Saturday, February 9, 2019

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Daniel Lawrence Taylor - Black Boy Fly




Writer and star of the BAFTA-nominated comedy series Timewasters, Breakthrough Brit winner Daniel Lawrence Taylor writes two original plays for Radio 4.

This sly family comedy takes a look at the costs of gentrification.

At the Peckham Branch of "So Woke" Coffee, street artist Sommore is painting a community artwork on the wall.

But Sommore has moved out of Peckham. And moved her son out too, to a private school in West London.

So what exactly is her message for the community?

Sommore ..... Nadine Marshall
Michael ..... Michael Ajao
Ashley ..... Don Gilet
Tom ..... Christopher Harper
Luke ..... Ronny Jhutti
Mrs Thomas ..... Clare Corbett
Pearl ..... Carolyn Pickles
Other parts played by Joseph Ayre and Tony Turner.


Produced and directed by Jonquil Panting.

To Hell With The Double Standard

Democrats should make it a rule that none of them resigns for things that Republicans don't have to resign over.

Democrats should make it a rule that none of them resigns over accusations of things that Republicans don't have to resign over with evidence of guilt provided and tested.   

I don't think anyone in Virginia should be resigning just yet, I don't think anyone should resign for having been a stupid kid when they were a stupid kid, not while Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court with evidence he was an attempted rapist and a public sexual assailant not being enough to keep him off the court and Donald Trump is in office with him having bragged about being a sexual assaulter.  

Democrats should stop accepting a double standard that is used to hold us to impossible to defend from tactics.   We have to reject alleged Democrats and liberals who insist on those standards when no one holds Republicans to them or even anything close to them. 


Walk Away

I didn't plan this when I wrote the piece below this morning but I just listened to a mildly humorous Majority Report piece about some dweeb named Brandon Strata who thinks he can take on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (she'd crush him).  The segment contained this exchange which is interesting from my point of view.

Jamie Peck:  Is he going to run as a Democrat or a Republican, do you think?

Sam Seder:  I. . . I . . . He's already walked away from the Democratic Party. 

Matt Lech and Michael Brooks:  Yeah, he walked away.

Matt Lech:  You can't walk back . . . 

Michael Brooks:  You can't walk back to what you walked away from. 

To which, of course, my question is?  Why doesn't that apply to Bernie Sanders who has walked away from the Democratic Party he did so much to screw over even as you enthusiastically support him coming in to try to steal its presidential nomination?    I think "steal" is an accurate term in that the nomination of a party should only ever be given to an actual member of a party. 

Democrats should disqualify anyone who hasn't been a party member for the two entire presidential cycles previous to the election from being eligible for the nomination of the party.  This kind of bullshit has got to stop.


What Bernie Sanders Has In Common With Donald Trump

Consider the odd fact about Bernie Sanders that, after being an independent politician for decades, he briefly joined the Democratic Party in 2016 to run a campaign for the nomination of a party he wasn't a member of until he joined for purposes of utility, then, after the election was over, he dropped out of the Democratic Party instead of remaining in the party whose nomination he and his inner circle claimed he had a right to.   Oddest in that is that even as the wreckage of the 2016 election was smoking, Sanders' cult like supporters were talking about him running again, in 2020 (when, by the way, he will be 79 years old) FOR THE SAME PARTY THAT HE JUST DROPPED OUT OF.

In thinking about that passage from his call in show appearance in 1989, it occurred to me why Sanders didn't want to be part of a political party, why he hadn't taken his own advice and started or taken over a third party, it is because he isn't so much an independent as the central figure in a political cult, one which worked well for him in the offices and state he has been elected in, one which can work to take advantage of the anti-democratic caucuses that so many states have stupidly kept instead of going to far more democratic primaries.  I believe he is hoping that in the crowded field of Democrats already announced for 2020 that his cult will carry him to the nomination where he figures he'll have no trouble knocking off Trump.  I think the peculiarities of Bernie Sanders' career as the head of a cult have given him both too much confidence and too much arrogance.  That's one thing that can happen when, instead of having to compete with other party members, you're the head of your own political cult.

I think it would be a good idea for someone to look very hard at the financial side of the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 and his ongoing cult, I would look, especially, at Jane O'Meara Sanders' finances and Jeff Weaver's.  The same level of scrutiny that is needed in the Trump regime should be applied to Sanders and his inner circle.  I think there are considerable financial attractions to run another campaign, look how many perennial candidates have been grifting off of our corrupt political system while getting nowhere in the past. 

As stated yesterday, I have, in the past, respected Bernie Sanders while learning that his actual record of political achievement has been a lot less than advertised. Barack Obama's campaign fueled on the Aaron Sorkin style rhetoric of aspiration was one thing coming from a relatively young man, though the actual achievement he accomplished in office makes it sound empty and hollow now.  For a man in his late 70s who has spent a lifetime in politics, if that's all there is to his campaign, you have every right to look at the past record of achievement. And that doesn't match the hype. 

The Sanders campaign in 2016 was based on working the caucuses, something which it's clear he already understood the potential of in that 1989 statement.  I expect that's still what he's hoping to do.  You can do that on the basis of a cult centered on a single figure, I don't think you can win the presidency on that basis, certainly not without the aid of billionaires foreign and domestic.  Trump had the mass media to do the same thing for him, Sanders will not.  He is deluded if he thinks they will let him get anywhere near the presidency, it will be worse than what the media did to George McGovern when he ran against the, then, most corrupt president in our history, something which was already obvious by the election in 1972.  Such delusion is not uncommon among cult figures.

Friday, February 8, 2019

What I Learned From Blogging

Every once in a while I get a comment on one of the old pieces from my archive and, not understanding the comment, I'll go back to see if it really had anything to do with what was said or if it was some kind of auto-spam that I, for the life of me, can discern no motive for.

One followed up this afternoon was attached to part of the epic series of Darwin War brawls, with the atheists who trolled me but who will not be posted here, anymore.  I don't know when it was that I first suspected, then concluded that atheists are unusually prone to lying, no matter what level of evidence you present them with, no matter how detailed, no matter how obvious it becomes that your knowledge of what is being brawled over is superior to their argument out of ignorance, bigotry and copied, previous atheist diatribes.  The post-war Darwin cult is essentially one big lie of that kind.

I will say it again, I have come to the conclusion that atheism, which not only denies the reality of God but, also and for the same reason, the reality of sin, leads many atheists to be flagrant liars.  If not liars themselves then supportive of their fellows.   That is one of the strongest conclusions I've come to from writing blogs.   I have come to see that insight is also a revelation into looking into the position of atheism and "secularism" in politics and society and even in science.  If people want to know where "post-truth" started, it's never been rare and it's certainly never been absent from formal even academic discourse.  It's certainly never been absent from politics.  Not to mention the media and the law.  I was surprised to find so much of it in science and academia and among the graduates of reputable universities.  Ours is a dark age, brought farther into the darkness by the belief that it is not a sin to tell a lie.

I doubt people try harder to avoid lying unless they believe it is a sin.  A real sin which will have real consequences, for them.  You don't get that with "secularism" for which you can read "atheism" or "materialism."

The Dizzyingly Complex And Diverse World Of The Determination of Sex Difference

If you ever want to look for information on species around which an industry has arisen that isn't directly connected to their economic utility online, good luck trying to find it.  I used my, I'm immodest enough to say, not inconsiderable skill with search terms to try to find out what scheme of sex determination exists in lobsters if there's even just one, and have not been able to find it.   Too bad, I really could use some Jordan Peterson mockery to divert me as I cough and hack and try one expectorant after another to try to avoid dying.

That said, this is an excellent introduction to the wide range of schemes that nature has for determining sex in different species, ignorance of which I recall encountering during the Darwin wars, though the exact context doesn't come to mind.   I don't remember ever writing anything formal about it so I suspect it was in comments somewhere.    Anyway, here's Judith Mank in a Royal Institute video giving a lot to think about.  I would call your attention to the chart of pie graphs that show that among different classes of animals there is an incredible range of different schemes of sex determination, that variation even occurring within classes and it not being closely related to closeness of relatedness in evolutionary distance.


I look at this and wonder if the way we talk about gender and sex among different species, with such different mechanisms and results and wonder if the concept, so obviously derived from our experience of our own species isn't foolish.  Clearly, the meaning of gender and sex that is so radically different has, sometimes, analogous aspects that make them like human sex difference but, often, there are also extreme differences that makes those less than the whole picture.   Remember this the next time they write about "lesbian" penguins at a zoo.  What does that even mean?

I will use this to make fun of Jordan Peterson, the meat-headed (literally) pseudo-science peddling guru of slacker, screen-based male resentment.  But not only him but the evolutionary psychology which I am not unhappy to say, gets saddled with his pronouncements as it gradually decays and tumbles into the boneyard of discontinued science.  I wonder if Peterson was ever challenged on his theory that women shouldn't be paid as much as men because something about lobsters and our common ancestor 500,000,000 years ago.  If you hadn't read me pointing it out before, we share exactly the same common ancestor with lobsters that we share with preying mantis - that fun group in which it's known for females to pull the head off of males who come to copulate with them, eating it as his headless body completes the act before going on to eat the rest of him.  And, also, the black widow spider.   I think someone should tell those incel losers about that fly in the lubricant.  Their man-god is a total, psychology based fraud.  Oh, yeah, and psychology gets to wear Jordan Peterson, too.  If the human species has a future, I predict that what is called "psychology" will be noted for the pseudo-science it is and always has been with very, very little exception.  Jordan Peterson might serve as a text book example,  I hope they mention lobsters.  And his families' all beef diet scam.

OK, I was determined to get that out of this.  Back to the steam kettle.

Update:  I found this online resource to get an idea of how much more complex the situation is, specifically in the group that lobsters are a part of:

The Decapod Researcher’s Guide to the Galaxy of Sex Determination

which is incredibly confusing, especially to someone like, I suspect, Jordan Peterson who doesn't have a clue about what they're talking about when they talk about "sex roles" in lobsters.  To make comparisons with human sex and gender roles and patterns is as absurdly naive a practice that gets called science as any before us, now.  That is Ken Ham level, meathead stupidity only secular, which makes it OK (see relevant post of the other day below).  Only no one calls what he does "science".

"We're not Democrats " . . . " for ONE NIGHT in Vermont we did go into the Democratic Party"

The crew at Majority Report posted a clip that some twitter account has posted of him on a call in talk show in 1989 that they don't see what the problem is, concentrating on Bernie Sanders saying something nice about The Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition as they continue to miss what is obviously problematic about what he said about what the Burlington Bernie Sanders cult were up to by way of phony, temporary status as Democrats for purposes of ratfucking Democratic caucuses for ends other than those of actual Democrats, exactly what Bernie Sanders and his cult did in 2016, to such likely catastrophic results and which the old asshole and his ship of fools, including the Majority Reporters, are talking of doing again in 2020.   I have decided that this is going to be a decisive parting of the ways because I've seen the asshole, play-left do this kind of thing in 1968, 1972 (George McCovern's self criticism on his role in changing the rules for that year is well worth reading) in 1980 in 2000, in 2004, and in 2016.  And now, after seeing Trump in full effect, they're talking about another Bernie hijacking attempt in 2020.   Assholes and idiots all of them- what are they all trustifarians or something?


I have transcribed what Sanders said,  you can just imagine the internal debates in the Bernie cult in some small room in Burlington strategizing how to take over the Democratic Party for one night, using the anti-democratic process of the caucuses.  I will bet you that some of the same people said some of the same thing while they plotted his attempted hijacking in 2016 as Sanders depended on non-Democrats doing what his crew did in 1988

In Burlington we had a real debate about our attitude toward Jessie Jackson's campaign.  I think many of us were impressed by the positions that Jackson was bringing forth.  We Were were deeply impressed by the concept of of the Rainbow Coalition which I believe is exactly what has to be done in this country. And we were impressed by Jackson's charisma and his going into the ghettos and into the poor areas and speaking for the family farmers who were being thrown off of their land.   And that moved us very much.  The problem that we had is that, of course, Jackson was functioning within the Democratic Party and we're not Democrats.  So we had a discussion within our own organization and we ended up saying, yeah, we're not Democrats but we think that what  Jackson was doing was so important that we are going to support him.  And for one night in Vermont we did go into the Democratic Party and in fact Jackson ended up winning the Democratic caucuses.  So I was sympathetic to Jackson I agree with the concept of the Rainbow Coalition, I do disagree with Jesse in terms of whether the Democratic Party can be the real vehicle for social change.  I believe it should be a third party. 

And instead of starting a third party or taking over one - generally not hard to do considering almost all of them are Potemkin false fronts for fools to play with - he did what he did in 2016.

Of course there was all the difference between what Jackson did and what Sanders did is that Jackson was and remained a Democrat who had a legitimate right to run for the Democratic nomination.  Sanders is a phony who joins and drops out and will join again but is too much of a conceited egoist to remain in the party.

I used to have enormous respect for Bernie Sanders, we supposedly agree in almost all of the big issues, only I don't believe he really believes what he says since 2016.  I think it's all about him and his vanity.  If he runs in 2020 he will confirm that.

As for Majority Report, I draw the line at Republican-fascist and Trump enablement.   I think they're in it for what they figure will get them the most clicks.  They won't be getting them from me.

Watch For Susan Collins To Pull Her Susan The Suckered Routine Out Of Her Treadbare Acting Kit

Slate magazine notes that perjurer-sex-criminal member of the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh declared war on Roe v. Wade in his dissent in the Louisiana attempt to ban abortion, John Roberts, probably understanding that overturning Roe would cause a fire storm that could destroy the Republican-fascist stranglehold on power and make radical change on the Court far more popular, voted with the non-fascist four, this time. 

On Thursday night, the Supreme Court blocked a stringent Louisiana abortion law by a 5–4 vote, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the liberals to keep the measure on hold. Roberts’ vote is surprising, but not a total shock: The Louisiana statute is a direct violation of the Supreme Court’s 2016 ruling in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, and until the court overturns that decision, the Louisiana law cannot take effect. To Roberts, this precedent matters. To Justice Brett Kavanaugh, it does not. Kavanaugh so disagreed with the majority that he wrote a dissent explaining why the Louisiana law should be allowed to move forward—an opinion that should not be taken as anything less than a declaration of war on Roe v. Wade.

You can read the rest of the piece to get that end of it.  I'm going to concentrate on the woman who put Kavanaugh on the Court, Susan Collins who lied through her teeth that she believed he would not vote to ban abortion, something she knew very well he would.  She lied through that whole disgusting episode, telling the majority of her own constituents to go to hell as she shored up her Republican support and got money for her campaign out of it.  Susan Collins is and always has been a fraud, as I've tirelessly pointed out to people she's gulled - with the help of the Maine and national media which lied on her behalf - she always has been a mainstream Republican which, these days, is hard right.  She was always right of even the "moderate" Republicans of Maine of which I don't believe any really exist anymore.  Republicans are fascists, I'm not Rachel Maddow, I don't need to pretend that's not the case for network purposes. 

Susan Collins is probably hoping that John Roberts saves her from having to face the firestorm that having Roe overturned before he next election will be, though I wouldn't count on that if I were in her position, but, then, I never would be in her position.  She should be exposed for the lying fraud she is even as she plays her patented Susan the Suckerd act, as she played with Mitch McConnell and Trump over ACA repair legislation in order to vote for the billionaire bonanza the skank always wanted to vote for.  

Susan the Suckerd is just one of her acts, she's got a rather tacky little trunk of routines, her Ritual Dance of Indecision the other major one.  The woman is a total fraud and a disgrace, she should be ridiculed and exposed and driven from office, though I am hoping that she is driven out by the voters, I'll take hounding her from running again as a second choice.  

Thursday, February 7, 2019

Oh, Good Lord, I Just Found Out Margaret Atwood Has Written A Sequel

Last night, going to read a blogger who I have a lot of respect for but who doesn't post nearly as much as I wish she would these days, a passage in her post made me realize that Margaret Atwood's "Handmaidens" concept, what was so effective in her fantasy novel back when it was first published, has proliferated and it now obscures the motivation in most oppression of most women which is purely economic exploitation and financial bondage and enslavement and not based on their reproductive systems.   Neither is the sexual enslavement of women based on any motives of reproduction but of sex, women sold to men to have their vaginas and mouths and anuses rented out for sex and not for reproduction. 

The extent to which the make believe anti-religious "Handmaidens" image is focused on is the extent to which the very real exploitation of women under very secular economic systems is ignored.  While there are certainly horror cult-criminal gangs like the Fundamentalist LDS which should be prosecuted, that is hardly even a significant part of the oppression of women.  Even in those the focus isn't as much reproductive as to provide degenerate gangsters with women to have sex with, they certainly don't seem to care much for the welfare of the children that result except as sex partners, especially the boys who are dumped on the side of the road so as not to compete with the old goat gangster-pedophiles.

My guess is that a lot of those who watch the TV show - and the, certainly, the far smaller number who read the first book or will read the sequel, aren't really greatly bothered by the very real trafficking in women, for economic exploitation, both as formal slave labor and wage slavery and as disposable raw material in the sex industry.   I think most of it, frankly, is more like the zombie mania that sprang up as the Living Dead franchise decayed and spawned or, in a perverse way, like the Pride and Prejudice mania that . . . I wonder if anyone has done a comparison of Jane Austin and "Handmaidens".  Certainly some masters candidate needs some unimportant concept for a thesis.

I wish there were some way to know if that's the case.  I certainly can't imagine that's what Atwood intended or intends but that's how it strikes me. 

Who Does "Growth" Go To, Who Doesn't Get Any Of It: Winnie Byanyima On Attaining Economic Dignity


I've Decided To Give Winnie Byanyima This Platform

I haven't been given an answer as to why what Winnie Byanyima said at Davos was being ignored.  I knew that she was the head of Oxfam International but when I heard the video down below, I hadn't known that there are videos of her making the same point to elites at elite institutions for years, now.   She has been saying the same things that the new wave of American politicians are now saying.   Here she was two years ago at the International Monetary Fund, pointing out how we have to destroy the death hold the worlds billionaires have on the world. 



Wednesday, February 6, 2019

Why Isn't Everyone Talking about Winnie Byanyima?


Since she was on the same panel as Rutger Bergman was when he made the statement that made him instantly famous,  I'm wondering why the compelling words of Winnie Byanyima haven't made her as famous.  It's not to take anything away from what he said but what she said was important and brutally frank about the brutality that our economic system imposes on the working poor.

Ken Goldman is, of course, billionaire scum. 

Majority Report At Its Deluded Worst

As I've said, I like a lot of what they say on Majority Report, I mostly like their staff, though I think Jamie Peck is a harmful idiot.   I realized the other night, after writing what might be the last farewell to my previous experimental example that they might be my new example of what is wrong with the left.  At least in their case there's also some there which is what's right with the left, too.

That said, this segment with "Virgil Texas" that was posted as "The Difference Between Elizabeth Warren And Bernie Sanders" contains such a high bullshit to substance level that it's pretty much what's wrong with the New York City style left than which there are few lefts in the country more prone to fatally flawed delusion.


To start with, I don't know much of anything about "Virgil Texas" who is listed as Gamer, Co-Host Chapo Trap House, which for all I know is the kewelest of kewel current things but the guy seems to be more firmly based in gamer delusion than in any real reality.  I wouldn't say he's much less of an idiot than Jamie Peck.

I may go into details about this later but wanted to post this and point out a few things, SUCH AS THE FACT THAT FUCKING BERNIE SANDERS ISN'T A DEMOCRAT HE HAS NO BUSINESS TRYING TO GET THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION FOR PRESIDENT.  Given the damage that his campaign, his wife, his manager, his cult did the last time, GIVEN THE FACT THAT HE'S THE POLITICAL EQUIVALENT OF 148 YEARS OLD, he shouldn't be running for president under any identity.   The same goes for Biden and Bloomberg who, as well, are the political equivalent of 148 years old, though Biden, at least, has the fact that HE HAS BEEN A DEMOCRAT HIS ENTIRE POLITICAL CAREER to make him the least unqualified of all of them.

Elizabeth Warren has what none of them has much of a chance of being, a Democratic President who might take enough seats in the Congress to end Republican-fascist domination.  She's not the only one but Bernie Sanders has absolutely no chance of doing that, the extent to which the Majority Report team promotes his candidacy is the extent to which they are doing exactly what Howard Schultz was accused of doing by that guy at Barnes and Nobel.

Jamie Peck should go read that trusty old history of the American left, The Long Detour by James Weinstein, in which she would see that the biggest enemy that the one and only successful Socialist Party had were the Marxists.  Though there are other socialisms that have been terrible for the reputation of socialism, the Marxists have been fatal to socialism being acceptable to an effective margin of voters in the United States.  We saw Marxism with power all during the 20th and into the 21st century.  The paper on that experiment is written in blood.  There is no prospect of a Marxist or Marxist influenced socialism ever gaining power OR ELECTIVE OFFICE in the United States.  And "socialism" the word, itself, has been irretrievably damaged by that association.  The old Socialist Party was more successful at the ballot box in Oklahoma and Kansas than it was the industrial North East, back then.  But that was on the power of the old Socialism, not least of which was Christian socialism,  before it was so discredited.  It has no prospect of ever succeeding anywhere under that name and with those associations.

Young Jamie might feel all brisk and frisky and lefty over the frisson of scandal and worry and excitement that having a real, officially named "Socialist Party" might be, as opposed to the Democratic Party, but she should look up how many of those there are and have been in the United States in the last century, especially since the Marxists destroyed the old and moderately successful Socialist Party in the late summer of 1919.  The assholes who were at the center of that, Katterfeld and Wagenknect never produced anything of any importance for any working person anywhere, they were party hacks and, in Katterfeld's case, an ineffective anti-religious yahoo latching onto science.  My guess is any political effectiveness he had would have been in enhancing the power of fundamentalists in the coming decades.  The guy was a putz.

My guess is that both of them acted at the direction of Lenin and Trotsky as much as Trump does at the direction of Putin, and to pretty much the same end, the attempted enhancement of Russian dictators and gangsters.   And that's not to mention that total asshole, John Reed.

"Socialist" parties, after the one destroyed by them in 1919, can't even be called dime a dozen because none of them were ever worth even a fraction of a cent.

The word "socialist" is a hindrance to the idea of economic justice and an aid to capitalism of the worst kind.  It might make the Jamie Pecks of the world feel all brisk and frisky but anyone who doesn't realize there are more important things at stake are idiots and should be dumped.

Democrats Should Strike At Republican Fascism Now

I hope that Congressional Democrats meet Donald Trump's threats over investigations into him with immediate issuance of subpoenas for things like Donny jr's phone records and that they immediately vote to send the official transcripts of hearings to Mueller.   Trump sounded more like the two-bit dictator he aspires to be than ever last night - and I only listened in clips because I couldn't stand wading through the lies.  

I don't know how the House could hold the feet of the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court to the fire but they should start to address the likelihood that they will try to enable Trumpian fascism, it's been their fondest dream to have the country under a Republican-fascist strong man for decades.  Kavanaugh is certainly a weak link in that because of his outrageous perjury and the refusal of Grassley to release his entire record during the Bush II regime.  I think he should be under investigation. 

The Lengths To Which Atheists Will Go To Try To Keep People From Believing In God Are Not Astronomical, They Are Of A Far Greater Magnitude

In that list of atheist ideologue generated "science" to get by problems that materialism encounters around questions of origin, of the universe and of life, I should have included the several odd flavors of "panspermia" which attempts to get by the insuperable problems of improbability of life arising spontaneously on Earth by random chance events, the creation and preservation of complex molecules, the random chance concentration of such molecules, their interaction, the even harder to explain matter of them happening to find themselves in a containing membrane, etc. by just saying well, all that happened somewhere else and the resultant organisms just happened to come here.  Apparently they give such powers of interstellar travel to organisms that their fellow atheists ridicule people for believing that ETs have and, since their motives are to preserve atheism, that makes it all OK.

After the discovery of the background radiation in the 1960s and their steady-state universe model was discredited, Hermann Bondi admitted that, though Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle held out for decades after that.

In the meantime both Gold and Hoyle joined in the panspermia fashion among such atheists as wanted to avoid the embarrassing problem of the incredible improbability life arising on Earth by random chance.  Hoyle, my notes say, estimated the chance of that happening by random events was in the order of  10 40,000  and the estimated number of atoms in the universe is believed to be 10 80 .  Obviously the chances of atoms on Earth, in such numbers required to construct even a very simple organism capable of sustaining its life and, without any precedent or knowable motivation, reproducing successfully, both or the resultant organisms surviving, is of an order so incredibly small that even Hoyle, a committed idological atheist came to the conclusion that intelligent design had to be involved.  He favored organisms on other planets - though the question of where and how they arose, so improbably on their home planet, didn't seem to trouble him.

Of course, the improbabilities expressed in Hoyle's terms would have been the same for life arising anywhere.  And those improbabilities involve it happening once, it is far less likely that it would have happened twice or a jillion times by spontaneous random chance events. The chances of those entirely different organisms being biologically interactive would seem to me to be dependent on even greater improbabilities, though that's unknowable since we've never found "other life".    And added to the problems of those improbabilities were the ones involved in interstellar travel, the lengths of time in harsh, radiation ridden space and the unknowable improbability of such organisms just happening to land on an unseemingly incongenial Early Earthy environment and flourishing doesn't seem to bother such atheist-scientists.  As I recall Gold's theory was that life on Earth is the result of ETs leaving their garbage here.  Which, by the way, is no more absurd than that other hero of 20th century atheist-scientism, Francis Crick who seems to have had his own panspermia scheme which, for the life of me, sounds like what I remember of how Superman was sent here by his parents as their planet couldn't sustain life.  And these are some of the most respected scientists of the 20th, not the 17th century

Hoyle mixed in some really loopy theories that such pandemics as the swine flu epidemic of 1918-1920 were due to his interstellar traveling viruses.  How such viruses would survive such travel is a problem that pales to the improbability of such viruses, arriving for the first time into the history of life on Earth, finding hospitable hosts that would allow them to do what they are supposed to do doesn't seem to figure into Hoyle's calculations of improbability, but, then, he was a cosmologist who was probably extremely naive about biological topics.  I would like to know what Francis Crick's reaction to that would have been but, as can be seen, he was pretty loopy on that and many other topics,* too.

And atheists do this, much of the time AS SCIENCE and are held to be taken seriously AS SCIENTISTS without any evidence or even very good arguments to support their speculations and it is acceptable BECAUSE THEY ARE DOING IT FOR ATHEISM.

I do have to say that my disillusion with much of science, especially those fields which have been wide open to atheist ideological manipulation has been bitter and harsh but those guys have been getting away with stuff that no one else would be allowed to.

I have come to something like Hoyle's position in considering the problem of the origin of life, I don't think it could have happened by random chance events, I don't believe it would have arisen by chance anywhere.  Since Hoyle admitted that it was more reasonable to believe that "intelligence" was involved in the origin of life on Earth (he avoided it being necessary for life, elsewhere) it is an inescapable conclusion that the idea that God created life is more probably true than the random chance event improbabilities that atheists insist on.   But none of that is a matter of science, I've exhaustively shown why that question can't be a scientific question BECAUSE SCIENTISTS CAN'T OBSERVE THE ORIGINAL ORGANISM(S) FROM WHICH ALL LIFE TODAY IS DESCENDED.  Without that actual object, which will certainly never be had to observe, there is no possibility of scientists to theorize one into existence.  We will never know.  What we can know is that atheists have been allowed to put the most absurd speculations into science, on a formal level and, probably even more dangerously, into the popular understanding of what science is.  That bull shit should stop, right now.  Tell the atheists to take it somewhere else just as religion was centuries ago.

This has been another response.

*  Typical of Darwinists, Crick was a firm believer in scientific racism and a proponent of eugenics.   I have come to believe that such beliefs are all but inevitable in most of those who believe in natural selection.

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Alternative To Listening To Trump Lie Radio Drama - Anthony Neilson - Twisted





A convicted killer is visited by a psychiatrist to be assessed for parole. He's been jailed for 9 years. Before she makes her assessment, she has a proposition to put to him...

Catherine Horne
Rufus Sewell 

How Should I Feel About This?

I just got a comment that that starts "I'll immediately grab your rss. . . "  I haven't had anyone try that that since the 1980s.  At my age it probably wouldn't be good for my heart.  Thanks for the sentiment, I guess. 

Haven't Felt This Crappy Since My Surgery

If I could give every Republican and every billionaire-oligarch what I've got, I'd do it. 

I might have to take tomorrow off, entirely.  

Hate Mail

I would put Grover Furr in the same category as Holocaust deniers, climate change deniers, flat Earthers, . . . He's a latter-day Stalinist kook, not reliable, especially on any topic surrounding his god, Stalin.   I'm not troubled that those American fascists who want to keep rehashing the Stalin era as an attack on the non-Stalinist liberals in the United States have called him out. Like the proverbial broken clock, by chance they have to get something right about 1/43,200th of the time.   I'm done with the anti-anti-commie fallacy, I can despise all of them. 

Hate Mail - On How Materialism Invalidates Science and Atheists Who Claim Their Rights Have To Stand Outside Of Atheism To Do It

I was struck [during the discussion with Bukharin] by the fact that this denial of the very existence of independent scientific thought came from a socialist theory which derived its tremendous persuasive power from its claim to scientific certainty. The scientific outlook appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man and history in which there was no place for science itself. This conception denied altogether any intrinsic power to thought and thus denied also any grounds for claiming freedom of thought . 

Michael Polanyi:  The Tacit Dimension

As can be seen, in that quote, the idea that scientism, materialism and, in every case I've ever encountered those two together in one locus, atheism, would seem to inevitably have that effect.  The only way that someone who holds that "scientific outlook" can avoid self-impeachment is by refusing to follow the consequences of their position to the end, the strategy of most of the current crop of philosophically incompetent atheists and even of many whose professional career is spent scribbling philosophy.  When, early in his career, at the end of his Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein ended by saying: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen, What of man cannot speak, about that he must be silent, he was playing that kind of game, the favorite one of the logical positivists of declaring questions they didn't like out of bounds.  Wittgenstein got over that crap fairly fast.  But the habit of bullying people on that same kind of easily dismissed authority is annoyingly ineffective with the general public, what most of the scientific, philosophical new atheists find so aggravating, persists in the game of declaring questions and ideas out of bounds on a phony claim of incomprehensibility when everyone knows what those mean.

It is inevitable that in order for science to have any transcendent meaning as truth, the minds which are the only place in the universe where science exists, have to have properties that materialism cannot account for and can only deny.

One of the most interesting things about this, for me, is that it shows how ready atheist champions of scientism are to violate the very methods and standards of science they claim to be the foremost champions of.  There is a passage in Hans Kung's Does God Exist, that is especially apropos of Michael Polanyi's experience because it begins with the Marxist reaction to Einstein's work and continues to show how, at the very center of science, scientists will jam their atheist ideology where, by the rules, it doesn't belong and no none bats an eyelash.

Advocates of dialectical materialism, in the light of their beliefs, had violently condemned Einstein's model of the universe at an early date as "idealistic,"  To them, it did not seem to confirm their dogma of the infinity and eternity of matter.  When, at the end of the 1940s, the attempt was made in books on Christian apologtics actually to identify the point of time of the big bang with that of the divine creation of the world, even non-Marxists were disturbed.  The German astronomer Otto Heckmann, who had played a leading part in the investigation of the expansion of the universe, tells us:  "Some younger scientists were so upset by these theological trends that they resolved simply to block their cosmological source.  They produced the 'steady state cosmology,'  the cosmology of the expanding but nevertheless unchanging universe."  But this theory of Bondi, Gold and Hoyle, of a stationary universe, had to assume a spontaneous generation of matter and seemed to be contradictory; after the discovery of cosmic microwave radiation and also quasars (1962-1963), the theory has scarcely any prospects of being accepted. 

I will point out, at this time, that the Christian apologists weren't violating any of the ground rules of Christian apologetics, whatever you might think of their arguments. Christian apologists aren't barred from including science in their work, they were violating no rules of their game.  In fact, given how one of the atheist slams against religion is that they don't include science in their method, you'd think they'd be happy to have them including some.  But, no.

The scientists who created science with the primary motive of preventing anyone from believing in God the Creator were in basic violation of what are alleged to be the rules of science.  If a religious scientist were caught doing what they did so flagrantly, they'd be pretty much booted out of the profession and made a laughing stock.  Contrary to assertions that such an effort was over by the 1960s, it continued in the highest reaches of science into at least 1989 when John Maddox, the editor of that most prestigious science journal in English, Nature, railed against the big bang exactly for the implications that religious people took from it and, in fact, that obsession is still a continuing one that rules much of cosmology, multi-verse theory, various bouncing cosmologies that are created by the likes of Sean Carroll and Lawrence Krauss, who a dozen years ago, seemed to understand the problem of engaging in such stuff but who went on the atheist pro-tour since then.  Though, considering what most of it is, it's more semi-pro.

And what you can say about cosmology being, as Hawking is quoted as saying, a religion for atheists, which resides securely within science, you can say exactly the same thing for sciences such as abiogensis and huge swaths of the behavioral sciences which is explicitly started as a refutation of the idea that God created life.  Scientists have never much been troubled with that religio-idological use of science when it is materialistic-scientistic, atheists who are using it that way, no matter how bogus the results as a representation of observable reality.  And so much of what was produced that way, unsurprisingly, turns out to be bogus. 

In the two paragraphs after that in Kung's books, he goes over the not at all atheist unfriendly analysis of Hoimar von Ditfurth, after criticizing the religious use of science, he gives, what I think is a rather mild but rather definitive criticism of atheists who do what he just slammed religious people for doing.

On the other hand, on Ditfurth speaks very seriously to those natural scientists who argue the other way around and commit the same mistake as the theologians:  "With every advance they made, with every new piece of knowledge acquired, it seemed to them increasingly improbable that there could be any transcendent reality at all hidden behind the facade of visible appearances."

I'll break in here and call out that phrase "it seemed TO THEM" for those who missed it.

What we said on principle about atheism is confirmed here:  "If a scientist maintains an atheistic standpoint, he has a perfect and indisputable right to do so.  No one has any means available to refute him.  But if the man thinks he can substantiate his belief with his scientific insights, he is simply falling a victim - Nobel prizewinner or not - to the the fallacy here discussed."  Wanting to stick only to what can be weighed and measured, even outside natural science, says Ditfurth, is a "professional neurosis" or an occupational disease of people who "think they have to convince themselves" that "there are no other fields of reality at all" outside the field of things that can be weighed and measured.

I would call your attention to the idea "he has a perfect and indisputable right to do so," to hold an atheistic standpoint.   There is no room for that right or any other right within materialistic atheism, rights can't be weighed or measured.  In order to assert that right, the atheist would have to, already, hold that there are other fields of reality, just as his claim that his science has the possibility of the transcendent quality of truth relies on there being more to our minds than chemical reactions that generate electrical currents in line with physical causation. 

Ah, yes, rights.  Rights that atheists both undermine the existence of even as they claim them for themselves.  It is inevitable that, being a political blogger, that would interest me the most in this discussion.  It is no accident, no coincidence and it had a high probability that the materialism of Nikolai Bukharin would lead to the result that it did for him and tens of millions of others.  In the end, he was put on show-trial and executed by his fellow materialists, no rights being involved.  His service to his materialism ended during Stalin's show trial purge, reportedly his last message to Stalin was "Koba, why do you need me to die" reportedly it was on his desk when Stalin died.  Materialism is the god that failed him, even as so many materialists in the west signed onto that letter supporting Stalin's show trials.  Quite a few of them were scientists.  Polanyi's continued work was opposed by many of them.

Monday, February 4, 2019

Everybody's Crying "Enlightenment" When They Don't Know The Meaning Of The Word

Well, it's a much longer post than I'm up to writing right now but easily 99% of the scientistic-materialist-atheist claims on "the enlightenment" are proof of only one thing, the SMA using the word never read much of the literature of the "enlightenment".  In no case is that more obvious than those who like Coyne and Dawkins and easily most of the more idiot parts of organized for-profit atheism, deny that any such thing as free will or free thought is possible due to their ideological devotion to a very 18th-19th conception of material causation and determinism.  Though their confusion is certainly not without precedent.  The double-speak that allowed that to develop goes back into the "enlightenment" itself with such things as the materialist monism of that rather curious atheist saint, Spinoza.*  That such a view of reality cannot help but erode the position of that supposed god of the "enlightenment," reason, because reason, itself can become no more than an act of materialist causation working itself out on whatever ambient chemicals and physical forces are present in the supposed person performing that reason.  It inevitably strips reason of any transcendental significance.  As I've pointed out, it reduces it to the same significance as iron rusting, ice freezing and salt going into solution.

I am not a great fan of the "enlightenment" which was never any more than the limits of the men, and almost every one of them were men, who created it. And that fact is, in fact, significant especially in the political context that is the focus of my blog.  Lots of them were as hypocritical and inconsistent and irrational as any other people in previous or subsequent thinking.   A good example of that is laid out in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy dealing with that light of the "enlightenment" and alleged father of "liberalism" and hero of our current Federalist-fascism,  John Locke.

Though Locke’s liberalism has been tremendously influential, his political theory is founded on doctrines of natural law and religion that are not nearly as evident as Locke assumes. Locke’s reliance on the natural law tradition is typical of Enlightenment political and moral theory. According to the natural law tradition, as the Enlightenment makes use of it, we can know through the use of our unaided reason that we all – all human beings, universally – stand in particular moral relations to each other. The claim that we can apprehend through our unaided reason a universal moral order exactly because moral qualities and relations (in particular human freedom and equality) belong to the nature of things, is attractive in the Enlightenment for obvious reasons. However, as noted above, the scientific apprehension of nature in the period does not support, and in fact opposes, the claim that the alleged moral qualities and relations (or, indeed, that any moral qualities and relations) are natural. According to a common Enlightenment assumption, as humankind clarifies the laws of nature through the advance of natural science and philosophy, the true moral and political order will be revealed with it. This view is expressed explicitly by the philosophe Marquis de Condorcet, in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (published posthumously in 1795 and which, perhaps better than any other work, lays out the paradigmatically Enlightenment view of history of the human race as a continual progress to perfection). But, in fact, advance in knowledge of the laws of nature in the science of the period does not help with discernment of a natural political or moral order. This asserted relationship between natural scientific knowledge and the political and moral order is under great stress already in the Enlightenment. With respect to Lockean liberalism, though his assertion of the moral and political claims (natural freedom, equality, et cetera) continues to have considerable force for us, the grounding of these claims in a religious cosmology does not. The question of how to ground our claims to natural freedom and equality is one of the main philosophical legacies of the Enlightenment.

It has been one of the greatest surprises to me that in the past twenty years I have come to see that those cannot be found in science and materialism and that, in fact, scientism and materialism will ALWAYS damage them in the end.  I can point out that Locke's commission to write a Constitution for the Carolinas in what would become the United States included grotesque inequality, both in terms of slavery and serfdom.  His "enlightenment" document shows he, himself, couldn't bring himself to either abandon the project - due, no doubt, to knowing that the English establishment would never tolerate equality - or to come clean that he really wasn't that opposed to such feudal, medieval institutions.

Shortly after in the same Encyclopedia article, it shows that that other light of "enlightenment" James Madison and the logo of our Federalist-fascists was far cruder in his dismissal of democracy and equality.

However, the liberal conception of the government as properly protecting economic freedom of citizens and private property comes into conflict in the Enlightenment with the value of democracy. James Madison confronts this tension in the context of arguing for the adoption of the U.S. Constitution (in his Federalist #10). Madison argues that popular government (pure democracy) is subject to the evil of factions; in a pure democracy, a majority bound together by a private interest, relative to the whole, has the capacity to impose its particular will on the whole. The example most on Madison’s mind is that those without property (the many) may seek to bring about governmental re-distribution of the property of the propertied class (the few), perhaps in the name of that other Enlightenment ideal, equality. If, as in Locke’s theory, the government’s protection of an individual’s freedom is encompassed within the general end of protecting a person’s property, then, as Madison argues, the proper form of the government cannot be pure democracy, and the will of the people must be officially determined in some other way than by directly polling the people.

In case you wonder how we got Trump even though he lost the election.  That Madison's desire to not have his wealth redistributed has produced the most massively and vulgarly and stupidly materialistic man to have ever held the presidency only goes to support the idea that such distortions, in the fullness of time, can ripen into total depravity. 

I would recommend you read the article, especially noting that those great heroes of the "enlightenment" were not so "enlightened" when it came to Women and People who aren't white and from other places.  Those habits of thought persist still, the backlash against "SWJs" "feminists" etc. prove that the habits of privilege that characterized and, basically, shaped the thinking of the "enlightenment" are with us still, especially among those who say "enlightenment".

I feel entirely justified in referencing an Encyclopedia, the topic being the "enlightenment," which was largely an encyclopedia project.  I can't help pointing out that the Stanford Encyclopedia is generally superior to Diderot's in just about every way and far more modest in its claims.

The terror of the French Revolution was a direct result of the muddle of such "enlightenment" thinking which inevitably resulted in an abandonment of moral restraint necessary to avoid that.  The French Revolution was only the precursor of the totalistic murder machines of the 20th century.  It was succeeded, immediately, by another emblem of "enlightenment" Napoleon's imperialistic, military mass slaughter.  I would bet there were many a beneficiary of the "enlightenment" who would really rather have missed the opportunity to experience it in reality instead of in ink on paper.

* I have to say, I'm a lot more on the side of the Rabbis who cursed him and excommunicated him than I am with him these days.  Though maybe he didn't think through the consequences of what he wrote, which only shows the limits of trying to apply mathematical thinking that far outside of where its efficaciousness can be demonstrated.  Geometry was invented to treat idealized objects, not the more complex world of life.

Are You Required To Vote For Someone Who Believes Freedom and Morality Are Delusions? From The Vault

Along with the dyspeptic decrepit, the often wacky Jerry Coyne is someone I don't feel like I need to address anymore.  That's right, more hate mail.   He's such a total a-hole that even lots of his fellow sci-blog atheist buddies don't address him anymore.  I wish I had copied the link to one of the old Science Blog crew who said,  Jerry Coyne, he's 12.  One of the few times I actually laughed over there.  I haven't been there for ages. 

Jerry Coyne does, actually, serve as a good example of what I was talking about below, about how the tepidly liberalish, often college based liberals of fashion are not only inconsistent with egalitarian democracy, their ideology is inevitably a danger to it, is it any wonder that the one you taunt me with from the other day is his rear guard defense of the Twitter self-exposed Richard Dawkins?   I looked around his place just now and find he's been doing stuff like speaking up for neo- . . . oh, make that "classical liberal" putz and frequent target of Majority Report, Dave Rubin.   To tell you the truth, I think this piece I wrote in 2012 could have served to decisively impeach his materialist-atheist ideology as anything enhancing liberalism, that is if the traditional American sense of the word, the kind of thing that MLK and, I'm finding ever more, AOC mean, not the stuff that Dave Rubin et al. say.   Neo-liberalism, "classical liberalism" is not only compatible with Coyne's style of materialism, it's compatible with oligarchic governance.  More than compatible. 

Last month, after reading a post by Jerry Coyne repeating the materialist party line that denies free will I asked the quite obvious question of why anyone should trust someone who believes that with a public office.    Since these questions are far more important to the continued existence of liberalism than most of the ideological fixations of blog blather, going to the very heart of freedom, equality,  a decent life and the democratic government that is the only effective means of having those,  I'm going to go into it again.   Coyne convinced me that materialism poses one of the most serious dangers that faces liberalism.  That isn't  bigotry, as an e-mailer froths at me, it's a question of  basic reason.

Here is what Jerry Coyne said:

Almost all of us agree that we’re meat automatons in the sense that all our actions are predetermined by the laws of physics as mediated through our genes and environments and expressed in brains.  We differ in how we interpret that fact vis-à-vis “free will and “moral responsibility,” though many of us seem to think that the truth of determinism should be quietly shelved for the good of the masses. 

I wouldn't entrust political power to someone who believes that while professing religious belief, declaring fealty to the Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights .  The idea that there is some constitutional requirement to vote for someone who believes that kind stuff is one of the nuttier superstitions current in contemporary pop-liberalism.

And it's certainly not just Jerry Coyne who believes that we are meat automatons  programmed by physical laws -almost always by "our genes" these days - that is an increasingly common belief in the general culture, one which comes directly from scientistic materialism, which is a deterministic ideology.   Here is another of the heroes of contemporary atheism, Richard Dawkins, on the topic:

In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

There is nothing in materialism that can overcome that determinism* which is so at variance with the experience of most people.   There is nothing in the ultimate reality of materialists that can overcome the assertion of that view of life.   There is no reason for anyone to believe that a materialist who believes there is "no evil, no good" will reliably tell the truth, refrain from stealing,  or killing or committing any other crime that they think they can get away with.  The fear of not getting away with it has proven to be quite ineffective in promoting good behavior and beneficial government, especially among the powerful and wealthy.   If you heard a politician say that they belived there is no such a thing as good or evil, but that  a god of "pitiless indifference" governed the universe and, furthermore, that the ones chosen by that  god to be "lucky" just plain win,   you would be insane to vote for them.   Yet that kind of thing, replacing physical forces for god,  is regularly said by atheists to, at most, muted objection by other atheists or even religious liberals.

If you don't believe that there is moral obligation in life that requires people not be hurt and exploited by those who are "lucky" or those who aspire to be "lucky", through that kind of exploitation  if you don't believe that there is moral obligation that not only supersedes the far more destructive passively  indifferent observation of intentional harm and exploitation,  there is no amount of merely expressed good intention that anyone should believe will result in anything but harm and exploitation.   The results of believing in materialism will always devolve, at best, into something like a putrid social Darwinism because there is nothing to stop that.  The government and culture of Victorian Britain was an experiment in the ability of mere stated good intentions,  cultural preference and habit based in religious professions, to overcome similar assumptions and it was a disaster for the large majority of people.   And that is the best possible outcome.   Atheist governments since the late 18th century have uniformly been  an actualization of the amoral assertions of materialists where the only guarantor of being spared from brutality is mere chance.

If an atheist wanted me to vote for them they would have to explain to me how they account for all of those things that are the moral foundations of democratic government which are denied by contemporary materialism.   Due to the record of those kinds of assertions by the heroes of atheism and the horrific record of what happens when atheists take hold of governments,  it is entirely rational for a voter to demand assurance from an atheist before they vote for them.  I have knowingly voted for atheists twice, in my memory, based on my knowing them and knowing that their atheism was not based in any kind of firm ideological position such as materialism.   I don't think I'll continue to vote for atheists on that basis of trust now that this kind of materialist undermining of democracy has gained currency among atheists.

As I've said for years now, the "no religious test" of the constitution is binding on the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the government and the agencies of the government, they are not and have never been binding on individual voters or even groups of voters.  Individual voters are perfectly free to consider the religious and ideological beliefs of people who ask for the privileges of having their vote and their permission to assume power.   There is no right for anyone but the winner of an  election to assume an elective office.   And it would be far better if that was looked on as a privilege and a responsibility than as a right.  

I have every confidence that if you asked them,  a huge majority of atheists and most professed liberals would say they would not vote for a biblical fundamentalist,  something which is certainly as much a "religious test" as not voting for atheists.   I would tend to doubt I'd vote for a biblical fundamentalist for similar reasons to those that now make me skeptical of voting for materialists.   Of course, if you believe that equality is also a delusion you wouldn't be troubled by a failure to act evenhandedly.   Which is a definitive example of the fact that when you  look at the problems that materialism causes for liberalism, those are fundamental, inescapable and pernicious.   There are many ideologies that rationally prevent a liberal voting for a person holding that ideology.   And, more importantly, there are moral reasons to not vote for them as well.

Ironically,  if you believe what Coyne and Dawkins say,  there is no moral or rational basis for atheists to complain about their unequal treatment by voters.   The very complaints of unequal treatment that atheists make are undermined by their own materialist determinism.  In a morally indifferent universe, atheists have no right to equal treatment, no one does.  "Meat automatons" have no rights that anyone is morally obliged to recognize, which is the fatal blow to liberalism which is inherently a part of materialism.  People who declare themselves to be nothing more than that have no rational basis for asserting their right to other peoples' votes.  It would be foolish to vote for people with such poor reasoning ability as to not see that discrepancy.

The current ideology of atheism is a huge obstacle to believing that democracy is a valid form of government or even possible. I say that due to things which atheists, themselves,  say,  atheists like Coyne and Dawkins who have large followings among atheists.   That some of them try to back track and come up with patch jobs to try to make their materialist ideology tolerable for the majority who believe that human history and experience are more effective proof that democracy is the only legitimate form of government doesn't change that.  I have yet to see one of those patches that didn't fall off at first washing.   Far from being an expression of bigotry,  the decision to not vote for an atheist, in the absence of a convincing refutation of determinism and amorality, is an entirely rational decision.

*  I've heard Daniel Dennett come up with some pretty absurd stuff which manipulates this problem by redefining free will into scenarios of mere indeterminacy,  something that hardly meets either the concept of free will or its efficacy to produce effectively beneficial government, the goal of democracy.   I'm not impressed enough with Dennett's arguments to want to go into them.   I think they are shallow, unserious word juggling.   I might change my mind and go into them later.

The Difference Between "A Place Where One Might Pick One's Deviancy Off The Peg" And Living The Life

The problem with fashion liberalism, the pervasive lefty-liberalish stuff as seen on college campuses and in the lefty media that I addressed below, this morning, is that it's not really different from the neo-liberalism or the "classical liberalism" that people of fashion want it to be. Their alternative is no real alternative.  Here's a short video raising ideas important to that. 

Radical thinkers: Max Horkheimer's Critique of Instrumental Reason





One of the problems with even this kind of critique is that it's no where near radical enough and it doesn't understand that there has, in fact, been a kind of real and viable alternative in the very things that Western academic thinkers reject, out of hand.  Of course I'm talking about those aspects of religious life that people like St. Francis, Dorothy Day, and thousands of other nameable people lived.   I have, of course, pointed out that the last major thinker of Horkheimer's and Adorno's Frankfurt School,  Jurgen Habermas, seems to have come to a conclusion that the only hope for equal justice and freedom is in that kind of thing and not in Horkheimer's and Adorno's program of how to think right about consumption. 

As I find so often on the popular left, things like Majority Report, they get somewhere but eventually they stall on exactly those kinds of issues.  The neo-liberalsm and classical liberalism that they, rightly, condemn, are just different varieties of the same kind of secular, materialistic view of life that Seder and Brooks and Peck hold as a matter of faith.  They haven't even gotten as far as the 1940s when Horkheimer and Adorno were first publishing their critique of the enlightenment, which I think will always tend to cause problems.  I can't say that their predictions made then about the consequences of enlightenment-style liberalism are exactly what we are seeing in the collapse of democracy in secular states, predicting a future in detail is hard.  But it is interesting to think about.

Feeling Cranky, Still Sick

I assume, since idiots living within hearing were setting off fireworks while smart people were trying to sleep, that the New England team won the stupid game.  I wish they hadn't.  As I've pointed out before, the only thing worse than a Boston sports fan's whining when their team loses is when they win.  

But this is going to be a rant against fireworks being made legal by the goddamned Republicans.  At least last night there wasn't much of a chance of them setting the woods on fire, we've had idiots set them off during periods of severe fire danger in the past several years.  I wonder what it will take to convince the state legislature that they should reimpose the ban and sensibly held until the goddamned Republicans overturned it, goddamned Republicans having overturned the ban in New Hampshire long before.  I hate goddamned Republicans, all of them, and I don't mind saying so.  Especially when their legislation wakes me up in the middle of the night. 

Being as it is, it's going to take a major catastrophe which will have to cost big business lots of money to get them to ban fireworks, again. As I was lying awake wondering of the idiots were done yet, I wondered if any firefighters had run into caches of fireworks in burning houses.  That must be fun.  It's bound to happen, sooner or later, though I doubt even injury and deaths of firefighters will get them to change that goddamned Republican law.   Maybe if it costs some big insurance company too much or something.  

Hate Mail - I'm Beginning To Understand How Nancy Pelosi Feels When Idiot Reporters Keep Asking Her About Compromising on Trump's Wall

What a bunch of inbred blog-rats say to each other is pretty much what they say to each other and nothing else.  It's unimportant.  Nothing important has been said there since the middle of the last decade.   I ran the series of experiments as to what I could learn from them about why the left continually fails, I think I've found everything there is to know about that from that source.  It came to feel too much like exploiting the feeble-minded.  

Things have moved on.

Sunday, February 3, 2019

Posting In A Time Of Pestilence

Sick as a frickin' dog.  My guess it is the bacterial bronchitis that's been going around here.  If I write something right now it's just going to be a rant against the Superbowl.  And who needs to hear me say that, again. 

I hadn't known till this morning that Walter Brueggemann had apparently retired from public speaking last year.   He's certainly given us everything we could have asked of anyone on that count, he's one of the great living preachers, he seems to be spending the time adding to his already incredible number of book titles.  I could read full time the rest of my life and not catch up.  Especially, as is so often the case with great writing, if you've read it only once, you haven't read it.

Hope he's taking some well earned rest. 

Luckily, there's also more video and audio of his sermons, lectures, talks, interviews, than you'd ever exhaust, as well, those also requiring more than one hearing to really get them. 

Here's another of his lectures that will be entirely more edifying than looking at the stupid game and the commercials, which are the whole point of the thing.