Saturday, July 28, 2018

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Gordon Pengilly - Bailey's Way - Two Episodes



Written by Gordon Pengilly, Bailey's Way stars Esther Purves Smith as Tanis Bailey , a young rookie constable on the the Calgary Police Service determined to make’Detective’ just as soon as she can. David LeReaney as Sergeant Mann and Grant Linneberg as Detective Donaldson. Introduced by Bob Boving.

More cast for Deadman's Flats: Barbara Gates Wilson; Shauna Burnett;
Frank Zotter.

More cast for He Kissed Me Goodbye: Cast: Dennis Fitzgerald; Andy Maton; Natasha Girgis; Edward Belanger; Caroline Cave.

It's summer and I spend most of my spare time weeding so I don't have much time to go online looking for new audio dramas.   These stand up to repeated  listening.  

I wish I could find Gordon Pengilly's radio plays I haven't heard before.  Clues will be appreciated.   

Fanny Brice - Ted Lewis - Second Hand Rose


She was good at what she did.

Just needed to get that out of my head. 

And here she is in the role that was my parents' favorite.


From Today's Lectionary Jeremiah 7: 1-11 - The Left Should Be Doing A Lot More God Talking Even If It Makes The Atheists P.O.ed

The following message came to Jeremiah from the LORD:
Stand at the gate of the house of the LORD,
and there proclaim this message:
Hear the word of the LORD, all you of Judah
who enter these gates to worship the LORD!
Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel:
Reform your ways and your deeds,
so that I may remain with you in this place.
Put not your trust in the deceitful words:
"This is the temple of the LORD!
The temple of the LORD! The temple of the LORD!"
Only if you thoroughly reform your ways and your deeds;
if each of you deals justly with his neighbor;
if you no longer oppress the resident alien,
the orphan, and the widow;
if you no longer shed innocent blood in this place,
or follow strange gods to your own harm,
will I remain with you in this place,
in the land I gave your fathers long ago and forever.

But here you are, putting your trust in deceitful words to your own loss!
Are you to steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury,
burn incense to Baal,
go after strange gods that you know not,
and yet come to stand before me
in this house which bears my name, and say:
"We are safe; we can commit all these abominations again"?
Has this house which bears my name
become in your eyes a den of thieves?
I too see what is being done, says the LORD.

I'm finding that the daily readings from the Catholic lectionary are so oddly appropriate for the news of the day under Trumpian-Republican fascism.  More so than a lot of the commentary from the secular left.

Someone was surprised when I said that Majority Report with Sam Seder was my current favorite Youtube channel because I obviously disagree with a lot of what they say on the show.  The materialism, the atheism, the quasi-Marxism of some of what is said but I don't listen to them for that, I listen for other things, not least of all Michael Brooks' uncanny imitation of Jordan Peterson who is such a whussy bully.   And they, themselves, aren't supportive of people who might agree with them about atheism and even materialism, they have some of the most robust criticism of the new atheist fad of anyone left of John Lennox.  And politically we're almost exactly in the same place most of the time, especially when it comes to realistic, practical politics instead of futile play-lefty crap.

That said, I didn't agree with Sam Seder when he said recently that religious people should keep their religion out of the public square.  I look at what has happened in this country since nice, good liberals have kept religion out of the public square, on the basis of them wanting to be all First Amendmenty and not make atheists and people who don't like Christianity annoyed.  The result was a perversion of Christianity into a fascist-imperial state religion like Roman imperial paganism with a few names changed and various regional and class resentment (I wonder the extent to which the lower orders in Roman society fell for the same thing), which has been a major component of Republican-fascist success.  It's not unlike what's happened in Russia with the Russian Orthodox establishment, to which I can't believe there is no push-back by Orthodox Christians who know making nice with Putin comes at the cost of denying the Gospel of Jesus. 

One of the big problems with American politics, American discourse and American society is that the religious left in America got intimidated out of putting their thoughts into the public square in the late 1960s, as I told someone recently, the death of The Reverenend Martin Luther King jr. was a convenient date to date that from but it had started before then, the Supreme Court ruling (rightly but hardly importantly) banning prayer and bible readings in public schools and the political reaction it and subsequent equally unimportant rulings restricting interactions between churches and states had a really strong part in that quashing of liberal religion in public.  I think, just as with the idiotic duping of the non-Marxist left scandalized by the anti-communist excesses of the late 40s-60s leading them to feel misplaced sympathy for the equivalent of apologists for Hitler and Mussolini, they got royally suckered by various anti-Christian factions through a pious citation of the words against an establishment of religion in the First Amendment.

Let me give you an example for comparison. Just as there was never anything intrinsically wrong with people choosing to not patronize Stalinists who wrote and made movies, as private citizens, which was never a valid First Amendment issue or, really any issue,* there was never anything intrinsically wrong with the Christian left expressing their political and social stands and actions in the language of their religion. 

The anti-Christian left has never produced anything except duping the left into taking massively unpopular, ballot-box poison positions on "principle" and eternally splitting into mutually hating, warring factions between tiny splinter groups.  That is unless you count the rare episodes of violence that were so useful to the fascists in discrediting the real left that got nailed for it.

* If you think that people not wanting to pay to see a movie written by that pill,  Lester Cole, is wrong, how is that any more wrong than the Montgomery Bus Boycott, various other boycotts?   That's entirely different from HUAC  wrongly hauling him in front of them in a tepid, watered down show trial with minimal consequences for Cole, or his fellow pill Lillian Hellman with even fewer consequences for her.   You can compare that to what their hero, Stalin did when he wanted to put people on show trials and they ended up with a bullet in their head a few hours after the preordained verdict was given.   I know Hellman went on record supporting the show-trials of Stalin, I wouldn't be surprised if Cole did, whether or not he signed on to that position like she did or not.  He remained a Stalinist for the rest of his life.  What was wrong about HUAC doing what they did is that it was a little taste of Stalinism in the United States, it is an irony that the very thing that will get Hollywood and show-biz and the scribbling class into a theatrical pose of outrage is the very thing that Cole and Hellman and those they want to paint as victims supported when it was carried to the ultimate extreme.

Needless to say, I haven't been boycotting Sam Seder's crew because of our disagreements.   Though I would if they started supporting stuff I think is immoral.

Friday, July 27, 2018

2001, It Was No 1984

When I went to see the movie 2001 the people I went with had some hash oil which I'd never done before.  They said you were supposed to see it stoned or you wouldn't get it.  I got shitfaced. 

Years later when I saw it straight I realized I liked it better when I couldn't remember it.  

Preeeeeeeeeee-tentious.   And the special effects they raved about, rinky dink now.  They don't even have the charm of the ones Georges Méliès created. 



Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Deserves Better Than To Get Used By Play-Lefty Idiots And Bernie Sanders

I should start by saying that I have no inclination to have any confidence in anyone who works with Glenn Greenwald, nevermind for him or sort of for him at The Intercept, so I'm not inclined well toward Briahna Gray, their Senior Politics Editor.  I am also wary of alleged lefties based in New York City - DC Axis when they interpret other places in the country. That's where I start from.   I despised Glenn Greenwald when despising Glenn Greenwald wasn't groovy. 

This exchange on Chris Hayes' show, All In, contains some of what was said by Ms. Gray that I agree with but it contains a glaring examples of some of the worst habits of the would-be real left in the United States(which I'd never mistake Greenwald and his outfit of even being part of), especially those from leftish enclaves being friggin' clueless about other places in the country.  I'll break in to point that out as we go. 

HAYES: You were – you were in that did you – am I right that you were

out there? You went and covered that rally.



BRIAHNA GRAY, SENIOR POLITICS EDITOR, THE INTERCEPT: I did. I was inKansas, and, you know, keeping in mind that everyone said it wasn`t goingto work in the Midwest and this was a complete waste of time and adisaster, you know, the venue had to bechanged the night before because it sold out within 10 hours and something like 4,000 people showed up at this bigger venue at 1:00 in the afternoon on a friday in triple digit degree heat.



You know, that`s not nothing.



HAYES: That`s not nothing.



GRAY: And I think that…



HAYES: That doesn`t mean that candidate is going to win, by the way.



GRAY: No, it doesn`t. Of course, none of this can be, you know, reduced in that way,

Let me break in right now to ask "reduced in that way?"  REDUCED?   Winning the friggin' general election is the whole point of the whole thing, getting hold of the key to doing anything worth doing in electoral politics SO YOU CAN MAKE LAWS AND CHANGE LIVES FOR THE BETTER! That's not "reducing" things, it's facing the hard reality of it.  Though, being a media figure, maybe like Jonathan Chait she figures that's the real purpose of everything. 

 but I think what it shows is that there is a message that is beyond partisanship. And when she talks about wanting to implement programs that speak to human dignity, that speak to basic material needs, people hear that and people understand that who might not otherwise associate themselves with one party or the other.

Which the loser in a general election most certainly DOESN'T GET TO DO NO MATTER HOW MUCH THEY WANT TO IMPLEMENT PROGRAMS.   If Democrats WIN A MAJORITY IN THE CONGRESS  in the general election, Republican-fascists DON'T get to implement programs, if Republican-fascists win, and  have a majority,  THE BEST DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIIST IN THE WORLD WILL NOT BE ABLE TO DO A SINGLE THING, NOT EVEN A CAUCUS COMPRISING THE ENTIRE DEMOCRATIC CAUCUS IN THE CONGRESS WITH ONE VOTE FEWER THAN A MAJORITY WILL BE ABLE TO DO IT.

HAYES: That is a good point.

No, it isn't a good point, as the entire history of what is current the Bernie Sanders left proves.  The only time Sanders was ever able to do things was when he was caucusing with a Democratic majority,  the same is true for all of the rest of the Democratic Socialists in the House who might join her, someday.  To pretend that this one candidate who has a good chance of becoming the first DSA member to become a member elected to Congress, and who is just great and wonderful and I hope she wins her election and has a long and successful career in office, is a sign that her politics works everywhere is ridiculous.  Of course she can Bernie can get out the true-believers to a rally or a caucus, though Bernie's record in the entirely more representative primary states was not impressive.  That doesn't produce the whole point of the matter, getting Republican-fascists out of offices and Democrats in them. 

And it sort of goes to what the Daily Caller person was saying, right,because she was saying, like, none of the signals were there to tell methat this is a bad thing that I shouldn`t like. And I can see peoplebeing, you know, seduced by it.



GRAY: Exactly.

That said, I have to say I think Michelle Goldberg, from the frickin' New York Times, makes a lot more sense.

GOLDBERG: I mean, I actually disagree that that goes beyond partisanship,right. I mean, I think you have one whole political party that genuinely does find this kind of language threatening and quasi-utilitarian andbelieves that, you know, first, you are talking about children deservinghealth care the next second you`re being reindoctrinated in FEMA camps.



But I think that inasmuch as there are swing voters, and there are not very many swing voters anymore, you know, in an electorate that`s polarized every election is a base election. But inasmuch as there are swing voters they`re not the kind of people that Beltway types like to pretend they arethese kind of judicious centrists carefully considering.



HAYES: Cross-pressured on the issues.



GOLDBERG: Those are the people I think – who kind of are most motivatedby appeals to their basic material needs.

Yes, and let's not forget how an effective margin of them were successfully played by the fascists, billionaires, domestic and foreign, who knew just what strings to pull to get them to vote against those interests for the biggest and most absurd conman who has run for the office in modern history, likely in all of history. 

HAYES: Let me just also say one thing here, just to be clear, she also hasa tremendous amount of distinct political talent. I mean, like, just to be clear, like these people are not created out of thin air. Like she is verygood at doing this that doesn`t just like, it is a little beyond the

message.

SEDER: Without a doubt.

Yes, Sam Seder, (of my current favorite Youtube channel),  without a doubt, she is great within the context of a district in which she stands a very good chance of winning.  A district very different from the large majority of districts in which a Democratic Socialist probably stands no chance of winning in a general election. If that were not the case, why haven't they won before? 

But I don`t mean to repeat myself, but I think the policy prescriptions are almost secondary. there`s nothing offensive in what she is saying in terms of like people wanting their kids to have health care.

But I think the idea that it is being straightforward, that is completely laid out there, speaks to the whole broader issue that politicos don`t necessarily contemplate, 

The ones who don't understand that winning a primary or caucus and then losing the general election OR CAUSING SO MUCH DAMAGE TO THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE THAT THEY THEN LOSE THE ELECTION don't seem to have learned a thing in the disastrous history of the lefty politicos and lefty magazine scribblers babbling the same kind of stuff that Brianna Gray is in this exchange.  I've come to the conclusion that that has been going on at least since the  idiots destroyed the Socialist Party in 1919 on orders from Lenin and Trotsky and went on to do things like endorse the racial bantustanization of the United States under order from the same in the early 1920s.  

Face that sad fact, the left in the United States is full to the top with play-boy and gal idiotic fuck-ups. Among the biggest ones today are some, maybe not all, but some who write for The Nation, In These Times, The Intercept (if we can pretend that anything like a leftist instead of a preening libertarian entity) and, after looking at their website, the Democratic Socialists of America.  
 
but it`s just like basically like do I think that person is authentic? Are they telling me what they believe, they are. And they seem to be pretty confident about it. And I think that a lot goes further than we imagine.

I'd rather not have to imagine it in the context of a race in Kansas that could make the difference between having Republican-fascists destroy the last vestiges of democracy and narrowly losing the chance to stop them.  I don't care how many preening New Yorkers get to feel all good about themselves for having "fought the good fight" I FUCKING CARE ABOUT WINNING ANY FIGHT.

GRAY: I there is something to the delivery of course. But you can`t also ignore that something like 70 percent of all congressional candidates who are in swing districts, Democrats who have won, ran health care as acentral policy. When I was in Kansas, I got a ride home from the airport with a 75-year-old Trump voter and her daughter. And when I asked her, youknow, what she was doing, because she talked to me about how sheappreciated that her grandkids could be on Health Care longer, because of Obamacare.



She appreciated that she was on Medicare and wanted – it was all aboutMedicare expansion. She was concerned that both of her adult children wereliving at home, couldn`t get a working – a living wage, and didn`t havehealth care.



And when I explained to her that I was going to a Bernie rally, and these are things that Bernie cared about, it didn`t take but a 10-minute car rideto get her on board.

How many people in Kansas does she think she's going to get to ride with for 10 minutes in a car because if that's what it takes, why isn't she out there  on the side of the road with her thumb out?   And does she know that she remained on board and will through the election?   If she came "on board" from having voted for Trump, I'd like to know how you figure her conversion is secure. 

And I think that you can`t undervalue the fact that people don`t have to be policy wonks to understand that basic policies that enable them to live a life in a wealthy and moral America matter, as Ocasio-Cortez says, matter.And it would have been a disservice to not have had them all these years.



HAYES: This is the Joe Lieberman column who is a sort of like perfect kind of…



GOLDBERG: Health care hero.



HAYES: I mean, Joe Liberman who said people should vote for Joe Crowley who is still on the ballot for the working families card, because AlexandriaOcasio-Cortez hurts the party, congress, and even America.



I think one of the things that she does here, which get this, right, which is like there is always the like but how are you going to pay for it, right? Oh, yeah, it sounds great to like do all of this stuff but like

let`s be real.



And I think part of the path that has been plowed by the Republicans it`s like why are you even going to talk about that? Why play that game? The president just pulled $12 billion out of thin air to like basically make some cash payments to some farmers. He is screwing on his trade policy.Like why even play the game?



GOLDBERG: And I think also she has kind of parried that kind of question really well which is we are laying out a marker for the kind of society that we want to create, right. I`m not coming to you with white paper about legislation that I am going to introduce next year.



SEDER: The problem is is that the faux concern about the deficit, and we can argue as to whether or not there is money – I mean, they came up with $70 billion a year for the military. We didn`t need that. But the notion of the deficit is no longer one of those sort of signifiers, one of those

cultural IDs that like guns, god – was. it used to be the deficit



HAYES: That got cast aside.



SEDER: And that got cast aside quickly.



HAYES: The last thing, though, I will say here, right, like – so, you know, obviously this is someone who is running – who is probably going to win, I think, in her district. It`s Bronx/Queens, a very liberal district, majority people of color. You know, you have got like Conor Lamb. You got people running in very different ways.



Like, I`m not quite sold on the idea, right. Like, the sort of – the thesis here, right, that the Bernie like thesis is like this is universal stuff. You can go to Kansas and do it. And I am not sold yet that that is true.



GRAY: Well, what if we look at the fact that Bernie Sanders won every district in the primary in West Virginia.



GOLDBERG: And Hillary won Mississippi, like that doesn`t mean that her brand of politics is viable there.



GRAY: Well, what if we look at the fact that Bernie Sanders won every district in the primary in West Virginia.

Let me underline that because it's the idiocy of Gray's position in a brief exchange.


GOLDBERG: And Hillary won Mississippi, like that doesn`t mean that her brand of politics is viable there.


GRAY: Well, no, because a general election and a primary election are very different.

Yeah, winning a primary means you get to be on the ballot, winning an election means you get to be in office.  



People are choosing based on pure partisanship in a general election. And I think that being overly dismissive of people on the ground whoarticulated a choice for a more progressive vision of the world, who articulated a choice for policies that spoke to their genuine material concerns is a fool`s errand.



HAYES: Whether it`s a fool`s errand or not, I am just saying it is an unanswered question, right, about like the – like I am going to go run as a Socialist in Kansas and that`s going to work.



GOLDBERG: I think these tensions are somewhat overplayed, right. I mean,every district sort of choose somebody who is appropriate. I don`t necessarily. I have no opinion about this primary in Kansas. I do know that when I was in Pennsylvania I met people who worked for both Conor Lamb

an also for some of the socialist candidates who won in the state house,and they didn`t see them as being on opposite sides of some kind of greatdivide.



HAYES: Michelle Goldberg, Sam Seder, and Brianna Gray, thank you both –

all for being with me tonight.



The idea that because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won an impressive upset in one of the most liberal areas of a relatively liberal city in a relatively liberal state that Bernie Sanders can build an empire with her across the country is ludicrous.  It doesn't surprise me that someone who works for the scumbag traitor, Glenn Greenwald, former idol of the play-left blog set and all round sleaze would be pushing that line. 


Hey, Rachel, Lee, Don't Pull That Line On Me - I've been watching the country going to hell under "more speech" most of my life

Listening to him being interviewed, by Rachel Maddow on just the most outrageous outrage surrounding the Trump-fascist abduction of children and their refusal to give them back to their parents, despite a court order to do so, I would love to ask Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigration Rights Project a really big question.

The question flows directly from how that policy came to be in place through the election of a criminal thug as president and a racist, very likely criminal thug being appointed Attorney General.  Trump as a public figure is 100% the creation of the media, the mass media, television, hate-talk radio, the tabloid media, the elite, print media having no insignificant part in it.   His entire false public image was sold to the people who voted for him by the American free press, freely pressing false images, false ideas, lies, to not put too fine a point on it, to the American People.   The very media on which American democracy depends because democracy is impossible without them knowing accurate information, lied us into Trumpian fascism, both through creating him as a candidate but, as well, telling lies about his opponent,  Hillary Clinton for almost as long as they were creating the fraud Trump and creating the milieu of fascism which permitted him to appeal to the Republian, now Republican-fascist primary voters and to peddle him in the general election along with the Republican-fascist thugs who run the Congress and who staff the majority on the Supreme Court.

As I will never stop pointing out, and this is getting ever closer to my question for Lee Gelernt, the series of Supreme Court and lower court rulings which created that fascist milieu was brought by Gelernt's organization, the ACLU, its well manicured fingerprints are all over those rulings, it briefed in favor of every one I'm aware of, it supported some of the worst of them even with the warning, sometimes by former members and, as I recall, at least one director of the ACLU that they would lead to disaster and could destroy democracy.

Lee Gelernt wouldn't be in court or on Rachel Maddow's show so often trying to get children out of Trump-regime baby jails if he hadn't been created by the American free press and if the same American free press, everything from the great grey drab of the New York Times down to the gutter level fascist media like the National Enquirer and FOX and Sinclair hadn't sandbagged Democratic candidates over the same period, especially Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2018.  It's his own organization that has been such an important part in getting them the ability to do what anyone would know they would do, sending the public discourse into a sewer of lies in promotion of the most criminal part of our politics on behalf of the wealthy people who own the media.

Why would an honest man remain in such an organization as the ACLU which has that history of advocacy?   Why should anyone find anything any member of the ACLU credible? 

And while we're at it,  Rachel, when are you going to address the part that the "free press" "free speech" rulings play in permitting the media to lie us into Republican fascist and Trumpinan fascism.  And don't try that goddamned lie, "more speech."   I've been watching the country going to hell under "more speech" most of my life.

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Stupid Mail - The Last Answer I'm Giving For A While

I as many of those who have not admired Richard Dawkins' scientific claims for many decades and his anti-religious bigotry for fewer decades was tickled when, on live radio he was challenged to give the full title of his scripture, On the Origin of Species and we hear that he, a high-priest of Darwinism, couldn't readily do it after he claimed he could.  You can listen to the exchange for the context that made that so satisfying.

The title, as can be seen on the original title-page of the first edition is plainly:

"On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"


Image result for first edition origin of species title page

The very title contains the basic claim of racism, that there are "favored races" and the signpost to eugenics, not all that long after, Nazi eugenics, that the favoring of some races over others means that those so favored are preserved.  In other places Darwin explicitly claims that the "favoring" of such favored races is inherited biological superiority, And the converse of that, the losers in the "struggle for life" are biologically, inherently inferior as will be the children they produce.  And he, himself predicted that it would be catastrophic if such aid to the underclass as was found in the horrific Victorian death camps, the Work House system and universal vaccination went on. 

As that quote given in a footnote this morning points out,  any application of that idea in political and legal terms, "biopolitics" will have to include the converse of that, the expression of the same idea, that "unfavored races" will have to die, they will not be "preserved" and when that is the scientifically asserted basis on which such decisions by governments and legal systems are executed, it will mean that people kill other people.

When you do that on a national basis (the "nation" as a biological entity taking the place of different "races") it will mean entire populations will be targeted for death.  As I've had to point out many times, Charles Darwin explicitly made such claims in his scientific writings in which he explicitly endorses the idea that the extinction of entire ethnic and racial groups in such a struggle, explicitly including the killing of people, would be beneficial to the survivors.  And that's not to mention members of the economic underclass even in his super-race, Brits.  That is present in everything from his major scientific publications, Origin of Species, especially The Descent of Man, and in letters to people like G. A. Gaskell (do a word search of my archive, I'm tired of giving links you never look at).   And that was, as well, an immediate response by scientists and jurists and people who asserted they were in the business of improving life that started within weeks of the publication of the book that carried that title, and that continues to this day within science and certainly outside of it.  That is a line of development that led within 48 years to the first eugenic law being passed in Indiana, explicitly asserted as scientifically valid through Darwinism, within 80 years to the beginning of the Nazi genocides.

Since I began looking into this, literally every lead I got, starting with Darwin's own writings, his own letters and correspondence and going on from the writings he cited and endorsed, following on from those, everything I looked at was a uniform confirmation of what I've said about him.   I've challenged those asserting another interpretation to refute it with evidence from the primary record and have gotten almost nothing, the little that was produced so flimsy that it was easily knocked down, generally using the very words of Charles Darwin and those who knew him, personally, intimately and scientifically.  As I said last week when challenged, I still have a large amount of evidence that proves what I'm saying.  You guys have yet to refute a single part of it with anything but jr. high level mockery and lies drawn from the phony post-war fiction surrounding Darwin.

Practical Paranoia In Contemporary Life

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.” 


Joseph Heller, Catch-22

I've noticed I'm getting a lot of junk-robo calls that seem to be using strategies to get me to say the word "yes".  I've started avoiding saying  it even when they ask,  "Mr. McCarthy?" I love trying to screw with computerized robocalls.  It's even more fun than playing with an ELIZA bot, which gets old fast. 

After a few of them I suspected that they were trying to get me roped into a bogus contract but haven't noticed any money going missing from my accounts and haven't gotten any bills.  So, now I'm suspecting its bogus polling agencies trying to get my "yes" recorded so they can include it in their bogus polling.  Doubting that any liberal entity would have the funds to do that, or need to, the positions of liberalism being far more popular than the word itself, I'm guessing it's some fascist entity.   

At least that's what I'm guessing it's all about.   Anyone heard anything?  

When You Claim A Struggle For Life Will Make Life Better For The Winner You're Arguing That Murder Is Good

One of the more constant cliches I've had hurled at me in writing about the depravity of Darwinism is "keep digging".  Which, obviously is what I have done, only the results aren't what Darwin's Defenders had hoped for. And I would recommend digging deeper to anyone who wants to argue about it, not ignoring the primary record of scientific writing and citations of it in para-scientific writing, especially as applied in law and policy.  Ignorance of the history of science, in this case the history of Darwinism, is no secure basis for making any stand.  Though a lot of that was like lumps of poisonous metal not needing to be mined, it was lying right there on the surface, in plain sight, ignored or merely covered with the thinnest of sheets.

The scandal of the blatant scientific antisemitism of Kevin Macdonald and John Hartung was not hidden IT WAS THE VERY SUBSTANCE OF THEIR SCIENTIFIC CLAIMS WHICH WERE REVIEWED AND ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION IN SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS IN THE LATE 20TH AND EARLY 21ST CENTURIES, even as in poplar culture "never again" became a popular statement and movies about the Holocaust were in theaters.  (As an aside, I don't know if my earlier citation of Macdonalds CV had anything to do with it but you apparently can't access it from his website, anymore.   I believe I copied it while available, though I have lost that. Always back-up.)

The worst aspect of the scandal wasn't that some ultraDarwinists were making racist comments, racism is an intrinsic part of Darwinism from the 1860s, in print, no doubt in the very mind of Darwin as he certainly considered his theory in terms of his own racism as he was formulating it.*   The scandal is that in the post-war period, as the history of American and Canadian and other eugenics, including German eugenics, which includes the death industrial complex of the Nazis, fully informed by all of the STEM disciplines were extensively documented and written about, reviewed scientific publications didn't hesitate in the least in publishing something that could have certainly fit right in in pre-war science that informed that industry.  I would bet you anything that if you put it in the correct, current Darwinian language that such a thing will happen again.

In short, they, sounding like the worst of Darwinian racists from the period up to and including as the Nazis were fomenting their biopolitics, their thanatopolitics** found that they could be published with scientific review, in scientific journals. 

As I recommended last week, go read how Karl Pearson, one of the most renowned and influential scientists of his time was coming up with ingenious means, using a scale used in the first genocide of the 20th century, in East Africa, citing the war-criminal inventor of it, for promoting the exclusion, the discrimination against the very Polish and Russian Jews who a mere 14 years after their scientific study was published in Britain were being shot into trenches by the Einsatzgruppen in Poland and Russia and elsewhere East of Germany.  My guess is that the scientific establishment in Britain, American and, no doubt Germany, didn't imagine anyone concluding that those Jews, who Pearson and his co-author Margaret Moul were so concerned would develop into a parasitic (they used the term in their paper) force on British society, would be seen the same way in Germany by a biopolitical party who were quite prepared to engage in a "struggle for life" which, as all struggles for life, struggles for existence will, includes many, many deaths.  We certainly have people as ready to do that here, they certainly have such people in Britain or in practically every country who would eagerly embody Karl Pearson and Charles Darwin's concept of winners in such a "struggle for life".

Clearly, science didn't learn much that it cared about from that test of time of the ideas behind it all.  Clearly, a lot of people in the general society haven't, either.  Most of them considered to be educated and enlightened.  Some of them with excellent personal, family reasons to have dug deeper into it.

*  If you doubt that Darwin was a racist read the one book which is the only one of his books which many of his most ardent admirers have opened, The Voyage of the Beagle.  And they're something like intellectuals among Darwinists as most of them haven't even gone to the bother of looking even at that most popular and least scientific of his books.  Go look up his descriptions of the Fuegians.  As for his clear preference of inequality among people,

The perfect equality among the individuals composing the Fuegian tribes must for a long time retard their civilization. As we see those animals, whose instinct compels them to live in society and obey a chief, are most capable of improvement, so is it with the races of mankind. Whether we look at it as a cause or a consequence, the more civilized always have the most artificial governments. For instance, the inhabitants of Otaheite, who, when first discovered, were governed by hereditary kings, had arrived at a far higher grade than another branch of the same people, the New Zealanders,—who, although benefited by being compelled to turn their attention to agriculture, were republicans in the most absolute sense. In Tierra del Fuego, until some chief shall arise with power sufficient to secure any acquired advantage, such as the domesticated animals, it seems scarcely possible that the political state of the country can be improved. At present, even a piece of cloth given to one is torn into shreds and distributed; and no one individual becomes richer than another. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how a chief can arise till there is property of some sort by which he might manifest his superiority and increase his power.

If you go on to read more of him, look at The Descent of Man to see that the racism on display in Beagle didn't lessen as he - and it should never be forgotten that he was a British aristocrat at the height of British imperialism - developed his theory of natural selection out of Malthusian depravity.   I'd say the chances of a British aristocrat "discovering" that equality was beneficial was somewhat far less than fifty-fifty. 

Hidden beneath his fantasy about "some chief [who] shall arise with power sufficient to secure any acquired advantage" is certainly a claim that violent conflict, no doubt with death and the threat of death, would lead the survivors to a higher state by virtue of inequality expressed in violence.  The intellectual granddad of Nazism and contempt for equality under law and economic justice.   As I said, it didn't get better when he expressed his preferences in terms meant to be scientific, in natural selection.

**  If you think that "never again" was a lesson universally learned at such great cost through the Nazi death industry, you couldn't be more wrong.  Google "thanatopolitics" and look at what scholars using that word today are writing in such glib terms in academic, scholastic writing and writing that attempts to ape their language.  Here, from "The Funambulist"  which is apparently dedicated to the scholarly consideration of "the politics of space and bodies".  "Cruel Designs: The Thantopolitics of the Death Penalty"

This notion emerges from the observation that death is “at work” and that there are therefore only two possible ways of dealing with it: acceleration or deceleration of the death process. Biopolitics therefore involves by definition its counterpart (one might say that there are the same), thanatopolitics. The administration of toxicity in the context of food production (an important part of biopolitics) or society’s infrastructure (pollution) or its risk factor (nuclear accidents), is what I include in this thanatopolitics that a given society has to organize to either administrate the acceleration or the deceleration of the death process.

Consider that as you remember how reviewed science journals and academic publishers so readily published  Macdonald and Hartung's writings about the alleged scientific, Darwinian character of Jews.  The article continues:

Although one can see how biopolitics cannot escape from thanatopolitics, death penalty corresponds to thanatopolitics that escapes from biopolitics, and therefore brings us back to a premodern mode of sovereignty. It would be however inaccurate to think that the conditions of the execution are also considered in the logic of the premodern era. The shift of this era toward our era was also marked by the invention of a thanato-technology in order to administrate death in a more efficient way, efficiency being one the key notion of this new mode of sovereignty. In Les corps vils: Expérimenter sur les êtres humains au XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Vile Bodies: Experimenting on Human Beings in 18th and 19th century) about which I will soon dedicate an entire article, Grégoire Chamayou introduces the genesis of the guillotine that remained the technology of the execution in France until 1981, when death penalty was abolished (my translation): . . . 

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Traumatizing To Conservatives


"He does not thereby become a German" - The Biological Basis of Nazi Genocide

As I said in the comments the other night, one of the claims about the motivation of the Nazis in their genocides couldn't be more obviously wrong.  It was after the guy who lies about me every day, Steve Simels, attributed the Holocaust to the Spanish Inquisition which I have never found mentioned anywhere in the Nazi literature promoting genocide, almost every point in that,  the Nazis pin their condemnation of Jews on biology, not religion.   What I said about his knowledge of the Spanish Inquisition, something shared almost universally by those with a superficial college education in the English language,  is obviously true.  Their conception of it is derived entirely from things like Monty Python skits and ideological blathering from anti-Catholics and atheists, that is the case with what most college credentialed people who know not more than that something called "The Spanish Inquisition" happened believe they know about it, that it was bad and you're supposed to figure it was to blame for anything anyone wants to blame on it, no evidence required as long as you hold to the common college grad line on it.

The common conception gets that one thing right, The Inquisition was bad, it was among the more morally atrocious products of the late medieval period which lingered in many places until well into the modern period.  It is rightfully considered to have been an emblem of a period of great corruption among the rich and powerful, both in the Catholic Church and in secular governments, all of them monarchies.   It wasn't, though, a monolithic entity and by the time it ended, it had been supplanted by forces in European and Western culture which fueled the Age of Genocides which was the 20th century.  Foremost among those was one largely and one exclusively atheist ideological movements, Darwinism* and Marxism.

The Spanish Inquisition, was, by the way, led by the Spanish state at its most infamous phase, when Fredinand and Isabella demanded control of the Inquisition from church authorities and made a bad thing even worse.*  Ironic for the charge made is that the most infamous Grand Inquisitor of that period, Tomas de Torquemada, came from a famous and powerful family of conversos, converts from Judaism to Catholicism.  His uncle was a famous Catholic theologian of the period, Juan de Torquemada, who became a cardinal and the archbishop of several powerful diocese.   He was also powerful in Rome voting in four papal conclaves, something of a kingmaker, only he was more of a pope maker, at least in the election that brought Nicholas V into the papacy.  As I said to Simps, who certainly never thought about it before, the Christian churches, including the Catholics, wanted Jews to join them, whereas the Nazis wanted to kill them, and did, those converted to Christianity and not as well as the atheists and secularists.  For Hitler, for the Nazis, being Jewish like being German was a matter of biology,  Nazism was first to last a biological ideology. 

Let me point that out again, in caps, EVEN IN THE SPANISH INQUISITION, THE VERY EVENT AND INSTRUMENT THAT IS ALLEGED TO BE A FORERUNNER OF THE NAZI GENOCIDE,  CATHOLICS WANTED JEWS TO BE CATHOLICS AND ACCEPTED CONVERTS AS EQUALS, EVEN ELEVATING THEM TO BE "PRINCES OF THE CHURCH" EVEN PUTTING THEM IN CHARGE OF THE SPANISH INQUISITION.   Anyone who doesn't see the problem with the accusation is either a total liar or a complete idiot. [Note: responding to the trolling, I should point out, one can be and people frequently are both.] The two things, the two practices have nothing in common.

We know this because, in fact, the earliest document of Hitler expressing his antisemitism is known, a letter of 1919, in which he says exactly that, expressing his antisemitism in purely biological terms, explicitly rejecting religious terms and, well, that first. This translation is found at the Jewish Virtual Library, I will set the passages relevant to points I want to make about it in the most bilious green that blogger provides with this template.  No doubt, other, more complete analyses of the document are possible, and it would be irresponsible to claim that this is the last word on the topic as the most developed form of Nazi genocidal theory was in its infancy when this was written, the year the Nazi Party came into existence.  The Anti-Defamation League, though, did say that it was written at a point when Hitler wasn't trying to cover up his ultimate intentions, something he did as he was carrying out the plan first drafted in this document.

Dear Herr Gemlich,

The danger posed by Jewry for our people today finds expression in the undeniable aversion of wide sections of our people. The cause of this aversion is not to be found in a clear recognition of the consciously or unconsciously systematic and pernicious effect of the Jews as a totality upon our nation. Rather, it arises mostly from personal contact and from the personal impression which the individual Jew leaves­­ almost always an unfavorable one. For this reason, antisemitism is too easily characterized as a mere emotional phenomenon. And yet this is incorrect. Antisemitism as a political movement may not and cannot be defined by emotional impulses, but by recognition of the facts. The facts are these: First, Jewry is absolutely a race and not a religious association. Even the Jews never designate themselves as Jewish Germans, Jewish Poles, or Jewish Americans but always as German, Polish, or American Jews. Jews have never yet adopted much more than the language of the foreign nations among whom they live. A German who is forced to make use of the French language in France, Italian in Italy, Chinese in China does not thereby become a Frenchman, Italian, or Chinaman. It's the same with the Jew who lives among us and is forced to make use of the German language. He does not thereby become a German. Neither does the Mosaic faith, so important for the survival of this race, settle the question of whether someone is a Jew or non­Jew. There is scarcely a race whose members belong exclusively to just one definite religion.

Through thousands of years of the closest kind of inbreeding, Jews in general have maintained their race and their peculiarities far more distinctly than many of the peoples among whom they have lived. And thus comes the fact that there lives amongst us a non­ German, alien race which neither wishes nor is able to sacrifice its racial character or to deny its feeling, thinking, and striving. Nevertheless, it possesses all the political rights we do. If the ethos of the Jews is revealed in the purely material realm, it is even clearer in their thinking and striving. Their dance around the golden calf is becoming a merciless struggle for all those possessions we prize most highly on earth.

This reminds me of nothing so much as the current atheist practice of misrepresenting passages in the Bible, completely turning the meaning of the story to an atheist and putrid purpose, a tactic obviously shared with Hitler.  The entire point of the story of the golden calf is that in order to be a people, it was necessary for them to worship God who is not a material object like anything in the physical universe, a part of the universe.   It is especially dishonest  of Hitler to fault the very people who broke out of the worship of material things for what he, himself, promoted.

And, as I said, for Hitler the entire thing was a matter or biology, of material, biological inheritance.   "He does not thereby become a German." Whereas no Catholic would doubt that St. Edith Stein was a Catholic before she was murdered by the Nazis as a Jew.  There were a lot of Catholics and other Christians murdered by the Nazis because of their Jewish heritage, as well as Catholics and other Christians murdered for their religion, some of them murdered for their nationality as Poles, in the mass shootings by the Einsaztgruppen in Poland, during the invasion in September 1939, for example.



For Hitler, who obviously bought the biological determinism of Darwinism, along with most of the science establishment of the time, it was all a matter of the "material realm," people being scientifically transformed into objects for use or disposal, their quality, value, being determined by their biological inheritance, their health or mental capacity, the undesireable to be culled from the herd, a concept which was introduced by Darwin, himself, and which is repeated over and over again in the literature of Darwinism up to and during the Nazi period and after.   Hitler's talk of spirituality was a perversion of the word, an emotional appeal that is at odds with his (emotional) citation of the practice of reason, an appeal to the "enlightenment" ethos.

The value of the individual is no longer decided by his character or by the significance of his achievements for the totality but exclusively by the size of his fortune, by his money.

The loftiness of a nation is no longer to be measured by the sum of its moral and spiritual powers, but rather by the wealth of its material possessions.

That pile of bull shit is so obvious it hardly seems worth pointing out that "the loftiness of a nation" was always measured by the sum of its wealth and material possessions.  The entire body of the Jewish-Christian scriptures is a warning of the calamity that comes with that practice, it is directly in opposition to it, which is exactly why the Nazis, as all atheist-materialist ideologies hate it so much.  They hate it because the tradition is in opposition to materialism, vulgar and going under the guise of intellectualism.  The same reason that in the classical period, one of the Nazis favorite Romans, Tacitus, hated Judaism and other Roman aristocrats hated Christianity.

The rest of this piece of shit is given only to prove my points, it is as banal as it is disgusting.

This thinking and striving after money and power, and the feelings that go along with it, serve the purposes of the Jew who is unscrupulous in the choice of methods and pitiless in their employment. In autocratically ruled states he whines for the favor of "His Majesty" and misuses it like a leech fastened upon the nations. In democracies he vies for the favor of the masses, cringes before the "majesty of the people," and recognizes only the majesty of money.

He destroys the character of princes with byzantine flattery, national pride (the strength of a people), with ridicule and shameless breeding to depravity. His method of battle is that public opinion which is never expressed in the press but which is nonetheless managed and falsified by it. His power is the power of money, which multiplies in his hands effortlessly and endlessly through interest, and which forces peoples under the most dangerous of yokes. Its golden glitter, so attractive in the beginning, conceals the ultimately tragic consequences. Everything men strive after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy, is to the Jew only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination.

In his effects and consequences he is like a racial tuberculosis of the nations.

The deduction from all this is the following: an antisemitism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the form of the pogrom. An antisemitism based on reason, however, must lead to systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of the Jews, that which distinguishes the Jews from the other aliens who live among us (an Aliens Law). The ultimate objective [of such legislation] must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general.

If he'd put this in terms of contemporary evo-psy, he could probably have gotten it published in a journal and a book published by a major publisher and gotten it cited in a new-atheist screed.  I've already mentioned John Hartung in other posts.** As an aside, Hartung's blog is called "Struggle for Existence".  I will also note, in passing, that one of Hartung's antisemitic scientific publications is the cited basis of one of Richard Darwkins' claims about the Jewish People which would fit right into this document.***

This is a rough, first draft for a plan of rational, scientific, industrialized murder.

For both these ends a government of national strength, not of national weakness, is necessary.

The Republic in Germany owes its birth not to the uniform national will of our people but the sly exploitation of a series of circumstances which found general expression in a deep, universal dissatisfaction. These circumstances however were independent of the form of the state and are still operative today. Indeed, more so now than before. Thus, a great portion of our people recognizes that a changed state ­form cannot in itself change our situation. For that it will take a rebirth of the moral and spiritual powers of the nation.

And this rebirth cannot be initiated by a state leadership of irresponsible majorities, influenced by certain party dogmas, an irresponsible press, or internationalist phrases and slogans. [It requires] instead the ruthless installation of nationally minded leadership personalities with an inner sense of responsibility.

But these facts deny to the Republic the essential inner support of the nation's spiritual forces. And thus today's state leaders are compelled to seek support among those who draw the exclusive benefits of the new formation of German conditions, and who for this reason were the driving force behind the revolution ­­the Jews. Even though (as various statements of the leading personalities reveal) today's leaders fully realized the danger of Jewry, they (seeking their own advantage) accepted the readily proffered support of the Jews and also returned the favor. And this pay­off consisted not only in every possible favoring of Jewry, but above all in the hindrance of the struggle of the betrayed people against its defrauders, that is in the repression of the antisemitic movement.

Sounds like something the ACLU would endorse being said "on principle" the daffiest, most irresponsible and preening of "principles" ever articulated by a degenerate intelligentsia after the Century of Genocides.

Respectfully,

Adolf Hitler

Read it and weep, Stupy, no Christianity, no mention of the Spanish Inquisition, something you only know from some Monty Python skits and whatever you heard your fellow ignoramuses gassing on about.  As I pointed out last week, in the years after this, after the Beer Hall Putsch when Hitler got sent to prison where he was provided with the latest literature of Darwinian biology, he put it all together in Mein Kampf, a book which the Nazis intended would replace The Bible in their interim heresy of "Positive Christianity" in which the plan was to eventually  drop any pretense of Christianity for a purely Nazi, atheist creed, explicitly replacing the The Bible with Mein Kampf, the Cross with swastikas, morality with pseudo-scientific assertions of Aryan superiority eugenic biology and the kind of constant "struggle for life" which Darwin said was the engine of biological progress and Hitler in place of the God of Abraham, Issac, Jacob, Moses, the Prophets and Christianity.

In the earliest periods, the Inquisition had no authority to persecute Jews but was inaugurated to oppose heresy within Christianity.  It could and did target some converts suspected of practicing other religions, including Judaism.  It was when secular leaders got control of it that the worst of the anti-Semitic part of the Inquisition started, no doubt not discouraged by the fact that one of the punishments that it could inflict was the confiscation of property, something which was the motivation of some if not most of the expulsions of Jews from German and English realms.  But it was hardly a uniform manifestation over the centuries it existed, in fact, unlike the Nazi courts - when those were even used - most of the people accused by the Inquisition got of relatively lightly or were acquitted, whereas the Nazis uniformly killed people, if not immediately, then as they worked people to death or used them in criminal experiments for science.

* Given that Darwinism, natural selection, immediately generated

- the assertion, by scientists that racial, ethnic and class inequality were not only natural, a product of biology but was the engine of biological progress,

-  the assertion  that efforts in giving those in need the necessities of life upset natural selection, their death through starvation, exposure, disease, AND VIOLENT CONFLICT, THE "STRUGGLE FOR LIFE" WHICH DARWIN, IN HIS VERY TITLE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, INTRODUCED INTO HIS THEORY.

- proposals for eliminating support to those deemed of lesser fitness, on the basis of class and identity within populations, leading to an increased death rate of those   (as Karl Pearson named one of his major collection of Darwinian essays)

-  claims of the enormous benefit of not only the deaths and elimination of those marked as "unfit" through negligence and, from the very start of Darwinism, through government policy and action, including, from the beginning, the use of killing as well as things like forced sterilization, and from the first decade and directly from the major figures of Darwinism, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, etc. of NOT ONLY THE BENEFIT BUT THE NECESSITY OF GENOCIDE, and that genocide would be beneficial for those who did the killing, who won Darwin's "Favored Races In The Struggle for Life."

- that the cultural change in Europe brought by Darwinism led to biological advocacy for genocide, such as Rudolph Hess's claim that "National Socialism is nothing but appllied biology" as well as the active eugenics that became law in the United States Canada and in other advanced, scientific socieities, a direct inspiration to fascists and Nazis,

I'm not going to continue to practice the massive lie of post-war college credentialed, received ideology based in useful ignorance  that eugenics is somehow separate from Darwinism.

You can't even honestly separate the advocacy of genocide from Darwinism, it was there from the start, finding its inspiration on the very title page of the first edition of On the Origin of Species, something confirmed in the further elucidation of the theory, from Darwin, Galton, Haeckle.  And, for the purpose of this footnote,  Thomas Huxley (see his infamous essay, Emancipation Black And White, from five years after the publication of Origin of Species), the very person who gave the word "Darwinism" its modern meaning, applying a word which had, before 1860 referred to the quite different evolutionary theory of Darwin and Galton's common grandfather, Erasmus Darwin but with the publication and adoption of On the Origin of Species and natural selection as the central ideology of evolutionary biology, from then on referred to natural selection.  His Darwinism was enough to lead him to declare

The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion; emancipation may convert the slave from a well-fed animal into a pauperised man; mankind may even have to do without cotton-shirts; but all these evils must be faced if the moral law, that no human being can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own nature, be, as many think, as readily demonstrable by experiment as any physical truth. If this be true, no slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

That is said after Huxley described what he believed was a scientifically inevitable result of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the subsequent adoption of emancipation in the United States.

The question is settled; but even those who are most thoroughly convinced that the doom is just, must see good grounds for repudiating half the arguments which have been employed by the winning side; and for doubting whether its ultimate results will embody the hopes of the victors, though they may more than realise the fears of the vanquished. It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still  less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest.

Thomas Huxley was writing to an audience he had to have known was, in 1865, largely inspired by the end of slavery in the United States, though his appeal was to those who could be encouraged to believe that racial and, though I'm not addressing it here, today, gender inequality was scientifically validated.  His fellow Darwinists, beginning with his master, Charles Darwin, weren't so mealy mouthed about their claims as to what that imaginary "struggle for life" would mean, the genocide of those considered inferior by them and the benefit to those  having done the killing and winning that struggle for life.  And all of the ones I've read considered Northern Europeans, White People, Aryans, as the inevitable winners in that struggle for life.   Of course, a "struggle for life" is a death struggle in which people actually have to die.  Though, in Darwin's case, taking a claim from W. R. Greg, the Irish population, though having been repeatedly and brutally culled through famine, even within his lifetime, remained biologically inferior to the Brits.  In all applications of natural selection in the human species, the scientific thinker will inevitably include his own group as superior and whatever group he despises as inferior.

**  Not everyone in the field is as critical as Tooby, however. A review praising [Kevin] MacDonald's first book appeared in the journal Ethology and Sociobiology four years ago (the publication was in the process of being taken over by HBES at the time); the author, John Hartung, a professor at the State University of New York and a former secretary of HBES, concluded that the Holocaust, "the most enormous act of reactive racism ever perpetrated," had been misrepresented as an unjustified evil so as to cow non-Jews into looking the other way while Jews "purloin" land in Israel. According to Lingua Franca, which covered the incident, the only public reaction to Hartung's review was a "tepid" letter by the journal's editor saying he didn't realize that it could be offensive, and an outright defense of Hartung by HBES's then-president, Dick Alexander. As for MacDonald, the author of the book that inspired these remarks, there was little visible effort at the time to refute him or to challenge the appropriateness of having him serve in so many key positions.


*** Christians seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. ‘Love they neighbour’ didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only ‘Love another Jew.’ The point is devastatingly made by the American physician and evolutionary anthropologist John Hartung. He has written a remarkable paper on the evolution and biblical history of in-group morality, laying stress, too, on the flip side – out-group hostility.

Richard Dawkins:  The God Delusion

As a number of reviewers pointed out, if Hartung or Dawkins had bothered to read the very book of the Bible they base their antisemtic claims on, they would see that there were commandments that required that aliens living among the Children of Israel be treated as equals, with equal rights and that after a number of years, they should be considered as members of the assembly.  In short, it is an ideological lie of the same kind which this post addresses on several sides.

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Stupid Mail

Eschaton is the only cult where the cult members totally ignore the cult leader.  Not least because he's too lazy to bother. 

About The Only Good Thing That Has Ever Happened on FOX

Dem. Candidate CRASHES Fox News To Protest ICE Kidnappings


Massachusetts state senator Barbara L’Italien magnificently taking advantage of the incompetence of the FOX staff to speak truth to liar.   

For the record, the Arizona Democrat they thought would come in and support the Trumpzi ICE ICE stealing babies and children and putting them in concentration camps to score political points with the Republican-fascist base and the fascist media doesn't stand where they thought she did.  

For her part, Kirkpatrick denied the assertion she is pro-ICE. The Arizona Democrat said she is "disgusted" by Trump's immigration policies in a statement released after the flap on Monday.

"This morning, Fox News and other outlets put out false reports on my position on ICE without a single word from me," Kirkpatrick said. "ICE needs top-to-bottom reform. Trump's policies — especially around family separation — are illegal and should end immediately."

A spokesperson for Kirkpatrick said there is no one by the name of Joe Katz on her current campaign, and that the Kirkpatrick campaign ignored a request from Fox and Friends on Saturday.

“There was no conversation made between our campaign and Fox,” said Kirkpatrick spokeswoman Abigail O’Brien.

Barbara L’Italien deserves to become a star, she's an example of how there are hundreds of great Democrats working on the state and local levels you never hear about.  You can remember that when some Green jerk or lefty blog layabout whines about what shit Democrats are, as they never achieve anything because they never try to do anything.   Her comment in response to Sam Seder's unusually intelligent question about how her district has changed, is the best news I've heard in a week. 



Monday, July 23, 2018

Duncan Black, A Media Whore Online And A Hypocrite

If it were possible for me to sue Duncan Black for carrying the lies that Steve Simels has told about me on his for-profit blog for the past six or seven years, I would do it.

Duncan has certainly been aware that he publishes the lies told about me on his blog for years and has certainly done nothing to prevent that happening.  This afternoon, there was this exchage:

Avatar
Stëve Sïmels, blog malignancy • 2 hours ago
That Idiot From Maine©:
The very word which Hitler adopted as the name for his policy of,
not only invading Poland and other countries to the East, murdering 
almost all of their inhabitants (reserving a small class of slave, 
helots to serve the Aryan masters) but also to get rid of Jews,

He's writing a book called THE HOLOCAUST: JEWS WERE AN AFTERTHOUGHT


•Reply•Share ›
Avatar
geysergazer permanently cranky  Stëve Sïmels, blog malignancy • an hour ago
Six million dead: an afterthought. What an asshole.


•Reply•Share ›
Avatar
SufferinSuccotash, LockHimUp  geysergazer permanently cranky • an hour ago
Oh yeah, let's have a Wansee Conference.


So, as you can see, there is actual defamation published there.   It, of course, doesn't occur to these members of his "Brain Trust" (they really do call it that) that they might want to actually see what was written that they're commenting on.

I have pointed out the irony of Duncan Black having gotten his start in blogging through the encouragment of the long defunct and entirely better blog, Media Whores Online, dedicated to exposing the lies in the corporate media.  "The Horse" as she was known, encouraged Duncan who was considered something of a protogee, several articles he wrote were published there, including one that held Katha Pollitt responsible for The Nation which she was a columnist for.  The Nation, published articles by Christopher Hitchens, though, unlike Black, she had no responsibility for deciding what was published in the magazine.  Duncan Black does have that kind of control, he could stop Steve Simels from publishing libel at Eschaton any time he chose to.   I at one time made the mistake of being a regular at Duncan's blog and was rather supportive of him, defending him when he was criticized.  That was a mistake, he's a jerk.  I wonder if "The Horse" has seen what an ass her protogee is or if she cared or cares that he practices the kind of thing her blog was opposed to.

I am asked, from time to time, why I bother paying attention to the lying troll, let me ask you how you would like to have someone create the lie that Steve Simels has created about me if it were you.

Answer To A Quibble

Ah, there's absolutely no question that the German word "Lebensraum" made so infamous by Hitler was invented to translate ideas that were present in Charles Darwin's presentation of his theory of natural selection, note this section from a paper, On the genealogy of Lebensraum by C. Abrahamsson,  Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Lund, especially these sentences.

Here Peschel develops the term Lebensraum in order to translate Darwin’s hypothesis into geographical terms. For Peschel the notion of Lebensraum drew attention to the fact that, according to him, natural selection was always already a telluric selection (Peschel, 1860).

The Darwinian influence on German Geography 

Before we proceed to investigating the formation of the concept of Lebensraum in Ratzel and Kjellen, it is important to ´ give a brief overview of the geographical and historical context in which Ratzel’s ideas emerged. I will argue that the key event influencing and to some degree shaping German geographical thought during the second half of the 19th century was the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Of particular interest here is the fact that The Origin of Species appeared in German translation in 1860, just months after the original book was published (see Gliboff, 2008). The publication of The Origin of Species didn’t go unnoticed by the younger generation of German geographers at the time. Oscar Peschel, Ratzel’s predecessor at the chair of geography in Leipzig, began promoting Darwinian ideas immediately after Origin of Species appeared, most noticeably in a review in the journal for which he was the editor at the time, Das Ausland. Here Peschel develops the term Lebensraum in order to translate Darwin’s hypothesis into geographical terms. For Peschel the notion of Lebensraum drew attention to the fact that, according to him, natural selection was always already a telluric selection (Peschel, 1860). Without going into detail, suffice to say that the reception of Darwinian thought into the German sphere was widely divergent. Often, though not always, the battle lines were drawn along ideological lines, Darwinism being associated mainly with a liberal-universalist ideology, being associated with British civilisation distinct and different from Germanic kultur. Another, equally important, dividing line concerning the reception of Darwinism was that between monogenism – positing a common ancestry of man – and polygenism – positing that the races of man are of different lineages. These two battle lines are of importance when we want to understand the reception of evolutionary thought in German geography (see further Zimmerman, 2001; Richards, 2008; and Livingstone, 2005; Smith, 1991).

I will start by noting that the term "a liberal-universalist ideology" might be deceptive for an American audience, the term, beyond any doubt, is what today is called "neo-liberalism" the kind of liberalism that includes the most inhumane market ideology, free market ideology, what Glenda Jackson as an MP condemning Margaret Thatcher noted was all sharp elbows and sharp knees.  It isn't egalitarian, it is absolutely in line with what Darwin supported in Haeckel's book "Freedom in Science and Teaching" not only undemocratic and unsocialist but anti-democratic and anti-socialist while being absolutely aristocratic.

The very word which Hitler adopted as the name for his policy of, not only invading Poland and other countries to the East, murdering almost all of their inhabitants (reserving a small class of slave, helots to serve the Aryan masters) but also to get rid of Jews, Roma and other people within Germany and Austria to create more "living space" for Aryans and to "purify" the Aryan population.  That concept is present, certainly in The Descent of Man but, as can be seen in the date of Peschel inventing the term for purposes of translating Darwin, in 1860, when he would have been working from the first edition of On the Origin of Species.  Darwin confirmed that discovery of those ideas in his first and major book on evolution in his later editions in which he blatantly identifies natural selection with Spencer's Darwinist elucidation "Survival of the Fittest" (Darwin's capitalization) and most blatantly of all in The Descent of Man in 1872.

That in the ensuing years there were details in the use of the term "Lebensraum" though not in the basic concept of what it meant, on the idea as a law of science, does nothing to change the fact that it is a term that flows directly from Darwin into German science and even the more general intellectual life of German academics and those who read popular science.  The final solution, Hitler's order to the German officers who were about to invade Poland that they were to murder all of the Polish people, minus a small number who were judged sufficiently Aryan, those are an aspect of the exact telluric selection that Peschel correctly identified in Darwin's writing.   That Friedrich Ratzel and Rudolf Kjellen did some fine-tuning of the concept doesn't change much.   Ratzel being credited (so they think) with the idea in a more developed form was as much an aspect of his Darwinism as it was Peschel's.  Ratzel was one of those German-European academics who, reading Origin of Species,  took to Darwinism which powered all of his later work.  It's exactly the same phenomenon that led Galton and Greg, in Britain, to almost immediately begin developing eugenics, which also had an independent development of Schallmeyer's German eugenics inspired by his reading of the book.

Update:  I should have noted that Ernst Haeckel's book, Freedom in Science and Teaching, which Charles Darwin, in a published letter, endorsed without reservation was written in opposition to the conservative (for its time and place) viewpoint expressed by Rudolph Virchow, for the "liberal" (for its time and place) viewpoint of Darwinism, which explicitly opposed democracy and socialism while bolstering aristocracy, though a biological aristocracy of qualities and not of inherited titles.  It's the same "liberalism" which was consistent with the socialism of Karl Pearson and George Bernard Shaw, as well as others in Britain (and America) who endorsed the idea of mass eradication of those deemed "less fit" as expressed by H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence, among others.  Needless to say, its not compatible with the present American left's idea of liberalism based in egalitarian democracy though the fact that the debate in 1870s Germany makes consideration of Haeckel's elucidation of Darwinism entirely relevant to the posts this answer grew out of.  That's true no matter how ignorant so many American lefties are of these issues and what the terms they misconstrue meant in the context in which they were used. 

Having proved, beyond any doubt, that ideas that would be adopted by and later identified with Nazism were present in the writings of Charles Darwin and the understanding of those Darwin, himself said were the people who best understood his theory, and that those ideas, expressed in exactly the same terms the Nazis would use them only a few short years later were in the bedrock of Darwinism as it was expounded in mainstream biological and other sciences, it's only necessary to point those out and how it was the mere translation of them into German instead of American or British English, changing the groups slated to be killed is there, for all time, in the primary documentary record.

That mainstream science and academic culture refuses to acknowledge that obvious and glaring line of descent of Nazism due to its ideological war with creationism changes nothing about the fact that that is there and it is still present in mainstream biology and, probably even more dangerously, the pseudo-social sciences, such as also provided so much scientific cover for the Nazis in the 1920s-40s.  Having removed the need for direct observation in evolutionary science, the even less restrictive and more "liberal" practices of the social sciences is a guarantee of trouble.  Evolutionary Psychology, which has already harbored a Kevin Macdonald and John Hartung, in plain sight is proof of that potential.

Update 2:  In reading the paper this post is based on, I sensed a reluctance on the part of the author to state the obvious connections I haven't had any hesitation to point out.  Considering the readiness of Darwin's defenders to use any and all accusations and tactics to preserve their mythical version of him, I'm not surprised.   But even with what could, to Darwin-true-believers, be a safety switch, rescuing their Darwin, the slightly different interpretations, what I would say were viewpoints of the idea of Lebensraum, those connections AND THEIR CONTINUING RELEVANCE are undeniable.  From the end of the paper:

This series of men – Ratzel, Kjell en and Haushofer – is the familiar genealogy used to describe the formation of the concept  of  Lebensraum.  I  do  not  disagree  with  this  argument, there are strong affinities and resemblances between the theories and practices of all three men. There are, however, adverse effects connected with the emphasis of a linear genealogy stretching from the Ratzelian Lebensraum, via Kjellen’s organic state theory to Haushofer’s operationalization in Geopolitik. 

I argue that this particular genealogy has failed to acknowledge a crucial operationalization of the concept of Lebensraum in relation to National socialist planning and  ideology.  I  am  talking,  here,  more  specifically  of  the planning  programs  that  were  initiated  by  Heinrich  Himmler’s Reich’s Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom , particularly the work conducted by Konrad Meyer and his associates at the Planning and Soil office of that organization (Koehl, 1957). The aim of the Planning and Soil office was to provide the Third Reich with areal plans for its Eastern conquests, known as Generalplan Ost . That plan, according to Rossler (1990), was developed as a detailed policy  for  the  settlement  and  administration  of  the  newly  acquired Eastern territories (see further Rossler and Schleiermacher, 1993; Barnes, 2012; Rossler, 1989; Burleigh, 1988; Kamenetsky, 1961). 

For Himmler, and other high-level Nazi officials, the formulation of the Generalplan Ost was a step towards a larger reorientation and reformation of the German people (Rossler, 1990). In one sense the Generalplan Ost can be understood as the implementation of ideological ideas stemming from the more radical “green” wing of the Nazi-party – prominent among them were Richard Walther Darre, Gottfried Feder and Fritz Todt (Bramwell, 1985; Dahl, 2006). The operationalization of Lebensraum, in the context of the Generalplan Ost, is closely connected to the semantic shift identified by Esposito. 

Lebensraum thus came to function as a key element in the formation of the biocracy of the Nazi-state. More precisely, it came to function as a conceptual bridge between its thanatopolitics, reaching its zenith in the final solution, and the biopolitical policies aimed towards strengthening the German race. (Esposito, 2008; Burleigh and Wippermann, 1991; Neumann, 2002; Mouton, 2007; Weiss, 2010). Furthermore, it is of importance to account for the divergent mobilisation of Lebensraum in Nazi policy if we are to better understand how certain elements of it actually never went away.

I inserted breaks in what is otherwise presented as a single paragraph, for clarity.

This passage is definitive support for my interpretation of the connection, Darwinian in all three of the men mentioned at the beginning of this passage, between Lebensraum and the genocides of the Nazis, most noted, the "final solution".  And that the entire policy of the Nazis tied up their two "biopolitical" aims, getting rid of entire populations and "strengthening the German race".  That is an idea taken directly from Darwin, the contention that a "struggle for existence" will result in the survivors being of enhanced quality and the danger to the would-be improved stock by the presence of those whose lesser quality made the desireability of them being culled from the population a matter of political and legal urgency.  I've given some, though not all, of the passages from The Descent of Man proving he considered that to be a logical necessity of his theory of natural selection, something which the later generations of Darwinists would endorse right up to the war, as mentioned, most authoritatively by his son, Leonard Darwin, and which didn't end with the war, being promoted by such later day Darwinists as his grandson Charles Galton Darwin, R. A. Fischer, Francis Crick, James Watson, Arthur Jensen, and numerous others in mainstream science.  Those are among the "certain elements of it that never went away."