Stupid Mail - All About Simps

Oh, so Madonna gives a tribute to Aretha Franklin that's all about Madonna, Simps gives a 100th shout out to Leonard Bernstein that's all about him.  

I wasn't going to say anything about Lenny.   If people want to listen to that Candide Overture for the 253rd time they've got every right to do so.  

I can say that I do genuinely like the dances from West Side Story and there are a few of his songs I genuinely like.  The 2nd movement of the Psalms.  And a bit of the music from On the Waterfront, though I really didn't like the movie, at all.  Some of the "best Bernstein pieces" lists I've seen today are, truly, more insulting than anything I ever said about him.  Then there's Simps posting a picture of himself.  

Update:  Yeah, I do like the music he wrote for On the Waterfront 

New York Philharmonic
Leonard Bernstein, Composer-conductor

Update [Upchuck warning] 2

I'm not making this up, you know, this is the link I was sent.   [Not for those with a delicate constitution or who have eaten a challenging supper.]  He looks like the Yellow Kid's great, great,  grand idiot.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - George Orwell - A Clergyman's Daughter

A Clergyman's Daughter 

Dramatisation of one of Orwell's lesser novels. A strictly conservative clergyman's daughter goes missing from home. 8 days later, she finds herself, suffering from amnesia and no memory of her previous life, in south London with a group of homeless people, about to depart to Kent for the hop picking.

I'm doing something I haven't done before, posting a play that I haven't listened to, myself, yet.   It's been a crazy week and I haven't had time to look for a new play I haven't posted before.  So, I'll be hearing it for the first time, too. 

The book was adapted, though, from what I understand, Orwell wrote some of it in dramatic form, himself.  It was an experimental novel that Orwell reportedly wasn't happy with, at one point saying he didn't want it reprinted. Though he changed his mind, apparently, authorizing all of his work to be re-released.   

Notes On Yesterday's Posts

I made a crucial error in the second of my posts from yesterday, in this paragraph, I mistakenly typed the word "inferior" when it should have been "superior" as given in blue, below.

And it certainly doesn't explain anything about that situation within a species as the "traits" of those theorized to be in some way regressive or inferior life - and in many of Darwin's own imaginary scenarios - are warned as having superior reproductive potential than those assigned the category of "superior".   That habit of Darwinist thought is as rampant today as it was at any period after Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, it is why, even with the potent example of the Nazis eugenic murders, post-war scientists maintain a belief in eugenics , including the most eminent of them, R. A. Fischer, James Watson, Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, William Shockley (physicists, ha!), and in numbers constituting ubiquity, the social sciences,  Eugenic thinking is alive and as dangerous as it ever was.

I could have noted that that very basis of eugenics, based in the most notably Malthusian feature of Darwinism, is one of the most basic of absurdities in his theory of natural selection.  You will often hear it claimed that natural selection is not a claim of progressivity or teleology attributed to nature when that assertion is present all through the entire scientific literature of Darwinism from beginning to today, though not admitted to.  When, as they disclaim their own assertions of progress and purpose in natural selection, they will say that it is merely based on reproductive advantage.  Well, if those people categorized as "inferior" have superior reproductive capability, that should mark them as those who have won the "struggle for life" that Darwin sets up, regardless of whatever "traits" they carry.  I first noted that when I realized that in the contradictions between his claims about "savages" as opposed to "civilised men" in which he praised the superiority of the winners of "savages" culling their inferior members and bemoaning the failure of "civilised men" to do the same, which he said was bound to lead to dysgenic catastrophe, but he nevertheless held that "civilised men" were the superiors of those very "savages" that he claimed were the winners in a "struggle for existence".  The doublespeak in Darwin is ubiquitous.

As I've mentioned over and over again, when I started this about twelve years ago, now, I was a conventional though relatively passive  believer in natural selection in the typical college-credentialed manner.  I started this looking for Darwin's rejection of eugenics I'd been assured were there but, as soon as I started reading him, literally all there was was his acceptance of and support for eugenics.

The more I looked at it the worse I realized it was, not only as what Marx criticized* it as being in his own reconsideration of it,  Darwin imposing the British class system on all of nature, but its absurdity as a logical structure and scientific theory became ever more apparent.  I am at a loss to explain how anyone could believe that it was a real thing without having an aristocratic motive in maintaining its assertions of inequality in the human population.  I do believe that and its use as an attack on the traditional Protestant literal reading of the Bible story of creation - a feature of not only the naive faith of the imagined ignorant masses but as much of religion as even most college credentialed people comprehend - are the entire reason it was kept even as its acceptance among biologists was very shaky around the beginning of the 20th century.  I haven't read Vernon Kellogg's contemporary account of that period**, yet, though I've skimmed passages of it.

I think for most people, it's no different from being a fan of a sports team only it's a team in the great struggle of atheism vs. religion, anti-Christianity vs. Christianity, college-credentialed vs. non-college credentialed, modernism vs. tradition,  etc.  Not to mention the features of regional resentment and the class-interest that was such a big part of how it took the affluent establishment by storm even from the start.  It was always the good news to the affluent and those who hoped to become affluent, Darwin's assurance that nature had crowned them as the superiors they always felt themselves to be.  I certainly haven't found that Darwin's greatest fans have ever so much as read him or his disciples.  Not even those with PhDs.   They're often as ignorant as anyone in the brawl.

* As someone who rejects Marx's prescription for politics, I will admit he was one of the most astute and brilliant critics in the history of Western thought.  Einstein said about Eddington's failed Fundamental Theory that for all his brilliance, his critical faculty failed in that case.   I think the same is true of Marx whose critical brilliance nailed the worst feature of natural selection as a scientific theory but couldn't see the problems in his own theory of history.   I think that's often what happens when they try to extend science past where science can actually make the necessary observations to find reliable knowledge.  That seems to be a general defect in science when their ambitions exceed their observational abilities.  You can't make that up by adopting an ideological foundation and pretending it can make up for that.

** Darwinism To-day; a discussion of present-day scientific criticism of the Darwinian selection theories, together with a brief account of the principal other proposed auxiliary and alternative theories of species-forming

Update Hate:  Um, from what I've read Wilhelm Marr was an atheist who detested Christianity and he was also heavily influenced by Darwin's own named chief disciple in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, as well an atheist who despised Christianity.

Darwin, himself, said that Haeckel's theories concerning natural selection within the human population, including such things as his racist classification of human groups, his claims of severe inferiority for named groups, his assertion that such groups would be inevitably wiped out and that that murder would be benefical for the surviving (murdering) human population, etc.  were so in line with his own that if he had known Haeckel was putting them into a book Darwin wouldn't have written The Descent of Man.  So, yeah, there was everything in common with the two parts of that post.

I do think it's remarkable that the current push to come up with an, if I recall correctly, eleven part definition of "antisemitism" includes, for obvious ideological reasons, everything that makes the word so problematic without that push for such a definition.  It's obviously a project that floundered in ideological interest even if it didn't start that way.  It's bound to fail.  I think they should come up with different words to mean different things, many of which are not like the others.

I have read that very late in life Marr repented of his antisemitism because he was already disturbed at the direction his own organized antisemitic group was going.  Too little, too late.  His legacy, as can be seen from it being reprinted by Kevin Macdonald, is still used to promote the hatred of Jews. 

Just Read Him You Idiot - Hate Mail

Darwin did two things in On the Origin of Species and, even more so, The Descent of Man. Or, rather, he claimed to.

He claimed that "natural selection" was an explanation of how species evolved from other species, in the most common imagination of that, with the extinction of the parent species which didn't have "traits" that both led to increased numbers of offspring for those who had the biologically inheritable "traits" and, with their descendants increasing dominance in the percentage of the parent species, eventually those "traits" would generate a new species which was not the same as the parent species.

But his entirely imaginary scenario doesn't actually explain the origin of species.  I don't think such an all encompassing explanation of how the present day diversity of life evolved will ever be had, the phenomenon is a. too big with too many diverse numbers of organisms and even "species" involved, all with their own histories, b. those histories, certainly at least a thousand billion* to one, of the organisms comprising evolution are not only unknown, they are forever lost and are unknowable and always will be.  You can't do science on that basis.  Or at least that's the pretense of scientific method as it is taught about in school.

That is true if you take what I was taught as defining "species," as distinct from other species, the ability of members of a species to successfully mate with others and to produce viable, reproducing offspring of the same species.  Those with such "traits" could breed with those who don't have such traits within the parent species, they are members of the same species.  The survival of those members of the species which don't have the Darwinistically imagined "traits" that would, eventually change the species into a new species proves that they weren't members of a different species than those they could mate with which had those "traits".  How those would come to define a new species unable to mate with the members of the parent species is in no way explained by "natural selection".

How that imagined scenario gave rise to new species is as unexplained as it would be if natural selection were never invented.   And that doesn't even begin to present problems for it in the form of such scientific alternative explanations as genetic drift and the mere facts of chance survivals based on luck and not any inheritable biological trait.  Not to mention complications as the recent discovery of epigenetic inheritance, which I don't think anyone really understands as a discrete phenomenon, if it even is all the same thing.

And it certainly doesn't explain anything about that situation within a species as the "traits" of those theorized to be in some way regressive or inferior life - and in many of Darwin's own imaginary scenarios - are warned as having superior reproductive potential than those assigned the category of "superior".   That habit of Darwinist thought is as rampant today as it was at any period after Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, it is why, even with the potent example of the Nazis eugenic murders, post-war scientists maintain a belief in eugenics , including the most eminent of them, R. A. Fischer, James Watson, Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, William Shockley (physicists, ha!), and in numbers constituting ubiquity, the social sciences,  Eugenic thinking is alive and as dangerous as it ever was. 

Eugenics, though not called that or admitted,  is still the common popular "understanding of science" if Darwinism is the topic, or, in a minor tragedy of intellectual life, the common conception of "evolution".   I don't think the science of evolution will ever be free of that until natural selection is relegated to the dustbin of history.  The Malthusian origins of natural selection, founded in the imaginations of the British aristocracy that Malthusianism was whipped up to benefit by suppressing the lower orders of society are its most potent features, no matter what aristocracy of the mind is adopting it.  It's even common among those who, in the imagination of others, are a degenerate class, ethnicity or race.  Among my fellow Irishmen, as well as among members of other groups, I find it grimly amusing when I find out one of us designated as biologically inferior by Charles Darwin are his biggest fan-boys.

I am going to advocate that you do what the Darwin fan club never seems to advocate, read his scientific books, read the things he cites as reliable science, note the people whose ideas he supports, fact check all of them.  Don't cut them any slack, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE GODDAMNED SCIENCE.   That's how I got here.

* I made up that number,  you might as well say "a bazillion to one".  We don't even know that number how can we know something as complex as the lives of those unnumbered organisms?

The Deadly Uses Of Words Especially Those Presented As Having The Power Of Science

Yesterday I criticized the scholars who take on that most dismal and so necessary of scholarly topics, the Shoah, the genocides of the Nazis, a study that is matched in grim awfulness only by the study of other genocides, especially those of the modern period.  I said that they had been reticent to state the obvious fact, as obvious as the Nazis own advocacy of and elucidation of their plans, that their genocide against the Jews and others they identified as national groups was based on Darwin's theory of natural selection - in German natürliche Auslese.  As I showed yesterday, in the actual documents from the Wannsee Conference in which the criminals planned the largest program of mass murder in the history of planned mass murders, they used those very words. 

My criticism accused that area of scholarship of being afraid of rousing the ire of the Darwin industry and cult which mounted the post-Nazi, post-WWII fraud of the eugenics free Darwin who had nothing to do with eugenics as (what is considered, by scientists to be) science and as political policy, even though that connection between natural selection is only deniable by telling a whopper of a lie, a lie whose selling to at least the educated class of the English Speaking Peoples is a huge success in salesmanship.  That sales job has been done through costume dramas on the BBC and PBS and by popular science, it has been done through the para-scientific media and it has even become a part of "liberal religion".   "Darwin Sunday" is becoming a fixture in many churches, even as the people turning Darwin into some kind of Christian figure are entirely ignorant of what the man advocated and the fact that natural selection is a total and complete negation of the Gospel, the Prophets and The Law.   If you want to see what a really awful thing this is, google "darwin sunday" in light of what his actual writing shows and in all of its church hall kitchiness.

I should have mentioned that in thinking about this it occurred to me that the  academic suppression of the obvious Darwinism of the Nazi's genocidal thinking could have had a less craven motive, they may fear that pointing out that natural selection is a component of such genocidal thinking will empower it for that purpose. The use of natural selection to advocate removing groups from the human future predates Nazism, it started immediately after the theory was published turning up in the 1860s in the work of Ernst Haeckel and, in a seemingly more benign form, with typical British understatement, in the work of Francis Galton and in a form between those by Charles Darwin, himself*.  They may well fear exactly what I said was true, that science in the form of natural selection, can be used as a potent justification of genocide, as it, in fact was justified by scientists.  They might fear that with the retention of the theory that pointing out the obvious would be used politically and legally to support genocide in exactly the same way it was used to justify lesser forms of eugenics.

That fear is not only well founded, it is absolutely founded in the history of Darwinism in real history, in real life, in real law, in everything from the forced and coerced sterilizations in the United States, Canada and elsewhere to the actual murders of the Nazis and others, which preceded the Nazis in East Africa in the first decade of the 20th century.  I have looked at the documentation of English and American eugenicists, Eugen Fischer, the scientific officer of the African genocide, its Mengele, was an honored participant in English language eugenics in the 1920s and 30s, he was a professional scientist even in the post-war period when at least one person I've read advocated he be hanged along with the rest of the Nazi war criminals. 

As even the academic study of the Shoah is finding, it cannot avoid the fact that those who planned, advocated and carried out the Nazi genocides were instructed on how and what to do by American and other eugenicists, it will not be able to give an accurate account of the Final Solution as planned at the Wannsee Conference without addressing its Darwinistic foundation in natural selection.  Which is part of why I have come to conclude that as long as that theory has currency in science it is a real danger if not a guarantee that what was done as a result of believing it will happen again.  It happened more than once already, it started happening as soon as the first actual laws based on natural selection were put into place, it happened as soon as war gave scientific officers like Fischer a chance to practice it for the advancement of science.   All of that is part of the same continuum of Darwinism in real life, in real history, in the phenomenon of human thought in human culture.

It is interesting, though horribly grim, to read how the thinking of the sheer and calculating evil of Reinhardt Heydrich, the sadistic and proudly efficient murderer, the man with a "heart of iron" was confused in exactly the same way that natural selection required to be to be accepted as a scientific theory.  His assertion that even those Jews who had survived the first selection, to be murdered immediately, due to their presumed lack of economic utility to Nazism (they even called Germans placed in that category "useless eaters"), even the ones of those who they could not manage to work to death, the survivors of even the program to work them to death, would have to be murdered despite their economic utility due to their survival proving they were superior - "the fruit of natural selection" - because they could be counted on to restart a Jewish race.   No doubt one that Heydrich suspected would be biologically superior to the one the Nazis planned on wiping out.

What is so striking in that is that he and the Wannsee documents give the entirely human planned and artificial selection of the Nazis the status of being "natural".  That is exactly what Darwin did to sell his theory of natural selection when he used the entirely artificial practice of animal husbandry in commercial animal breeding of farm animals and pets as an instance of  and proof of "natural selection."   There is nothing "natural" about human breeding of animals anymore than there was the genocide of the Nazis, but that basic category error is the foundation of the theory as an explanation of the evolution of species, only one of the huge problems with the theory.  There is no secure means of identifying the artificial selection of human beings and their intentional choosing of animals for early slaughter and those chosen to be allowed to breed with anything that happens naturally, there was never any reason to believe that the one artificial practice was what actually happens in nature resulting in new species.

The category errors don't stop there, though, as from the time of Darwin it was also used to confuse the difference between diversity within a species with difference among different species - if "species" diverging is based on an inability to mate to produce live, reproducing offspring.  Clearly the two categories have hard, biological differences of the most basic and extensive meaning.

Bad articulation almost inevitably produces bad science, that is something that has been known from the time of at least Lavoisier,

It is impossible to disassociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based, the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind, and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality.

Antoine Lavoisier, 1789

And when one word is used to portray different phenomena, the results are not a representation of reality.  That leads to confusion but it can lead to entirely more horrible things than mere confusion.  Especially when science is granted such omnipotence on the basis of its presumed omniscience.  It can even be used to justify mass murder.  It was used to justify the French Revolution cutting off Lavoisier's head in the name of reason.  Bad science has real life consequences.

-------------------------------

The word "antisemitism" is a fairly new word, having been invented in the 19th century, in German, in one of the more enormous of contemporary ironies, by a raging antisemite, Wilhelm Marr,  to give sciency cachet to his hated of Jews and to his political program using hatred of Jews to gain power and to harm Jews.

And the ironies never seem to end with Marr, all three of his wives had Jewish ancestry even as he developed one of the pillars of Nazi ideology, the biological impossibility of Jews becoming Germans.

I am going to spend a little time with Marr, the inventor of the word "antisemitism" to illustrate one of the really big problems with the way the word is used.  It is used to describe everything from a desire by Christians to convert Jews to Christianity, a desire by some Christians who believe being Christian is essential for salvation, for Jews to be saved and it is used to describe those who hate Jews and want do destroy them in the most horrific of tortures, to obliterate them on the basis of their biological identity.  And it is a word used to describe everything between those two opposite ends and so much more beside that.  It is used to describe Jews who criticize the policy of the Israeli government but who, nevertheless, support the existence and flourishing of Israel.

In one of Marr's antisemitic pamphlets, The Victory of Judaism Over Germany: From a nonreligious point of view,**  Marr identifies Christians as "new-jews" attributing to them one of the most vicious of perennial attributes given to Jews.

The Roman world of the day as well as all of classical antiquity was in the throes of disintegration at the time the Jews were imported. Semitism therefore encountered fertile ground for its realistic approach and already in Constantine’s days the “new-Jews” (Christians) were the power behind the money.

All the nations of antiquity, including the trading Phoenicians and Carthaginians, did not think well of engaging in, what we now call dotage, profiteering and usury. If in the Middle Ages we encounter a “Mr. Moneybag” he was a Jew. Jews were made use of but despised. This attitude is similar to its modern form, in which traitors are met with contempt while their treason may be welcome.

The abstract realism of Judaism had thus been forcibly imported into western society by the Romans. Times and circumstances proved favorable for Judaism’s development and proliferation. Judaism had turned into the realistic helper in history and encountered a more fertile ground for its indolent and speculative realism in the West than it ever possessed in Palestine. 

This, of course, provoked envy among the peoples of the West and since the mob has always preferred to use religion as a cover for its ends, so the spread of Christianity was accompanied by the spread of an (apparent) religious hatred of Jews in the Occident.

I am not a student of Marr's writing so I have not looked for confirmation of this being a feature of his, the coiner of the term's, antisemitism, an equation of Christianity with Judaism, any Christian hatred of Jews covering up the fact that Christianity is how Judaism spread and, in Marr's assertion, was victorious over Germany.  I haven't but will be looking into that, I'm sure, though I don't have the time to, right now.

It does, though illustrate how fraught with ambiguities and contradictions and ideological opportunities that badly defined words, especially neologisms intended to be scientific can be.  The present program to come up with an international definition of "antisemitism" is full to the top with all three, the desire being to use the word to describe entirely different things and to associate all of those things, everything from wanting Jews to achieve salvation through conversion (not something I think is necessary for Jews to be saved, by the way)  with the Nazi genocide and those who would like to do that again, to those who are critical of Israeli military and domestic policy.   That present day project is bound to only make things worse because, though the idea of fixing on a definite definition for the term might be a good one, they want to reproduce all of the problems with the word within their definition and many of them want to do so for ideological purposes instead of lexicographical clarity.

*  It infact predates Nazism, turning up in the 1860s in the work of Ernst Haeckel and, in a seemingly more benign form, or, at any rate, expressed with typical British understatement, in the work of Francis Galton.  And in a form between those by Charles Darwin, himself.  Not to mention the sons of Charles Darwin, George and Leonard as well as others in the direct line of scientific and quasi-scientific-political Darwinism.

**  In researching this post the ironies came on fast and hard.  Note who this translated version of the pamphlet comes through, one of the most noted of scientific antisemites, the man David Irving called on to be his scientific witness in his lawsuit to shut-up the fine scholar of the Shoah, Deborah Lipstadt,  Kevin Macdonald.  I can only wonder at his motives in posting the translation of Marr but I am pretty sure it is not my motive in citing it.  Macdonald is a proponent of the ultra-Darwinism of evolutionary psychology, a man who published peer-reviewed antisemitism as science in reviewed journals and who was honored by late 20th, early 21st century science based in California, the state which wrote the eugenic law the Nazi used as the model for their eugenics laws.  I wouldn't be surprised if Macdonald takes it down if he finds out about this post.

Update:  If what I wrote wasn't provocative enough, already, I will note that I've never seen, anywhere, that along with the categories of "war criminal", those who committed "cries against humanity" I've never seen anyone propose categorizing those who committed atrocities in the name of science as having committed "crimes against science" or even "crimes against intellectual decency".  By agreement and out of utilitarian expediency those last two areas have been exempted from considerations of morality.   I think that when they are granted an assumption of omnipotence on the basis of presumed omniscience along with that exemption, they are bound to become fruitful generators of murderous depravity for which the perpetrators will be granted an exemption by reason of science.  The history of post-war Nazi scientists, even those who produced some of the most potent excuses for mass murder and whose work was part of that industrialization of human lives and bodies demonstrates that that suspicion is, as well, securely founded.

I wonder if Saturday Night Live has ever asked if Vicki Lawrence would be available to do Lindsay Graham.   Someone has to parody him.  I mean someone other than himself. 

Aaron Copland Looking Backward - Threnody 2: In Memoriam Beatrice Cunningham

Walden Chamber Players · Ashima Scripp · Curtis Macomber · Marianne Gedigian · Christof Huebner

I've been called out to care for a family member so, oh, dear, I won't be able to carry on brawling for now.   

Here's the second to last entry in the chronological listing of the works of Aaron Copland, composed in 1973.   I thought it might be interesting to go backward instead of forward, as I did when I posted many of the works of Copland that I think don't get nearly enough performances a couple of years back.  It was based on the brawl I had over the idiotic claim that because a composer reuses thematic material, that means the later piece was already in existence before it was composed.  I am beginning to suspect that dyschronia is one of the symptoms of the materialist-atheist mindset. 

"eine natürliche Auslese darstellend"

These are the actual pages of the notes from the Wannsee conference which seem to constitute some of the clearest direct evidence that the Nazis planned the industrial genocide of the Jewish People, as reproduced at the Holocaust Museum.  It is clear from this passage that natural selection (natürliche Auslese) was the basis of their intentions.  I don't know but I believe that is why the passage so like the passage that I gave in translation the other day is highlighted from the browned pages.

As in the posts in which I demonstrated that even if Charles Darwin had never endorsed eugenics all that would need to prove that Darwin's theories inspired eugenics is for the man who invented eugenics, Francis Galton to say that is what inspired him in creating it, which he did AS WELL AS REPRODUCING HIS COUSIN'S ENCOURAGEMENT OF HIS EARLIEST EUGENIC WRITING.  All it takes to prove the Darwinian nature of not only the intended genocide of Jews as well as Poles, Czech and Slovak People, the Roma People, etc. is to consult what the Nazis gave as their motives, what they exposed as being the basis of their eugenic-genocidal thinking.  And they did.

I think the academic study of the Shoah has fallen entirely short of what's necessary in not only exposing the motives of the Nazis, what made them turn petty antisemitic feelings into a biological imperative to conduct a struggle for life in which they intended to wipe out their rivals and those they saw as a danger due to intermarriage, lowering the "fitness" of the Germanic population.  And the entirely more important part of it, to make sure what inspired them is preventing from having that result, again.   I think the obvious reason that they have demurred from stating the obvious Darwinist nature of the Shoah, all of the Nazi genocides is that they don't want to upset the Darwin cult, both in popular culture and within science, itself.   As long as the basis of the Nazi genocides are in place, "never again" is an empty phrase.  As long as those are current in science, in popular understanding, in politics and in law, it is almost certain to happen again.  If not with the same victims, with enough to make it matter.  Ten would be more than enough for it to matter.

The Nazis were explicit in their planning, they didn't think they'd be able to kill the mixed-heritage population because it would be found to be unacceptable.  That is reflected in other Nazi documents that talk about how difficult it would be to get the German soldiers to kill Jews who seemed too German to them and how it would be easier to get them to kill Jews who seemed Polish or Russian.  They intended to do that with those of part German heritage the American way as endorsed by the eminent Supreme Court justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.* through forced sterilization which would have the same outcome as genocide, eliminating them from the future.  In that they could be paraphrasing directly from Darwin, Karl Pearson or just about any Western Darwinist of the time,  merely changing the categories of those to be cut off from the future and applying German scientific-industrial diligence to accomplish what was desired.   However, I'm not going to translate the documents, myself and open myself up for the kind of dishonest wrangling that always happens when the Darwin industry and cult denies what is there in plain sight to anyone who reads the originals.

* I've just started looking into the claim I came across that Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an early advocate of Darwinism and eugenics, though it's not anywhere near as easy researching him as it is his son.

Two Comments - Using Genocide As A Tool To Promote Bigotry Among The Ignorant

steve simelsAugust 22, 2018 at 3:20 PM
There's a phrase for somebody like you, who's pathologically unable to blame anti-Semitism on Christianity.


The Thought CriminalAugust 23, 2018 at 9:48 AM
There's a phrase for someone like you who denies the fact that the Nazis were inspired to murder Jews based on their belief in Darwinism, as expressed in their own words even at the Wannsee conference (I'm reading through all of the documents from it and, you know what, Stupes, I haven't found the word "God" or "Jesus" once, though I have found "natural selection") and it is an invincibly ignorant liar. Though since going online I've come to shorten that to "Simels".

It's no surprise that a Simels, motivated only by their anti-Christian bigotry refuses to acknowledge that anti-Semitism was a phenomenon that preceded the birth of Jesus and was rampant among Greek and Roman pagan intellectuals and politicians, even when faced with the words of one of the Nazis' favorites, Tacitus who also despised Christianity.

Simps, you really don't care about the Shoah, it's just a tool for you to maintain and promote your own bigotry and to use as a tactic in argument, since you aren't very good at making arguments, only effective with your fellow bigots and idiots.

Harvard Should Be Required To Change Its Motto To Mendacium Because Veritas Is False Advertising

Harvard University and, especially, Harvard Law School should suffer derision and shame for maintaining someone like Alan Dershowitz on its faculty and as an emeritus faculty member.   That was true before he retired, as he traded off of his Harvard connection as it is now that he is one of the designated liars to prop up the most corrupt, incompetent disastrous presidency in the history of the country.  Dershowitz's lies have reached Rudy Giuliani levels of shameless absurdity.

As a New Englander who has seen the Harvard product in its full diversity up close, from the rare person who doesn't seem to have had their moral sensibility (or practical competence) destroyed by Harvard to the typically mid-level Harvard grad who is more clever than brilliant, if that, while being a world-class snob, I consider it more of an elite academic brothel than a label guaranteeing even secular quality and certainly not as a grantee of even merely acceptable morality.

The hegemony of Harvard and its fellow elite schools on the Supreme Court, in large areas of the media and politics needs to be broken because, as such things as Alan Dershowitz's presence in American politics and people like Sean Spicer's presence as Harvard honorees prove, it's a disgusting institution.  I'd love to shame them into spending some of their obscene endowment on helping the public schools in the Boston area instead of building up the brothel, I'd love to see them forced into serving the truth that their lying slogan is all about.

Aaron Copland Looking Backward - Proclamation and Midday Thoughts

Leo Smit, Piano

These are listed as the last two pieces by Aaron Copland in the chronological list of his compositions, though each of them have a double date that I believe means either they were composed or started before they were completed or published or revealed or revised.  Proclamation 1973/82 and Midday Thoughts 1944/82.

I think the Ivesian ending of Proclamation is an especially fitting summation of a great American composer's works.

I'm not sure how far I'm going to take this but it could turn into a series.

For every complex thing there is an explanation that is Simels neat and wrong. 

Hate Mail

Simels is apparently nostalgic for atmospheric nuclear testing, Bull Connor tearing black people apart with dogs,  KKK murders, Bloody Sunday, the Vietnam War,  The assassination of Patrice Lumumba and its horrific aftermath, the invasion of the Dominican Republic and its horrific aftermath, The Assassinations of JFK, RFK the Reverend MLK jr.  back alley abortions, women being kept in the pink collar ghetto (those who weren't toiling in horrific conditions in the blue collar version of that) etc. etc. etc.

No doubt it was a relatively good time to be a straight, white, middle class-upper middle class male - I remember such things as a TV show called "It's A Man's World,"  No women reporters or news readers.  Nancy Dickerson got about a 4 minute News spot as the soaps were on.   And here's a hint, when they talked about "a man's world" not only did they not mean any men of color,  they didn't mean anyone in the LGBT world.  And, yeah, it really sucked in many ways to be LGBT back in the legendary 60s.  Especially for LGBT people of color.

And, Steverino, there's good music in every decade but most of it always sucks.  The 60s had at least if not more than its fair share of that crap.   Lots of the movies sucked.  While TV managed to get suckier the longer it went on Newt Minnow didn't call it The Vast Wasteland back then for nothing.  And, good Lord, the food, the chemicals, the sugar, the heart attacks!   The 60s were one of the worst decades for food in the U.S of A.

Nostalgia is a stupid and cheap and easy form of sentimentality that never remembers it as it really was.   If you're going to make up stuff why not get creative about it instead of indulging in Simels' favorite genre, the tiresomely derivative.

Walter Brueggemann - Willard Lecture 2018:

Come for the excellent lecture loaded with that radicalism I was talking about as found only in the right religious contexts, and stay for the excellent panel discussion.

There is nothing being discussed on the secular left that is as a radical advocacy for making economic justice and equality real as this.

Covert Darwinism In Support of Inequality In The Scientistic Wreckage of Intellectual Culture

Old Hate Mail - Never Again Will Only Happen If We Make It So, So I'll Never Stop Pointing This Out As Necessary

Oh, for crying out loud, I've hardly used even all of the widely known material that proves the Nazi genocides were Darwinian in their origin.  There is this infamous declaration made by Reinhard Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference of why, after they'd murdered all of the Jews who had no economic utility to the Nazis they'd either work those to death or kill those who survived even that culling.  His thinking was absolutely Darwinian, expressed in terms of natural selection.

“during the course of the Final Solution, the Jews will be deployed under appropriate supervision at a suitable form of labor deployment in the East. In large labor columns, separated by gender, able-bodied Jews will be brought to those regions to build roads, whereby a large number will doubtlessly be lost through natural reduction. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the elements most capable of resistance. They must be dealt with appropriately, since, representing the fruit of natural selection, they are to be regarded as the core of a new Jewish revival.”

That's not something that some creationist made up, it's something quoted from the Holocaust Museum website.

NATURAL SELECTION IS DARWINISM, IT IS THE CORE OF DARWINISM, it is the origin of eugenics including the Nazi eugenics of which their entire policy was made.  All of it, from murdering those deemed unfit among Germans to the elimination of those considered biologically inferior to "Aryans" so they could not "pollute" the German people,* to murdering possible rival groups in a Darwinian struggle for life . . . exactly in accord with Darwin's book in which he set out his theory, beginning with the title. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.  

Heydrich, the architect of the earlier stage of the genocide carried out by the Einsatzgruppen and one of the main planners of the "final solution" intended the "Aryans" of which he believed himself to be a superior example (Hitler favored him due to his "Aryan" appearance as well as his amoral depravity) to win any "struggle for life" because they were the "favoured race".   Darwin would only disagree on the basis of his belief that his own group was pretty favored and his list of those races which were to disappear was somewhat different.   As I pointed out the week before last, it's remarkable how those who believe that natural selection is a real thing instead of an ideological delusion inevitably include whatever groups they like as the "favoured races" (inevitably including their own) and which are expendable.   That's inevitable whenever people believe that natural selection is a real thing.  We've had more than a hundred fifty years to prove that in real life. And real life has proved it.

Anyone who isn't willing to face the factual truth of that is more than slightly willing to have it happen again, they're just hoping it happens to someone else, apparently. 

* The participants discussed a number of other issues raised by the new policy, including the establishment of the Theresienstadt camp-ghetto as a destination for elderly Jews as well Jews who were disabled or decorated in World War I, the deferment until after the war of “Final Solution” measures against Jews married to non-Jews or persons of mixed descent as defined by the Nuremberg laws, prospects for inducing Germany's Axis partners to give up their Jewish populations, and preparatory measures for the “evacuations."

I've got a family commitment that means I can get called to go out at any time, which is the reason I don't have a morning post.  I'm still dealing with it at noontime, I'm hoping to write something later.

I'm tempted to say "Mop Heads" and leave it at that but . . .

Aaron Copland - Something Wild

Aaron Copland conducts his musical score for the 1961 movie "Something Wild".

TRACKS
1. New York Profile 2:49
2. Park At Night 1:27 
3. Subway Jam 2:16 
4. Marry Ann Resigned 2:01
5. Incarceration And Nightmares 7:07
6. Escape Through The City 7:24
7. Love Music  1:58
8. Walk Downtown 3:11
9. Episode On The Bridge  4:52
10. Mother Alone 0:58 
11. Reunion 1:04

I saw Something Wild on TV, it must have been on Saturday Night At The Movies, back when network TV showed good to great movies.  I remember the music being extremely effective in the context of the movie which had a really strange and disturbing plot.  We're going way back, though.  I haven't seen it in more than 50 years.

Some recent comments on IMDB judge it by contemporary standards, I'm not going to argue that that's inappropriate, though I don't remember anyone judging it by those standards in the early 1960s.  I've got no problem with judging movies by contemporary standards, we're alive now and things change.  Movies stay the same.  That changes nothing about the music, which is fine music on its own.  By the standard of movie music, it's on the highest level. 

Some of the thematic material showed up later in the decade when Copland wrote his Duo for Flute and Piano.  But the duo hadn't been written yet, or even commissioned when the film score was written.

Woodstock Nation, 

    bullshit sales slogan.  

I will never understand young people born decades later who maintain nostalgia for the 1960s.  I was there and I don't understand why anyone my age would be nostalgic about the 60s anymore than I can imagine anyone being nostalgic for the Reagan years.   Mistakes to not repeat that get repeated, that's what the 60s mostly were. 

Why Lawyers So Often Are Scumbags

Paul Manafort's scumbag defense lawyer, Kevin Downing, should be punished for his violations of ethical rules in trying to nobble the jury, the public and Trump to get a pardon for his scumbag client.

The legal profession, which I used to have a lot of sympathy for,  is disgusting when they go from defending their clients into getting off the guilty, especially when they are guilty of what Paul Manafort is known to have done to empower murdering despots.   If Manafort is convicted, even by the machinations of lawerly lying he's guilty and, considering the gravity of what he did for enormous amounts of pay, deserves to rot in prison.

I don't think we demand that lawyers behave as if they're dedicated to producing justice nearly enough, in prosecutors, when the accused are innocent as charged, by defenders when the accused are guilty as charged.  The line that it's not their job to do anything other than get their clients off is inadequate.  There isn't any reason to respect what they do or the whole business of the law on that basis.

Downing is as big an asshole as I accused the judge in the Manafort trial as being, with what he did in the last few days, more so.

What Show Biz Is All About

When people started pointing out the Trump regime's use of "whataboutism" the tactic of deflecting criticism of their actions and policies by saying "but what about Obama or Clinton or anyone else," more often enough through a lie sold through the media, some people thought it was some kind of innovation in American politics, some said he'd learned it from Putin's mastery of that technique of lying,  I wondered why people thought they were seeing something new.  "Whataboutism" is a basic means of lying that is widely employed by liars of all ideologies and, in the case of Trump and his puppet master, Putin, criminal proclivities.

It doesn't always take the form of "whatabout" explicitly but the same structure of coming up with a deflective stream of distraction is widespread.  Since this piece is calling attention to what I wrote about the movies and their real life effect in politics, I'll deal with that.

In doing a wordsearch of  D. W. Griffith with other search terms this morning, I came across this video DEFENDING DW GRIFFITH & JOHN FORD  with  Arthur Lennig (who I'd never heard of before about five this morning) emeritus professor of cinema at the University of Albany.   You'll need to listen to what is said to understand what I'm going to say.

First, this is D. W. Griffith, the director of Birth of a Nation which was not only the inspiration for restarting the moribund Klu Klux Klan, it was one of its most potent promotional tool.  Despite what my volunteer in everything wrong with the secular left says, that was known from the start of the thing, the NAACP regularly protested and picketed it from even before its release. 

In 1913, Dixon sold the motion picture rights to D.W. Griffith, a wildly ambitious and prolific director who, as the son of a former Confederate officer, shared Dixon’s view of Reconstruction as a crime against the South. What really stirred his blood, though, was Dixon’s description of the Ku Klux Klan riding to the rescue of persecuted white Southerners—an image he believed was crying out for the big screen. The Clansman began shooting on Independence Day 1914 and was scheduled to open in Los Angeles on Feb. 8, 1915.

The local branch of the NAACP, however, had other ideas. Dixon’s previous work was so notorious that the civil rights group tried to have The Clansman (it was retitled shortly afterward) banned before having seen it. When the members arranged a screening on Jan. 29, their fears were confirmed. It was, they claimed, both “historically inaccurate and, with subtle genius, designed to palliate and excuse the lynchings and other deeds of violence committed against the Negro.” They sought to have it barred on the grounds of public safety. When their efforts failed, they urged the NAACP’s national headquarters in New York to take up the fight.

As documented in last night's brawl in the comments, there is no questioning the fact that the man who revived the KKK, William Simmons said that he was motivated by seeing the movie, Birth of a Nation, nor that that kind of thing was the intention of the racist who wrote the novel it was based on nor the racist director who filmed it.  You don't make that kind of movie without wanting it to have the effect which it did, actually, have.  The KKK, one of the most infamous terrorist groups in the history of the United States in both its first and its second incarnations.  The second version regularly used D. W. Griffeth's movie to promote itself. 

But listening to Lennig, you will hear that he starts with a huge "whatabout" about another infamously racist director of racist movies, John Ford in a movie I used as an example a few years back,  Judge Priest.   And you can hear just how dishonest it regularly gets when the topic is the cinema by the discussion of black-face and the use of vicious racist stereotyping of black men who want to rape white women - one of the most infamous pieces of racist propaganda which was so dangerous that Ida B. Wells Barnett had to debunk it in writing about the terror campaign of lynching as it was at its height.   Lennig, a "professor emeritus" in Cinema at a respected university goes through so many twists and turns to defend D. W. Griffith from people who discuss one of the most obvious things about his career as a movie maker, THE PRIMARY REASON HE HAS ANY RELEVANCE TO POLITICS OR SOCIETY AT LARGE.  The emeritus guy does that so baldly and so flagrantly that he makes Kellyanne Conway and Rudy Guliani sound like amateur night at the Liars Club.

If Lennig had named a thousand and one other racist directors, authors, artists, etc. it wouldn't have made Griffith or his movies one bit less racist than they were nor changed the evil they were in American life.  Whatabout" doesn't exonerate anyone of what they did.  But that argument is pervasive among those who want to defend, especially, profitable depravity and evil.

The emotional attachment that people have to their shows and, in the college credentialed culture-set, to the legend of "the cinema" produced such ridiculous nonsense long before anyone heard of Trump.

It is  directly related to the "free speech-free press" bullshit lines about the moral impunity of porn or racist lies, often in lines like "whatabout all those people who look at porn or listen to neo-fascist racist incitement to violence and don't rape-murder people"?   That direct relationship takes its most obvious form in paying lawyers to say such stuff in court, to fund "expert witnesses" who will say that on the witness stand or in depositions or in newspaper and magazine articles.  I don't know if the now just about extinct porn barons like Heffner and Guccione still inflate the massively overpopulated world of awards with those given to those who lied to their profit or not.

Of course most of the people who listened to Hitler in a newsreel or watched Triumph of the Will never murdered a single Jew (or Pole, or Roma or disabled person, or all of the other the designated forgotten) but that does nothing to cut the causal connection between watching those and the people who did get up and do those things BECAUSE OF WHAT THEY WERE TOLD IN THE MOVIES. Ariel Castro did what he was instructed to believe he had a right to do in porn, he said that was what inspired him, the man who murdered Kitty Genovese was informed by porn, as well.

Hardly anyone who watched Jodie Foster movies went out and tried to shoot Reagan, though the guy who did was motivated by watching her movies.  But those weren't carrying the intentional message to kill anyone like Reagan. 

Birth of a Nation and other racist movies carry that messaging that gets people killed by intent.  Yet the fans of free speech and the cinema want to exempt them from any responsibility for what they produced.  I think we see in Apocalypse Now as filtered through the mind of Donald Trump, when violence is made cinematically exciting and dramatic, with Wagner's music (for Pete'sake) the spectacle won't lead the audience to get a positive message, they'll be too excited by the spectacle and music and directorial manipulation of them to be paying close attention to an implied message.

I think word for word show biz has generated more lies than just about any other influential thing in life.  I think so when it is done unintentionally as in Francis Ford Coppola's movie, D. W. Griffith's intentional promotion of not only racism but white supermacist violence and in John Ford's racist movies but I think an even higher level of lying takes place in the defense of such stuff by "professors of cinema" newspaper and magazine scribblers who make a living off of the movies, and by the lawyer-liars who are hired to defend the movies from people who are  damaged by them or who are appalled by their real-life effects when people take their intentional messaging as a how-to do what is promoted in them.  And I certainly include the judges and Supreme Court members who have been a part of that earlier and far bigger and every bit as dishonest "whatabout" campaign.  Donald Trump is a direct result of that effort.  He, as  the public persona who was sold by lies to be president is a 100% American show-biz product, produced under the period of "more speech" in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and its high-point in the American media as it gave way to the reaction starting in the late 1970s, when racist comedians began pushing the envelope back to where it was when Griffith was working.

No one should be surprised by Kellyanne Conway or Rudy Giuliani and the massive lying that has become so dangerous under Trump, it was pioneered by a long line of liars, many of them taken to be of the left as well as those on the right who benefitted by some of the legal tactics meant to enable the left, such as the "free speech" absolutism promoted by that left.  It might have been an unintended side effect, like Trump's misunderstanding of Coppola's big cinematic spectacle, but his misunderstanding is an understanding of it.  Why anyone would have expected giving lying in the mass media protection from even civil remediation wouldn't lead here is what led to probably the stupidest thing any smart, moderny people have ever done.  Especially as they had the whole depraved history of the 20th century under the influence of electronic mass media to inform them.   Movies, TV, the girly magazine owners, and the rest of what has become of "culture" had everything to do with that.  They paid the lawyers to lie us here.  We were suckers for them, that's what show biz is all about.

This Is Who Simels Wants To Be When He Grows Up

America This Is Your Mind On Hollywood

I'm doing something I think I've only done once or twice before, reworking and reposting a piece the day after I first posted it.  Having a lot of trouble with my eyes, the last few days and looking at what I wrote on a big screen, yeesh!.  This is nothing I am happy to be writing about but given we are being governed by those suckered by TV and Hollywood, it is important. 

Films and hotels have many aspects that are the same. For example, there is always a big vision, an idea.
Francis Ford Coppola

Back at the height of my reading of the lefty magazines, a period which began to ebb in the 1990s and still hasn't ended, entirely, I'd have told anyone who predicted that twenty years later I'd be depending on Esquire more than The Nation for important news that they were insane.  Shows how reliable the prediction business that seems to obsess the news media in the United States probably is.

I know the estimable Charles Pierce gets more repetition but I've come to really value Jack Holmes as someone who often gets it just about perfect.  One of his recent pieces about Donald Trump's mind and its formation in TV and the movies  tells us a lot of why we are in such danger from Trump.

After recounting the horrific story of how Trump, responded to veterans plea that there be more support given to service members damaged by the United States spraying Agent Orange on Vietnam out of his mis-remembered viewing of the movie Apocalypse Now - even Robert Duval's famous line, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" didn't register with the grad of one of the Ivys as he repeatedly told some of the audience, some of the Vietnam veterans some of them must have been wrong that they weren't spraying Agent Orange in the movie. because of what he remembered from watching it -  Holmes goes into some detail about the consequences of having the reality TV star as president in horrifying specificity:

It's always comforting to remember the world's most powerful man is swimming in a mental sea of informational flotsam, his synapses firing erratically as he latches onto the profoundly limited number of things he thinks he knows, most of which are fragments of reality he internalized around 1982. This is how you get the moronic, bordering-on-incomprehensible advice for dealing with wildfires he spooned out of his brain onto The Tweet Machine last week. It's something that he heard once, maybe, filtered through the kaleidoscope of his reasoning faculties, which he then presents as God's Own Truth. Of course it is—he's the one saying it.

Obviously, this has some negative consequences for, say, veterans. The Vietnam vet groups in the Apocalypse Now fiasco meeting were trying to improve treatment for vets exposed to Agent Orange. It does not appear they made progress, and Weidman says they now struggle to get the president's ear at all. One upside of the meeting, however, was it was the last time veterans' groups had to deal with Omarosa, whom Trump tapped to run point on vets issues when he first entered office. Now a mortal enemy Trump wants to see "arrested," the former Apprentice was then saying nice things about the president, so he doled out out crucial responsibilities to her for which she was completely unqualified. Apparently, shortly after the Apocalypse meeting, Omarosa simply got bored of her vets assignment and other aides took it over.

It's bad.  Really bad.  And I don't mean the Omarosa angle, I'd certainly trust her more than the three businessmen thugs Trump lets run the VA.  Well, it being Omarosa,  "trust" isn't the right word, though "more" is.

But what's worse is a country which has an effective electoral margin (along with the putrid, anti-democratic Electoral College) which handed the country to the biggest liar and phony in our history on the power of his TV presence, his fascist Boss-man "Apprentice" character along with the long running subplot of the media in which Hillary Clinton was not one of the most dedicated public servants to ever get the nomination of a major party, but that she was written a role something like what I'm told was Omarosa's stock character of evil black woman villain.

Our system, and by that I don't mean only the putrid, corrupt vote-suppressing states and the Electoral College (now subject to Supreme Court rigging, as well) but also the media, from highest to lowest (and, it seems most influential) has produced Donald Trump through media saturation of the collective American mind.

Donald Trump is able to do what he is doing BECAUSE of the "free-press" which now, thanks to the innovative language and creation of neologisms of the "free-speech-free-press" industry means the media, including FOX and Sinclair, Breitbart, etc.  They installed him, they sustain him and the people who put him there, billionaires domestic as well as foreign, used the media they control, knowingly using the corrupt elections system as their tool box to do it.

I don't know what Francis Ford Coppola intended in making Apocalypse Now but I doubt he intended it to inform the ignorant and pathological criminal depravity of the Trump regime, though obviously it does that.   I don't generally go looking for quotes that I never read to illustrate a point but here's one from James Gray

 'Apocalypse Now' poses questions without any attempt to provide definitive answers, and the film's profound ambiguities are integral to its enduring magic.

How anyone could maintain a view permitting ambiguity about the moral depravity of the characters in that movie or have the intention of leaving the audience with an ambiguous view of what they presented is disturbing.

I think it's related to that thing that Terry Eagleton talked about, the pose of suspended judgement and decision that is such a big part of the folly of modernism and the demands of the materialist-scientistic view of life.  The claim that unless  something has the status of proof required by nothing but pure mathematics, we are not to assert the truth of something.  If that was what Coppola got out of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it leaves me to wonder if the fault was his or Conrad's.  Which is one of the reasons I've come to wonder about the efficacy of using fiction to make points about such serious life or death truths and about the entire project of modernism, as can be read in the quote by Jack Levine right under the blog header above.

I would like to hear Coppola on this, on how dangerous such stylish ambiguities are when a reality-TV president misremembers the directorial the auteurial intent in the movie.

Making a movie to make a point is about the most lavishly, expensively inefficient and incredibly stupid ways to make a point that have ever been dreamed up.  Writing an opera to do that is probably less of a waste of resources, effort and time.  Making a TV drama series must be at least as bad, especially if it goes into more than a couple of seasons.  Though presenting Trump as a fascist boss-man seems to have gotten across with a dangerous number of people.  If the point was about the depth of evil of the characters in Apocalypse Now, built off of the presentation of evil in Heart of Darkness,  I doubt that more than a minority of the audience gets the point.   That is even more true when it is a high-budget extravaganza with audacious and memorable effects of the kind that will be adjudged to make it a great movie.  The part those play in the ambiguous take away from the famous "Ride of the Valkeries" scene of the movie is probably one of the main contributions to Trump's use of it in his gawdy, vulgar mental furniture and, as a result of people buying his TV persona, in his use of it in governing us, including the veterans Jack Holmes wrote about.

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Is the left any better?  I'd have thought so back when I subscribed to four lefty mags, before I went online.  I don't think so now that I've read a lot of the lefty thinking, only instead of producing electoral victory and powerful presidencies, the left produces electoral impotence and (perhaps as a result) impotent presidencies such as those of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

The Trump regime is just the most recent and extreme in a series of disastrous presidencies since the high point of American liberalism, the Johnson administration got suckered by the Harvard boys and some Generals into sinking it in the mire of the Vietnam war.   One of the strongest tools they used to talk Johnson into increasing the American presence there was his fear of the media calling him weak, saying he "lost Vietnam" and empowering the Republicans who were not yet overtly fascist.  The American media was wildly supportive of the Vietnam war in the early 1960s and, I would say, well into the Nixon administration, that is after they helped use opposition to the war to end Johnson's plans to run in 1968 and then to defeat Hubert Humphrey when he got the nomination in his stead.

The part that the "new left" played in that self-defeating idiocy was no where near as important as the role that the media played in it, and I would include Hollywood which has never been remotely liberal in general and when it has been it's generally been pretty stupid about it.  I mean, Susan Sarandon is hardly the only one,  Aaron Sorkin is as big a tool in his own way.  Never, ever trust a Hollywood liberal, especially one who wants to prop up an updated version of JFK's Camelot, which was a lot of hooey even before his assassination.  In his own way, I think Obama or at least many of his supporters thought it was going to be President Bartlett and CJ and Leo and Toby and the team as they elected Jimmy Smits who won narrowly over the noble Republican  (it was that big a pile of bullshit) Alan Alda who would be offered a job and CJ got to be chief of staff.  Well, in the real life that such TV produced, we got Trump.  Shows you how realistic that show was.

The left are as big a bunch of suckers for show biz as the right, it's just they like different shows.  Even some of the best of them, such as the crew at Majority Report show signs of it.  The lower quality rungs of the left are as wallowing in show biz as the right.  I doubt there are many of them serious enough to miss or give up their shows to save egalitarian democracy.   I used to think it was all that pot we smoked, now I think it's all the TV and movies that sank the left, and the lefty magazines that were running their own old movies of lefty classics on a loop through their heads.  Look at the movies the Hollywood lefties were making, look at the hagiographic junk produced about losers like Emma Goldman and the Hollywood lefties.  John Reed, for Pete'sake, that total and complete asshole douche-bag John Reed!

The Far Left Isn't Radical Enough To Work

Anyone who reads my blog who thinks the reason I don't read the lefty magazines as much as I did in the 1990s is because I'm more conservative obviously doesn't read my blog.

The reason I gave up on the "secular" left, the atheist-materialist-scientistic-quasi-Marxist left is that they are not radical enough.  They aren't as radical as the liberation theologians and, as Marilynne Robinson rightly pointed out, the liberation theologians aren't as radical as the economic justice of the Mosaic Law and that isn't as radical as the Gospel and the Epistles.   And as Elizabeth A. Johnson pointed out in her feminist hermeneutical reading of those, the full meaning of those in terms of radical justice isn't yet exhausted.

On the rare occasions I read The Nation or In These Times or The Progressive (Madison style radicalism, ha!) I see why their left has failed and will always fail, the reason that despite an individual candidate here or there, the Democratic Socialists are going to prove as disappointing as that left always has been.  It's not radical enough and its ideological basis in materialism and scientism will rot out any better intentions from the bottom.  You've got to really believe that life is not the same as non-living matter, that rights and the moral obligation to respect rights are real and absolutely binding in order to get you ass up out of your computer chair or off your couch and do the unglamorous, unexciting work of making real justice.  As I've pointed out, they don't even seem to be able to notice that Marxism in real life wasn't much if any better than Nazism in real life when judged on things like people murdered.   How much more obvious does it get than something manifested in tens of millions of murders?

Naw, that left is no left anyone should have any faith will do anything in the future it hasn't already done.  Or, rather, not done.