The first thing to know about Steve Simels is that he's never told the truth except by accident. The second thing to know is the first thing is the last thing.
What I actually said was too complicated for Simps to focus on, never mind understand. He couldn't tell the truth about it for that reason. His intellectual process is founded on pop music, American TV and Hollywood movies.
Saturday, September 8, 2018
Second Feature Short - Black Jack Justice - Justice And The Happy Ending
Every man has his ghosts. Old square-jaw didn't figure he had any right to expect to be the exception. But sometimes the past takes on flesh and looks you in the eye... and things can never be quite the same afterwards. When that moment comes for Jack and Trixie, will it bring down the whole house of cards, coffee and gaudy metaphors; or will it re-introduce those most contradictory concepts - Justice and the Happy Ending?
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Dick Riley - The Middleman Out
Russel Horton - Tony Donlan
F. Murray Abraham - Jack Gilroy
Merwin Goldsmith - Victor Dallas
Steven Lang - Bill McHale
Another week of being too busy to listen to new radio drama, to start with I'm going to post one of my favorites of those I posted long enough back so some readers probably missed it. I liked the integration of original musical by Lonnie Knight that comments on the hero's situation.
Bottom Suckers Mocking Honorable Work And Workers
I hadn't heard about the actor Geoffrey Owens being job-shamed for doing what almost all actors do, taking a day job considered to be menial until right before I wrote this.
There's everything more dignified about bagging groceries than there is in having appeared with Donald Trump on "The Apprentice" or "Celebrity Apprentice". I can imagine that there were lots of "celebrities" who were degraded and humiliated and who sank lower than actors so often have to working with Donald Trump than Geoffrey Owens did doing honorable work. There's often a really big price to be paid in working in any of the arts, definitely, for almost everyone in them, a financial price, the kind that makes you have to work a job like Owens did. The thing I like about this story the most is Owens saying that he felt his work in a grocery store was honorable and nothing to feel shame over.
FOX, mentioned in the post immediately blow this, and the Daily Mail were the media sources trying to hold up Mr. Owens to ridicule, two of the biggest cesspools in the media. Bagging groceries is far more honorable work than getting paid millions to work for those bottom sucking corporations.
There's everything more dignified about bagging groceries than there is in having appeared with Donald Trump on "The Apprentice" or "Celebrity Apprentice". I can imagine that there were lots of "celebrities" who were degraded and humiliated and who sank lower than actors so often have to working with Donald Trump than Geoffrey Owens did doing honorable work. There's often a really big price to be paid in working in any of the arts, definitely, for almost everyone in them, a financial price, the kind that makes you have to work a job like Owens did. The thing I like about this story the most is Owens saying that he felt his work in a grocery store was honorable and nothing to feel shame over.
FOX, mentioned in the post immediately blow this, and the Daily Mail were the media sources trying to hold up Mr. Owens to ridicule, two of the biggest cesspools in the media. Bagging groceries is far more honorable work than getting paid millions to work for those bottom sucking corporations.
From Tacky To Even More Tacky - the aesthetics of American-fascist vs. Nazi style propaganda
Hitler had Leni Riefenstahl, Trump has FOX to promote his Hitler style rallies.
Susan The Sucker
Susan Collins is going into her repeat ritual dance of indecision on voting to put the purjurer and partisan thug, Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court where she knows, as everyone knows, he will be a vote for a whole program of extreme right-wing things she has to pretend to not favor in order to gull the voters of Maine to, again, return her to the Senate. She gets some of her best national media from that dance performance, she'll do it whatever.
The fact that after Democratic Senators have released the suppressed documents proving it, she can not pretend to not know that Brett Kavanaugh's assurance to her on Roe v. Wade was the lie that she and he and everyone else knew it was is any kind of an assurance she won't calculate that she gets more from voting for him than against putting him on the court to overturn Roe. I'll talk more about that kind of ritual open lie later
As with her last noted suckering, in her vote for the American Care Act damaging billionaire tax bonanza on the assurance of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump that she'd get a vote to correct that (a vote which was certain to fail even if Paul Ryan let it come to the floor in the house, it was that big a fraud), only for them to immediately say, forget about it, punk, she knows damn well that Brett Kavanaugh's assurance to her on Roe is the same thing.
She knows this dance backwards and forwards she's the Ginger Rogers of this dance step, she's danced it her entire political career running as a "moderate" in a state which would never have voted for someone who openly voted for what she has, in fact, supported in her votes. She has voted for almost the entire line of anti-woman, anti-choice, anti-decency judges that any Republican has put up. Her "moderation" even in scare quotes is a total fraud, a line to be piously repeated for and by the media, in Maine but also the national media.
Susan is a professional sucker, Susan the Sucker. That is the name of any honest biograpy of her that gets written, though the text of the book, if it is honest, will have to point out that she knew her ritual suckering is an act. At this point it's happened so often that the media and voters know their role in the act. I'm not writing this expecting that Susan or the Republican media in Maine will give it up, I'm writing it because there is a chance that the voters in Maine might realize they don't have to buy that tired old, too often played act anymore.
The fact that after Democratic Senators have released the suppressed documents proving it, she can not pretend to not know that Brett Kavanaugh's assurance to her on Roe v. Wade was the lie that she and he and everyone else knew it was is any kind of an assurance she won't calculate that she gets more from voting for him than against putting him on the court to overturn Roe. I'll talk more about that kind of ritual open lie later
As with her last noted suckering, in her vote for the American Care Act damaging billionaire tax bonanza on the assurance of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump that she'd get a vote to correct that (a vote which was certain to fail even if Paul Ryan let it come to the floor in the house, it was that big a fraud), only for them to immediately say, forget about it, punk, she knows damn well that Brett Kavanaugh's assurance to her on Roe is the same thing.
She knows this dance backwards and forwards she's the Ginger Rogers of this dance step, she's danced it her entire political career running as a "moderate" in a state which would never have voted for someone who openly voted for what she has, in fact, supported in her votes. She has voted for almost the entire line of anti-woman, anti-choice, anti-decency judges that any Republican has put up. Her "moderation" even in scare quotes is a total fraud, a line to be piously repeated for and by the media, in Maine but also the national media.
Susan is a professional sucker, Susan the Sucker. That is the name of any honest biograpy of her that gets written, though the text of the book, if it is honest, will have to point out that she knew her ritual suckering is an act. At this point it's happened so often that the media and voters know their role in the act. I'm not writing this expecting that Susan or the Republican media in Maine will give it up, I'm writing it because there is a chance that the voters in Maine might realize they don't have to buy that tired old, too often played act anymore.
Friday, September 7, 2018
Impeach Kavanaugh At The Earliest Possible Time
This is a quick link to an article at Slate that advocates what I did the other day, impeaching Brett Kavanaugh for the purjury that he has already committed, the purjury he committed in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, his involvement in crimes which he lied about and covered up, etc.
Here's the end of the article, after a thorough discussion of his perjury.
But he did nothing. He did not come forward to the Senate to provide information about the confidential documents Miranda had given him, which were clearly from the Democrats.
Kavanaugh also apparently did nothing when the Senate referred the case to the U.S. attorney’s office for criminal prosecution. (Miranda was never prosecuted.)
Eventually, though, Kavanaugh went even further to help cover up the details of the theft.
During the hearings on his nomination to the D.C. Circuit a few months after the Miranda news broke, Kavanaugh actively hid his own involvement, lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee by stating unequivocally that he not only knew nothing of the episode, but also never even received any stolen material.
Even if Kavanaugh could claim that he didn’t have any hint at the time he received the emails that these documents were of suspect provenance—which I personally find implausible—there is no reasonable way for him to assert honestly that he had no idea what they were after the revelation of the theft. Any reasonable person would have realized they had been stolen, and certainly someone as smart as Kavanaugh would have too.
But he lied.
Under oath.
And he did so repeatedly.
Significantly, he did so even though a few years earlier he had helped spearhead the impeachment of President Bill Clinton for perjury in a private civil case. Back then Kavanaugh took lying under oath so seriously that he was determined to do everything he could to help remove a president from office.
Now we know that he procured his own confirmation to the federal bench by committing the same offense. And he did so not in a private case but in the midst of public hearings for a position of trust, for a lifetime appointment to the federal judiciary.
His actions were dishonorable and dishonest.
This week, as part of his efforts to be elevated to the highest court in the land, he has calmly continued to deceive, falsely claiming that it would have been perfectly normal for him to receive secret Democratic letters, talking points, and other materials. And if this absurd notion were somehow true, it would not even be consistent with what he testified to 12 and 14 years ago. Back then, he didn’t state it would have been normal for him to receive secret Democratic strategy materials.
Instead, he explicitly and repeatedly went out of his way to say he never had access to any such materials. These objectively false statements were offered under oath to convince the committee of something that was untrue. It was clearly intentional, with Kavanaugh going so far as to correct Sen. Kennedy when the senator described the document situation accurately.
That’s why—without even getting into other reasonable objections to his nomination—he should not be confirmed.
In fact, by his own standard, he should clearly be impeached.
Here's the end of the article, after a thorough discussion of his perjury.
But he did nothing. He did not come forward to the Senate to provide information about the confidential documents Miranda had given him, which were clearly from the Democrats.
Kavanaugh also apparently did nothing when the Senate referred the case to the U.S. attorney’s office for criminal prosecution. (Miranda was never prosecuted.)
Eventually, though, Kavanaugh went even further to help cover up the details of the theft.
During the hearings on his nomination to the D.C. Circuit a few months after the Miranda news broke, Kavanaugh actively hid his own involvement, lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee by stating unequivocally that he not only knew nothing of the episode, but also never even received any stolen material.
Even if Kavanaugh could claim that he didn’t have any hint at the time he received the emails that these documents were of suspect provenance—which I personally find implausible—there is no reasonable way for him to assert honestly that he had no idea what they were after the revelation of the theft. Any reasonable person would have realized they had been stolen, and certainly someone as smart as Kavanaugh would have too.
But he lied.
Under oath.
And he did so repeatedly.
Significantly, he did so even though a few years earlier he had helped spearhead the impeachment of President Bill Clinton for perjury in a private civil case. Back then Kavanaugh took lying under oath so seriously that he was determined to do everything he could to help remove a president from office.
Now we know that he procured his own confirmation to the federal bench by committing the same offense. And he did so not in a private case but in the midst of public hearings for a position of trust, for a lifetime appointment to the federal judiciary.
His actions were dishonorable and dishonest.
This week, as part of his efforts to be elevated to the highest court in the land, he has calmly continued to deceive, falsely claiming that it would have been perfectly normal for him to receive secret Democratic letters, talking points, and other materials. And if this absurd notion were somehow true, it would not even be consistent with what he testified to 12 and 14 years ago. Back then, he didn’t state it would have been normal for him to receive secret Democratic strategy materials.
Instead, he explicitly and repeatedly went out of his way to say he never had access to any such materials. These objectively false statements were offered under oath to convince the committee of something that was untrue. It was clearly intentional, with Kavanaugh going so far as to correct Sen. Kennedy when the senator described the document situation accurately.
That’s why—without even getting into other reasonable objections to his nomination—he should not be confirmed.
In fact, by his own standard, he should clearly be impeached.
Dusan Bogdanovic - Seven Little Secrets
Dusan Bogdanovic, composer and guitarist
Dusan Bogdanovic, Seven Little Secrets. Recorded by Dusan Bogdanovic in 1999. Published by Editions Doberman-Yppan
The collection is based on Dogen's haiku:
The world?
Moonlit drops shaken
from the crane’s bill
DOGEN
Images are all by V. Van Gogh:
1. Blühender Mandelbaumzweig in einem Glas.
2. Der Schnitter (Nach Millet).
3. Grünes Weizenfeld.
4. Trauernder alter Mann.
5. Ein Paar Schuhe.
6. Die Sternnenacht (Zypressen und Dorf).
7. Bildnis einer jungen Mann mit Kornblume.
I can actually play a couple of these on guitar, 4 and 7. Maybe I should work up the other five. They are tiny masterpieces. I love how 6 takes the time to get where it's going. Like classical haiku, you could probably write a long paper on each of them.
Stupid Mail
Eschaton, a blog for people who might be able to read but don't. And its owner does his best to make sure they won't have to.
It's a real scream that Stupy is in a lather because I said I thought Bert Reynolds was a crappy actor and a crappy person. If he hadn't attributed to me what I'd never said about Reynolds yesterday I'm not sure I'd even know he hadn't died five years ago and I'd never have given my opinion of his acting. Stupy has got to be the most superficial, movie "star" addled dolt on the play-left I've ever seen.
I'll bet when a few weeks back I had an idle minute and clicked on one of those "celebrities" of the 1970s-80s now You-tubes in the side bar and found that the "celebrities" were apparently a bunch of minor TV actors who had gotten chewed up and spit out by Hollywood - not one of whom I recognized - are people he'd know and idolize because they'd been on a screen. He's addled by whatever appears on the wall-screen.
I used to aspire to not know anyone in the gossip column in the Parade magazine, I stopped looking at it before I reached that stage but I'll bet I wouldn't know any of them now. For Stupy in his senescence, they're his imaginary friends.
Update: "He was self-deprecating".
Maybe he knew he was a crappy actor and figured he should let people know he knew more about it than the likes of Stupy.
It's a real scream that Stupy is in a lather because I said I thought Bert Reynolds was a crappy actor and a crappy person. If he hadn't attributed to me what I'd never said about Reynolds yesterday I'm not sure I'd even know he hadn't died five years ago and I'd never have given my opinion of his acting. Stupy has got to be the most superficial, movie "star" addled dolt on the play-left I've ever seen.
I'll bet when a few weeks back I had an idle minute and clicked on one of those "celebrities" of the 1970s-80s now You-tubes in the side bar and found that the "celebrities" were apparently a bunch of minor TV actors who had gotten chewed up and spit out by Hollywood - not one of whom I recognized - are people he'd know and idolize because they'd been on a screen. He's addled by whatever appears on the wall-screen.
I used to aspire to not know anyone in the gossip column in the Parade magazine, I stopped looking at it before I reached that stage but I'll bet I wouldn't know any of them now. For Stupy in his senescence, they're his imaginary friends.
Update: "He was self-deprecating".
Maybe he knew he was a crappy actor and figured he should let people know he knew more about it than the likes of Stupy.
Contempt of Court And Contempt For Law And The Legal Profession Is Richly Earned By All Of Those
If you thought the hypocrisy and testilying that came from Brett Kavanaugh (Yale) was disgusting, we're about to get to the really putrid part of it when his well-placed, Yale-Ivy credentialed colleagues who are allegedly liberal will come out and tell us how we shouldn't worry about having their buddy (and ticket to the ultimate legal insider set) Brett, on the Supreme Court. We've already had some of that, so much of it that some at Yale felt it necessary to call bull-shit on their "liberal" colleagues.
Many conservative voices have spoken in support of President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh. But so have some liberal lawyers, including some of our colleagues at Yale Law School. Why would left-leaning attorneys lend their authority to a judge who has an unmistakable record of hostility to core liberal causes, from abortion rights to voting rights, from environmental regulations to restraints on presidential power?
In celebrating Kavanaugh, liberals may be acting out nostalgia for a long-gone bipartisan appointment process. They may be failing to admit the importance of values to judging, or they may be misreading Kavanaugh’s record. Perhaps they think he is the best nominee they can hope for, or that his personal virtue recommends his confirmation. Then again, maybe they are simply seeking influence. None of these are creditable reasons: There is no liberal case for Kavanaugh.'
I can give you another reason, their "liberalism" was always more of a professional-ideological pose than it was anything to do with the lives of real people, the environment, equal justice under the laws, certainly not anything like economic justice.
The last Senate Judiciary hearings that I listened to gavel-to gavel were those to confirm Alito (Princeton-Yale) to the Supreme Court, the ones which had the memorable moment of staged tears with Alito's wife, cued by Lindsay Graham (U of South Carolina) fleeing the hearing room in tears. Lindsay apparently is the guy in the Republican Caucus they count on to direct the pantomimes and skits. A natural role to assign a right wing gay guy, I guess.
The thing about those hearings which was the last straw wasn't the old-white, mostly lawyer, many Ivied men and their emetic pious citations and calls for "comity" and the inevitable sports metaphors, it was hearing Alito's colleagues on the bench, in law schools and in the establishment of the legal profession, the "liberals" and even "feminists" among them calling for his confirmation. That came after the part of the hearing which made me most outraged, something I can't stop thinking about or bringing up, Professor Ronald Sullivan of Yale pointed to two rulings by Alito dealing with the strip searches of a 10-year-old girl who was not under suspicion for a crime and the adult wife of a wealthy veterinarian who was under suspicion for a crime. Alito considered the strip search of the little girl as quite proper and OK, but was outraged when the wealthy woman was strip searched. I'll never get over how that failed to make an impression among Alito's "liberal" even "feminist" supporters that made the slightest differnce.
The legal profession is held in low regard, while a bit of that is unjustified, lots of it is richly earned by lawyers, by judges, by "Justices". The antics of T. S. Ellis (Harvard-Oxford), the judge in the first Manafort trial which may well have been from a partisan, political motive AND ANYONE WHO READ WHAT HE DID DURING THAT TRIAL WOULD BE WELL WITHIN REASON TO ASSERT THAT is only one recent example of that. Republicans in the corrupt Senate have rigged the system to prevent an indisputably legitimately elected Democratic president the ability to appoint judges and a Justice to the Supreme Court - the rule obviously being that the white-supremacists of the Republican-fascist party can nullify the election of a Black Democratic President - and the legal profession, lawyers, judges, "Justices" are totally OK with that. We are about to hear a raft of the lawyers, law professors, no doubt the judicial colleagues of Brett Kavanaugh give their more than merely tacit approval to the process.
Never take a "liberal", even a "feminist" in the legal profession's word without subjecting them to extreme skepticism and a critical look at WHAT THEY DO. That's certainly a good rule for any who have or will support putting the likes of Alito or Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. You can read it in the excerpt above, their professional interest is served by them giving that support, they, like Alito and Kavanaugh and the rest of the Republicans on the Supreme Court put personal self-interest above even the morality they give lip-service to. They are disgusting, they deserve the contempt they earn, their colleagues who tolerate their behavior, the kind of thing I criticized Rod Rosenstein (University of Pennsylvania, the "minor Ivy" not a state school, - Harvard) for yesterday, bring the contempt for their profession on it.
I'm going to occasionally give the provinance of the politicans, judges, lawyers, "journalists" because I think we all need to know what educational credentialing entities to attribute them to. Almost all of them will turn out to be Ivy-Ivy Equivalent in every case, though a few will have gone to public schools, most went the prep-Ivy route. The despotism we are under is a product of elite schools. Federalist-fascism is largely a product of the Harvard Law faculty.
Update: Oh, to be fair, Paul Manafort is a product of the Ivy-equivalent, Georgetown University, BS, JD. Another piece of shit the elite Jesuits who run that place, the same ones who produced Gorsuch and Kavanaugh at the prep-preIvy level, need to answer for producing.
Many conservative voices have spoken in support of President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh. But so have some liberal lawyers, including some of our colleagues at Yale Law School. Why would left-leaning attorneys lend their authority to a judge who has an unmistakable record of hostility to core liberal causes, from abortion rights to voting rights, from environmental regulations to restraints on presidential power?
In celebrating Kavanaugh, liberals may be acting out nostalgia for a long-gone bipartisan appointment process. They may be failing to admit the importance of values to judging, or they may be misreading Kavanaugh’s record. Perhaps they think he is the best nominee they can hope for, or that his personal virtue recommends his confirmation. Then again, maybe they are simply seeking influence. None of these are creditable reasons: There is no liberal case for Kavanaugh.'
I can give you another reason, their "liberalism" was always more of a professional-ideological pose than it was anything to do with the lives of real people, the environment, equal justice under the laws, certainly not anything like economic justice.
The last Senate Judiciary hearings that I listened to gavel-to gavel were those to confirm Alito (Princeton-Yale) to the Supreme Court, the ones which had the memorable moment of staged tears with Alito's wife, cued by Lindsay Graham (U of South Carolina) fleeing the hearing room in tears. Lindsay apparently is the guy in the Republican Caucus they count on to direct the pantomimes and skits. A natural role to assign a right wing gay guy, I guess.
The thing about those hearings which was the last straw wasn't the old-white, mostly lawyer, many Ivied men and their emetic pious citations and calls for "comity" and the inevitable sports metaphors, it was hearing Alito's colleagues on the bench, in law schools and in the establishment of the legal profession, the "liberals" and even "feminists" among them calling for his confirmation. That came after the part of the hearing which made me most outraged, something I can't stop thinking about or bringing up, Professor Ronald Sullivan of Yale pointed to two rulings by Alito dealing with the strip searches of a 10-year-old girl who was not under suspicion for a crime and the adult wife of a wealthy veterinarian who was under suspicion for a crime. Alito considered the strip search of the little girl as quite proper and OK, but was outraged when the wealthy woman was strip searched. I'll never get over how that failed to make an impression among Alito's "liberal" even "feminist" supporters that made the slightest differnce.
The legal profession is held in low regard, while a bit of that is unjustified, lots of it is richly earned by lawyers, by judges, by "Justices". The antics of T. S. Ellis (Harvard-Oxford), the judge in the first Manafort trial which may well have been from a partisan, political motive AND ANYONE WHO READ WHAT HE DID DURING THAT TRIAL WOULD BE WELL WITHIN REASON TO ASSERT THAT is only one recent example of that. Republicans in the corrupt Senate have rigged the system to prevent an indisputably legitimately elected Democratic president the ability to appoint judges and a Justice to the Supreme Court - the rule obviously being that the white-supremacists of the Republican-fascist party can nullify the election of a Black Democratic President - and the legal profession, lawyers, judges, "Justices" are totally OK with that. We are about to hear a raft of the lawyers, law professors, no doubt the judicial colleagues of Brett Kavanaugh give their more than merely tacit approval to the process.
Never take a "liberal", even a "feminist" in the legal profession's word without subjecting them to extreme skepticism and a critical look at WHAT THEY DO. That's certainly a good rule for any who have or will support putting the likes of Alito or Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. You can read it in the excerpt above, their professional interest is served by them giving that support, they, like Alito and Kavanaugh and the rest of the Republicans on the Supreme Court put personal self-interest above even the morality they give lip-service to. They are disgusting, they deserve the contempt they earn, their colleagues who tolerate their behavior, the kind of thing I criticized Rod Rosenstein (University of Pennsylvania, the "minor Ivy" not a state school, - Harvard) for yesterday, bring the contempt for their profession on it.
I'm going to occasionally give the provinance of the politicans, judges, lawyers, "journalists" because I think we all need to know what educational credentialing entities to attribute them to. Almost all of them will turn out to be Ivy-Ivy Equivalent in every case, though a few will have gone to public schools, most went the prep-Ivy route. The despotism we are under is a product of elite schools. Federalist-fascism is largely a product of the Harvard Law faculty.
Update: Oh, to be fair, Paul Manafort is a product of the Ivy-equivalent, Georgetown University, BS, JD. Another piece of shit the elite Jesuits who run that place, the same ones who produced Gorsuch and Kavanaugh at the prep-preIvy level, need to answer for producing.
Thursday, September 6, 2018
Stupid Mail
When I saw what Stupy said about me in regard to Bert Reyolds (Stupy takes every stupid occasion to say something stupid about me), I figured he must have died while I wasn't even thinking about him being alive and, what do you know, he died.
The comment was too stupid to repeat but from what it said Stupy apparently doesn't know that Bert Reynolds was a right wing Republican who voted for Trump - something I didn't know till I googled to find out if I was right about him being dead.
I never had any use for Bert Reynolds, he wasn't my type. He was a crap actor and not much else as far as I knew. Though I did know he was a Republican at least from when I recall him campaigning for Reagan, or supporting him in some way. As I said, I didn't spend much time paying attention to him. I vaguely remember someone showing me the Cosmo center-fold. I wasn't impressed. It was so friggin' tacky. And he was a goddamned Republican. He could have looked like Jim Hutton and I'd never have given him a second look for being a Republican.
Update: Who cares, the people at Eschaton who ever do anything useful number in the low single digits. What happens there is of no importance. I do find it funny that Duncan made an ineffectual attempt to write dissing the Ivy-League elite (he's from one of the "minor Ivies") the thing that Stupy and I fell out over when I dissed Obama and his first Education Sec. The ones who convinced me that it should be a rule that no Democratic president should ever appoint a Sec of Education who had never been to a public school as a student and who sent their children to public schools. And I don't mean that charter-school public-funded prep-school bull shit. Simps went nuts and said I thought they should hire someone who'd gone to community college. For the record, I know lots of people who went to community colleges who are several magnitudes smarter than your average Eschatot. For one, they're more likely to have had real jobs.
The comment was too stupid to repeat but from what it said Stupy apparently doesn't know that Bert Reynolds was a right wing Republican who voted for Trump - something I didn't know till I googled to find out if I was right about him being dead.
I never had any use for Bert Reynolds, he wasn't my type. He was a crap actor and not much else as far as I knew. Though I did know he was a Republican at least from when I recall him campaigning for Reagan, or supporting him in some way. As I said, I didn't spend much time paying attention to him. I vaguely remember someone showing me the Cosmo center-fold. I wasn't impressed. It was so friggin' tacky. And he was a goddamned Republican. He could have looked like Jim Hutton and I'd never have given him a second look for being a Republican.
Update: Who cares, the people at Eschaton who ever do anything useful number in the low single digits. What happens there is of no importance. I do find it funny that Duncan made an ineffectual attempt to write dissing the Ivy-League elite (he's from one of the "minor Ivies") the thing that Stupy and I fell out over when I dissed Obama and his first Education Sec. The ones who convinced me that it should be a rule that no Democratic president should ever appoint a Sec of Education who had never been to a public school as a student and who sent their children to public schools. And I don't mean that charter-school public-funded prep-school bull shit. Simps went nuts and said I thought they should hire someone who'd gone to community college. For the record, I know lots of people who went to community colleges who are several magnitudes smarter than your average Eschatot. For one, they're more likely to have had real jobs.
I Declare: Lindsay Graham Is A Gay Man Who Carries Water For The Anti-LGBT Side No One Should Avoid Pointing That Out
I haven't been watching the Kavanaugh hearings, Senate Judiciary hearings always make me want to puke, even at the best of times. Though I have listened to video of some of the Senators questioning of him, Senator Mazie Hirono stands out, as do a few others.
I don't listen to the Republicans, prefering to read their hypocrisy and lies than to hear it coming from their lying lips. So, I didn't hear Lindsay Graham make the comment at the end of this paragraph.
Perhaps that’s why one of the most gripping moments of the hearings came late Wednesday night when Sen. Kamala Harris asked whether Kavanaugh was aware of any laws “that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body.” It was not a legal question. It was simply a way to make concrete what has been happening all week. Kavanaugh’s response—“I’m not thinking of any right now, senator”—was perfectly truthful. There are none. That’s why a roomful of men talking about undue burdens in Planned Parenthood v. Casey isn’t a sporting event for these spectators. When Sen. Lindsey Graham smugly told the nominee on Thursday morning that “the last time I checked, liberty didn’t equate to abortion,” that wasn’t a performance. It was a promise.
Lindsay Graham is a deeply in-the-closet though practically universally known to be gay man who is a member of a rabidly anti-LGBT party from one of the most benighted states in the country on LGBT issues, a state which has, nonetheless, kept him in the Congress for decades, South Carolina is a state with a long history of hypocrisy of that kind, having sent pretty openly known aristocratic gay men to the Congress since the antebellum period. The all-round rapist and degenerate Senator Jim Hammond, for example.
Lindsay Graham would certainly know that before the Supreme Court changed its mind and abolished laws against gay sex those laws did " give the government the power to make decisions about the male body."
I wonder what Brett Kavanaugh might have had to say about the court case that knocked town "sodomy laws" and the Constitutionality of state laws making it a felony for men to have sex for a few minutes as opposed to the laws that would force women to be pregnant for nine months, if not have life-long consequences of laws that gave the power to make decisions about womens' bodies.
I know that one of the things to fear from a Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court will be that the Roberts-fascists will overturn the recent ruling against state laws banning same-sex marriage or recognizing those which are legally entered into in other states. I wouldn't be surprised if they overturned the Loving v. Virginia if Clarence Thomas weren't married to a white woman. Though, given what he is, he might vote to overturn it, I've heard lawyers say that some of his legal writing has the logical conclusion that Loving was wrongly decided. I would love it if someone pointedly asked him more about such issues.
Lindsay Graham is a living monument to hypocrisy of the most disgusting kind, out him whenever you mention his name.
I don't listen to the Republicans, prefering to read their hypocrisy and lies than to hear it coming from their lying lips. So, I didn't hear Lindsay Graham make the comment at the end of this paragraph.
Perhaps that’s why one of the most gripping moments of the hearings came late Wednesday night when Sen. Kamala Harris asked whether Kavanaugh was aware of any laws “that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body.” It was not a legal question. It was simply a way to make concrete what has been happening all week. Kavanaugh’s response—“I’m not thinking of any right now, senator”—was perfectly truthful. There are none. That’s why a roomful of men talking about undue burdens in Planned Parenthood v. Casey isn’t a sporting event for these spectators. When Sen. Lindsey Graham smugly told the nominee on Thursday morning that “the last time I checked, liberty didn’t equate to abortion,” that wasn’t a performance. It was a promise.
Lindsay Graham is a deeply in-the-closet though practically universally known to be gay man who is a member of a rabidly anti-LGBT party from one of the most benighted states in the country on LGBT issues, a state which has, nonetheless, kept him in the Congress for decades, South Carolina is a state with a long history of hypocrisy of that kind, having sent pretty openly known aristocratic gay men to the Congress since the antebellum period. The all-round rapist and degenerate Senator Jim Hammond, for example.
Lindsay Graham would certainly know that before the Supreme Court changed its mind and abolished laws against gay sex those laws did " give the government the power to make decisions about the male body."
I wonder what Brett Kavanaugh might have had to say about the court case that knocked town "sodomy laws" and the Constitutionality of state laws making it a felony for men to have sex for a few minutes as opposed to the laws that would force women to be pregnant for nine months, if not have life-long consequences of laws that gave the power to make decisions about womens' bodies.
I know that one of the things to fear from a Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court will be that the Roberts-fascists will overturn the recent ruling against state laws banning same-sex marriage or recognizing those which are legally entered into in other states. I wouldn't be surprised if they overturned the Loving v. Virginia if Clarence Thomas weren't married to a white woman. Though, given what he is, he might vote to overturn it, I've heard lawyers say that some of his legal writing has the logical conclusion that Loving was wrongly decided. I would love it if someone pointedly asked him more about such issues.
Lindsay Graham is a living monument to hypocrisy of the most disgusting kind, out him whenever you mention his name.
That Didn't Take Long
While I've opened up comments to those who aren't on google, I've turned comment moderation back on due to, well, I'm sure you can figure it out.
Dušan Bogdanović - Ricercar Kalij
Guitar, Sanel Redžić
Recorded in Jakobskirche in Weimar in April 2018
Notice
Trying to fix the problem with the comments, I have decided to experiment with open commenting, automatic moderation has been turned off.
I will manually remove any comments which attack other commentators, though feel free to say what you want about me. If things become unacceptable, I will go back to moderation of comments. Don't abuse it.
I will manually remove any comments which attack other commentators, though feel free to say what you want about me. If things become unacceptable, I will go back to moderation of comments. Don't abuse it.
Impeach Kavanaugh The Purjurer
If, as Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republican caucus of the Senate seem to be bent on doing, they put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, as soon as Democrats have control of either the House or both the House and Senate, they should make him the second Supreme Court member to be impeached and the first to be successfully removed from office by impeachment. There is no absolute necessity that he lie about it during these confirmation hearings, he has already lied about it under oath. But even if he doesn't, technically, lie about what he did in regard to stolen Democratic Senators files when he was a legal hack for the Bush II regime, the House and Senate are not bound by the strictest rules of evidence in the impeachment process. It isn't a law court because there is no right for anyone to hold a public office, holding a public office is, or ought to be considered, first and foremost, a chosen responsibility and, second, a privilege. It is dangerous to hold people in those positions to the same rules as are allegedly required to convict everyday citizens of crimes. Removal from office is not the same thing as convicting some poor person of a crime and sending them to jail, the liberty of an innocent person is not a privilege, it is a right. At least until the Republican-fascist court changes that.
Brett Kavanaugh is unfit to be a member of a Supreme Court, he's hardly the only one you can say that about on the court he's being named to. Roberts and Alito both lied about having made up their mind on issues, Neil Gorsuch certainly did as Charles Pierce pointed out in his column the other day. Clarence Thomas lied about his sexual harassment of Anita Hill. But Brett Kavanaugh's perjury was done in plain sight, without any question and was about crimes committed against the very foundations of democratic government.
No matter what, he and Neil Gorsuch were placed on the Court by an illegitimate president who is the puppet of billionaires, foreign and domestic. They should always be considered to be as illegitimate as the president who put them there.
Brett Kavanaugh is unfit to be a member of a Supreme Court, he's hardly the only one you can say that about on the court he's being named to. Roberts and Alito both lied about having made up their mind on issues, Neil Gorsuch certainly did as Charles Pierce pointed out in his column the other day. Clarence Thomas lied about his sexual harassment of Anita Hill. But Brett Kavanaugh's perjury was done in plain sight, without any question and was about crimes committed against the very foundations of democratic government.
No matter what, he and Neil Gorsuch were placed on the Court by an illegitimate president who is the puppet of billionaires, foreign and domestic. They should always be considered to be as illegitimate as the president who put them there.
Hate Mail - I'm Not Supposed To Exist According To The Geometry of Political Science It's No Wonder No One Has Asked Me To Sell Out
If I'm not being accused of being in the employ of George Soros, I'm accused of getting money from the Discovery Institute or some other outfit which certainly shares no point of political, religious, social or economic opinion in common with what I say.
If someone can tell me how to get some of that Soros money, let me know, I could use it. The fact that my computer was used when I got it eight years ago and it's just a matter of time before it goes the way of all flash (oxidized into obsolescence) is just the start of it. I'm old with all the health issues that entails. I'm serious, tell me how to get paid for saying what I'm saying and if they aren't fascists and there aren't any strings attached, I'll consider offers. Though, as I've criticized George Soros in the past I doubt he's going to send any cash my way. By the way, I did like his father's book, Maskerado Ĉirkaŭ la Morto, which details what Tivadar Soros did to hide his family from the Nazis.
Selling out isn't a question, apparently. I don't sell out to anyone, perhaps why I'm not paid-off and no one has ever brought it up. I mean as a proposal, not as an empty accusation.
When I called my self "The Thought Criminal" it was when I was weary of having people at the blog I wrote for telling me that I was saying what wasn't permitted to be said within the confines of lefty orthodoxy. That I almost always did so to a. slam the vulgar materialist, anti-egalitarian and what I'd early identified as the Republican-fascist right and b. to slam the kind of play-lefties who played our politics into their hands, never stopped that. If you look at the first piece I posted as The Thought Criminal, reprinted from that blog, it was a critique of using a geometic figure, a line, to define political ideology, it will give you a clue as to why the accusations about where people have assumed I stand fall all over the place. I didn't find out until after the biggest blow up at that blog, which resulted in me choosing to not write for it anymore that that piece (and another) was used as a clarion call by "skeptics" (read "atheists") to go on the attack. Something which I was able to document as relevant to the response I got to that last piece.
If my positions as a radical-egalitarian traditional American-style Law, Prophets, Gospel and Epistles based liberal and an anti-Darwinist, anti-materialist, anti-scientism (NOT anti-science) radically anti-fascist, Nazi, Marxist, writer has you confused, it's no wonder. We're not supposed to exist, we don't fit on the line of allowable thought.
I do try to back up what I say with the best evidence and always try to point out where I have to rely on secondary sources. I'm a firm believer in the old-fashioned kind of scholarship that we were all supposed to practice when we learned to write papers in public high-school. I'm doing what old Mrs. F. told us you had to do to write an acceptable paper in 9th grade.
Hate Update: I never was a huge supporter of Bill Clinton though I certainly voted for him in 1992. The stupidest vote I ever cast in my life was my 1996 protest vote for Ralph Nader (may I spend years in purgatory for that one) because Bill Clinton signed onto Newt Gingrich's attack on the poor in the name of "bipartisanship". After his monumental stupidity of helping, again, to sandbag his entirely more worthy wife's campaign in 2016 by meeting with Loretta Lynch, my regard for him teeters on the precipice between contempt and loathing.
That does nothing to change the fact that in the $40,000,000 +++++++ Republican-fascist investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton they are the two Americans in the history of the country who are most demonstrably documented to be innocent of criminal behavior. I'm no Bill Clinton fan, at all. I am of Hillary. Before we knew what disaster was about to fall on election night 2016, I was hoping Samantha Bee's fantasy of Hillary Clinton having her AG serve Bill the divorce papers would happen. It was a nice fantasy. However, that was her choice and I'd never interfere with the sanctity of other peoples' marriages.
If someone can tell me how to get some of that Soros money, let me know, I could use it. The fact that my computer was used when I got it eight years ago and it's just a matter of time before it goes the way of all flash (oxidized into obsolescence) is just the start of it. I'm old with all the health issues that entails. I'm serious, tell me how to get paid for saying what I'm saying and if they aren't fascists and there aren't any strings attached, I'll consider offers. Though, as I've criticized George Soros in the past I doubt he's going to send any cash my way. By the way, I did like his father's book, Maskerado Ĉirkaŭ la Morto, which details what Tivadar Soros did to hide his family from the Nazis.
Selling out isn't a question, apparently. I don't sell out to anyone, perhaps why I'm not paid-off and no one has ever brought it up. I mean as a proposal, not as an empty accusation.
When I called my self "The Thought Criminal" it was when I was weary of having people at the blog I wrote for telling me that I was saying what wasn't permitted to be said within the confines of lefty orthodoxy. That I almost always did so to a. slam the vulgar materialist, anti-egalitarian and what I'd early identified as the Republican-fascist right and b. to slam the kind of play-lefties who played our politics into their hands, never stopped that. If you look at the first piece I posted as The Thought Criminal, reprinted from that blog, it was a critique of using a geometic figure, a line, to define political ideology, it will give you a clue as to why the accusations about where people have assumed I stand fall all over the place. I didn't find out until after the biggest blow up at that blog, which resulted in me choosing to not write for it anymore that that piece (and another) was used as a clarion call by "skeptics" (read "atheists") to go on the attack. Something which I was able to document as relevant to the response I got to that last piece.
If my positions as a radical-egalitarian traditional American-style Law, Prophets, Gospel and Epistles based liberal and an anti-Darwinist, anti-materialist, anti-scientism (NOT anti-science) radically anti-fascist, Nazi, Marxist, writer has you confused, it's no wonder. We're not supposed to exist, we don't fit on the line of allowable thought.
I do try to back up what I say with the best evidence and always try to point out where I have to rely on secondary sources. I'm a firm believer in the old-fashioned kind of scholarship that we were all supposed to practice when we learned to write papers in public high-school. I'm doing what old Mrs. F. told us you had to do to write an acceptable paper in 9th grade.
Hate Update: I never was a huge supporter of Bill Clinton though I certainly voted for him in 1992. The stupidest vote I ever cast in my life was my 1996 protest vote for Ralph Nader (may I spend years in purgatory for that one) because Bill Clinton signed onto Newt Gingrich's attack on the poor in the name of "bipartisanship". After his monumental stupidity of helping, again, to sandbag his entirely more worthy wife's campaign in 2016 by meeting with Loretta Lynch, my regard for him teeters on the precipice between contempt and loathing.
That does nothing to change the fact that in the $40,000,000 +++++++ Republican-fascist investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton they are the two Americans in the history of the country who are most demonstrably documented to be innocent of criminal behavior. I'm no Bill Clinton fan, at all. I am of Hillary. Before we knew what disaster was about to fall on election night 2016, I was hoping Samantha Bee's fantasy of Hillary Clinton having her AG serve Bill the divorce papers would happen. It was a nice fantasy. However, that was her choice and I'd never interfere with the sanctity of other peoples' marriages.
When Are "Responsible" Conservatives Going To Question Themselves About The Role That Things They Wanted Had In Producing The Trump They Regret Now?
In a week when we have an anonymous upper level member of the Trump regime writing an op-ed saying the country is being governed by an amoral, ignorant, cruelly indifferent and unstable toddler with attention deficiency one thing really struck me, hearing that the media's white knight of the Department of Justice, Rod Rosenstein sat behind Trump's pick for the Supreme Court, the known perjurer and tool of Republican-fascist ideology and action, Brett Kavanaugh in what was interpreted as his support for putting Trump's second pick on the Supreme Court. An appointment which, in Kavanaugh's own writings, holds the very real possibility that Trump could get by Supreme Court ruling what he couldn't do by firing Sessions and then Rosenstein, shutting down the investigation into the massive criminality that put Trump in office.
In July Rosenstein made an unprecedented and controversial decision to ask Federal Attorneys to assign staff to review Kavanaugh's long paper trail, the one that Chuck Grassley and the Trump regime is hiding from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the public because, among other things he's lied under oath to get appointed as a federal judge. Not to mention that he's a two-faced Republican party hack who has turned from a Ken Starr prosecutor of a sitting president to a lawyer hack who has said that when it's a Republican president, they should be immune from prosecution.
The reason given for Rosenstein's presence was their "long term friendship". Maybe I'm just not as good a buddy as Rod Rosenstein but if I had a friend whose record was that of Brett Kavanaugh's I wouldn't be his friend. I wonder if it wasn't an attempt by Rosenstein to facilitate the advancement of his friend. I haven't fact-checked it, but at least one source dates their friendship from their both being involved with the Ken Starr witchhunt after Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton which produced no evidence that either of them were criminals. Whatever role he's playing in the protection of another Republican, Bob Mueller's investigation in Donald Trump, Rosenstein is a long-time Republican apparatchick.
Apparently such a friendship withstood the depravity and injustice and cruelty that Brett Kavanaugh's record as a federal judge displayed all during his tenure as a judge. Apparently he didn't hurt the kind of people that a Rod Rosenstein thinks are important enough to end a friendship over. Something in the anti-egalitarian soul of such Republican conservatism (and not just among Republicans) is basically antithetical to egalitarian democracy and the moral obligation for respect of all peoples rights which is displayed so well in Brett Kavanaugh's public career*.
When you watch the MSNBC Republican hires, the ones who were never-Trump and anti-Trump I have to wonder why they expected that the trajectory of mainstream Republican policy didn't lead here. The imperial presidency - when it's a Republican - has been part of Republican orthodoxy since the time of Nixon. Racism and bigotry has, as well. The Southern Strategy was a real thing only it wasn't exclusively Southern, it was effective in many areas of the country. And over all there is the empowerment of billionaires and millionaires and the thwarting of egalitarian democracy and collective moral obligations which inevitably include the moral obligation to produce economic justice.
I hear the former members of the Bush II administration, conservative columnists, George Will, Jennifer Rubin, etc. who, working for MSNBC, now, are striking an anti-Trump position. I will not judge whether or not that position is a pose, I think they really are shocked at how the policies and ideological positions they thought were safely pushed under the old guard who had a vestige of a sense of honor or shame have produced a Trump. I think that they are genuinely horrified that so much of what they thought they wanted produced this. But I don't see any sign that any of them are feeling any need for self-questioning, for asking themselves how their party, the Republican Party is the one which has produced this amoral, treasonous, evil presidency. I certainly see no evidence that John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito or Sandra Day O'Connor have had any second thoughts about their role in producing this disaster. I think a good part of the Trumpian amorality was the substance of large parts of their Supreme Court careers, that kind of legal-professional amorality is built into an elite education in the law.
This disaster is a direct product of and consequence of conventional, orthodox, American conservative, Republican policy and legal rulings, even more so, conservative, Republican journalism. Its continuation will be done through those. If Trump is removed against his will or through the political process, as long as those policies, legal rulings and journalistic assertions that produced him still stand, it's only a matter of time until it happens again. Nixon's wasn't the Republican presidency with the greatest number of criminals in it, that would be Reagan's, the man that such Republicanism sets up as some kind of heroic ideal. That wasn't that much of an improvement over Trump's even more floridly criminal regime. And that doesn't address the total craven, opportunistic pathology in the Republican Congress, the blatant corruption that this week is best personified in Chuck Grassley.
Those Republicans, all of them, owe us a real and public soul searching of the kind I have called on the American left to conduct. Even more so because those Republicans have held actual power and have produced a right-wing, Republican version of the imaginary worst-case scenario of a left-wing despot that they erected as a boogy-man to win power. The one which the Trumpzi mob imagines constitutes the "deep state". The only deep state of that kind is in people like Brett Kavanaugh and Rod Rosenstein and Chuck Grassley. The ones who have kept Trump in office and will support the totally awful Mike Pence.
Everyone seemes to be is asking "why now" over the NYT op-ed of yesterday. I wonder if their plan isn't to try to remove Trump before the election so as to blunt the Democratic wave and keep Republicans like Grassley and whatever billionaire bought goon who replaces Paul Ryan in control. I don't think anything counts as paranoid fantasy anymore. Nothing can count as too ridiculous to be possible, though it might merely be wrong.
* And while I'm at it, I'm going to point out that the Jesuit prep-school that Kavanaugh was bragging on being a product of, the one that also produced the putrid and amoral Neil Gorsuch obviously didn't do a single thing to instill a sense of basic morality in either of them. Those Jesuits who produced those two should be sent to a monastery to practice prayer and repentance for that. It's disgusting that a Brett Kavanaugh and a Neil Gorsuch could both make that boast.
In July Rosenstein made an unprecedented and controversial decision to ask Federal Attorneys to assign staff to review Kavanaugh's long paper trail, the one that Chuck Grassley and the Trump regime is hiding from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the public because, among other things he's lied under oath to get appointed as a federal judge. Not to mention that he's a two-faced Republican party hack who has turned from a Ken Starr prosecutor of a sitting president to a lawyer hack who has said that when it's a Republican president, they should be immune from prosecution.
The reason given for Rosenstein's presence was their "long term friendship". Maybe I'm just not as good a buddy as Rod Rosenstein but if I had a friend whose record was that of Brett Kavanaugh's I wouldn't be his friend. I wonder if it wasn't an attempt by Rosenstein to facilitate the advancement of his friend. I haven't fact-checked it, but at least one source dates their friendship from their both being involved with the Ken Starr witchhunt after Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton which produced no evidence that either of them were criminals. Whatever role he's playing in the protection of another Republican, Bob Mueller's investigation in Donald Trump, Rosenstein is a long-time Republican apparatchick.
Apparently such a friendship withstood the depravity and injustice and cruelty that Brett Kavanaugh's record as a federal judge displayed all during his tenure as a judge. Apparently he didn't hurt the kind of people that a Rod Rosenstein thinks are important enough to end a friendship over. Something in the anti-egalitarian soul of such Republican conservatism (and not just among Republicans) is basically antithetical to egalitarian democracy and the moral obligation for respect of all peoples rights which is displayed so well in Brett Kavanaugh's public career*.
When you watch the MSNBC Republican hires, the ones who were never-Trump and anti-Trump I have to wonder why they expected that the trajectory of mainstream Republican policy didn't lead here. The imperial presidency - when it's a Republican - has been part of Republican orthodoxy since the time of Nixon. Racism and bigotry has, as well. The Southern Strategy was a real thing only it wasn't exclusively Southern, it was effective in many areas of the country. And over all there is the empowerment of billionaires and millionaires and the thwarting of egalitarian democracy and collective moral obligations which inevitably include the moral obligation to produce economic justice.
I hear the former members of the Bush II administration, conservative columnists, George Will, Jennifer Rubin, etc. who, working for MSNBC, now, are striking an anti-Trump position. I will not judge whether or not that position is a pose, I think they really are shocked at how the policies and ideological positions they thought were safely pushed under the old guard who had a vestige of a sense of honor or shame have produced a Trump. I think that they are genuinely horrified that so much of what they thought they wanted produced this. But I don't see any sign that any of them are feeling any need for self-questioning, for asking themselves how their party, the Republican Party is the one which has produced this amoral, treasonous, evil presidency. I certainly see no evidence that John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito or Sandra Day O'Connor have had any second thoughts about their role in producing this disaster. I think a good part of the Trumpian amorality was the substance of large parts of their Supreme Court careers, that kind of legal-professional amorality is built into an elite education in the law.
This disaster is a direct product of and consequence of conventional, orthodox, American conservative, Republican policy and legal rulings, even more so, conservative, Republican journalism. Its continuation will be done through those. If Trump is removed against his will or through the political process, as long as those policies, legal rulings and journalistic assertions that produced him still stand, it's only a matter of time until it happens again. Nixon's wasn't the Republican presidency with the greatest number of criminals in it, that would be Reagan's, the man that such Republicanism sets up as some kind of heroic ideal. That wasn't that much of an improvement over Trump's even more floridly criminal regime. And that doesn't address the total craven, opportunistic pathology in the Republican Congress, the blatant corruption that this week is best personified in Chuck Grassley.
Those Republicans, all of them, owe us a real and public soul searching of the kind I have called on the American left to conduct. Even more so because those Republicans have held actual power and have produced a right-wing, Republican version of the imaginary worst-case scenario of a left-wing despot that they erected as a boogy-man to win power. The one which the Trumpzi mob imagines constitutes the "deep state". The only deep state of that kind is in people like Brett Kavanaugh and Rod Rosenstein and Chuck Grassley. The ones who have kept Trump in office and will support the totally awful Mike Pence.
Everyone seemes to be is asking "why now" over the NYT op-ed of yesterday. I wonder if their plan isn't to try to remove Trump before the election so as to blunt the Democratic wave and keep Republicans like Grassley and whatever billionaire bought goon who replaces Paul Ryan in control. I don't think anything counts as paranoid fantasy anymore. Nothing can count as too ridiculous to be possible, though it might merely be wrong.
* And while I'm at it, I'm going to point out that the Jesuit prep-school that Kavanaugh was bragging on being a product of, the one that also produced the putrid and amoral Neil Gorsuch obviously didn't do a single thing to instill a sense of basic morality in either of them. Those Jesuits who produced those two should be sent to a monastery to practice prayer and repentance for that. It's disgusting that a Brett Kavanaugh and a Neil Gorsuch could both make that boast.
Wednesday, September 5, 2018
Out Of Order
Blogger seems to be doing something weird with comments. I'm not even going to try to figure it out.
I might only post comments for a while and not respond to them. If Simps says something too hilarious to ignore, I'll do it in a post.
I might only post comments for a while and not respond to them. If Simps says something too hilarious to ignore, I'll do it in a post.
Hate Mail - First He Insults Me, Then He Plagiarizes Me, Then He Lies About Me, All The While Making Up Stuff Which I've Never Said
I have no opinion about Spike Lee's movie BlacKkKlansman, I wasn't aware of its existence till finding out my troll claimed to know what I'd say about it when I hadn't heard of it or anything about it. I had time to look at a couple of reviews, it's not a universally supported film, apparently. I probably won't see it, I don't watch many movies, especially those purporting to be "based on true events" because I don't believe that when it comes from the movies. I've got no problem with someone like Spike Lee trying to harness the potential of movies to sway people, if it's going to happen I'd rather it happen for better than worse motives, I do have a problem with them doing what I slam the fascist use of movies for, not telling the truth. If that's a habit of Mr. Lee, I don't have any idea. Of course, any movie writer, director, producer, who starts from scratch instead of "based on" BS, they can't be faulted for having distorted history or current events. Fiction movies based on original screen plays never lie about those things contained completely within that story, though it can get facts about anything outside of that impinging on real, reality wrong.
I will be mildly curious to see what Stupy makes of this.
Update: Apparently Shitforbrainz Simels is a. claiming that he's reading a book about tourists going to Nazi Germany when what he's really done is read a review about it in the Washington Post, b. he's snarking that he hasn't found a mention of Charles Darwin in the book. I happen to have read a review of the book which said that most of the people mentioned in it were convinced that Hitler was on the right track, it said the only fan of Hitler who had his mind changed was Thomas Wolfe, the American novelist who saw a boarder guard beating up on a Jewish person he'd just stripped of all of his possessions.
Um, Stupy, anyone who, in the 1930s thought Hitler was on the right path wasn't likely to be the brightest bulb in the marquee sign, something you could relate to, and if they understood that Nazi ideology and policy was entirely based in biology and, as I demonstrated the past two weeks, they, themselves said that what they were doing was based in Darwinism, natural selection. I'll bet that in those travels of his to France, Sweden, etc. Stupy is as plug ignorant of the intellectual bases of the present day governments of those countries as his fellow American untellectuals would be.
Though just about anyone who knew anything about biology and had read Nazi literature would have known that relationship to Darwinism. I wouldn't be too certain that some of them didn't know that was the basis of Nazi ideology, lots of the visitors to the Reich I've read about were eugenicists and before the end of WWII literally no one anywhere I've looked ever denied the connection of Darwin with eugenics. As I've pointed out many times before, in April, 1939, in Eugenics Review, Darwin's own son, Leonard, a major figure in British eugenics, was proudly pointing out the connections between his father and German eugenics, which of course, meant Nazi eugenics. He was certainly not the only person to note that. Charles Davenport certainly knew it as he was heavily involved with Nazis in his eugenics promotion right up into the war, before the United States joined it.
Maybe it just didn't come up in the author's theme of the book Stupy is pretending that he's reading, authors pick and choose what they look at and what they include in their books. Maybe it just didn't fit. Or maybe the author realizes that they would be attacked for pointing out that glaring fact and an author's interests include selling more books.
I think there are scads of writers who know that, I mean, I found that out within the first week of my research into the question, and I started out almost as ignorant as Stupy. There are two lines of direct connection, complete with scientific citations by Darwin and his fellow scientists and direct correspondence between them. An honest researcher could hardly miss it.
One goes directly from Charles Darwin to Francis Galton (the father of eugenics) to scientists and people like Darwin's sons George, Francis, Leonard and Horace, all of them major figures in British eugenics, and American eugenics which the Nazis used to formulate their theories and who were in nearly constant contact.
The other was even more direct, Charles Darwin to Ernst Haeckel to his students and readers who fed directly into German science and social thought directly into the Nazi theoreticians and politicians. You might call Wilhelm Schallmeyer a third line, but he was definitely aware of Haeckel and that chain of connection even though he said his own eugenics came from the same source as Galton's and Haeckel's, Shallmeyer reading On The Origin of Species.
Two direct chains connect Darwin with the Nazis, more, actually. Whether or not the kind of person who would have gone on vacation to Nazi Germany would have known that in the 1930s, not all of us are are as ignorant as they may have been.
I will be mildly curious to see what Stupy makes of this.
Update: Apparently Shitforbrainz Simels is a. claiming that he's reading a book about tourists going to Nazi Germany when what he's really done is read a review about it in the Washington Post, b. he's snarking that he hasn't found a mention of Charles Darwin in the book. I happen to have read a review of the book which said that most of the people mentioned in it were convinced that Hitler was on the right track, it said the only fan of Hitler who had his mind changed was Thomas Wolfe, the American novelist who saw a boarder guard beating up on a Jewish person he'd just stripped of all of his possessions.
Um, Stupy, anyone who, in the 1930s thought Hitler was on the right path wasn't likely to be the brightest bulb in the marquee sign, something you could relate to, and if they understood that Nazi ideology and policy was entirely based in biology and, as I demonstrated the past two weeks, they, themselves said that what they were doing was based in Darwinism, natural selection. I'll bet that in those travels of his to France, Sweden, etc. Stupy is as plug ignorant of the intellectual bases of the present day governments of those countries as his fellow American untellectuals would be.
Though just about anyone who knew anything about biology and had read Nazi literature would have known that relationship to Darwinism. I wouldn't be too certain that some of them didn't know that was the basis of Nazi ideology, lots of the visitors to the Reich I've read about were eugenicists and before the end of WWII literally no one anywhere I've looked ever denied the connection of Darwin with eugenics. As I've pointed out many times before, in April, 1939, in Eugenics Review, Darwin's own son, Leonard, a major figure in British eugenics, was proudly pointing out the connections between his father and German eugenics, which of course, meant Nazi eugenics. He was certainly not the only person to note that. Charles Davenport certainly knew it as he was heavily involved with Nazis in his eugenics promotion right up into the war, before the United States joined it.
Maybe it just didn't come up in the author's theme of the book Stupy is pretending that he's reading, authors pick and choose what they look at and what they include in their books. Maybe it just didn't fit. Or maybe the author realizes that they would be attacked for pointing out that glaring fact and an author's interests include selling more books.
I think there are scads of writers who know that, I mean, I found that out within the first week of my research into the question, and I started out almost as ignorant as Stupy. There are two lines of direct connection, complete with scientific citations by Darwin and his fellow scientists and direct correspondence between them. An honest researcher could hardly miss it.
One goes directly from Charles Darwin to Francis Galton (the father of eugenics) to scientists and people like Darwin's sons George, Francis, Leonard and Horace, all of them major figures in British eugenics, and American eugenics which the Nazis used to formulate their theories and who were in nearly constant contact.
The other was even more direct, Charles Darwin to Ernst Haeckel to his students and readers who fed directly into German science and social thought directly into the Nazi theoreticians and politicians. You might call Wilhelm Schallmeyer a third line, but he was definitely aware of Haeckel and that chain of connection even though he said his own eugenics came from the same source as Galton's and Haeckel's, Shallmeyer reading On The Origin of Species.
Two direct chains connect Darwin with the Nazis, more, actually. Whether or not the kind of person who would have gone on vacation to Nazi Germany would have known that in the 1930s, not all of us are are as ignorant as they may have been.
There Is Nothing Classier Than Capuano's Concession Speech
Michael Capuano wins the classiest concession speech prize with his gracious, mature, just completely classy speech after his upset loss to Ayanna Pressley in the Massachusetts 7th Congressional District. It was the best one I've ever heard. I hope he stays in politics and goes on to even bigger things as I hope Ayanna Pressley does. From everything I've read about her, she will be a great Representative.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
Unless You Can Come Up With An Intelligent Explanation Of How It Could Happen, Random Chance Dogma Is Unintelligent Design
A containing membrane would have been necessary for the molecules necessary for the first organism to have made a second one to have been gathered and been kept and concentrated within that first organism to make the necessary components of the second one, at least two or twice as many as would be required to make and maintain the first one. None of the act of reproduction would happen outside of that first organism. And, especially in the materialistic view of that event, whatever specific molecules that would have initiated and carried out what must have been a complex operation of reproduction would have had to be present in a sufficient concentration to have done that. I can think of no way for that to have happened without a containing membrane and almost certainly for some of those component molecules to have been made by the first organism, itself. Some molecular mechanism would have had to trigger that first, totally unprecedented reproductive act in the history of life on Earth.
If you want to propose that all happened outside of a containing membrane, it is unlikely in the extreme that it happened once by chance, just the right chemicals drifting or wafting into each other at just the right time and,or in the right sequence. For it to have happened a second time is ridiculously unlikely. I'd say that it would have probably been even more in need of divine intervention than if it happened within a membrane, especially as the scenario would have to have it happening, by chance, again and again and again, . . .
Remember, there's no trial and error about it because the first error would be the last for incipient life on Earth. You can't get past that fact that two living organisms would have had to be the result of the first and the majority of subsequent reproductions in order for their numbers to have increased.
And once you accept that scenario, first the construction of the membrane containing the first organism would have had to have happened by random, chance events before there was a living organism whose body chemistry could control it, That, in itself, would be astonishingly unlikely.
And then consider, that randomly assembled membrane, by chance surrounding just the right combination of molecules or structures, would have had to have the potential to reproduce to have the potential to split apart, surround both the "parent" organism and the offspring (you really can't determine which was which, by the way) and to reseal itself around both instead of the act killing both, which makes makes the idea that happened without intelligent design a ridiculously improbable series of extremely improbable events and, so unlikely.
No, abiogenesis is an absurd hypothesis if you believe in the conventional idea that there was one original organism that assembled without divine will behind it, to think it happened more than once only multiplies the unlikelihood, not to mention the idea that two entirely independent lines of life would have combined or been able to. Anytime I think about these things the more obvious it becomes that intelligent design is more probable than the random chance events of assembly of life scheme. Intelligent design of that, at least, makes entirely more sense.
If you want to propose that all happened outside of a containing membrane, it is unlikely in the extreme that it happened once by chance, just the right chemicals drifting or wafting into each other at just the right time and,or in the right sequence. For it to have happened a second time is ridiculously unlikely. I'd say that it would have probably been even more in need of divine intervention than if it happened within a membrane, especially as the scenario would have to have it happening, by chance, again and again and again, . . .
Remember, there's no trial and error about it because the first error would be the last for incipient life on Earth. You can't get past that fact that two living organisms would have had to be the result of the first and the majority of subsequent reproductions in order for their numbers to have increased.
And once you accept that scenario, first the construction of the membrane containing the first organism would have had to have happened by random, chance events before there was a living organism whose body chemistry could control it, That, in itself, would be astonishingly unlikely.
And then consider, that randomly assembled membrane, by chance surrounding just the right combination of molecules or structures, would have had to have the potential to reproduce to have the potential to split apart, surround both the "parent" organism and the offspring (you really can't determine which was which, by the way) and to reseal itself around both instead of the act killing both, which makes makes the idea that happened without intelligent design a ridiculously improbable series of extremely improbable events and, so unlikely.
No, abiogenesis is an absurd hypothesis if you believe in the conventional idea that there was one original organism that assembled without divine will behind it, to think it happened more than once only multiplies the unlikelihood, not to mention the idea that two entirely independent lines of life would have combined or been able to. Anytime I think about these things the more obvious it becomes that intelligent design is more probable than the random chance events of assembly of life scheme. Intelligent design of that, at least, makes entirely more sense.
Dusan Bogdanovic, Polymetric Studies
Dusan Bogdanovic, Polymetric Studies. Recorded by Dusan Bogdanovic in 1999. Study no.1 combines 12/16 and 3/4; Study no.2, 5/8 and 3/8; Study no.3, is a canon in 11/8+7/8 meter; no.4, combines different variants of 9/16 and Study no.5, 3/16 and 1/4. Published by Editions Doberman-Yppan.
All images are graphic works by M.C. Escher(1898-1972).
Beautiful.
On Susan Collins And Why The Media Should Cut The Crap About Her
Susan Collins is a right-wing Republican scumbag who has to pretend she's not a scumbag to gull enough Maine voters into putting her back in office, that's been the sum total of her political strategy, that has been the sum total of her substance. She will vote to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court knowing that he will do everything he can to put an agenda she pretends she opposes into practice, to overturn Roe v. Wade, to destroy the possibility of universal health coverage, to destroy labor and environmental laws and regulations, to enrich the billionaires and millionaires, to concentrate power into Republican-fascist hands, and to allow Donald Trump and other Republican presidents the ability to break any law with total and complete impunity.
Susan Collins is pretending to believe Kavanaugh's lies about Roe being "settled law" even as both of them know that it's a lie, it's a lie for public consumption, or at least the emission of the news media who know that both of them are lying as they pretend the lie is true. She will vote for him because she really does want him to do all of those things or maybe she is indifferent to him doing some of them, she is concerned only with the power of her Republican-fascist party and her political career. She is a monument of hypocrisy and self-service, an emblem of this time of politics with no honor and no morals.
If the massive opposition to him sways her, it will only be because she calculates that she will lose something she isn't prepared to lose if she shocks the world and votes against him. It would take the biggest campaign of dissuasion yet mounted by Maine Voters to do that and I doubt there is one big enough. She knows she can count on the Maine media to cover her shame, most of the national media, too.
Susan Collins is pretending to believe Kavanaugh's lies about Roe being "settled law" even as both of them know that it's a lie, it's a lie for public consumption, or at least the emission of the news media who know that both of them are lying as they pretend the lie is true. She will vote for him because she really does want him to do all of those things or maybe she is indifferent to him doing some of them, she is concerned only with the power of her Republican-fascist party and her political career. She is a monument of hypocrisy and self-service, an emblem of this time of politics with no honor and no morals.
If the massive opposition to him sways her, it will only be because she calculates that she will lose something she isn't prepared to lose if she shocks the world and votes against him. It would take the biggest campaign of dissuasion yet mounted by Maine Voters to do that and I doubt there is one big enough. She knows she can count on the Maine media to cover her shame, most of the national media, too.
I Assume This Guy Has No Womb For Brett Kavanaugh To Nazionalize.
Today, something a little different. I'm going to forego talking about the hilarity of Steve Simels copying arguments and language I've developed in my last several years of public writing and developing thinking about the idiocy of ACLU, Joel Gora, Warren Court-Robert's-fascist dogma on "free speech" even as he insults me and lies about me. Though I'd find that fun, it's not the most important thing about what he and others said at Duncan Black's blog, last night.
It was in his back and forth with one of the others at that blog that I'm going to take my theme for this post. That commentator goes by the appropriate name "Less Than Useless" which is what that line of "free speech" absolutism has been. I'm not going to take it in the complete sequence the exchange happened, you can read that here.
There was this:
Stëve Sïmels, blog malignancy Adam Hominem-hardened Democrat • 11 hours ago
I've said it before, but -- Nazis don't have free speech rights. We already listened to everything they have to say, and then we executed them for crimes against humanity.
Less Than Useless Stëve Sïmels, blog malignancy • 11 hours ago
That's nice and snarky, but we didn't execute them for speaking. ACTING on the Final Solution, there's the difference.
That said, I couldn't care less either way if Bannon gets interviewed or not. I don't like people claiming that articles about these monsters are puff pieces or propaganda for them, when The New Yorker has the best, most accurate journalism in this country right now.
Sy Hersh! Elizabeth Kolbert! Jane Mayer! Jon Lee Anderson! Ryan Lizza! These guys reported the crimes of the people they covered. I have a problem when libs and progressives complain because they just report the facts and let THAT outrage people, instead of painting them as monsters.
Report the facts. Outrage is for readers--not reporters.
First, there is no way to separate what the Nazis said from what they did. Alfred Rosenberg, after Hitler the second most important theoretician and ideologue of Nazism, did most of what he did and what he was executed for through what he said. Criminal enterprises are done through and known through the speech of the conspirators and perpetrators.
The claim that words advocating the murder of entire races, entire groups of people are harmless ignores that they're not even entirely harmless before the time the words convince enough people to kill those people individually, in small numbers, in the hundreds, thousands and millions. The Nazis rhetoric in the 1920s hadn't killed many people, if any, there was a time before they killed even one person, but their speech led to them convincing more and more people to their thinking. You can't separate it from what happened in 1933 when they won power and used that power to create a sense of national danger through setting the Reichstag on fire and using the power they had gained THROUGH ELECTIONS to seize power and build to passing the eugenic laws, followed close on by the laws against Jews, their using their position in power to spread their propaganda, to make membership in the Hitler Junger mandatory and everything else that led to their invasion of Czechoslovakia, then Poland which is when their industrial scale mass murder started with their practice genocide of the disabled and the Einsatzgruppen mass murders as they pushed East.
You can't separate the Nazi speech of the 1920s from their winning power through election, their seizure of dictatorial power from that and their mass murder from that. It all started with their speaking, with their speech and what they said with it. All along the way their speech fueled that, step by step. One of the things that made the prototypical Nazis groom Hitler for leadership was his speech. Even while he was still obscure he was chosen by the Nazi leadership because of his ability to sway an audience, a skill which the Nazi director Leni Riefenstahl used her "free speech" to highlight in Triumph of Will, using the magnification of speech through modern technology to bring what was said to millions more people than would have heard it, radio being another tool exploited to its maximum contemporary potential to magnify the power of that speech.
The pretense that speech is unrelated to what that speech advocates is the basic stupidity of the ACLU, Joel Gora, Warren-Roberts court dogma on free speech. The result of the permission by the Warren Court to allow the media to lie about liberals with impunity has led to the flood of Republican and fascist enabling lies in the media which has produced a series of increasingly bad Republican administrations and a series of appointments to the Supreme Court which have been baldly political, favoring their party and even appointing a Republican as president on 2000. The evidence of that being a result of the 1964 Sullivan decision enabling the lying with impunity includes that in 1960, before that ruling Nixon lost the election, he won the 1968 election, the first one after the ruling. Nixon, of course, started appointing the series of increasingly bad Supreme Court nominees which has brought us to the edge of the disaster the Republicans are about to push the country over. One of his key appointments was the race-baiting, Black and Latino voter intimidator, William Rhenquist, one of the keys of Republican-fascist advancement.
Less Than Useless then got to the basis of the "free speech" absolutist line, which I'll take piece by piece.
Less Than Useless Sabine • 11 hours ago
So...who gets to determine where the line is?
That is the central idiocy of the free speech absolutist line, that it is impossible to determine what is dangerous speech, speech which does everything from deprive people of their rights to murdering people in the tens of millions. That is such an idiotic line of irresponsible and dishonest nonsense that it needs to be addressed.
First, speech which advocates depriving people of their rights to life, to the necessities of life, to equal access to education, to an equal vote, to equal participation, to clean drinking water and air and food that isn't poisonous, to dignity is not anything like speech which asserts the right of people to all of those things on an equal basis. They are not the same, they are opposites and so are their results.
If you want a bright line, that one is there and it is so bright that apparently if you've been to elite law-schools or make money in the media, or get suckered by the speech of jerks like Joel Gora or Nat Hentoff it blinds you to the obvious.
Anyone who has the intelligence of a toddler as they learn that other people and animals have feelings like theirs and that that matters has the ability to understand that distinction, though so many college-educated free speech absolutists don't have that ability. It would seem their education had the effect of making them stupider than those toddlers. Including members of the United States Supreme Court going back more than a century.
Second claiming that we couldn't possibly determine that people who advocate murdering people for who they are, enslaving people, violating their right to their bodily integrity, and everything down to depriving them of their equal dignity* have a potential to make that real and that that is an absolute bright line that makes their speech dangerous, is lying. Blatantly and obviously lying. No one is that stupid that they couldn't make that distinction. Anyone who couldn't determine that is rationally held to be too stupid to trust with making any important decisions, never mind being a Supreme Court justice, a judge or a member of a jury.
The pretense that judges and juries and regulators and politicians and We The People aren't to be trusted to decide that Nazis don't get a chance to try to reproduce here what they did in Europe in the 1930s and 40s is one of the most disgusting poses of the post-war pseudo-liberals. Their reason that we can't do that because we supposedly can't do it in the best possible way, with mathematical certainty is made disgusting by the tens of millions of corpses produced by the Nazis, the fascists, the Marxists, etc. in the 20th century.
The movement of the 18th and 19th century for the disestablishment of religion was supposedly inspired by the bloodshed of the 30 Years and similar supposedly religious wars. The estimates of those dead from the 30 Years War is from 4 to 12 million**. We of the modern period don't seem to learn much but absurdity from a far higher body count. I can only attribute that to the amorality of Enlightenment scientistic post-Christian orthodoxy, the same kind of thinking that holds those mountains of bodies don't matter nearly as much as their stated plans for the economy in defining their character. It makes absolutely no logical sense, which is ironic, considering the standard of proof held up as the one required by the free-speech absolutists for making that life-or tens of millions of deaths distinction.
I disagree. Free speech, even insane lying speech, is protected. The real solution is, as one of the Founders said, an educated public.
Considering "The Founders" not only made no provision for public education in The Constitution nor requiring the various states to do so, that is a load of horse shit. Not to mention that lies have no positive educational value, lies prevent you from being educated in a way that electoral democracy and a decent world requires. As it says in the Bible, you will know THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH WILL MAKE YOU FREE. Lies enslave, as George Orwell reminded us. Any "founder" who held that lies deserved the same protection as the truth was either too dishonest or too stupid to trust. And, beside that, there is no reason for us to not have learned that lesson in the two centuries and counting since they wrote the Constitution. The conceit of the "originalist" "strict-constructionists" is that we were not to have learned anything by experience and observation in that interval. It is ironic that form of fundamentalism is so popular among those who scoff at Biblical fundamentalism.
Not to mention The Founders were aristocrats, almost all of them racists and slave owners who not only tolerated a reign of terror against those held in slavery but they were also expansionists who were quite ready to commit genocide to take the entire continent. Jefferson certainly was, George Washington, held up as the moral, the spiritual authority among them conducted a scorched earth campaign against the Iroquois nation which you can read more about if you search "Washington town destroyer". Hitler, in Mein Kampf enthusiastically cited the American genocide and land theft as a precedent for what he wanted to do.
We are in an onslaught of ignorant hate speech, and the real reason anyone falls for it is the relentless propaganda of FOX and bankrolling by billionaires using crazy fucks to vote for their tax cuts.
Which they do through sponsored speech magnified in power through de-regulated cabloid TV, hate-talk radio, movies, and other entertainment and info-tanement methods using the best advice of the social sciences to tell them how to lie and deceive and persuade more people, more effectively. Science and "science" have made hate-speech funded by billionaires far more dangerous in the age of electronic media than those "Founders" could have imagined in the age of hand printing presses and unamplified human speech.
If the nation goes down because it can't tell the difference between a con man and a real President who happens to be a woman, so be it. But the situation appears to be correcting itself even as we speak.
"SO BE IT?" WE'RE TALKING ABOUT THE UNITED STATES BEING GOVERNED BY A GUY WHO SAID THAT THERE WERE GOOD NAZIS FOR FUCKSAKE, YOU THINK WE HAVE THE LUXURY TO JUST SAY "SO BE IT" AS THEY'RE PUTTING CHILDREN IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS ON THE BASIS OF ETHNICITY OF WHIPPING UP NAZIS TO VOILENCE, AS THEY'RE ABOUT TO NATIONALIZE WOMEN'S BODIES, AS IVY LEAGUE ASSES LIKE THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORKER TRIES TO NORMALIZE NAZIS? AND THAT ANYONE WHOSE REACTION TO THAT IS TO PREEN IN THEIR AFFLUENT, BLOG-BASED FREE SPEECH ABSOLUTIST BULL SHIT! It isn't correcting itself, you shithead, it's getting worse all the time on the power of lies. If Trump is defeated and Pence doesn't take over the assholes they're putting on the Supreme Court will only make certain they have another chance to try again. Consider this progression, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, Trump . . . relieved only by the center right, Ripon Society Democrats of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Let me break this to you, bunky, 1964 was fifty-four years ago. Earl Warren is dead and decayed. Even that asshole-liberatarian-liberal Nat Hentoff is dead, finally. Things have moved way, way down that road.
I wonder how many German "liberals" figured things were going to correct themselves in about 1937. I wonder what a comment thread at Eschaton in Germany that year would have read like.
* Dignity is only enhanced, perhaps only really exists when you accept the rights of other people and the moral obligation to respect those rights. Without that it's not dignity, it's snobbery and fashion and sucking up to people with money.
** Some include the victims of plague in that number, which, considering they had no real way of treating or preventing that, gets you farther from reality.
Update:
No, I'm not being inconsistent when I advocate both equality and preventing the likes of Nazis and Stalinists from advocating what they advocate. They have every right to advocate the equal rights of others, including those who, in reality, they want to deprive of all of their rights, including to their lives. That choice of theirs, to advocate dictatorship, inequality, violence, murder, means that they exercised their equal right to make choice to advocate what no one has a right to advocate. Their choice isn't different from the choice of those who act on that speech, on what that speech encourages them to do.
Anyone who claims there is a right to lie is wrong and, given the hard lesson of what lying has resulted in in society, in politics, in science and the professions and, yes, in religion, anyone who holds in 2018 that there is a right to lie is mentally deficient. That it is only the most impotent of those, religion, foremost, that people get in a snit about is instructive of what cowards such people are.
That mental deficiency is so rampant in the United States due to the truncated, inadequate poetic language of the First Amendment that, given that history of what comes of lying, it is one of the most serious mental health challenges we have. Especially when "liberals" like the one above, faced with the very real possibility of Trumpian fascism destroying democracy and wiping out the whole menu of rights on top of those they have already abridged or destroyed, says "so be it". Ignoring that irrationality is grotesquely immoral, itself.
No Hollywood bull shit about the poor Hollywood 10 Stalinists who were unable to get paid the big bucks for their advocacy of Stalinism changes the fact that they favored a dictator and a system which murdered scores of millions of people, many of them on the suspicion that they might support equal rights. Nothing whatsoever would have been lost if they had never had the opportunity to spread that poisonous message. That foreign import would never have sold anyway, whereas racist fascism was already indigenous and a horrible habit of the country. Nazism was far more compatible with that bad habit. The Warren Court might have imagined they were politely, nicely, in the Holmes manner, enabling the free speech of the likes of the Communists to peddle their innocuous insanity. They were actually enabling the fascists and Nazis, the KKK and the self-interested malignity of billionaires, domestic, after Roberts, foreign, as well.
I'm in favor of learning from the history and mistakes of the past. Why continue what produced such terrible results?
It was in his back and forth with one of the others at that blog that I'm going to take my theme for this post. That commentator goes by the appropriate name "Less Than Useless" which is what that line of "free speech" absolutism has been. I'm not going to take it in the complete sequence the exchange happened, you can read that here.
There was this:
Stëve Sïmels, blog malignancy Adam Hominem-hardened Democrat • 11 hours ago
I've said it before, but -- Nazis don't have free speech rights. We already listened to everything they have to say, and then we executed them for crimes against humanity.
Less Than Useless Stëve Sïmels, blog malignancy • 11 hours ago
That's nice and snarky, but we didn't execute them for speaking. ACTING on the Final Solution, there's the difference.
That said, I couldn't care less either way if Bannon gets interviewed or not. I don't like people claiming that articles about these monsters are puff pieces or propaganda for them, when The New Yorker has the best, most accurate journalism in this country right now.
Sy Hersh! Elizabeth Kolbert! Jane Mayer! Jon Lee Anderson! Ryan Lizza! These guys reported the crimes of the people they covered. I have a problem when libs and progressives complain because they just report the facts and let THAT outrage people, instead of painting them as monsters.
Report the facts. Outrage is for readers--not reporters.
First, there is no way to separate what the Nazis said from what they did. Alfred Rosenberg, after Hitler the second most important theoretician and ideologue of Nazism, did most of what he did and what he was executed for through what he said. Criminal enterprises are done through and known through the speech of the conspirators and perpetrators.
The claim that words advocating the murder of entire races, entire groups of people are harmless ignores that they're not even entirely harmless before the time the words convince enough people to kill those people individually, in small numbers, in the hundreds, thousands and millions. The Nazis rhetoric in the 1920s hadn't killed many people, if any, there was a time before they killed even one person, but their speech led to them convincing more and more people to their thinking. You can't separate it from what happened in 1933 when they won power and used that power to create a sense of national danger through setting the Reichstag on fire and using the power they had gained THROUGH ELECTIONS to seize power and build to passing the eugenic laws, followed close on by the laws against Jews, their using their position in power to spread their propaganda, to make membership in the Hitler Junger mandatory and everything else that led to their invasion of Czechoslovakia, then Poland which is when their industrial scale mass murder started with their practice genocide of the disabled and the Einsatzgruppen mass murders as they pushed East.
You can't separate the Nazi speech of the 1920s from their winning power through election, their seizure of dictatorial power from that and their mass murder from that. It all started with their speaking, with their speech and what they said with it. All along the way their speech fueled that, step by step. One of the things that made the prototypical Nazis groom Hitler for leadership was his speech. Even while he was still obscure he was chosen by the Nazi leadership because of his ability to sway an audience, a skill which the Nazi director Leni Riefenstahl used her "free speech" to highlight in Triumph of Will, using the magnification of speech through modern technology to bring what was said to millions more people than would have heard it, radio being another tool exploited to its maximum contemporary potential to magnify the power of that speech.
The pretense that speech is unrelated to what that speech advocates is the basic stupidity of the ACLU, Joel Gora, Warren-Roberts court dogma on free speech. The result of the permission by the Warren Court to allow the media to lie about liberals with impunity has led to the flood of Republican and fascist enabling lies in the media which has produced a series of increasingly bad Republican administrations and a series of appointments to the Supreme Court which have been baldly political, favoring their party and even appointing a Republican as president on 2000. The evidence of that being a result of the 1964 Sullivan decision enabling the lying with impunity includes that in 1960, before that ruling Nixon lost the election, he won the 1968 election, the first one after the ruling. Nixon, of course, started appointing the series of increasingly bad Supreme Court nominees which has brought us to the edge of the disaster the Republicans are about to push the country over. One of his key appointments was the race-baiting, Black and Latino voter intimidator, William Rhenquist, one of the keys of Republican-fascist advancement.
Less Than Useless then got to the basis of the "free speech" absolutist line, which I'll take piece by piece.
Less Than Useless Sabine • 11 hours ago
So...who gets to determine where the line is?
That is the central idiocy of the free speech absolutist line, that it is impossible to determine what is dangerous speech, speech which does everything from deprive people of their rights to murdering people in the tens of millions. That is such an idiotic line of irresponsible and dishonest nonsense that it needs to be addressed.
First, speech which advocates depriving people of their rights to life, to the necessities of life, to equal access to education, to an equal vote, to equal participation, to clean drinking water and air and food that isn't poisonous, to dignity is not anything like speech which asserts the right of people to all of those things on an equal basis. They are not the same, they are opposites and so are their results.
If you want a bright line, that one is there and it is so bright that apparently if you've been to elite law-schools or make money in the media, or get suckered by the speech of jerks like Joel Gora or Nat Hentoff it blinds you to the obvious.
Anyone who has the intelligence of a toddler as they learn that other people and animals have feelings like theirs and that that matters has the ability to understand that distinction, though so many college-educated free speech absolutists don't have that ability. It would seem their education had the effect of making them stupider than those toddlers. Including members of the United States Supreme Court going back more than a century.
Second claiming that we couldn't possibly determine that people who advocate murdering people for who they are, enslaving people, violating their right to their bodily integrity, and everything down to depriving them of their equal dignity* have a potential to make that real and that that is an absolute bright line that makes their speech dangerous, is lying. Blatantly and obviously lying. No one is that stupid that they couldn't make that distinction. Anyone who couldn't determine that is rationally held to be too stupid to trust with making any important decisions, never mind being a Supreme Court justice, a judge or a member of a jury.
The pretense that judges and juries and regulators and politicians and We The People aren't to be trusted to decide that Nazis don't get a chance to try to reproduce here what they did in Europe in the 1930s and 40s is one of the most disgusting poses of the post-war pseudo-liberals. Their reason that we can't do that because we supposedly can't do it in the best possible way, with mathematical certainty is made disgusting by the tens of millions of corpses produced by the Nazis, the fascists, the Marxists, etc. in the 20th century.
The movement of the 18th and 19th century for the disestablishment of religion was supposedly inspired by the bloodshed of the 30 Years and similar supposedly religious wars. The estimates of those dead from the 30 Years War is from 4 to 12 million**. We of the modern period don't seem to learn much but absurdity from a far higher body count. I can only attribute that to the amorality of Enlightenment scientistic post-Christian orthodoxy, the same kind of thinking that holds those mountains of bodies don't matter nearly as much as their stated plans for the economy in defining their character. It makes absolutely no logical sense, which is ironic, considering the standard of proof held up as the one required by the free-speech absolutists for making that life-or tens of millions of deaths distinction.
I disagree. Free speech, even insane lying speech, is protected. The real solution is, as one of the Founders said, an educated public.
Considering "The Founders" not only made no provision for public education in The Constitution nor requiring the various states to do so, that is a load of horse shit. Not to mention that lies have no positive educational value, lies prevent you from being educated in a way that electoral democracy and a decent world requires. As it says in the Bible, you will know THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH WILL MAKE YOU FREE. Lies enslave, as George Orwell reminded us. Any "founder" who held that lies deserved the same protection as the truth was either too dishonest or too stupid to trust. And, beside that, there is no reason for us to not have learned that lesson in the two centuries and counting since they wrote the Constitution. The conceit of the "originalist" "strict-constructionists" is that we were not to have learned anything by experience and observation in that interval. It is ironic that form of fundamentalism is so popular among those who scoff at Biblical fundamentalism.
Not to mention The Founders were aristocrats, almost all of them racists and slave owners who not only tolerated a reign of terror against those held in slavery but they were also expansionists who were quite ready to commit genocide to take the entire continent. Jefferson certainly was, George Washington, held up as the moral, the spiritual authority among them conducted a scorched earth campaign against the Iroquois nation which you can read more about if you search "Washington town destroyer". Hitler, in Mein Kampf enthusiastically cited the American genocide and land theft as a precedent for what he wanted to do.
We are in an onslaught of ignorant hate speech, and the real reason anyone falls for it is the relentless propaganda of FOX and bankrolling by billionaires using crazy fucks to vote for their tax cuts.
Which they do through sponsored speech magnified in power through de-regulated cabloid TV, hate-talk radio, movies, and other entertainment and info-tanement methods using the best advice of the social sciences to tell them how to lie and deceive and persuade more people, more effectively. Science and "science" have made hate-speech funded by billionaires far more dangerous in the age of electronic media than those "Founders" could have imagined in the age of hand printing presses and unamplified human speech.
If the nation goes down because it can't tell the difference between a con man and a real President who happens to be a woman, so be it. But the situation appears to be correcting itself even as we speak.
"SO BE IT?" WE'RE TALKING ABOUT THE UNITED STATES BEING GOVERNED BY A GUY WHO SAID THAT THERE WERE GOOD NAZIS FOR FUCKSAKE, YOU THINK WE HAVE THE LUXURY TO JUST SAY "SO BE IT" AS THEY'RE PUTTING CHILDREN IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS ON THE BASIS OF ETHNICITY OF WHIPPING UP NAZIS TO VOILENCE, AS THEY'RE ABOUT TO NATIONALIZE WOMEN'S BODIES, AS IVY LEAGUE ASSES LIKE THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORKER TRIES TO NORMALIZE NAZIS? AND THAT ANYONE WHOSE REACTION TO THAT IS TO PREEN IN THEIR AFFLUENT, BLOG-BASED FREE SPEECH ABSOLUTIST BULL SHIT! It isn't correcting itself, you shithead, it's getting worse all the time on the power of lies. If Trump is defeated and Pence doesn't take over the assholes they're putting on the Supreme Court will only make certain they have another chance to try again. Consider this progression, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, Trump . . . relieved only by the center right, Ripon Society Democrats of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Let me break this to you, bunky, 1964 was fifty-four years ago. Earl Warren is dead and decayed. Even that asshole-liberatarian-liberal Nat Hentoff is dead, finally. Things have moved way, way down that road.
I wonder how many German "liberals" figured things were going to correct themselves in about 1937. I wonder what a comment thread at Eschaton in Germany that year would have read like.
* Dignity is only enhanced, perhaps only really exists when you accept the rights of other people and the moral obligation to respect those rights. Without that it's not dignity, it's snobbery and fashion and sucking up to people with money.
** Some include the victims of plague in that number, which, considering they had no real way of treating or preventing that, gets you farther from reality.
Update:
No, I'm not being inconsistent when I advocate both equality and preventing the likes of Nazis and Stalinists from advocating what they advocate. They have every right to advocate the equal rights of others, including those who, in reality, they want to deprive of all of their rights, including to their lives. That choice of theirs, to advocate dictatorship, inequality, violence, murder, means that they exercised their equal right to make choice to advocate what no one has a right to advocate. Their choice isn't different from the choice of those who act on that speech, on what that speech encourages them to do.
Anyone who claims there is a right to lie is wrong and, given the hard lesson of what lying has resulted in in society, in politics, in science and the professions and, yes, in religion, anyone who holds in 2018 that there is a right to lie is mentally deficient. That it is only the most impotent of those, religion, foremost, that people get in a snit about is instructive of what cowards such people are.
That mental deficiency is so rampant in the United States due to the truncated, inadequate poetic language of the First Amendment that, given that history of what comes of lying, it is one of the most serious mental health challenges we have. Especially when "liberals" like the one above, faced with the very real possibility of Trumpian fascism destroying democracy and wiping out the whole menu of rights on top of those they have already abridged or destroyed, says "so be it". Ignoring that irrationality is grotesquely immoral, itself.
No Hollywood bull shit about the poor Hollywood 10 Stalinists who were unable to get paid the big bucks for their advocacy of Stalinism changes the fact that they favored a dictator and a system which murdered scores of millions of people, many of them on the suspicion that they might support equal rights. Nothing whatsoever would have been lost if they had never had the opportunity to spread that poisonous message. That foreign import would never have sold anyway, whereas racist fascism was already indigenous and a horrible habit of the country. Nazism was far more compatible with that bad habit. The Warren Court might have imagined they were politely, nicely, in the Holmes manner, enabling the free speech of the likes of the Communists to peddle their innocuous insanity. They were actually enabling the fascists and Nazis, the KKK and the self-interested malignity of billionaires, domestic, after Roberts, foreign, as well.
I'm in favor of learning from the history and mistakes of the past. Why continue what produced such terrible results?
Monday, September 3, 2018
Stupid Mail
There's not enough to him to make a moron, there's barely enough to make a cautionary lesson.
Update: The (in)sincerest form of flattery?
Just now, looking to see what Simps might be saying about me, I find he's cribbing me at Duncan's.
Update: The (in)sincerest form of flattery?
Just now, looking to see what Simps might be saying about me, I find he's cribbing me at Duncan's.
Stëve Sïmels, blog malignancy Less Than Useless 4 minutes ago
Dusan Bogdanovic, Fantasia, Hommage à Ohana
Zoran Dukic, Guitar
The quality and originality of Bogdanovic's music never seems to fail.
I don't know what the relationship of the Goya picture of a woman holding the corpse of her lover (a 18th century reflection of the Pietà ?) is to the Hawaiian word which I read online means "family" in everything from parents and children to the entire human species and the music. I first took it to be a person I didn't know and it still might be. It could be titled "Piece" and it would still be fascinating and haunting music.
Noam Chomsky - Bakunin’s Predictions
I found this Youtube today and in a way it's appropriate for Labor Day. A lot of what Chomsky says in it is very close to some of my own conclusions about the atheist-materialist left not being fundamentally different from the fascist right, though, of course, Chomsky's analysis of that is somewhat different.
Bakunin, at least in Chomsky's presentation of his prediction, didn't understand that there was the possibility of taking a fundamentally different path, one base in a higher view of life than is possible in he materialist-atheist-scientistic framing that a good European intellectual would have used to make pronouncements and predictions about the future. If it weren't so hot I would type out a long passage from Hans Kung's Does God Exist? to present that. Maybe when it cools off a bit. Though I'll probably need to get out in the garden when that happens.
Hate Mail - "YEC" Is Absurd And I Think Natural Selection Is In Another Way, "intelligent design" I Find Credible In The One Thing I've Put A Lot Of Thought Into About It
When someone asks me if I'm a "young Earth creationist" I know two things. First, they've never read what I wrote, second, that they probably couldn't understand me when I pointed out why "YEC" is bad religion and bad science.
That's even assuming they'd know the second half of that last one, why it's bad science. I doubt that most of those on the "Darwin" side could tell you much about that or much about Darwinism or much about science. It's more like whether or not they like the Red Sox or the Yankees or some football team or other. Though I've got more respect for baseball and basketball fans so maybe I should have left it at the football analogy. Atheists are generally more on that level "science rules, faith-heads drool" argumentation.
Of course I'm not a "YEC" and of course I recognize that evolution is the the best explanation of the evidence of the appearance and disappearance of life forms in the geological record, that is backed up, to an extent, by genetic evidence and physiological evidence. I don't believe that just saying "natural selection" is any more of an explanation of how different species evolved than saying we don't know what mechanisms brought that about. I am on record, here, of doubting there is one mechanism that explains that or produced the diversity of life on Earth and I'm on record saying that, since, by an enormous percent, the evidence that would be needed to know that is and will be forever lost to us so I doubt any explanations, even those which have substantial evidence to demonstrate their probability, will be more than scratching the surface of that. I believe one of the most powerful of "mechanisms" is chance which a. isn't heritable so natural selection is irrelevant to it, b. isn't any one thing so even to consider it a "force" similar to gravity is ridiculous.
I think that biologists wanted to have some nifty "force" like Newtonian physics provided the 19th century, hankering after the repute and cred (and level of arrogant) certainty that came with that, so they were eager to elevate natural selection to be such a force when the extreme complexity of living organisms and their individual lives, chance, environment, interaction with other organisms, etc. meant that organisms are not amenable to the same treatment as nonliving objects in motion in the same way. They are too individual to generalize about them, as individuals or the species that are comprised of individuals and so far more complex in the way that physics and chemistry can about atoms and molecules and even aspects of physiology considered as matters of those. Physics, especially of that time, dealt with far simpler objects and in far more reliably generalized ways than constitutes the entire history of life on Earth.
Show me you understand what I just said and maybe I'll answer your other comments that cut like a rubber knife.
I will say that whenever I'm forced to think about the origin of life, holding as I do with that one idea of Darwin, that all of present life on Earth was probably the result of a single organism that reproduced and, in time, mutated into other lines of reproducing, mutating life, thinking about what it would have taken for that first, Eve-Adam, organism to have assembled so as to start to metabolize, to sustain its life and, in a totally unprecedented way, to have successfully reproduced so as to not kill itself or its "offspring" - especially my assumption that the concentration of chemicals that would have inspired that first act of reproduction would have necessitated a containing membrane that would have had to break open, divide and reseal itself in both organisms, leads me to believe that such a thing couldn't be the result of anything but intelligent design. If the rest of it happened in the conventional, Darwinian way of random mutations subjected to what he thought of as "natural selection", I have no idea though I doubt it was much like the absurdly reductionist abstraction he imagined. But I can't imagine how incredibly improbable such a first and second organism in our line could have arisen by chance events in the hostile environment that, even in our time, is more likely to kill an organisms than to sustain it. Even Darwin pointed out that the largest number of organisms die without leaving progeny. And that was after billions of years of trial and error to have produced the possibility of that continuing.
That's even assuming they'd know the second half of that last one, why it's bad science. I doubt that most of those on the "Darwin" side could tell you much about that or much about Darwinism or much about science. It's more like whether or not they like the Red Sox or the Yankees or some football team or other. Though I've got more respect for baseball and basketball fans so maybe I should have left it at the football analogy. Atheists are generally more on that level "science rules, faith-heads drool" argumentation.
Of course I'm not a "YEC" and of course I recognize that evolution is the the best explanation of the evidence of the appearance and disappearance of life forms in the geological record, that is backed up, to an extent, by genetic evidence and physiological evidence. I don't believe that just saying "natural selection" is any more of an explanation of how different species evolved than saying we don't know what mechanisms brought that about. I am on record, here, of doubting there is one mechanism that explains that or produced the diversity of life on Earth and I'm on record saying that, since, by an enormous percent, the evidence that would be needed to know that is and will be forever lost to us so I doubt any explanations, even those which have substantial evidence to demonstrate their probability, will be more than scratching the surface of that. I believe one of the most powerful of "mechanisms" is chance which a. isn't heritable so natural selection is irrelevant to it, b. isn't any one thing so even to consider it a "force" similar to gravity is ridiculous.
I think that biologists wanted to have some nifty "force" like Newtonian physics provided the 19th century, hankering after the repute and cred (and level of arrogant) certainty that came with that, so they were eager to elevate natural selection to be such a force when the extreme complexity of living organisms and their individual lives, chance, environment, interaction with other organisms, etc. meant that organisms are not amenable to the same treatment as nonliving objects in motion in the same way. They are too individual to generalize about them, as individuals or the species that are comprised of individuals and so far more complex in the way that physics and chemistry can about atoms and molecules and even aspects of physiology considered as matters of those. Physics, especially of that time, dealt with far simpler objects and in far more reliably generalized ways than constitutes the entire history of life on Earth.
Show me you understand what I just said and maybe I'll answer your other comments that cut like a rubber knife.
I will say that whenever I'm forced to think about the origin of life, holding as I do with that one idea of Darwin, that all of present life on Earth was probably the result of a single organism that reproduced and, in time, mutated into other lines of reproducing, mutating life, thinking about what it would have taken for that first, Eve-Adam, organism to have assembled so as to start to metabolize, to sustain its life and, in a totally unprecedented way, to have successfully reproduced so as to not kill itself or its "offspring" - especially my assumption that the concentration of chemicals that would have inspired that first act of reproduction would have necessitated a containing membrane that would have had to break open, divide and reseal itself in both organisms, leads me to believe that such a thing couldn't be the result of anything but intelligent design. If the rest of it happened in the conventional, Darwinian way of random mutations subjected to what he thought of as "natural selection", I have no idea though I doubt it was much like the absurdly reductionist abstraction he imagined. But I can't imagine how incredibly improbable such a first and second organism in our line could have arisen by chance events in the hostile environment that, even in our time, is more likely to kill an organisms than to sustain it. Even Darwin pointed out that the largest number of organisms die without leaving progeny. And that was after billions of years of trial and error to have produced the possibility of that continuing.
Dusan Bogdanovic - In Winter Garden
Dusan Bogdanovic, composer and guitar'
Dusan Bogdanovic has been posting his music on Youtube, posting pieces I didn't find there when I was trying to post all of his music last year. I'm posting this one in case some guitarist wants to get the music and work up a performance for when it would be more seasonal. Not that you need that for performing a piece.
I'm still being impressed with Dusan Bogdanovic's Counterpoint for Guitar and wish he could bring out an inexpensive edition of it that would put it on the stands of more guitar players. I'm trying to interest a friend into doing a similar book for keyboard. I don't have the cred to bring one out. Or the time.
Laboring Under A Delusion Is As American Play-Lefty As Overweening Pride - A Labor Day Post
One of the minor sources of fun on the internet is finding out that many of the widely quoted quotes and attributed attributions are more urban legend than accurate. Even the ones so common that when you find out they're either fake or wrongly attributed, you've got a suspicion that you've spread those yourself. Yeah, there's that little fun around, these days. Trump is in office, Nazism is reviving and the world's gone to hell.
But the reason that some of those aphorisms spread is because they're true and they describe reality. The one I'm going to briefly go over is that one about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Whether Einstein or Freud or Rita Mae Brown said it, it's obviously something that happens a hell of a lot. I think one of the longest programs of futile and hopeful repetition is found in the secular left's century and counting of hoping for some of the stupidest things anyone could ever come up with to hope for.
Revolution, to start with. Revolutions have an abysmally awful record, there is hardly one which, if they didn't usher in a government worse than the one before, it will produce one at least as bad. Most often it brings one in that has a mixed record, one of getting rid of a few bad features of the previous regime often replacing those with at least as bad if not many times worse. Those revolutions that the English speaking, secular left values the most, the French Revolution, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, various smaller ones, have been uniformly horrific bloodbaths that murdered many thousands and millions of those who the revolutionaries - generally from the educated elite - claimed their revolutions were brought on to save. That is a record which started to be amassed with some of the largest bodies of accurate information possible, in the late 18th century. Yet the romantic view of that uniformly failing method of making change for the better has prevailed from that time till our own.
If the American revolution deserves to be included in that record, perhaps setting off the fashion is well worth asking in this time of "original intent" and whatever else the fascists of Harvard Law and the U. of C. are calling it. The government that resulted had to give the poor and non-rich farmers the aristocrats gulled into fighting it for the stated ideals a measure of equal rights, endowed by The Creator. The aristocrats wouldn't have survived the resulting revolution brought on by those demanding what they were promised. But as soon as those poor folk started to demand equal, equal rights, the aristocrats rigged up the Constitutional Convention and made sure that democracy wasn't going to be the result of their revolution. I will get back to typing out more of Wendell Phillips book on that topic, probably once the hard frost sets in.
The American revolution and its aftermath saw a hardening and expansion of the slavery which was the most obvious lie the Founders told about equal rights under law, the continued program of genocide and land stealing, some like Jefferson aspiring to steal the entire continent from the original inhabitants was a second. Women certainly saw no expansion of their rights, nor did even white men who didn't own property, all of those groups had to fight against the regime the revolution brought, an action in which the present day Republican-fascists are succeeding in destroying as much of the progress towards equality as they can, using the very Constitution that revolution brought, to reimpose an even grosser form of inequality than reigned before the end of the Civil War. That is something which has been an aristocratic project in progress since the 1870s.
So, revolution is one of the most seriously stupid of romantic delusions on the part of the secular left.
Related to that is the idiocy that their scheme for bringing about their glorious revolution - which the dopes always believe they are going to win, even today when the Nazis and fascists are armed like few armies in the history of the world - of making sure the worst of the worst get into power. That has been one of the biggest selling point of that massive idiocy of third-parties which never win elections, which never even gain a toehold in office and which inevitably fail and are replaced by the next lefty-magazine promoted-reported third party effort. Buying third parties would be like buying seeds from a catalog that is universally known to have never sold a single viable seed but which has nice envelopes. And hoping that the next package will result in an abundant harvest.
One of the stupidest things about the play left, especially the anti-religious, atheist part of the play-left (most of it) is the idea that insulting people is a way to get them to do what you want them to do. That's something that hasn't worked since forever. And it's always been, not only a uniform failure but a means of the opponents of the left to rally those who resent the insults to their side. Regional resentments, class resentments, resentments on the basis of whether or not you or your family have college credentials, have the right fashion sense, whether or not you eat the right kinds of food, have had access to adequate dental care, the list of ways in which play lefties have practiced that stupidity and then whined when the people they love to feel superior to don't vote the way they want them to is all the proof anyone needs that the secular, play-left isn't nearly as smart as they think they are and the never tire of announcing themselves to be.
The secular left isn't alone in doing that but since their pretense is that they favor the rights and dignity of all people regardless of their position in life, it is the stupidest thing in the world when they do it. And even stupider is when they get played by billionaires, domestic or foreign, to do it. The support for the Putin connected hack Jill Stein and her ship of fools, the Greens was part of it but I'm afraid that that is being repeated in the fevered dream that that one seat that the Democratic Socialists will likely win in New York City is going to bring about a wave of such successes within the Democratic Party, something which is far more likely to lose far more votes in far more places, certainly in this next election. And when the Democratic Socialist candidate wins, two things will happen. The play left will demand that she be given far more power than her position warrants and when she inevitably starts in the business of making laws and supporting them, the play lefties will get pissed off at her and a good part of them will turn on her. If there's one thing you can depend on it is that faction of the play left who don't want any lefty in power except the one in their imagination who will always do exactly what they want, even changing that when the play-lefty either forgets what it was they thought they wanted or when they change their mind out of some petty pique when THEY feel insulted.
I can see no evidence that the secular left has ever learned anything from its history of making the same claims that doing the same things that they've done before will, finally, work this time. There are reasons for that but it's a holiday and I know this piece won't get many readers as it is. I've learned that much from the twelve years I've been doing this. Nor am I under any illusion that play-lefties will read this and change even the most obvious point in it, the one about the futility of insulting people into agreeing with you. But I don't expect they won't because they feel insulted, they wouldn't have if I'd flattered them, either.
Anyone who wants to keep on with the play-left that does that is hoping that doing the same thing for another century will have a different result than the past century of them doing the same thing. The only thing that has ever worked wasn't the conceited, atheist, play-left. And it wasn't any kind of instant, super-duper revolutionary change. It was hard work whose success depended on convincing people who weren't originally in favor of equal rights and justice that they had a moral obligation to favor equality and justice. Even for those they didn't like those they didn't respect, those they felt smarter than and nicer than. As soon as fashion and life-style snobbery entered into it, that failed. A lot of that came in in the late 1960s and, especially, the 70s, it was one of the ways they put a stop to the possibility of change in the 1960s. Yeah, the hippies were actually part of that. As were the campus radicals, that turn from the religious left and the congress of 1964-65 to that shut it down. I remember how stupid it got as soon as the focus went to fashion.
But the reason that some of those aphorisms spread is because they're true and they describe reality. The one I'm going to briefly go over is that one about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Whether Einstein or Freud or Rita Mae Brown said it, it's obviously something that happens a hell of a lot. I think one of the longest programs of futile and hopeful repetition is found in the secular left's century and counting of hoping for some of the stupidest things anyone could ever come up with to hope for.
Revolution, to start with. Revolutions have an abysmally awful record, there is hardly one which, if they didn't usher in a government worse than the one before, it will produce one at least as bad. Most often it brings one in that has a mixed record, one of getting rid of a few bad features of the previous regime often replacing those with at least as bad if not many times worse. Those revolutions that the English speaking, secular left values the most, the French Revolution, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, various smaller ones, have been uniformly horrific bloodbaths that murdered many thousands and millions of those who the revolutionaries - generally from the educated elite - claimed their revolutions were brought on to save. That is a record which started to be amassed with some of the largest bodies of accurate information possible, in the late 18th century. Yet the romantic view of that uniformly failing method of making change for the better has prevailed from that time till our own.
If the American revolution deserves to be included in that record, perhaps setting off the fashion is well worth asking in this time of "original intent" and whatever else the fascists of Harvard Law and the U. of C. are calling it. The government that resulted had to give the poor and non-rich farmers the aristocrats gulled into fighting it for the stated ideals a measure of equal rights, endowed by The Creator. The aristocrats wouldn't have survived the resulting revolution brought on by those demanding what they were promised. But as soon as those poor folk started to demand equal, equal rights, the aristocrats rigged up the Constitutional Convention and made sure that democracy wasn't going to be the result of their revolution. I will get back to typing out more of Wendell Phillips book on that topic, probably once the hard frost sets in.
The American revolution and its aftermath saw a hardening and expansion of the slavery which was the most obvious lie the Founders told about equal rights under law, the continued program of genocide and land stealing, some like Jefferson aspiring to steal the entire continent from the original inhabitants was a second. Women certainly saw no expansion of their rights, nor did even white men who didn't own property, all of those groups had to fight against the regime the revolution brought, an action in which the present day Republican-fascists are succeeding in destroying as much of the progress towards equality as they can, using the very Constitution that revolution brought, to reimpose an even grosser form of inequality than reigned before the end of the Civil War. That is something which has been an aristocratic project in progress since the 1870s.
So, revolution is one of the most seriously stupid of romantic delusions on the part of the secular left.
Related to that is the idiocy that their scheme for bringing about their glorious revolution - which the dopes always believe they are going to win, even today when the Nazis and fascists are armed like few armies in the history of the world - of making sure the worst of the worst get into power. That has been one of the biggest selling point of that massive idiocy of third-parties which never win elections, which never even gain a toehold in office and which inevitably fail and are replaced by the next lefty-magazine promoted-reported third party effort. Buying third parties would be like buying seeds from a catalog that is universally known to have never sold a single viable seed but which has nice envelopes. And hoping that the next package will result in an abundant harvest.
One of the stupidest things about the play left, especially the anti-religious, atheist part of the play-left (most of it) is the idea that insulting people is a way to get them to do what you want them to do. That's something that hasn't worked since forever. And it's always been, not only a uniform failure but a means of the opponents of the left to rally those who resent the insults to their side. Regional resentments, class resentments, resentments on the basis of whether or not you or your family have college credentials, have the right fashion sense, whether or not you eat the right kinds of food, have had access to adequate dental care, the list of ways in which play lefties have practiced that stupidity and then whined when the people they love to feel superior to don't vote the way they want them to is all the proof anyone needs that the secular, play-left isn't nearly as smart as they think they are and the never tire of announcing themselves to be.
The secular left isn't alone in doing that but since their pretense is that they favor the rights and dignity of all people regardless of their position in life, it is the stupidest thing in the world when they do it. And even stupider is when they get played by billionaires, domestic or foreign, to do it. The support for the Putin connected hack Jill Stein and her ship of fools, the Greens was part of it but I'm afraid that that is being repeated in the fevered dream that that one seat that the Democratic Socialists will likely win in New York City is going to bring about a wave of such successes within the Democratic Party, something which is far more likely to lose far more votes in far more places, certainly in this next election. And when the Democratic Socialist candidate wins, two things will happen. The play left will demand that she be given far more power than her position warrants and when she inevitably starts in the business of making laws and supporting them, the play lefties will get pissed off at her and a good part of them will turn on her. If there's one thing you can depend on it is that faction of the play left who don't want any lefty in power except the one in their imagination who will always do exactly what they want, even changing that when the play-lefty either forgets what it was they thought they wanted or when they change their mind out of some petty pique when THEY feel insulted.
I can see no evidence that the secular left has ever learned anything from its history of making the same claims that doing the same things that they've done before will, finally, work this time. There are reasons for that but it's a holiday and I know this piece won't get many readers as it is. I've learned that much from the twelve years I've been doing this. Nor am I under any illusion that play-lefties will read this and change even the most obvious point in it, the one about the futility of insulting people into agreeing with you. But I don't expect they won't because they feel insulted, they wouldn't have if I'd flattered them, either.
Anyone who wants to keep on with the play-left that does that is hoping that doing the same thing for another century will have a different result than the past century of them doing the same thing. The only thing that has ever worked wasn't the conceited, atheist, play-left. And it wasn't any kind of instant, super-duper revolutionary change. It was hard work whose success depended on convincing people who weren't originally in favor of equal rights and justice that they had a moral obligation to favor equality and justice. Even for those they didn't like those they didn't respect, those they felt smarter than and nicer than. As soon as fashion and life-style snobbery entered into it, that failed. A lot of that came in in the late 1960s and, especially, the 70s, it was one of the ways they put a stop to the possibility of change in the 1960s. Yeah, the hippies were actually part of that. As were the campus radicals, that turn from the religious left and the congress of 1964-65 to that shut it down. I remember how stupid it got as soon as the focus went to fashion.
Sunday, September 2, 2018
Paul Dukas - Piano Sonata in E-flat minor
Alexander Vaulin, piano
Dukas' Sonata is about the biggest piano sonata or sonata for any instrument. It is a masterpiece of inexhaustible content and genius which is relatively seldom played due to its massive size and challenge. I associate it with this time of the year for reasons I can't figure out.
Score
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