegiance may simply be a proxy for wealth, and Republicans tend to be better off than Democrats. “It stands to reason that wealthier people should be more likely to use Ashley Madison, which can be expensive,” Arfer said. “So the party effect we observed could be driven by income instead of, or in addition to, ideology.”
I've always said the rich were generally trashier than the poor.
There is always the possibility that some Ashley Madison clients are plunged into turmoil by the realisation that their behaviour is in direct conflict to the standards they hold most dear. For such people, the authors have some suggestions that may help. “Such a person either needs to change his behaviour or change his values,” said Arfer. “That’s easier said than done, but simply learning more about human sexuality could help, particularly if my hypothesis about worse sexual self-control is right.”
Introduces a conscience not otherwise in evidence among Republican-fascists, Libertarians and Greens. If they developed such a conscience, they would find that it was impossible to remain Republican-fascists (crooks and liars), Libertarians (egomaniacle baby-men) or Greens (Quislings)
Democrats are less inclined than Republicans to cheat on their spouses, according to researchers who matched voter records to accounts hacked from a US website that specialises in extramarital affairs.
The study of 80,000 voters in five US states found that Democrats used the Ashley Madison adultery website substantially less than Republicans, Libertarians, Greens and unaffiliated voters. Libertarians consistently ranked as the site’s most frequent clients.
The results highlight an apparent paradox where those with more conservative views and supposedly stricter attitudes towards sex seem happier to hop into bed with someone outside their relationship than more liberal types.
“Our results are perhaps the strongest evidence yet that people with more sexually conservative values, although they claim to act accordingly, are more sexually deviant in practice than their more sexually liberal peers,” the researchers write in Archives of Sexual Behaviour.
Well, as that "apparent paradox" rests on the self-reported morality of such people and they are obviously lying about their moral standards, what's paradoxical is that anyone would believe any science that depends on such self reporting. I would point out that if the conclusion of the study is true and Democrats (standing in for traditional American style liberals) are more honest when it comes to keeping their promises than Republicans (crooks and liars), Libertarians (egomanical baby-men) and Greens (Quislings) then wouldn't that entirely impeach any answers they gave on other questions? And why do the scientists who conduct such science never figure that's a problem with their reported results?
Me, I'm happy to have people believe that Republicans, Libertarians and Greens are undependable liars but that's not science, it's politics.
The equation of adultery with liberalism is kind of disgusting, when did breaking promises and risking all of the associated suffering for other people involved in adultery become "liberal"? Oh, yeah, when genuine liberalism was corrupted by the amorality of "enlightenment" liberalism. Real liberals don't do things that hurt other people or at least they know they shouldn't, which might well account for those who successfully keep their promises and don't wreck their families, infecting their loved ones with STDs, etc.
Kodi Arfer, a behavioural scientist at the University of California in Los Angeles, and Jason Jones, a sociologist at Stony Brook University in New York, linked the 2012 voter registration records for California, Florida, Kansas, New York and Oklahoma to credit card payments made by people living in those states to Ashley Madison between 2008 and 2015. The payment details were released in 2015 when a group called the Impact Team hacked millions of Ashley Madison accounts.
Of the five states looked at in the study, California had the greatest proportion of Ashley Madison users, with one in 560 voters holding an account. But in this state, political allegiance was only marginally linked to who signed up, with Libertarians making up one in 250 account holders and Democrats making up about one in 700. The rest all fell in between.
According to the study, the smallest percentage of the website’s clients lived in Oklahoma, where only one in 943 voters had made payments to the site. But the state, which has backed a Republican in every presidential election since 1968, boasted the greatest political split in users, with fewer than one in 1,500 Democrats holding an Ashley Madison account compared with one in 700 Republicans.
Across the board, Libertarians made up the greatest proportion of Ashley Madison clients. In the four states that had Libertarians, namely California, Florida, Kansas and New York, about one in 250 of the site’s clients had registered as Libertarians.
Anyone who watched footage from the Libertarian Party's national convention will find this not at all surprising. Libertarians are mostly the worst cases of arrested 12-year-old boy development with raging issues of assholishness that you're likely to find outside of the trolling of this blog and the blogs where such boy-men congregate. Apparently, according to the study findings here, those who congregate at "liberal" blogs are atypical of American liberalism or at least of the opposition to Republican-fascism. Which is not surprising to me but it may have been twelve-years back in observing that phenomenon.
The study does not shed light on why Republicans might be more likely to have affairs than Democrats, but Arfer has a couple of theories. The first is that, thanks to more restricted sex education and discussion, right-leaning people may be less well-informed about sex and sexuality, and so have poorer sexual self-control. The second is that people who are more interested in taboo activities declare themselves Republicans, and profess to have stricter attitudes, to deflect suspicion.
But another explanation is possible. Political party allegiance may simply be a proxy for wealth, and Republicans tend to be better off than Democrats. “It stands to reason that wealthier people should be more likely to use Ashley Madison, which can be expensive,” Arfer said. “So the party effect we observed could be driven by income instead of, or in addition to, ideology.”
I've always said the rich were generally trashier than the poor.
There is always the possibility that some Ashley Madison clients are plunged into turmoil by the realisation that their behaviour is in direct conflict to the standards they hold most dear. For such people, the authors have some suggestions that may help. “Such a person either needs to change his behaviour or change his values,” said Arfer. “That’s easier said than done, but simply learning more about human sexuality could help, particularly if my hypothesis about worse sexual self-control is right.”
Introduces a conscience not otherwise in evidence among Republican-fascists, Libertarians and Greens. If they developed such a conscience, they would find that it was impossible to remain Republican-fascists (crooks and liars), Libertarians (egomaniacle baby-men) or Greens (Quislings)
Stupid Mail - Where Spelling Doesn't Matter And When It Does
I will confess that I do like annoying the petty, mid-brow spelling monitors. Given that surnames so often have variant spellings, often used even within the same family, that distinction is meaningless. Quibbling about such things is done only by people who can't hold up their end on substantive issues. It isn't important and so isn't serious. I have learned in my time online, extreme fussiness about spelling is generally a sign that someone isn't serious and often not too bright.
I intend to go right on violating fussy propriety in spelling, if you don't like that, bite me. I save my rigor in spelling for my chords, and I play those on a piano, not a computer. Spelling makes all the difference in the meaning of music because of the sound, it makes hardly any in the meaning of prose, the sound of which is badly represented in the futile classicism of standard English spelling, anyway.
I intend to go right on violating fussy propriety in spelling, if you don't like that, bite me. I save my rigor in spelling for my chords, and I play those on a piano, not a computer. Spelling makes all the difference in the meaning of music because of the sound, it makes hardly any in the meaning of prose, the sound of which is badly represented in the futile classicism of standard English spelling, anyway.
Thursday, July 19, 2018
"No one thinks like that anymore" - Geesh!
How, no let me make that HOW STUPID CAN YOU GET?
Here's a call Sam Seder took yesterday.
Change the ethnicity of this callers idea of a master race (the one Pearson and Moul targeted for inferiority) unsurprisingly the one to which this racist boy-fascist belongs to (funny how that's always the case with Darwinists) and the claims are exactly the ones Pearson was making in 1900 and the ones that Darwin was making in The Descent of Man in 1872. It will always be here as long as people believe in natural selection, it is an inherent aspect of the theory.
Update: I especially liked this comment:
Throw this guy out into the African wilds as an intelligence test. I’ll bet he scores lower than a lion.
Here's a call Sam Seder took yesterday.
Change the ethnicity of this callers idea of a master race (the one Pearson and Moul targeted for inferiority) unsurprisingly the one to which this racist boy-fascist belongs to (funny how that's always the case with Darwinists) and the claims are exactly the ones Pearson was making in 1900 and the ones that Darwin was making in The Descent of Man in 1872. It will always be here as long as people believe in natural selection, it is an inherent aspect of the theory.
Update: I especially liked this comment:
Throw this guy out into the African wilds as an intelligence test. I’ll bet he scores lower than a lion.
A Couple of Duncan's Blog Flies Have Accused Me Of Knowing Nothing About "Serious Music"
I have read a lot of stuff this week to prepare posts and my eyes need a rest. Here's a little piece I wrote in 2012. I've given a few links that weren't in the original. I especially recommend listening to the second one, a link to a Youtube of the recordings Eduard Stuermann made of Schoenberg's piano pieces, they are incredibly deep interpretations, beginning with the Op. 11. Stuermann was one of Schoenberg's closest associates, he coached him on all of the piano works, I believe. Some of the other links, like the one of Transfigured Night, are to live performances which I liked.
Denying We Have Placed Ourselves On The Edge of Extinction: The Book of the Hanging Gardens
Alfred Brendel, that great pianist, once said that the reason Arnold Schoenberg's music was disliked wasn't that it was cold "musical mathematics", the most unoriginal of frequently parroted attempts at musical put downs*. Brendel said that Schoenberg's music was hated because it was some of the most intensely emotional music ever written. I recall he mentioned the mono-drama Erwartung and the early Three Pieces op.11 as examples. Anyone who is really familiar with those pieces of extremely condensed emotion expressed in ultra-saturated, chromatic melody and harmony would find his description of Schoenberg's music confirmed. It is some of the most emotionally intense music ever composed.
I've loved Schoenberg's music since the first time I heard the quintet arrangement of the First Chamber Symphony as a teenager. It grabbed me in the third measure and it has never let me go. The orchestral versions of it are even more intense.
The Book of the Hanging Gardens is a song cycle from around the same time. I've been listening to it for decades and have played piano for some of the songs. I love the music very much for the same reasons I do every one of Schoenberg's published pieces. It is extremely beautiful, the production of a musical genius of the same order as Beethoven or Debussy. Milton Babbitt once said that fifty years after its composition, music was till trying to come up to it. The ensuing decades haven't done anything to resolve that situation. But it is not an easy work to love, being extremely disturbing. Disturbing in a way that so far surpasses a superficially unsettling, lesser experience that it's really inadequate to describe what I mean. It isn't merely in the sound or the words or the interplay of those, it is in the entire context of the work, its two creators and the context of all of them in the very real world of their creation. The rest of this post is an attempt to merely begin at a description of what I mean when I say that. Trying, as well, to give some, small description of the scope of Arnold Schoenberg's intellectual and artistic capacity, his position in intellectual and musical history and what the failure to listen to him tells us about us. There is no recent creative genius I'm aware of who was so engaged in external world and who consciously and, I would guess, unconsciously expressed that world in their art.
The poetry that Schoenberg set is by the very deeply ambiguous and often repulsive Stefan George*. There is no other possible description but that it is decadent. It always seems to be pulled between sublimity and an abyss of destructive self-indulgence. Schoenberg's music more surely is on the side of the sublime, though it openly chooses to involve itself in the amoral pit that the text plays on.
George was enough of a fascist that when the Nazis took over Goebbels offered him the leadership of the Academy of Arts. George refused. Some think his refusal was not based in moral clarity but in his being enough of an effete aristocrat that he disdained the vulgarity of the Nazis. He left Germany for Switzerland, not being able to tolerate the Nazis but not openly resisting them, dying within the year. He had associates and followers who were Jewish (though George was somewhat antisemetic), Nazis, anti-Nazi fascist (some of them were involved in a plot to kill Hitler).... He was also someone who was semi-openly gay even as the Nazis were beginning their oppression of gay people. He was nostalgic for the declining Germanic military aristocracy. I recall reading that he was attended by a Junker at his deathbed but am not sure if that's a myth or the truth.
Schoenberg's choice of poetry in many of his vocal works is extremely troubling or at least strange. His colleague and associate Eduard Stuermann talked about how the extreme decadence of the poetry of Pierrot Lunaire seemed to inspire him, even as Schoenberg expressed skepticism about using it ("We'll have nothing to do with that!"). In that case the choice of poetry was the choice of Albertine Zehme, who commissioned the piece so she could perform it but, despite his misgivings, Stuermann said that something in the decadent poetry inspired Schoenberg. He also pointed to his settings of George as another example. As anyone can hear, Schoenberg transformed such bizarre material into something that is emblematic of the intellectual climate and the disordered times. The premier of Pierrot was 1912, two years before the First World War demolished the world Schoenberg grew up in. He seems to have read the signs of the time and saw where they led.
I've repeatedly wondered why he would choose to set someone he must have known was as morally tainted as George. The best I've come up with is that he was expressing the intensely troubled moral ambiguity of the period he was living in. The absolute morality of traditional religion was considered passe in his circles and with it an absolute sense of morality. Much of philosophical writing during his life was the full and far from pure flowering of a brutal materialism that outright rejected morality in favor of a bloody interpretation of natural selection with individual, social and national expressions of its assumptions.
And that was only one of the many streams of thought current in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Many of those were anything from morally ambiguous to amoral to reveling in the depravity in the wake of an asserted death of morality. As well there were the intersecting ambiguities of vision promoted by the pseudo-science of psychology as well as the alien, though far less ambiguous, findings of physics.**
Schoenberg lived in that milieu and he was certainly well aware of it. He was a thoroughly modern man of his times, extremely well cultured and yet not of the same world. And in Vienna from the late 19th century, through the first decades of the 20th century, the degenerating Austrian empire with its over-ripe to rotting brilliance, the First World War, the aftermath with the staggering inflation and material deprivation, the turn into fascism with the failure of impractical attempts at democracy and the League of Nations, and into the Nazi period and the Second world war, exile in the United States, the after war years and into the very beginning of the casual decadence of Southern California in the 1950s, Schoenberg's witness was almost incomprehensibly broad. Over all of that was the steady rise of scientific racism, antisemitism, racing to the horrible epoch of the Holocaust, something which endangered and impinged on him, interacting with choices he had made earlier in his life. Beginning as a somewhat secular Jew, Schoenberg converted to Catholicism in time to have history make that choice extremely troubling in far more than just its implications. He reconverted to Judaism in response to the Holocaust and wrote several of his greatest works as a direct result of facing the meaning of the history of the 1920s through the Second World War and its aftermath. For a composer who was dealing so intensely with life in the last years of the 19th century (Transfigured Night), experiencing the subsequent decades with a high degree of knowledge, intellectual and moral discernment, it is not any surprise that the musical language he expressed his experience in would become far more emotional as time went on. By the time he reaches clarity in his reconversion compositions, Schoenberg did more to express the first half of the 20th century than any artist in any medium. His music expresses more about the subsequent years, under serious consideration, than anyone else I'm familiar with. By comparison, few others can come away without seeming, in some way, less serious or even trivial. When he arrives at his final compositions there is a sense that he had made his final choice, he had committed to a moral vision if not a path in response to as clear a view of the alternative as aware humanity has ever had. The issues of moral choice that he faced, squarely, in his music, if not in life, are unfashionable, rejected as old fashioned and unscientific. That refusal to choose is a continuation of the same moral failure that led to the disasters of the 20th century.
To ignore Schoenberg's interpretation of his time, the view of an extremely cultured artist, dealing directly with the horrors and moral issues that are made more exigent from our refusal to learn from our recent past is an indictment of our current intellectual life. Refusing to hear an artist dealing directly with the dangers of leaning over and looking into the most profound abyss our species has created for our world in a way that is brave, unsparing and absolutely human, is an act of intellectual and moral cowardice. The failure of the alleged intellectual class to engage with it is a symptom of the failure of our intellectual elite. An intellectual class that remains indifferent to Arnold Schoenberg betrays its shallowness as certainly as any class that rejects the scientific or mathematical accomplishments of his time. Imagine if the intelligentsia of the 19th century had rejected Beethoven and you can see what it means. Considering Schoenberg's macrocosmic address of real life as it deals with issues of life and death, morality and depravity, that indifference is a manifestation of complete cowardice and self indulgence. It is a choice for what lies in the dead abyss, beyond the the garden terrace.
* I'm aware of a form of that charge going back to at least the late 18th century.
** I am writing another post about the intersection between these and moral reform with the far from untroubled results.
Denying We Have Placed Ourselves On The Edge of Extinction: The Book of the Hanging Gardens
Alfred Brendel, that great pianist, once said that the reason Arnold Schoenberg's music was disliked wasn't that it was cold "musical mathematics", the most unoriginal of frequently parroted attempts at musical put downs*. Brendel said that Schoenberg's music was hated because it was some of the most intensely emotional music ever written. I recall he mentioned the mono-drama Erwartung and the early Three Pieces op.11 as examples. Anyone who is really familiar with those pieces of extremely condensed emotion expressed in ultra-saturated, chromatic melody and harmony would find his description of Schoenberg's music confirmed. It is some of the most emotionally intense music ever composed.
I've loved Schoenberg's music since the first time I heard the quintet arrangement of the First Chamber Symphony as a teenager. It grabbed me in the third measure and it has never let me go. The orchestral versions of it are even more intense.
The Book of the Hanging Gardens is a song cycle from around the same time. I've been listening to it for decades and have played piano for some of the songs. I love the music very much for the same reasons I do every one of Schoenberg's published pieces. It is extremely beautiful, the production of a musical genius of the same order as Beethoven or Debussy. Milton Babbitt once said that fifty years after its composition, music was till trying to come up to it. The ensuing decades haven't done anything to resolve that situation. But it is not an easy work to love, being extremely disturbing. Disturbing in a way that so far surpasses a superficially unsettling, lesser experience that it's really inadequate to describe what I mean. It isn't merely in the sound or the words or the interplay of those, it is in the entire context of the work, its two creators and the context of all of them in the very real world of their creation. The rest of this post is an attempt to merely begin at a description of what I mean when I say that. Trying, as well, to give some, small description of the scope of Arnold Schoenberg's intellectual and artistic capacity, his position in intellectual and musical history and what the failure to listen to him tells us about us. There is no recent creative genius I'm aware of who was so engaged in external world and who consciously and, I would guess, unconsciously expressed that world in their art.
The poetry that Schoenberg set is by the very deeply ambiguous and often repulsive Stefan George*. There is no other possible description but that it is decadent. It always seems to be pulled between sublimity and an abyss of destructive self-indulgence. Schoenberg's music more surely is on the side of the sublime, though it openly chooses to involve itself in the amoral pit that the text plays on.
George was enough of a fascist that when the Nazis took over Goebbels offered him the leadership of the Academy of Arts. George refused. Some think his refusal was not based in moral clarity but in his being enough of an effete aristocrat that he disdained the vulgarity of the Nazis. He left Germany for Switzerland, not being able to tolerate the Nazis but not openly resisting them, dying within the year. He had associates and followers who were Jewish (though George was somewhat antisemetic), Nazis, anti-Nazi fascist (some of them were involved in a plot to kill Hitler).... He was also someone who was semi-openly gay even as the Nazis were beginning their oppression of gay people. He was nostalgic for the declining Germanic military aristocracy. I recall reading that he was attended by a Junker at his deathbed but am not sure if that's a myth or the truth.
Schoenberg's choice of poetry in many of his vocal works is extremely troubling or at least strange. His colleague and associate Eduard Stuermann talked about how the extreme decadence of the poetry of Pierrot Lunaire seemed to inspire him, even as Schoenberg expressed skepticism about using it ("We'll have nothing to do with that!"). In that case the choice of poetry was the choice of Albertine Zehme, who commissioned the piece so she could perform it but, despite his misgivings, Stuermann said that something in the decadent poetry inspired Schoenberg. He also pointed to his settings of George as another example. As anyone can hear, Schoenberg transformed such bizarre material into something that is emblematic of the intellectual climate and the disordered times. The premier of Pierrot was 1912, two years before the First World War demolished the world Schoenberg grew up in. He seems to have read the signs of the time and saw where they led.
I've repeatedly wondered why he would choose to set someone he must have known was as morally tainted as George. The best I've come up with is that he was expressing the intensely troubled moral ambiguity of the period he was living in. The absolute morality of traditional religion was considered passe in his circles and with it an absolute sense of morality. Much of philosophical writing during his life was the full and far from pure flowering of a brutal materialism that outright rejected morality in favor of a bloody interpretation of natural selection with individual, social and national expressions of its assumptions.
And that was only one of the many streams of thought current in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Many of those were anything from morally ambiguous to amoral to reveling in the depravity in the wake of an asserted death of morality. As well there were the intersecting ambiguities of vision promoted by the pseudo-science of psychology as well as the alien, though far less ambiguous, findings of physics.**
Schoenberg lived in that milieu and he was certainly well aware of it. He was a thoroughly modern man of his times, extremely well cultured and yet not of the same world. And in Vienna from the late 19th century, through the first decades of the 20th century, the degenerating Austrian empire with its over-ripe to rotting brilliance, the First World War, the aftermath with the staggering inflation and material deprivation, the turn into fascism with the failure of impractical attempts at democracy and the League of Nations, and into the Nazi period and the Second world war, exile in the United States, the after war years and into the very beginning of the casual decadence of Southern California in the 1950s, Schoenberg's witness was almost incomprehensibly broad. Over all of that was the steady rise of scientific racism, antisemitism, racing to the horrible epoch of the Holocaust, something which endangered and impinged on him, interacting with choices he had made earlier in his life. Beginning as a somewhat secular Jew, Schoenberg converted to Catholicism in time to have history make that choice extremely troubling in far more than just its implications. He reconverted to Judaism in response to the Holocaust and wrote several of his greatest works as a direct result of facing the meaning of the history of the 1920s through the Second World War and its aftermath. For a composer who was dealing so intensely with life in the last years of the 19th century (Transfigured Night), experiencing the subsequent decades with a high degree of knowledge, intellectual and moral discernment, it is not any surprise that the musical language he expressed his experience in would become far more emotional as time went on. By the time he reaches clarity in his reconversion compositions, Schoenberg did more to express the first half of the 20th century than any artist in any medium. His music expresses more about the subsequent years, under serious consideration, than anyone else I'm familiar with. By comparison, few others can come away without seeming, in some way, less serious or even trivial. When he arrives at his final compositions there is a sense that he had made his final choice, he had committed to a moral vision if not a path in response to as clear a view of the alternative as aware humanity has ever had. The issues of moral choice that he faced, squarely, in his music, if not in life, are unfashionable, rejected as old fashioned and unscientific. That refusal to choose is a continuation of the same moral failure that led to the disasters of the 20th century.
To ignore Schoenberg's interpretation of his time, the view of an extremely cultured artist, dealing directly with the horrors and moral issues that are made more exigent from our refusal to learn from our recent past is an indictment of our current intellectual life. Refusing to hear an artist dealing directly with the dangers of leaning over and looking into the most profound abyss our species has created for our world in a way that is brave, unsparing and absolutely human, is an act of intellectual and moral cowardice. The failure of the alleged intellectual class to engage with it is a symptom of the failure of our intellectual elite. An intellectual class that remains indifferent to Arnold Schoenberg betrays its shallowness as certainly as any class that rejects the scientific or mathematical accomplishments of his time. Imagine if the intelligentsia of the 19th century had rejected Beethoven and you can see what it means. Considering Schoenberg's macrocosmic address of real life as it deals with issues of life and death, morality and depravity, that indifference is a manifestation of complete cowardice and self indulgence. It is a choice for what lies in the dead abyss, beyond the the garden terrace.
* I'm aware of a form of that charge going back to at least the late 18th century.
** I am writing another post about the intersection between these and moral reform with the far from untroubled results.
No One Now And In All Of The Future Can Eliminate The Many Ties That Bind Darwinism To Nazism and Why I Won't Call Myself A Socialist Anymore
It was one of the really eye-opening and shocking experiences I got when I started going online and reading the unfiltered, undiluted thinking of thousands more college credentialed people on the putative left the extent to which their lines of ideological assertion depend on the ignorance of those who accept them. Tens if not thousands of times more lefties than I ever could have afforded to read in print or heard on TV or the radio, many times more than ever appeared in those venues which so suddenly became quaint with the internet. While, in some ways, those ideological assertions aren't as obviously malignant as those on the right, there are plenty of them which are and plenty of them as dependent on lies and distortions and, as said, the ignorance of those they hope will accept them without fact checking.
There is absolutely no disputing Karl Pearson's Darwinist credentials, everyone I've ever read or heard on him, his work, his politics, his thinking during his lifetime and up till today have identified him as a Darwinist, one of the quintessential Darwinists, appointed as such by those who had the highest qualifications to make that identification, those who Charles Darwin said were the foremost carriers of his theory in science. Certainly Francis Galton, who was Pearson's teacher and model who chose him to carry on the leadership of his academic work, just as Galton more or less chose Charles Darwin's son, Leonard Darwin, to head British eugenics. Every other one of Charles Darwin's chosen inner circle seems to have, as well, accepted Karl Pearson, proto-Nazism and all, as an exponent of genuine Darwinism. As did British science. Karl Pearson was the fourth recipient of the Royal Society's Darwin Medal in 1898, two years after it was given to Darwin's "bull dog" Thomas Huxley, two years before Ernst Haeckel (the "chorus leader" of Darwinism in Germany, a title Huxley gave Haeckel) was given it and four years before Darwin's second most often cited scientist, Pearson's teacher, Francis Galton was given it. And I will note, after he wrote some of the things I have cited, they knew all about his proto-Nazi theories, though as Nazism hadn't been named yet, they couldn't have called it that. It is the ideas, themselves, that carry the poison, not the name.
So, no. There is no way out of accepting that the things Pearson said in 1900 and 1904 and in 1925 which were identical to the theoretical basis of the Nazi genocides, including, as I showed yesterday, that which led directly to the gas chambers and ovens in Auschwitz and the rest of the Nazi murder industry was mainstream Darwinism coming from one of the quintessential mainstream Darwinists in the pre-war period. That is as permanent a feature of the history of Darwinism as Leonard Darwin saying in April, 1939 that the Nazi's eugenic laws were in line with his own eugenics, which he, himself, attributed to his father. There is no one who has denied that who has the standing of Leonard Darwin to make that attribution, he made it repeatedly over the course of decades when his siblings and others who intimately knew Charles Darwin were alive to refute Darwin's son, if they believed he was lying about that. None of them ever did, I have challenged Darwin idolizes to show me anyone who did deny those links in the pre-war period, I've been doing that for a decade, no one has come up with anything.
Oh, yes. This paper is behind a paywall, the friggin' JSTOR one, so I can't read it, but get the title, Karl Pearson: Socialist and Darwinist and the name of the author, I believe a variant on the name of the ass who trolls me. I would be curious to know if Bernard Semmel read the Pearson-Moul paper I wrote about yesterday and maybe someday I'll be able to afford to find out if he noted it and its consonance with Nazism.
I will say that what I've read this week tipped the scale and I have really come to the conclusion that the word "socialism" has been so damaged with associations with the Fabians, the Marxists, the fascists, the Nazis and the Darwinists that I don't think it's ever going to recover any clean and non-pathological meaning. It's time to dump the word and all of that baggage and find some new articulation of democratic economic justice. If we have got to keep distancing ourselves from the history of the word, nothing is going to get done.
I would advocate something that ties that articulation of democratic economic justice to The Law, The Prophets and The Gospel, perhaps the Qu'ran and the Dharma or other anti-materialist ideas. It will have to be something that radically rejects the old, putrefied baggage of "socialism" to that extent. I would also divorce it from atheist materialism and scientism because those are exactly what led socialism wrong in the first place. If you read the first page of Semmel's paper, you will note that Haeckel, Darwin and Huxley all saw that Darwinism was incompatible with democracy and socialism, just one of the materialist ideologies that is deadly to both democracy and socialism. And as they were Darwinists, democracy and socialism were delusions to them. As can be seen from Pearson's articulation of the alleged scientific, biological imperative to commit genocide and continual internal culling within groups, his socialism pretty much did away with both democracy and the only thing about socialism that was ever any good, anyway. Without universal economic justice, socialism does devolve into a species of Nazism. That's what also happened under Marxism, after all.
There is absolutely no disputing Karl Pearson's Darwinist credentials, everyone I've ever read or heard on him, his work, his politics, his thinking during his lifetime and up till today have identified him as a Darwinist, one of the quintessential Darwinists, appointed as such by those who had the highest qualifications to make that identification, those who Charles Darwin said were the foremost carriers of his theory in science. Certainly Francis Galton, who was Pearson's teacher and model who chose him to carry on the leadership of his academic work, just as Galton more or less chose Charles Darwin's son, Leonard Darwin, to head British eugenics. Every other one of Charles Darwin's chosen inner circle seems to have, as well, accepted Karl Pearson, proto-Nazism and all, as an exponent of genuine Darwinism. As did British science. Karl Pearson was the fourth recipient of the Royal Society's Darwin Medal in 1898, two years after it was given to Darwin's "bull dog" Thomas Huxley, two years before Ernst Haeckel (the "chorus leader" of Darwinism in Germany, a title Huxley gave Haeckel) was given it and four years before Darwin's second most often cited scientist, Pearson's teacher, Francis Galton was given it. And I will note, after he wrote some of the things I have cited, they knew all about his proto-Nazi theories, though as Nazism hadn't been named yet, they couldn't have called it that. It is the ideas, themselves, that carry the poison, not the name.
So, no. There is no way out of accepting that the things Pearson said in 1900 and 1904 and in 1925 which were identical to the theoretical basis of the Nazi genocides, including, as I showed yesterday, that which led directly to the gas chambers and ovens in Auschwitz and the rest of the Nazi murder industry was mainstream Darwinism coming from one of the quintessential mainstream Darwinists in the pre-war period. That is as permanent a feature of the history of Darwinism as Leonard Darwin saying in April, 1939 that the Nazi's eugenic laws were in line with his own eugenics, which he, himself, attributed to his father. There is no one who has denied that who has the standing of Leonard Darwin to make that attribution, he made it repeatedly over the course of decades when his siblings and others who intimately knew Charles Darwin were alive to refute Darwin's son, if they believed he was lying about that. None of them ever did, I have challenged Darwin idolizes to show me anyone who did deny those links in the pre-war period, I've been doing that for a decade, no one has come up with anything.
Oh, yes. This paper is behind a paywall, the friggin' JSTOR one, so I can't read it, but get the title, Karl Pearson: Socialist and Darwinist and the name of the author, I believe a variant on the name of the ass who trolls me. I would be curious to know if Bernard Semmel read the Pearson-Moul paper I wrote about yesterday and maybe someday I'll be able to afford to find out if he noted it and its consonance with Nazism.
I will say that what I've read this week tipped the scale and I have really come to the conclusion that the word "socialism" has been so damaged with associations with the Fabians, the Marxists, the fascists, the Nazis and the Darwinists that I don't think it's ever going to recover any clean and non-pathological meaning. It's time to dump the word and all of that baggage and find some new articulation of democratic economic justice. If we have got to keep distancing ourselves from the history of the word, nothing is going to get done.
I would advocate something that ties that articulation of democratic economic justice to The Law, The Prophets and The Gospel, perhaps the Qu'ran and the Dharma or other anti-materialist ideas. It will have to be something that radically rejects the old, putrefied baggage of "socialism" to that extent. I would also divorce it from atheist materialism and scientism because those are exactly what led socialism wrong in the first place. If you read the first page of Semmel's paper, you will note that Haeckel, Darwin and Huxley all saw that Darwinism was incompatible with democracy and socialism, just one of the materialist ideologies that is deadly to both democracy and socialism. And as they were Darwinists, democracy and socialism were delusions to them. As can be seen from Pearson's articulation of the alleged scientific, biological imperative to commit genocide and continual internal culling within groups, his socialism pretty much did away with both democracy and the only thing about socialism that was ever any good, anyway. Without universal economic justice, socialism does devolve into a species of Nazism. That's what also happened under Marxism, after all.
Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Dusan Bogdanovic - Contemplation de mystérieux Chérubins
Contemplation de mystérieux Chérubins" by Dusan Bogdanovic for chamber ensemble and 8 vocalists. Performed at the Spegtra Aachen Festival in 2018. Conductor Mathis Gross; Rada Geffroy, solo mandolin; Ensemble Sine Nomine: Soprano- Anja Dewey, Kirsten Willnat; Alto- Verena Datené, Andrea Fühner; Tenor- Marco Fühner, Stefan Lenders; Bass- Andreas Dewey, Manuel Stamm; Ensemble La Banda and Ensemble Lunet: Recorders: Christian Seher, Eveline Arnold, Hanna Gründer, Susan Houtman, Hanne Marie Janse, Mathieu Vermeulen; Haruno Ikeda-Sprotte - Viola da Gamba; Chihoon Choi - Contrebasse. Recording and mix by David Ropertz.
The music is based on the 14th century Ioannis Kladas "Cherubic Hymn" . . . In English translation: We who mystically represent the Cherubim/and who sing to the Life-Giving Trinity the thrice-holy hymn/let us now lay aside all earthly cares/that we may receive the King of all/escorted invisibly by the angelic orders./Alleluia.
If You Think You Loathe Joe "Quisling" Lieberman More Than Anyone Else, Not While I'm Alive
Barack Obama is and was a jerk in that he never lost a chance to reward the enemies of Democrats and throwing his supporters under the bus to do it, whether it was watering down the spending on infrastructure to court Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe (making it far less effective for nothing) or what would later become Obamacare. It was one of the earliest of tests of Democratic leadership that Barack Obama failed when he idiotically kept Democrats from punishing the guy who put the "sling" in Quisling, the "shit" in piece of shit, Joe Lieberman for his treachery and disloyalty, his hypocrisy and his vengeful pettiness. Joe Lieberman is now encouraging people to vote for a really putrid Republican by voting for Joe Crowley on the Working Families Party ticket (fucking third party frauds) instead of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a veiled attack on liberals in the Democratic Party and, certainly as a support for the Republican-fascists he's supported pretty much since Democrats failed to give the Quisling the nomination in 2004.
The Estimable Charles Pierce has a piece about this treachery which also contains a valid criticism of Ocasio-Cortez as part of Bernie Sander's counter-productive attempt at kingdom building by sandbagging decent Democrats who might win in places a Bernie or Buster probably can't*. But, as he points out, she's still a rookie at national politics, Sanders doesn't have that excuse, he only has ego to explain it.
* That Bernie Sanders won the Kansas Caucus is a demonstration that Caucuses are an entirely unrealistic and anti-democratic way of choosing delegates to a convention. Democrats ARE chumps if they retain that 19th century relic into 2020. Democrats should get rid of caucuses by refusing to seat delegates who aren't selected through a primary, if states won't cooperate, they should run their own primary of members only, preferably through mailed-in ballots.
The Estimable Charles Pierce has a piece about this treachery which also contains a valid criticism of Ocasio-Cortez as part of Bernie Sander's counter-productive attempt at kingdom building by sandbagging decent Democrats who might win in places a Bernie or Buster probably can't*. But, as he points out, she's still a rookie at national politics, Sanders doesn't have that excuse, he only has ego to explain it.
* That Bernie Sanders won the Kansas Caucus is a demonstration that Caucuses are an entirely unrealistic and anti-democratic way of choosing delegates to a convention. Democrats ARE chumps if they retain that 19th century relic into 2020. Democrats should get rid of caucuses by refusing to seat delegates who aren't selected through a primary, if states won't cooperate, they should run their own primary of members only, preferably through mailed-in ballots.
and recorded the color of their pupils' hair and eyes to determine whether students belonged to the true "Aryan race."
You don't have to take my word for it that the kind of science that Karl Pearson introduced into the collection of University College London was an example of Nazi science before Nazism existed, how about The Holocaust Museum?
Hitler and other Nazi leaders viewed the Jews not as a religious group, but as a poisonous "race," which "lived off" the other races and weakened them. After Hitler took power, Nazi teachers in school classrooms began to apply the "principles" of racial science. They measured skull size and nose length, and recorded the color of their pupils' hair and eyes to determine whether students belonged to the true "Aryan race." Jewish and Romani (Gypsy) students were often humiliated in the process.
That would have preceded them being excluded from education (read the end of the first of this impromptu mini-series from Monday) on the basis of their biological classification and, then, murdered.
I don't know if he ever gave a reason why, in his early 20s, Karl Pearson changed the spelling of his first name to the German version of it with at "K" but he was certainly convinced of the racial superiority of the "Aryan race" going back to before Hitler was born. You can read that in his earlier depravity published as The Ethic of Freethought and Other Addresses and Essays, which, I believe, displays Pearson's, as many other figures in the British establishment of his day's primary goal of discrediting and eliminating Christianity and the morality of Christianity which they found uncongenial to their enjoyment of their wealth and class position. As has been seen, Karl Pearson's socialism was not really incompatible with the British class system and was, in fact, indistinguishable from Nazi socialism.
I would especially recommend the bizarre essay, A Sketch of The Sex-Relations In Primitive and Medieval Germany for what it exposes as the kind of racist, pseudo-scientific anthropology and history - more like gossip and racist lore - that not only Karl Pearson but his teacher - master, really - Francis Galton, Charles Darwin and such a huge part of the pseudo-scientific basis of Darwinism applied to human beings rested on. The same can be said of the quality of the material that Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology rests on today, as can be seen, especially, in the peer-reviewed, published work of the scientific racist - and before his retirement honored scientist in good-standing, Kevin Macdonald and his buddy John Hartung. Like the Republican reaction to Trump's treason on display last weekend, something which was certainly no surprise, it took those who reviewed, published and cited such science having its blatant anti-semitism thrown in their faces to get them to distance themselves from it.
And speaking of which, you really haven't gotten the full measure of Darwinian racism until you have read Karl Pearson's and Margaret Moul's 1925 study: The Problem of Alien Immigration Into Great Britain, Illustrated By An Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children, which, checking very early this morning, I found what use Pearson had made of that horrific relic of the German genocide in East Africa made by one of its scientific staff, Eugen Fischer that I learned of only yesterday. I had read Pearson and Moul's paper quite a while back and it wasn't until this morning that thinking about Fischer's little box of fake hair jogged my memory. I found what I expected to on page 19, in the section analyzing "Hair Pigmentation of Jews".
Our results were obtained with Fischer's glass silk hair scale which has a large series of numbered patterns, and we have grouped them above into eight classes of fairly definite character for comparison with those of other observers. It is very difficult to grasp what other observers who have not worked with standard scales really mean by their colours. Thus Jacobs' 35.5 yo of black hair seems compatible with nothing else recorded, and must certainly include all the very dark brown hairs. For the final comparison it has not seemed possible to do more than divide the whole series into dark and light hair as given by the second percentages in each column. Under these circumstances Jacobs' adult Jews correspond reasonably with the Galician adult Jews. A large mass of material for the German Jewish boys is provided in Virchow's German pigmentation survey and is directly comparable with ours, both sets of boys being of school age. Now our boys were those on whom the special eye examination was made, and these were on the whole older than the general school population. Hence our boys are likely to be older than the German boys. Yet they are clearly a lighter haired population. Of course hair darkens with age, and if we were to suppose the German Jewish boys to become as dark as the Jewish adults in the first two columns in our table as they grow older, there is no reason to suppose that the alien Jewish boys (who start older) would catch them up. Here again it seems possible that there is some infusion of foreign blood.
I will start by pointing out the sheer racism of it and the sheer pseudo-science -or, rather, if it wasn't done by scientists what should be considered pseudo-science - of using artificial, dyed fiberglass to make a biological and racial classification of real people based on their hair color. And it continued, in quite similar terms to that used by Nazis to classify Jews, Gypsies, etc. as the British study did things like compare eye-color to the size of heads of Jewish children, evaluated them on their cleanliness, The whole thing reeks. Yet it was considered valid science under the regime of Darwinism. I have not done it yet but I would expect if I could find the documents I would find this paper by Pearson and Moul cited by the Nazi scientists who, in the next few years, made the racial classification used to mark people for murder. I would imagine Eugen Fischer knew of this use of his little box of fake hair, I wouldn't be surprised if Pearson or one of his colleagues sent him the published paper. I wouldn't be surprised if Pearson didn't express his thanks for the scale Fischer provided. Scientists like to extend that kind of professional courtesy to each other.
Update: Going over this to correct the text, I realized that I should call your attention, in light of that quote from the Holocaust Museum, " Nazi leaders viewed the Jews not as a religious group, but as a poisonous "race," which "lived off" the other races and weakened them," the primary motivation that Pearson and Moul stated for why they had done their study on Jewish Children was concern that such "aliens" as the Jews of Poland and Russia would become "parasitic" on Britain and the native British society. It was a dilemma for them that there was a notably distinguished (since it's Britian, read that "rich and powerful") native British Jewish population whose opposition would certainly not be congenial to the status of their study (one word, "Disraeli") so they made a distinction between those admirable Jews and the ones who's hair color, head size and "cleanliness" they were talking about. I could point out to how Darwin did pretty much the same thing, only it was Gladstone and Irish home rule, but I've got other things to do right now.
Update 2: When Hitler came to power in 1932, he promoted like-minded scholars. Eugen Fischer became the director of the Kaiser WilhelmInstitute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, and he implemented the Nazi policies with such enthusiasm that Franz Weidenreich, a distinguished anatomist who had been forced to emigrate because of his ancestry, later suggested in the pages of the journal Science that he be tried as a war criminal.
Encyclopedia of Race and Racism
Update 3: I had a few minutes this afternoon so I looked around, the Pearson Moul study is cited by contemporary neo-Nazi, white supremacist and racist publications that note it supports their anti-Semitism. Just to tie up that loose end. I do not generally give links to neo-Nazi websites, whether or not they explicitly announce their allegiance. I will give you a clue, some of them are listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center list of racist organizations.
I have also found that, some racist "testing apparatus" apparently created by Eugen Fischer was apparently found at a university lab in South Africa, the lab being a source of pro-apartheid propaganda. The information is behind a paywall I can't afford to get past so I'm not sure if one of those is the box of fake hair mentioned below but I can't imagine he didn't make more than one of them as he continued in that line of junk science when the Nazis took over eight years after Pearson and Moul used their copy of it. I have been looking to see what Nazi citation of the paper there must have been but don't have the time to look in depth, just now. As Baur, Fischer and Lenz included citations of British Darwinists, including Pearson in their book, I can't imagine they were unaware of its contents. I did note that when Edwin Black was doing his research into American eugenics he found that a lot of records of American eugenics which he couldn't find here, he found copies of in German archives, efficiently collected and organized by Nazi researchers, he said:
Because the German and American wings[of eugenics]collaborated so closely, the German archives clearly traced the development of German race hygiene as it emulated the American program. More importantly, because the American and German movements functioned as a binary, their leaders bragged to one another and exchanged information constantly. Therefore I learned much about America’s record by examining Reich-era files. For instance, although the number of individuals sterilized in Vermont has eluded researchers in that state, the information is readily available in the files of Nazi organizations. Moreover, obscure Nazi medical literature reveals the Nazis’ understanding of their American partners. Probing the prodigious files of Nazi eugenics took my project to the Bundesarchiv in Berlin and Koblenz, the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Heidelberg University and many other repositories in Germany.
As the Pearson-Moul study was published in a major journal of British eugenics and as the topic was a heavily anti-semetic study of the very Polish and Russian Jews that the Nazis were already planning on murdering before they took power under the policy of Lebensraum, it's impossible to imagine them not studying it thoroughly. I wouldn't be surprised if some of it didn't inform some of the most vile of their anti-Jewish popular propaganda, such as the section asserting the dirtiness and low intelligence and unflattering moral character Pearson and Moul asserted.
Hitler and other Nazi leaders viewed the Jews not as a religious group, but as a poisonous "race," which "lived off" the other races and weakened them. After Hitler took power, Nazi teachers in school classrooms began to apply the "principles" of racial science. They measured skull size and nose length, and recorded the color of their pupils' hair and eyes to determine whether students belonged to the true "Aryan race." Jewish and Romani (Gypsy) students were often humiliated in the process.
That would have preceded them being excluded from education (read the end of the first of this impromptu mini-series from Monday) on the basis of their biological classification and, then, murdered.
I don't know if he ever gave a reason why, in his early 20s, Karl Pearson changed the spelling of his first name to the German version of it with at "K" but he was certainly convinced of the racial superiority of the "Aryan race" going back to before Hitler was born. You can read that in his earlier depravity published as The Ethic of Freethought and Other Addresses and Essays, which, I believe, displays Pearson's, as many other figures in the British establishment of his day's primary goal of discrediting and eliminating Christianity and the morality of Christianity which they found uncongenial to their enjoyment of their wealth and class position. As has been seen, Karl Pearson's socialism was not really incompatible with the British class system and was, in fact, indistinguishable from Nazi socialism.
I would especially recommend the bizarre essay, A Sketch of The Sex-Relations In Primitive and Medieval Germany for what it exposes as the kind of racist, pseudo-scientific anthropology and history - more like gossip and racist lore - that not only Karl Pearson but his teacher - master, really - Francis Galton, Charles Darwin and such a huge part of the pseudo-scientific basis of Darwinism applied to human beings rested on. The same can be said of the quality of the material that Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology rests on today, as can be seen, especially, in the peer-reviewed, published work of the scientific racist - and before his retirement honored scientist in good-standing, Kevin Macdonald and his buddy John Hartung. Like the Republican reaction to Trump's treason on display last weekend, something which was certainly no surprise, it took those who reviewed, published and cited such science having its blatant anti-semitism thrown in their faces to get them to distance themselves from it.
And speaking of which, you really haven't gotten the full measure of Darwinian racism until you have read Karl Pearson's and Margaret Moul's 1925 study: The Problem of Alien Immigration Into Great Britain, Illustrated By An Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children, which, checking very early this morning, I found what use Pearson had made of that horrific relic of the German genocide in East Africa made by one of its scientific staff, Eugen Fischer that I learned of only yesterday. I had read Pearson and Moul's paper quite a while back and it wasn't until this morning that thinking about Fischer's little box of fake hair jogged my memory. I found what I expected to on page 19, in the section analyzing "Hair Pigmentation of Jews".
Our results were obtained with Fischer's glass silk hair scale which has a large series of numbered patterns, and we have grouped them above into eight classes of fairly definite character for comparison with those of other observers. It is very difficult to grasp what other observers who have not worked with standard scales really mean by their colours. Thus Jacobs' 35.5 yo of black hair seems compatible with nothing else recorded, and must certainly include all the very dark brown hairs. For the final comparison it has not seemed possible to do more than divide the whole series into dark and light hair as given by the second percentages in each column. Under these circumstances Jacobs' adult Jews correspond reasonably with the Galician adult Jews. A large mass of material for the German Jewish boys is provided in Virchow's German pigmentation survey and is directly comparable with ours, both sets of boys being of school age. Now our boys were those on whom the special eye examination was made, and these were on the whole older than the general school population. Hence our boys are likely to be older than the German boys. Yet they are clearly a lighter haired population. Of course hair darkens with age, and if we were to suppose the German Jewish boys to become as dark as the Jewish adults in the first two columns in our table as they grow older, there is no reason to suppose that the alien Jewish boys (who start older) would catch them up. Here again it seems possible that there is some infusion of foreign blood.
I will start by pointing out the sheer racism of it and the sheer pseudo-science -or, rather, if it wasn't done by scientists what should be considered pseudo-science - of using artificial, dyed fiberglass to make a biological and racial classification of real people based on their hair color. And it continued, in quite similar terms to that used by Nazis to classify Jews, Gypsies, etc. as the British study did things like compare eye-color to the size of heads of Jewish children, evaluated them on their cleanliness, The whole thing reeks. Yet it was considered valid science under the regime of Darwinism. I have not done it yet but I would expect if I could find the documents I would find this paper by Pearson and Moul cited by the Nazi scientists who, in the next few years, made the racial classification used to mark people for murder. I would imagine Eugen Fischer knew of this use of his little box of fake hair, I wouldn't be surprised if Pearson or one of his colleagues sent him the published paper. I wouldn't be surprised if Pearson didn't express his thanks for the scale Fischer provided. Scientists like to extend that kind of professional courtesy to each other.
Update: Going over this to correct the text, I realized that I should call your attention, in light of that quote from the Holocaust Museum, " Nazi leaders viewed the Jews not as a religious group, but as a poisonous "race," which "lived off" the other races and weakened them," the primary motivation that Pearson and Moul stated for why they had done their study on Jewish Children was concern that such "aliens" as the Jews of Poland and Russia would become "parasitic" on Britain and the native British society. It was a dilemma for them that there was a notably distinguished (since it's Britian, read that "rich and powerful") native British Jewish population whose opposition would certainly not be congenial to the status of their study (one word, "Disraeli") so they made a distinction between those admirable Jews and the ones who's hair color, head size and "cleanliness" they were talking about. I could point out to how Darwin did pretty much the same thing, only it was Gladstone and Irish home rule, but I've got other things to do right now.
Update 2: When Hitler came to power in 1932, he promoted like-minded scholars. Eugen Fischer became the director of the Kaiser WilhelmInstitute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, and he implemented the Nazi policies with such enthusiasm that Franz Weidenreich, a distinguished anatomist who had been forced to emigrate because of his ancestry, later suggested in the pages of the journal Science that he be tried as a war criminal.
Encyclopedia of Race and Racism
Update 3: I had a few minutes this afternoon so I looked around, the Pearson Moul study is cited by contemporary neo-Nazi, white supremacist and racist publications that note it supports their anti-Semitism. Just to tie up that loose end. I do not generally give links to neo-Nazi websites, whether or not they explicitly announce their allegiance. I will give you a clue, some of them are listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center list of racist organizations.
I have also found that, some racist "testing apparatus" apparently created by Eugen Fischer was apparently found at a university lab in South Africa, the lab being a source of pro-apartheid propaganda. The information is behind a paywall I can't afford to get past so I'm not sure if one of those is the box of fake hair mentioned below but I can't imagine he didn't make more than one of them as he continued in that line of junk science when the Nazis took over eight years after Pearson and Moul used their copy of it. I have been looking to see what Nazi citation of the paper there must have been but don't have the time to look in depth, just now. As Baur, Fischer and Lenz included citations of British Darwinists, including Pearson in their book, I can't imagine they were unaware of its contents. I did note that when Edwin Black was doing his research into American eugenics he found that a lot of records of American eugenics which he couldn't find here, he found copies of in German archives, efficiently collected and organized by Nazi researchers, he said:
Because the German and American wings[of eugenics]collaborated so closely, the German archives clearly traced the development of German race hygiene as it emulated the American program. More importantly, because the American and German movements functioned as a binary, their leaders bragged to one another and exchanged information constantly. Therefore I learned much about America’s record by examining Reich-era files. For instance, although the number of individuals sterilized in Vermont has eluded researchers in that state, the information is readily available in the files of Nazi organizations. Moreover, obscure Nazi medical literature reveals the Nazis’ understanding of their American partners. Probing the prodigious files of Nazi eugenics took my project to the Bundesarchiv in Berlin and Koblenz, the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Heidelberg University and many other repositories in Germany.
As the Pearson-Moul study was published in a major journal of British eugenics and as the topic was a heavily anti-semetic study of the very Polish and Russian Jews that the Nazis were already planning on murdering before they took power under the policy of Lebensraum, it's impossible to imagine them not studying it thoroughly. I wouldn't be surprised if some of it didn't inform some of the most vile of their anti-Jewish popular propaganda, such as the section asserting the dirtiness and low intelligence and unflattering moral character Pearson and Moul asserted.
Stupid Mail
What can you expect from someone who sees the unwillingness of the still barely breathing members of "The Byrds" to keep on pretending that a group that didn't have a hit after about 1965 was an ongoing venture as some kind of tragedy but about 100,000 Narma and Herero people murdered by the proto-Nazis like Eugen Fischer (later actual Nazi), "meh".
Hey, if you want to keep this up, I could do 100 posts on the subject, producing atrocious things that mainstream Darwinists in science said AND DID and are saying now AND WOULD LIKE TO DO and barely scratch the surface. I've got tons of material I haven't used yet.
Hey, if you want to keep this up, I could do 100 posts on the subject, producing atrocious things that mainstream Darwinists in science said AND DID and are saying now AND WOULD LIKE TO DO and barely scratch the surface. I've got tons of material I haven't used yet.
Tuesday, July 17, 2018
As An Example of Something I Just Found And Wasn't Even Looking For
which shows how the online world will sink the lie of print and paper post-war Darwinist impunity.
Magic Lantern projector
Thirty samples of synthetic hair arranged by colour and texture in a tin box, designed by Dr. Eugen Fischer in 1905.
This object is a selection of 30 different colours and textures of synthetic hair in a tin box and, until some Museum Studies students looked into it more deeply, that was all we knew. Their research uncovered that the hair gauge was designed by the German scientist Eugen Fischer and used by him to judge the relative ‘whiteness’, according to hair colour and texture, of mixed race people in what is now Namibia. Fischer carried out his work in 1908 and Namibia is the site of the first genocide of the 20th Century, perpetrated by the Germans against the people of the Narma and Herero tribes. Up to three quarters of the population of these people were systematically killed. Fischer would go on to contribute to the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws established by Nazi Germany. The students were able to work out that the object probably post-dated Galton (who would have been 83 in 1905 when the instrument was designed) and was probably brought to the university and into the collection by Karl Pearson, founding Professor of the Department of Statistical Science, Galton’s disciple and ardent eugenicist.
It doesn't mention the body parts that Fischer sent back to his scientific colleagues in universities from those so murdered for scientific study. Sound familiar? And don't bother claiming this is "science" and not science. None of them ever lost a university appointment or scientific honor over it. After the war, after his crimes were partially revealed - indeed, his part in the African genocide was always known to his scientific colleagues, Eugen Fischer was appointed an honorary member in the Society for Anthropology in 1952, the same year he became an honorary member of the «Society for Constitutional Research» at Tübingen University under Ernst Kretschmer.
The search terms I used were straight forward, "eugen fischer karl pearson" and they returned a long list of connections between the major figures of Darwinism and Nazism. As I said, the lies that are the common current belief among English language people with educational credentials will inevitably fall because the information in primary documentation that comprises those links are pervasive in the primary documentation of Darwinism in the pre-WWII period. I never found a mainstream scientist who discounted the connection of Darwinism to eugenics and even German eugenics, aka Nazism, before the war.
Magic Lantern projector
Thirty samples of synthetic hair arranged by colour and texture in a tin box, designed by Dr. Eugen Fischer in 1905.
This object is a selection of 30 different colours and textures of synthetic hair in a tin box and, until some Museum Studies students looked into it more deeply, that was all we knew. Their research uncovered that the hair gauge was designed by the German scientist Eugen Fischer and used by him to judge the relative ‘whiteness’, according to hair colour and texture, of mixed race people in what is now Namibia. Fischer carried out his work in 1908 and Namibia is the site of the first genocide of the 20th Century, perpetrated by the Germans against the people of the Narma and Herero tribes. Up to three quarters of the population of these people were systematically killed. Fischer would go on to contribute to the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws established by Nazi Germany. The students were able to work out that the object probably post-dated Galton (who would have been 83 in 1905 when the instrument was designed) and was probably brought to the university and into the collection by Karl Pearson, founding Professor of the Department of Statistical Science, Galton’s disciple and ardent eugenicist.
It doesn't mention the body parts that Fischer sent back to his scientific colleagues in universities from those so murdered for scientific study. Sound familiar? And don't bother claiming this is "science" and not science. None of them ever lost a university appointment or scientific honor over it. After the war, after his crimes were partially revealed - indeed, his part in the African genocide was always known to his scientific colleagues, Eugen Fischer was appointed an honorary member in the Society for Anthropology in 1952, the same year he became an honorary member of the «Society for Constitutional Research» at Tübingen University under Ernst Kretschmer.
The search terms I used were straight forward, "eugen fischer karl pearson" and they returned a long list of connections between the major figures of Darwinism and Nazism. As I said, the lies that are the common current belief among English language people with educational credentials will inevitably fall because the information in primary documentation that comprises those links are pervasive in the primary documentation of Darwinism in the pre-WWII period. I never found a mainstream scientist who discounted the connection of Darwinism to eugenics and even German eugenics, aka Nazism, before the war.
For The Post War White Wash Of These Connections The Jig Is Up
We can know to within the realm of complete certainty that Hitler got Karl Pearson's thinking at least second hand through the one scientific work that we know he was reading as he was formulating his Nazi ideology in Mein Kampf . We know that with certainty because the book Grundruss von Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene was given to Hitler by the right-wing science publisher J. H. Lehmann to aid Hitler's research while he was in Landesburg prison. The book, by three German scientists of the day, Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer*, and Fritz Lenz cites Karl Pearson and a series he oversaw at the Galton Institute as among the foremost of sources of such science. You can also see from the citations that they used material from English language sources, Charles Davenport, Paul Popenoe, and, most interesting from my point of view, a book which Charles Darwin, himself, endorsed, Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius which they deemed to be "The classic work on the matter of hereditary endowment" They certainly got that from the English original because in their note on the book they discount the German translation as "not completely satisfactory". [See here in the original, pages 302 and 303]
These very ideas of English and American Darwinism were among the ones that Hitler was using when he formulated Nazism, just about every one of them from atheists who were almost uniformly hostile to Jewish-Christian religion.
The ties that bind English language Darwinism directly to Nazism are there in plain sight and always will be as long as the literature of both exist. You could cover that up in the print culture that created the post-war non-eugenic Darwin but that's over with access to the original documents online in easily found, easily researched form.
Scientists, science popularizers, those holding up their plaster-St. Darwin idol had better face that fact, that the long told lies of impunity for the concept of natural selection, Darwinism, are falling as people have a chance to look at that primary material. As I said, every single time I start to look into the writing and words of the mainstream Darwinists, I can almost guarantee you that I'll find some depravity. At times it's only quasi-Nazi-like, couched in veiled racism, other times, as in the major figure of Karl Pearson, it is indistinguishable from Nazism. And the ties to everything from neo-Nazism to the American Republican-fascist right are included in those connections. An example I've mentioned before, one of Paul Popenoe's post-war associates was James Dobson, the founder of Focus On The Family** and a major figure in right-wing American politics today. Darwinism is based in inequality, it cannot be reconciled with the basis of genuine American style liberalism. It certainly is incompatible with the political beliefs of some of its most ardent defenders such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. That tension is something that the neo-eugenicists have exploited in their attacks on them.
Dump Darwinism it's incompatible with democracy.
* Eugen Fischer was guilty of war crimes by that time due to him doing in a German concentration camp in East Africa in the first decade of the 20th century pretty much what Mengele and his colleagues in German science did in the 1940s. Only, as his victims were Black People, it's only recently that that connection has been made.
As can be seen from the passages from Karl Fischer I gave you this week, one sentence in this recent citation of that is absolutely wrong.
In the Herero work camps there were numerous children born to these abused women, and a man called Eugen Fischer, who was interested in genetics, came to the camps to study them; he carried out medical experiments on them as well. He decided that each mixed-race child was physically and mentally inferior to its German father (a conclusion for which there was and is no respectable scientific foundation whatever) and wrote a book promoting his ideas: 'The Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene'. Adolf Hitler read it while he was in prison in 1923, and cited it in his own infamous pursuit of 'racial purity'.
That idea did have a "respectable scientific foundation," such was given to it by one of the foremost scientists of that decade, Karl Pearson, years before Fischer carried out his proto-Nazi experiments and drew his proto-Nazi conclusions. Such is the "respectable" science that arises with Dariwnism for the reasons I stated below, it makes murder into a creator god on the basis of asserted inequality, including among humans of different races and classes. I would love to know if Fischer had read Pearson or what of Darwin he had read before he committed crimes against humanity. That was the same scientific basis on which the post-war scientific hero Francis Crick was writing in secret to his scientific colleagues to get support for the scientific racism of Arthur Jensen, whose work informs the racism of Charles Murray. It's a daisy chain of Darwinist racism that continues to our time.
These very ideas of English and American Darwinism were among the ones that Hitler was using when he formulated Nazism, just about every one of them from atheists who were almost uniformly hostile to Jewish-Christian religion.
The ties that bind English language Darwinism directly to Nazism are there in plain sight and always will be as long as the literature of both exist. You could cover that up in the print culture that created the post-war non-eugenic Darwin but that's over with access to the original documents online in easily found, easily researched form.
Scientists, science popularizers, those holding up their plaster-St. Darwin idol had better face that fact, that the long told lies of impunity for the concept of natural selection, Darwinism, are falling as people have a chance to look at that primary material. As I said, every single time I start to look into the writing and words of the mainstream Darwinists, I can almost guarantee you that I'll find some depravity. At times it's only quasi-Nazi-like, couched in veiled racism, other times, as in the major figure of Karl Pearson, it is indistinguishable from Nazism. And the ties to everything from neo-Nazism to the American Republican-fascist right are included in those connections. An example I've mentioned before, one of Paul Popenoe's post-war associates was James Dobson, the founder of Focus On The Family** and a major figure in right-wing American politics today. Darwinism is based in inequality, it cannot be reconciled with the basis of genuine American style liberalism. It certainly is incompatible with the political beliefs of some of its most ardent defenders such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. That tension is something that the neo-eugenicists have exploited in their attacks on them.
Dump Darwinism it's incompatible with democracy.
* Eugen Fischer was guilty of war crimes by that time due to him doing in a German concentration camp in East Africa in the first decade of the 20th century pretty much what Mengele and his colleagues in German science did in the 1940s. Only, as his victims were Black People, it's only recently that that connection has been made.
As can be seen from the passages from Karl Fischer I gave you this week, one sentence in this recent citation of that is absolutely wrong.
In the Herero work camps there were numerous children born to these abused women, and a man called Eugen Fischer, who was interested in genetics, came to the camps to study them; he carried out medical experiments on them as well. He decided that each mixed-race child was physically and mentally inferior to its German father (a conclusion for which there was and is no respectable scientific foundation whatever) and wrote a book promoting his ideas: 'The Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene'. Adolf Hitler read it while he was in prison in 1923, and cited it in his own infamous pursuit of 'racial purity'.
That idea did have a "respectable scientific foundation," such was given to it by one of the foremost scientists of that decade, Karl Pearson, years before Fischer carried out his proto-Nazi experiments and drew his proto-Nazi conclusions. Such is the "respectable" science that arises with Dariwnism for the reasons I stated below, it makes murder into a creator god on the basis of asserted inequality, including among humans of different races and classes. I would love to know if Fischer had read Pearson or what of Darwin he had read before he committed crimes against humanity. That was the same scientific basis on which the post-war scientific hero Francis Crick was writing in secret to his scientific colleagues to get support for the scientific racism of Arthur Jensen, whose work informs the racism of Charles Murray. It's a daisy chain of Darwinist racism that continues to our time.
** Just as the ties to figures like Karl Pearson discredits the awful British from of "socialism". Fabinanism, such ties as that of Dobson discredit the "Christianity" that is part of the American Republican-fascist right, the ones who also put a serial adulterer, bragging sexual assaulter and hater of the poor and white supremacist in the White House and maintains him there.
Note: I have stopped using the dishonest convention of putting discredited or all too temporarily unpopular science such as eugenics and scientific racism in scare quotes as "science". Science is whatever the scientists of its time decide it is, this science was accepted almost universally by biologists in the pre-war period, it is being reverted to now that the memory of the atrocities of the Nazis is fading with the deaths of those who experienced and witnessed it. Science wears this because science, scientists, maintain its repute as can be seen in Crick and Watson, etc. They don't get to hide behind poses of moral impunity as far as I'm concerned.
Update: Hey, it as you who slammed me for what I said about Karl Pearson, I'm not going to apologize for knowing how to prove I was right about him and to tie him into the general milieu in which he operated and his ideas operate today. Maybe if you read more instead of playing online . . .
Update: Hey, it as you who slammed me for what I said about Karl Pearson, I'm not going to apologize for knowing how to prove I was right about him and to tie him into the general milieu in which he operated and his ideas operate today. Maybe if you read more instead of playing online . . .
"Masterful Human progress following an inter-racial struggle" How Much More Obvious Can The Relationship of Darwinism To Nazism Get?
If the excerpt of the British Fabian socialist, undisputed expert in Darwinism in his day and still regarded as a great figure of science, Karl Pearson, didn't convince you that his entirely orthodox pre-war vision of Darwinism, which he got from one of Darwin's closest and most valued colleagues, Francis Galton, was indistinguishable from Nazism and the current thinking of neo-Nazis, you can complete that by his vision of what the genocides he advocated and promoted would lead to. He didn't think they should lead to any kind of peaceful millennium, such as that pointed out here a few days back the British utilitarians theoretically mused might be bought by the genocide of Jews. No, what would be bought by the genocides he advocated of the inhabitants of the Americas, Africa, Australia, etc. was a continued culling through violent struggle among groups and a program within a group of selective culling through the violence that is the basis of the class system and direct selection of who would get to leave children.
Continuing immediately after where I left off in the main contents of National Life From The Standpoint of Science, page 25, Karl Pearson makes that claim to an absolute certainty.
But America is but one case in which we have to mark a masterful human progress following an inter-racial struggle. The Australian nation is another case of great civilization supplanting a lower race unable to work to the full the land and its resources. Further back in history you find the same tale with almost every European nation. Sometimes when the conquering race is not too diverse in civilization and in type of energy there is an amalgamation of races, as when Norman and Anglo-Saxon ultimately blended; at other times the inferior race is driven out before the superior, as the Celt drove out the Iberian. The struggle means suffering, intense suffering, while it is in progress; but that struggle and that suffering have been the stages by which the white man has reached his present stage of development, and they account for the fact that he no longer lives in caves and feeds on roots and nuts. This dependence of progress on the survival of the fitter race, terribly black as it may seem to some of you, gives the struggle for existence its redeeming features; it is the fiery crucible out of which comes the finer metal. You may hope for a time when the sword shall be turned into the ploughshare, when American and German and English traders shall no longer compete in the markets of the world for their raw material and for their food supply, when the white man and the dark shall share the soil between them, and each till it as he lists. But, believe me, when that day comes mankind will no longer progress; there will be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock; the relentless law of heredity will not be controlled and guided by natural selection. May will stagnate; and unless he ceases to multiply, the catastrophe will come again; famine and pestilence, as we see them in the East, physical selection instead of the struggle of race against race, will do the work more relentlessly, and to judge from India and China, far less efficiently than of old.
Remember, this was not Karl Pearson, eminent man of science, respected member of the Fabian socialist ranting like Hitler as he said exactly the same things Hitler would begin saying two decades after Pearson gave this as a lecture, this was what he said was a fact of science, that science being what he regarded the glory of British Science, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, he was saying it in cultured English to a society of the nicest of British audiences, many of them members of the ruling aristocratic class.
It was a result of his scientific, materialist, atheist faith that Darwin had found the key to what they took as the central question of the life sciences, what the conventional - I would say enforced - hegemony of Darwinism in science still holds up as the central idea in biology, including, as can be seen in the revival of eugenics under Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology, still generates assertions of eugenics.
I don't know if there was ever a German translation of Karl Pearson's speech but, as with the translations of Darwinian scientific literature back and forth between English and German, the very terms that sound so deranged and morally repugnant when they come out of a Hitler, an Eichmann, a Goebbels, can be said in English through elegant prose, you can imagine hearing it in a refined, received British or an educated American voice, quite often in easily seen cognates.
I have known some American and British socialists of today, mostly Marxist, who, seeing the "socialist" label on a Karl Pearson or some other British scientist figure that they are the same kind of socialists they are. But there can be no question that the socialism of Karl Pearson, a development of his scientism, his atheism and his materialism when filtered through his Darwinism is an almost exact match for the National Socialism of the Nazis. The belief in natural selection - and given the impossibility of really observing Darwinian natural selection,* the production of new species, even the development of new traits that become a universal feature of species, it is a belief - inevitably leads to the same conclusions.
Darwin turned murder into a creative force when he posited a "struggle for existence" HIS WORDS, NOT MINE, as the engine of progress in evolution. The subsequent claim of post-war neo-Darwinists that Darwin's natural selection was not presented as a progressive force is a lie, as can be seen from reading the claims of conventional Darwinists of indisputable authority to make such claims such as Karl Pearson, indeed, going right back to Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, in the fifth and sixth editions he prepared of On the Origin of Species, in his first and confirmed generation of his followers named by him, Francis Galton and, foremost, according to his own introduction in The Descent of Man, Ernst Haeckel whose authorized elucidation of Darwin's natural selection was so influential in German science, in German intellectual life and, in the next generation, in politics and the law.** That was already happening during Charles Darwin's life, he corresponded with, not only German scientists, but German intellectuals and legal scholars on the application of his theory in legal policy, including the imposition of execution, the implication of state killing in improving the human stock.
* It is not only in the investigation of human society that the truth is sometimes unavailable. Natural scientists, in their overweening pride, have come to believe that eventually everything we want to know will be known. But that is not true. For some things there is simply not world enough and time. It may be, given the necessary constraints on time and resources available to the natural sciences, that we will never have more than a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system. For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them. In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them. Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were. Over and over, in these essays reproduced here, I have tried to give an impression of the limitations on the possibility of our knowledge. Science is a social activity carried out by a remarkable, but by no means omnipotent species. Even the Olympians were limited in their powers.
Richard Lewontin: Introduction: It Ain't Necessarily So
Lewontin is an honest enough person to admit that the belief that those "selective forces operating on most genes" can't either be observed or measured. In case no one missed that, it really means, there's no way to know if those things are there or even if they are real and not an imagined construct.
He goes on to present the problem in a way which directly shows the fact that natural selection must be believed and can't be known, "there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were." Anyone who reads any of the stories, the scenarios, the very substance that Darwinian natural selection is made of who doesn't see the truth of what Lewontin said isn't thinking about it very hard because it is obvious. In many of his writings on natural selection and, especially, his claims derived from it, Karl Pearson will admit that there is "little data" to support his claims, at one point I remember he even admitted that Darwin had no actual data to support what he said in Descent of Man, but then he claimed to see trends in other data or in life that support his Darwinian interpretation of them. What he was doing was imposing his ideological preferences on his observations, something which is rampant when even the biggest figures in science make up stories about fossilized remains and ALWAYS IS THE CASE WHEN THEY DO SO ON THE BASIS OF NO PHYSICAL EVIDENCE AT ALL. And as Richard Lewontin says, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces invented in those stories, they are a matter of preference. That is inevitably a practice under Darwinism because there is no way to discern what really happened in the past because it can't be observed, it can't be measured and any analysis that is done to retrospectively create the simulations of observations is no different from the stories told in the first chapters of Genesis or any ancient creation myth. The difference is that what the scientists are doing is sold as science and the amoral atrocities such as those Karl Pearson developed out of Darwinism are generally more viciously murderous and sold as having a scientific reliability they most certainly don't have. Darwin, Karl Pearson, today's Evolutionary Psychologists, all of them claim to have those powers which the Olympians weren't claimed to have had. Sometimes they are used to authorized mass murder and genocide. That's as clear as the words of Karl Pearson.
** In fact, Ernst Haeckel had considerable influence in British and American intellectual circles through translation of his works, some by the foremost British atheist of his day, Joseph McCabe - some of which, proto-Nazi depravity and all, was reprinted by the American atheist publishing firm Prometheus not that long ago. And, for those with a more modest budget and less of an attention span, in the famous series of Little Blue Books, that came from the foremost American atheist propagandist of his day, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. To read the history of eugenics and what would develop into fascism and its relationship with, not only the expected secular right but the secular left was quite an eye opener to me as to what materialism inevitably does to would-be leftism. It was one of the keys to my understanding of why the American left failed, catastrophically, continuing into today, as the likes of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. were succeeded by "secularists" and atheists.
Update: If you are still in denial due to the fact that the Nazis concentrated on European populations for wholesale slaughter instead of People of color, first, you should be ashamed of yourself for thinking like a Nazi, second, Karl Pearson practically gave them the very words in which the Nazis elucidated their plan to "cleanse" the German, the ARYAN population of "Asiatic" (the very word often used by the Nazis) pollution of them, Jews being foremost but only one of the groups they figured they needed to get rid of. I gave you that passage yesterday:
Frequently they intercross, and if the bad stock be raised the good is lowered. Even in the case of Eurasians, of whom I have met mentally and physically fine specimens, I have felt how much better they would have been had they been pure Asiatics or pure Europeans. Thus it comes about that when the struggle for existence between races is suspended, the solution of great problems may be unnaturally postponed; instead of the slow, stern processes of evolution, cataclysmal solutions are prepared for the future.
The word "final" in "final solution" was used because the Nazis found the Brits weren't going to let them deport Jews to Palestine or other places - no doubt, eventually in the continued culling of the sort both Pearson and they believed was necessary to "improve" the human species, they'd have gotten around to killing them in Palestine too. The "final solution" would certainly fall into the "cataclysmal solutions" to achieve his end that, in 1900, Pearson said were "prepared for the future" That Karl Pearson was presenting this as scientific fact in 1900 certainly gives him priority for such ideas over Hitler who was eleven at the time he said this.
Continuing immediately after where I left off in the main contents of National Life From The Standpoint of Science, page 25, Karl Pearson makes that claim to an absolute certainty.
But America is but one case in which we have to mark a masterful human progress following an inter-racial struggle. The Australian nation is another case of great civilization supplanting a lower race unable to work to the full the land and its resources. Further back in history you find the same tale with almost every European nation. Sometimes when the conquering race is not too diverse in civilization and in type of energy there is an amalgamation of races, as when Norman and Anglo-Saxon ultimately blended; at other times the inferior race is driven out before the superior, as the Celt drove out the Iberian. The struggle means suffering, intense suffering, while it is in progress; but that struggle and that suffering have been the stages by which the white man has reached his present stage of development, and they account for the fact that he no longer lives in caves and feeds on roots and nuts. This dependence of progress on the survival of the fitter race, terribly black as it may seem to some of you, gives the struggle for existence its redeeming features; it is the fiery crucible out of which comes the finer metal. You may hope for a time when the sword shall be turned into the ploughshare, when American and German and English traders shall no longer compete in the markets of the world for their raw material and for their food supply, when the white man and the dark shall share the soil between them, and each till it as he lists. But, believe me, when that day comes mankind will no longer progress; there will be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock; the relentless law of heredity will not be controlled and guided by natural selection. May will stagnate; and unless he ceases to multiply, the catastrophe will come again; famine and pestilence, as we see them in the East, physical selection instead of the struggle of race against race, will do the work more relentlessly, and to judge from India and China, far less efficiently than of old.
Remember, this was not Karl Pearson, eminent man of science, respected member of the Fabian socialist ranting like Hitler as he said exactly the same things Hitler would begin saying two decades after Pearson gave this as a lecture, this was what he said was a fact of science, that science being what he regarded the glory of British Science, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, he was saying it in cultured English to a society of the nicest of British audiences, many of them members of the ruling aristocratic class.
It was a result of his scientific, materialist, atheist faith that Darwin had found the key to what they took as the central question of the life sciences, what the conventional - I would say enforced - hegemony of Darwinism in science still holds up as the central idea in biology, including, as can be seen in the revival of eugenics under Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology, still generates assertions of eugenics.
I don't know if there was ever a German translation of Karl Pearson's speech but, as with the translations of Darwinian scientific literature back and forth between English and German, the very terms that sound so deranged and morally repugnant when they come out of a Hitler, an Eichmann, a Goebbels, can be said in English through elegant prose, you can imagine hearing it in a refined, received British or an educated American voice, quite often in easily seen cognates.
I have known some American and British socialists of today, mostly Marxist, who, seeing the "socialist" label on a Karl Pearson or some other British scientist figure that they are the same kind of socialists they are. But there can be no question that the socialism of Karl Pearson, a development of his scientism, his atheism and his materialism when filtered through his Darwinism is an almost exact match for the National Socialism of the Nazis. The belief in natural selection - and given the impossibility of really observing Darwinian natural selection,* the production of new species, even the development of new traits that become a universal feature of species, it is a belief - inevitably leads to the same conclusions.
Darwin turned murder into a creative force when he posited a "struggle for existence" HIS WORDS, NOT MINE, as the engine of progress in evolution. The subsequent claim of post-war neo-Darwinists that Darwin's natural selection was not presented as a progressive force is a lie, as can be seen from reading the claims of conventional Darwinists of indisputable authority to make such claims such as Karl Pearson, indeed, going right back to Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, in the fifth and sixth editions he prepared of On the Origin of Species, in his first and confirmed generation of his followers named by him, Francis Galton and, foremost, according to his own introduction in The Descent of Man, Ernst Haeckel whose authorized elucidation of Darwin's natural selection was so influential in German science, in German intellectual life and, in the next generation, in politics and the law.** That was already happening during Charles Darwin's life, he corresponded with, not only German scientists, but German intellectuals and legal scholars on the application of his theory in legal policy, including the imposition of execution, the implication of state killing in improving the human stock.
* It is not only in the investigation of human society that the truth is sometimes unavailable. Natural scientists, in their overweening pride, have come to believe that eventually everything we want to know will be known. But that is not true. For some things there is simply not world enough and time. It may be, given the necessary constraints on time and resources available to the natural sciences, that we will never have more than a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system. For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them. In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them. Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were. Over and over, in these essays reproduced here, I have tried to give an impression of the limitations on the possibility of our knowledge. Science is a social activity carried out by a remarkable, but by no means omnipotent species. Even the Olympians were limited in their powers.
Richard Lewontin: Introduction: It Ain't Necessarily So
Lewontin is an honest enough person to admit that the belief that those "selective forces operating on most genes" can't either be observed or measured. In case no one missed that, it really means, there's no way to know if those things are there or even if they are real and not an imagined construct.
He goes on to present the problem in a way which directly shows the fact that natural selection must be believed and can't be known, "there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were." Anyone who reads any of the stories, the scenarios, the very substance that Darwinian natural selection is made of who doesn't see the truth of what Lewontin said isn't thinking about it very hard because it is obvious. In many of his writings on natural selection and, especially, his claims derived from it, Karl Pearson will admit that there is "little data" to support his claims, at one point I remember he even admitted that Darwin had no actual data to support what he said in Descent of Man, but then he claimed to see trends in other data or in life that support his Darwinian interpretation of them. What he was doing was imposing his ideological preferences on his observations, something which is rampant when even the biggest figures in science make up stories about fossilized remains and ALWAYS IS THE CASE WHEN THEY DO SO ON THE BASIS OF NO PHYSICAL EVIDENCE AT ALL. And as Richard Lewontin says, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces invented in those stories, they are a matter of preference. That is inevitably a practice under Darwinism because there is no way to discern what really happened in the past because it can't be observed, it can't be measured and any analysis that is done to retrospectively create the simulations of observations is no different from the stories told in the first chapters of Genesis or any ancient creation myth. The difference is that what the scientists are doing is sold as science and the amoral atrocities such as those Karl Pearson developed out of Darwinism are generally more viciously murderous and sold as having a scientific reliability they most certainly don't have. Darwin, Karl Pearson, today's Evolutionary Psychologists, all of them claim to have those powers which the Olympians weren't claimed to have had. Sometimes they are used to authorized mass murder and genocide. That's as clear as the words of Karl Pearson.
** In fact, Ernst Haeckel had considerable influence in British and American intellectual circles through translation of his works, some by the foremost British atheist of his day, Joseph McCabe - some of which, proto-Nazi depravity and all, was reprinted by the American atheist publishing firm Prometheus not that long ago. And, for those with a more modest budget and less of an attention span, in the famous series of Little Blue Books, that came from the foremost American atheist propagandist of his day, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. To read the history of eugenics and what would develop into fascism and its relationship with, not only the expected secular right but the secular left was quite an eye opener to me as to what materialism inevitably does to would-be leftism. It was one of the keys to my understanding of why the American left failed, catastrophically, continuing into today, as the likes of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. were succeeded by "secularists" and atheists.
Update: If you are still in denial due to the fact that the Nazis concentrated on European populations for wholesale slaughter instead of People of color, first, you should be ashamed of yourself for thinking like a Nazi, second, Karl Pearson practically gave them the very words in which the Nazis elucidated their plan to "cleanse" the German, the ARYAN population of "Asiatic" (the very word often used by the Nazis) pollution of them, Jews being foremost but only one of the groups they figured they needed to get rid of. I gave you that passage yesterday:
Frequently they intercross, and if the bad stock be raised the good is lowered. Even in the case of Eurasians, of whom I have met mentally and physically fine specimens, I have felt how much better they would have been had they been pure Asiatics or pure Europeans. Thus it comes about that when the struggle for existence between races is suspended, the solution of great problems may be unnaturally postponed; instead of the slow, stern processes of evolution, cataclysmal solutions are prepared for the future.
The word "final" in "final solution" was used because the Nazis found the Brits weren't going to let them deport Jews to Palestine or other places - no doubt, eventually in the continued culling of the sort both Pearson and they believed was necessary to "improve" the human species, they'd have gotten around to killing them in Palestine too. The "final solution" would certainly fall into the "cataclysmal solutions" to achieve his end that, in 1900, Pearson said were "prepared for the future" That Karl Pearson was presenting this as scientific fact in 1900 certainly gives him priority for such ideas over Hitler who was eleven at the time he said this.
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