Saturday Night Radio Drama - Philip Levine - The Invader and other short pieces

The Invader 

A composer cannot understand how somebody else is able to publish his work before he can. It is as if somebody can read his mind......

James Thomason as Edmund Stanway 
Ronald Faulkner as Paul Farrow 
Patricia Leventon as Joan Sheldon 
Hamlyn Benson as Hanley
Valerie Kirkbright as Millie


Producer: Michael Bakewell

It's fun to hear how much can be done with less than a quarter of an hour.

Alan Bennett - A Visit From Miss Prothero

A Visit From Miss Prothero

Mr Dodsworth is happy in retirement. He has his budgie, his bowls, his grandchildren, and his quiet satisfaction with a lifetime's achievements in the Accounts Department at Warburtons. But then Miss Prothero visits and nothing will ever be quite the same again.

Patricia Routledge as Miss Prothero 

Hugh Lloyd as Mr Dodsworth

Greg Taylor - Black Jack Justice - Justice And The Deluge 

Justice And The Deluge 

It was the third straight day of rain that did it. People had been cooped up for days, riding out the storm, and Black Jack is sure that a flurry of human misery, or as he likes to call it - rent money is on its way. But when he turns out to be more right than either he or Trixie could have guessed, they find themselves on an island in the middle of the city, with the water rising fast. An island of the "gaudy, hard-boiled metaphor" variety, admittedly; but sometimes that's the way it goes.

Christopher Mott, Black Jack Justice

 Andrea Lyons, Trixie Dixon girl detective

Clarissa Der Nederlanden, Mary 

Gregory Z. Cook, Christopher Haydn (Donald Tell)

This long-running series of short episodes is one of my favorites. I love the writing, the voice-acting, the timing, etc.   

The Magical World Of Materialism - Oh, I Could Have Gone A Lot Farther Than I Did

In yesterday's exercise into the lunacy of materialist-atheism (I could have gotten into the Churchlands and the likes of Daniel Dennett) I didn't point out the exquisite accuracy the materialist idea-making mechanism in our brains would have to have.  If an idea is the product of a physical structure in our brain, most commonly imagined to be based in some specifically made protein (especially by those who magically chant "DNA") then in order for an idea to have coherence across the human population, our brains would have to make anything from roughly the same structure to very much the same structure, without any communication with other brains on what that structure should be, I would say in the case of very finely differentiated ideas, such as those found in mathematics and advanced science, the assumption they would have to be the product of virtually identical and, at least at the start, unique physical structures is a reasonable one.  Any difference in physical structure would have to result in a different idea being held, I doubt that any two brains could contain exactly the same concept of anything.

How our brains know how to make such totally unprecedented structures and for them to come out the same in very different brains with quite different ambient physical conditions (EXPRESSED IN IN RADICALLY DIFFERENT LANGUAGES WITH GREATLY DIFFERENT GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURES! for a start) is just another and higher hurdle for this ubiquitously held,  ridiculous article of atheist faith to have to jump over. 

When you really start to think about it, the idea quickly becomes no better than the most crude articulation of magical thinking, considering how often it would have to happen in each of billions of human beings every day, all day and night, the magical world of materialist-atheism makes the make-believe world of Harry Potter look like stark realism.  Considering the whole thing starts out with them wanting to diminish the  character of human consciousness based on their materialism, the whole thing devolves into an incredibly unacknowledged and unconscious animism.

Wish I Had More Horizon On This Screen - A Proposal For A New And More Realistic Graph Of Political Identity

Egalitarian Democracy Based In Economic justice and radical equality ____>

(Less criminal and depraved gangster governments) ____________ > (More

criminal and depraved gangster governments)  ___________________>  Totally

depraved violent, terror states run by amoral gangsters, Mussolini, Reign of

Terror, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the Kim regime in  North Korea, Nazism,

etc.

The old line Old Line balanced on some "center"  with Nazism on one end and "Communism" on the other,  based identity on what the various gangster governments claimed they were going to do with the money they looted, taking their obviously unreliable word for that.  The study of what the crooks do with money is what "political economy" is.  I base this new line on the most important things they do in reality, based in how many tens of millions of people they murder, destroy, enslave, oppress, what they do to destroy the basis of life, etc. 

I'll leave it to you to place the various governments of the United States, Britain, France, Japan, etc. on the middle parts of the line.  To some extent they are all between Egalitarian Democracy and the totally depraved "right end" of the line.  People who promote the various governments or positions that would produce that kind of governance also can be located on that line.  I'd place today's general run of Republicans in the United States in the area of More criminal and depraved gangster governments, the U.S. Supreme Court majority perhaps a bit farther to the right of that.   I'd put the current Brit Tory government a bit to their left but not by much.  Democrats fall in a number of places from the extreme of Egalitarian democracy to "Less criminal" some perhaps in that area, though the DLC isn't what it used to be. 

Marxists.   It pains me to say that Marxism being an anti-democratic political ideology based in faith in a pretty superstitious, deterministic model of history and human beings as physical objects,  I would not be able to honestly say they approach this new left position on the line, though there are some I think would if they gave up their atheist religion.  I don't think it's possible for a thinking materialist to really be considered a leftist in this graph of political identity because you have to believe in metaphysical characteristics of human beings to be on this left, metaphysical characteristics that materialism can't be made compatible with.   As a student of the history of Marxism in the United States and elsewhere, I think that is why, despite some of them having their hearts more in the right place than not, they always, inevitably end up damaging the struggle to achieve egalitarian democracy.  You can't say anything like that for fascism and Nazism because they are modern, biological ideologies that, as well, reject those same metaphysical characteristics of human beings, explicitly despising egalitarianism and democracy. 

I have to add that I am coming to believe the real character that determines where you fall on this line depends on whether or not you really believe that people, living beings, have a status higher than non-living physical objects, in human events, whether or not you believe people are the possessors of inalienable rights based in their status as endowed with those by God.   I think the extent to which someone really believes that, they will be ever more likely to fall on the Egalitarian Democratic end of the line.  As a student of history for decades, I think that really is what it comes down to.  It might be possible for someone who doesn't believe that to be an egalitarian democrat but it would have to be so rare that I can't think of anyone I'd reliably believe it about, off hand.

Hate Mail - Meh

I knew he'd throw a hissy-fit if I dissed Hollywood, he's essentially a septuagenarian Mike Teavee with worse sartorial sense.  Let him do his worst, anyone stupid enough to take him seriously is stupid and I don't care what they think.  

Memory Lane

Several years ago, closer to the glory days of the atheism fad of the '00s, when I got a wider range of atheist trolls, I posed a basic question concerning one of their ideological articles of faith that poses a fatal problem for the validity of egalitarian democracy (atheism always seems to inevitably be at odds with egalitarian democracy if not in theory, in real life).   The problem was with the article of atheist faith that our consciousness is nothing but an ephiphenoemon of the chemistry and chemically generated electrical activity in our physical brains and that our minds, our thinking our ideas, our reasoning, etc. were absolutely dependent on the chemical and physical structures of our brain.  The most common conception of that in the real of pop-science is all tied up in a superbly naive conception of DNA and what it is supposed to do and, along with that, an as naive conception of natural selection.  Neither of which make the slightest dent into a problem I came up with for that model held from everything from university professors to the most ignorant of materialist, "skeptical" blog rats impressing each other with stuff they have been repeating like an unattended automatic alarm system for years and, in some cases, decades.

The problem I posed came in several parts.

A. If all of our ideas are the product of structures manufactured in our brains, whether those structures are "proteins" or "tissues" or some other physical encoding of the idea or, to those attracted by the even more ridiculous metaphor for our minds, encoded like lines of code in random access memory, then, 

B.  How does a brain know it needs to make a new idea which has no presence in the brain before that idea can exist in the brain?

C.  How does a brain know WHAT it needs to build to come up with the right idea before there is anything in the brain that has even informed it that something new is needed?

D.  How does it know HOW to build what it needs to build to be the idea needed or desired before that ideas is present in the brain?  Indeed, how does it even sense such a need or desire in that absence? 

E.  How does it know that it has built the right structure to generate the ephiphenomeon of the appropriate idea once it's made something?   This is especially hard to explain because, once built, what it has built, right or wrong, good or bad, that structure would be the only thing present in the brain to BE that idea.

F.  How do you come up with a proposed mechanism to do all of that, not only within the real time frame with which we come up with new ideas and implement them in use - such as a totally unexpected thing coming at you or which you've got to avoid hitting while driving - that could do what you propose it does in real time?   The resort to magically intoning "DNA" doesn't work because not only does the construction of a string of amino acids take time - the thing that DNA does - in order for those strings of amino acids to fold into the right shape to be biologically active anywhere in our bodies takes a considerable time, too.  The resort to magically invoking "natural selection" contains that problem because, according to the neo-Darwinian synthesis, natural selection is intimately tied to DNA and invoking natural selection would also introduce the problem of creating entirely novel structures to be ideas that have never arisen in the known history of life on Earth or, in human experience, in the history of the universe, ideas which are entirely unrelated to past or, in fact, present success rates of reproduction.  If they wanted to push that, I'd point out the potential of so many of science's newer ideas for destroying our species and, so, of rather likely maladaptive character unlikely to have generated success in the past. 

I bring this up because I was doing a bit of Spring cleaning listening to this lecture by the eminent research biologist Rupert Sheldrake talking about his hypothesis of morphic resonance and, at this point, he brought up something I hadn't read about or heard of, a similar problem for the idea that ideas are stored in some physical form in our brains.  After going through the problem that scientists have had in a century of trying to locate the physical address of ideas, he pointed out the idea that our memories (however they come to be there) are stored as in some library made of meat would require a storage system to retrieve the ideas as needed or wanted.  He didn't go into detail but having worked in libraries in my youth, such a retrieval system would have to be exquisitely precise, extremely rapid, constantly working and of unknown nature.

Rupert Sheldrake also pointed out: 

G,  that for such a retrieval system to rummage through the imaginary meat library in our brains would, it, itself, would need, have to have a retrieval system in order to find it, and that system would require its own retrieval system, into an infinite regression.  

I liked the problem so much I decided to post this little stroll down my own memory lane and tack it on to the problem I lined out and which no one has gotten past yet.  I don't expect any progress from the atheists who troll my blog, they don't so much progress as fall into habits of thought, mutually reinforcing habits of pretending such questions and problems aren't there or don't matter or are driven off by reciting the magical spells of current materialist-atheism, "DNA"  Natural Selection, among the stupider ones things related to Alan Turing or some other sci guy of the past they know not much more about than is contained in the more vulgar reaches of popular science.  The smarter ones are chicken and the stupid ones are, alas, stupid

Update

Just wondering how many Twitter followers Devin Nunes' Cow has now.  It's gone from about twelve hundred before he issued his phony lawsuit to more than 614, 000 more than 500 times what it was before Trump's water boy decided to try to silence them for making fun of him.   

I needed something to cheer me up right now. 

James Comey Should Shut Up And Disappear From Public Life

I wish James Comey would take his sanctimonious hypocrisy and self-aggrandizement and clueless feelings of moral rectitude and hole up in some private fantasy land, never to be heard of in public life, ever again.   I know his type, the type who can always twist and bend scruples and moral conventions to serve their preferences and their own advantage while pretending they hold up a far different morality that serves another end.  He is a Republican-conservative version of what finds its counterpart in what I've called "process liberalism" a very popular series of alleged principles aimed at "leveling the playing field" but which focuses on such a narrow range of things that they inevitably end up benefitting the same people the likes of Comey do, the rich.  That they tend to come from backgrounds of privilege or venues of education that give them an entree into privilege doesn't strike me as surprising. 

Why I bring this up is Comey's veiled threat to the opponents of Trumpian fascism contained in his New York Times editorial of yesterday.   It's a veiled threat issued in the language of the "reasonable man" that Comey plays in life as he has served Republican fascism and Republican political ends.

I do have one hope that I should confess. I hope that Mr. Trump is not impeached and removed from office before the end of his term. I don’t mean that Congress shouldn’t move ahead with the process of impeachment governed by our Constitution, if Congress thinks the provable facts are there. I just hope it doesn’t. Because if Mr. Trump were removed from office by Congress, a significant portion of this country would see this as a coup, and it would drive those people farther from the common center of American life, more deeply fracturing our country.

In other words, the racists, the paranoids, the fascists who support Trump, armed with automatic weaponry  by the Supreme Court, might turn massively violent.  Oddly, enough, if the orderly,  Constitutional means of removing a criminal, treasonous president doesn't work, Comey isn't worried about the feelings and actions of the majority of the country who just might get pissed off over that, certainly the difference in arms stockpiles owned by the two groups has nothing to do with that. 

If you failed to get the implied threat in that, Comey embeds as a somewhat less than subliminal message in the next paragraph.

Critics of Mr. Trump should hope for something much harder to distort, or to nurse as a grievance, than an impeachment. We need a resounding election result in 2020, where Americans of all stripes, divided as they may be about important policy issues — immigration, guns, abortion, climate change, regulation, taxes — take a moment from their busy lives to show that they are united by something even more important: the belief that the president of the United States cannot be a chronic liar who repeatedly attacks the rule of law. Then we can get back to policy disagreements.

Notice the mention of "guns" in that, just in case you missed the only thing that his tender care for the feelings of Trump supporters could possibly give their opponents something to care about.  Thanks to Republicans on the Court our most fascism prone citizens are extremely dangerous.  They prove that with almost every mass shooting, every terror incident, they've been doing it for decades now, and yet the former Director of the friggin FBI is telling the rest of the population that they shouldn't upset them by removing an illegitimate, treasonous, fascistic president from office BY LEGAL CONSTITUTIONAL MEANS.  Perhaps if the FBI under James Comey had spent more of its resources investigating fascist and neo-Nazi activity, they wouldn't have gotten quite so out of hand.

For Comey, the man who sandbagged Hillary Clinton right before the last election by violating the FBI and Department of Justice rules on releasing not only information BUT HIS OWN OPINION about a woman they have chosen not to prosecute TWICE to call for " a resounding election result in 2020" is too rich and too hypocritical and too sanctimonious to be tolerated.  For him to be doing so in the New York Times which spent a quarter of a century sandbagging her, including publishing lies about her allleged impending indictment, lies reportedly spread out of the New York field office of the FBI UNDER JAMES COMEY'S DIRECTION, only puts the crap on the bullshit cake which has been James Comey's public discourse. 

Hate Mail - An Example Of How Hollywood Promotes The Murder of Women Through Glamorizing The Murderers of Women

Imagine me having more of a handle on TV and movie making these days. Two items from the news:

First, about two recent films presenting Ted Bundy as a sex symbol.

This year marks 30 years since Bundy’s execution, but instead of marking this as a time to remember the lives ruined by one of this century’s most notorious criminals, the media has once again cast the spotlight on Bundy. Netflix capitalized on the anniversary and renewed public interest with their latest true crime docuseries*, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. As if that weren’t enough, former Disney star and current thirst trap Zac Efron portrays Bundy in the Hollywood version, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile—a title which is so absurdly long and over-the-top, it seems almost tongue-in-cheek.

And neither of these projects is being subtle about their portrayal of Bundy as both America’s most infamous serial killer and a total dreamboat. Conversations with a Killer’s first episode is titled “Handsome Devil,” and barely 10 minutes can pass in the entire series without someone describing Bundy as “charming” or “handsome” or “clean-cut.” Zac Efron’s Bundy winks out at us from his film’s trailer, tearing open a woman’s shirt one moment, peeling off his own shirt in prison to reveal rock hard abs the next. Headlines have described Efron’s Bundy as “a Very Sexy Serial Killer” and “Disturbingly Hot.”

Here's one about how the Netflix production operation aspires to become a significant player in the world capital of fantasies and lying and, not insignificantly, the promotion of amoral depravity, the place that only knows two ways to tell a story, violence and sex:

If you're an actor or producer in Hollywood, it's hard to miss the flag Netflix has planted in Tinseltown. Its new 14-story tower is visible for miles in sprawling Los Angeles, topped by the company's red logo. The smell of popcorn greets visitors in the lobby.

Inside, Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos is recruiting some of TV's most successful producers and writers. Since Netflix Inc. streamed its first original series "Lilyhammer" in 2012, the company has built one of the most valuable TV networks by buying shows from others. Now, with a $16 billion budget, Netflix aims to become the world's largest creator of entertainment, making programs just like current suppliers including CBS Corp.

If there's one thing we know, when TV and the movies present someone as sexy, it's promoting what they did, their denials are lies.

Hollywood, though, is merely the most significant and profitable center for the promotion of the culture of fascism and, as is becoming all too clear, Americanazism.

I assume I don't have to make the same point about the location of that onetime source of mediocre cartoons and phonied up history movies about the likes of Davy Crockett, Disney, that is now in the business of making a necrophilic mass murderer of women into a sex symbol.

Reading about this Hollywood glamorization of a sadistic, woman hating serial killer and necrophile (who was a Republican, by the way) I have to wonder what the Hollywood-show biz #MeToo campaigners intend to do about that glamorization of the most extreme real-life end of what they have campaigned against by these mega-corporations they work for.   I don't see how they can let this pass without massive criticism of all involved and retain their credibility.   How any Woman could agree to be part of such a production is something I don't understand.  People talk about the Black and other actors of the past who, if they were to work in the movies, had to work in productions that reinforced the stereotypes and discrimination against their People.  But, then, I don't get how anyone could participate in movies or TV productions that reinforce the oppression of groups they are members of, gay men have done that since the advent of the medium.   Show biz of that kind soils pretty much everyone involved in it, eventually.   And turns societies that imbibe it into cesspools.

*  I remember far enough back when they used to peddle soft porn under the guise of "science films".   I concluded quite a while ago that "documentary" movies were just movies with a pretense of presenting reality.  The genre, as a whole, has a very mixed record of rising far above the level of Hollywood "historical" and "biographical" shit.  While it is, admittedly, a lot easier to casually digest a movie or TV show and so to make money from, as a means of informing its audience, it is probably about the most expensive and least informative effort of the kind.  Especially if you present people like mass murderer misogynist necrophiles as dreamy.  The movies are mostly shit.

Dusan Bogdanovic, Ex Ovo Improvisation from Tychy, 2002, Solo Guitar

The revival of "classical" improvisation on guitar seems to me to be more successful than it has been on piano. 

Just Sent To Me Too Good To Keep To Myself

Name The Victims Not The Attention Seeking Murderers

Note:  I have been writing on this topic for more than ten years, here is a piece I posted when I was the weekend writer at Echidne of the Snakes.  It is one of the disturbing things about the past decade that what I said then is more relevant now.   I remembered writing it when the  Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, said she would not speak the name of the mass murderer who murdered peaceful worshipers at two mosques.  I think it's a policy the world should adopt, especially those who are in the business of glamorizing murderers by treating them theatrically for TV and the movies.  

Saturday, May 23, 2009

“Body of Woman Found” by Anthony McCarthy

Echidne once said here that she wanted to be able to walk down any street without fear of being attacked because she is a woman. That is an entirely reasonable desire, to not have your life restricted because you have to take into account the reign of terror that is so prevalent. But year after year you live with it and you know it would be dangerous not to. It generally goes unmentioned or is taken as if it was some natural phenomenon, like the weather. Don't go there, is advice given as casually as a reminder to wear a raincoat. "Or you might get killed" is so well understood, it's not said.

Some of Suzie’s recent posts made me stop being distracted from the issue of the terror campaign against women. They have stuck in my mind and have been making me brood over an unpaid obligation.

In the aftermath of the murders of the Amish school girls, in October 2006, noticing how that horrible crime was covered by the press, the real nature of the murders of women due to their gender became obvious to me. Women are the target of a lynching campaign just as black Americans and others were in the 19th and 20th centuries. A woman is lynched somewhere in the United States almost every singe day, it’s been going on for decades.

The results are not only the deaths of a horrific number of women and girls just about every single day, it is in the terror women live under and the depressing, damaging effects of the intended demoralization. A boyfriend or husband who murders a woman doesn’t’ only target her, the clear message is that men have the right to use women as objects and to dispose of them if they want to. A man who murders a woman due to her gender believes he is within his rights to do so. The society we live in has instilled that belief through constant and pervasive, generally subtextual though sometimes explicit lessons. The movies and TV are full of them, there to be seen any time you watch.

Here are two pieces recovered from the blog I tried to start the week after the school girls were murdered, I will explain that doomed effort in a footnote.

MURDER

Every day four women die in this country as a result of domestic violence, the euphemism for murders and assaults by husbands and boyfriends. That's approximately 1,400 women a year, according to the FBI. . The number of women who have been murdered by their intimate partners is greater than the number of soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.


Don't Say Tragedy, Call Selfish, Cowardly Hate Crimes What They Are

The news readers keep saying that the murders of Naomi Rose Eversole, Marian Fisher, Lina Miller, Mary Liz Miller, and Anna Mae Stoltzfus, and the attempted murder of other, still endangered girls is a tragedy. It isn't a tragedy. Tragedies are not planned in detail, they are not planned with everything including toilet paper for the comfort of the murderer taken into an Amish school from which adults and males are released before the murderer begins to carry out his plans. This was a hate crime planned and committed by a man who felt he was entitled to murder little girls he didn't know. He felt that his gender entitled him to terrorize, humiliate and murder them.

This wasn't a tragedy, this wasn't a story set into motion for the entertainment or revenge of the gods, this was one man who believed his being born with a penis gave him the power of life and death over these girls. Maybe over all girls. He could have chosen any girls to murder. This man choosing to murder girls from what he would certainly have known was a pacifist sect is everything anyone needs to know about his sense of entitlement and his cowardice. His name and identity are useless except as a study in that particular type of cowardly, selfish man. After what there is to know about him has been collected and studied he deserves to be erased from the collective memory of the world.

Lynchings are not tragedies, they are crimes, sordid murders by self-centered cowards who believe that their gender, race, religion, ethnicity or class entitles them to murder other people. Knowing the murderers for what they are is all anyone needs to know about them. Using that knowledge of their taste in entertainment, their hobbies, their upbringing and their other pathologies in order to avoid producing more of these defective human beings is all that they are good for. None of this should be anything but a scientific study in pathology.

Dwelling on the names and lives of these cowards risks turning them into something they aren't. While studying their psychological flaws the fact that they were selfish and cowardly should never be forgotten. People with mental illness can sometimes be selfish slime too. Normal people might see them memorialized on TV as examples of evil, potential killers will see them as heros to be emulated or topped. Ignoring that possibility even as the programs talk about the "copy-cat" nature of a lot of these crimes is a crime in itself. It is the same crime the neighbors of Kitty Genovese committed when they ignored her as she was being murdered. It is cynical indifference. It is time to put an end to sensation murder used as profit driven entertainment and entertainment posing as news. It is part of the problem in the age of TV and video.

Call these crimes what they are. Don't memorialize the criminals. Don't instruct their admirers and fellow degenerates.

* Note:

The blog died in the difficult and confusing change from the old blogger to the new one that happened just after I began it. My old blog started acting up at the same time and eventually died, largely due to my technical incompetence. I still have no idea why that happened.

I think it’s a good idea to put these lynchings in the face of society on a continual basis and to call the crimes what they are. I’m not so sure that one person trying to maintain a blog dedicated to that purpose will do the job. I think every blog should document the extent of the terror campaign through posts or in the comment threads. That is a task that everyone should be involved in. Just as in the piece about the suppression of sexism on the blogs, we’ve all got to do it.

To the person who asks why I’m bringing this up now? The headline in a newspaper wrapping something I ordered through the mail says that police suspect that a woman. was murdered by her husband. She isn’t named, it just says “ the body of a woman was found”.

No Left At All - Hate Mail

In her great, criminally neglected and suppressed essay on the depravity of the culture of the British elite, Mother Country, Marilynne Robinson points out that the Land Grant Act, the G.I. Bill of Rights and other achievements in massive redistribution of wealth and social advancement of the underclass are routinely dismissed by American intellectuals who will slobber all over the place about the pitiful measures of the British Welfare State which were nowhere near as effective a means of wealth redistribution.  I would add to that things like the earlier Morrill Act which established the great public land-grant universities in the various states.  

I don't know if it's the same thing but watching the incredible spectacle of British politics - I've become a fan of the Speaker John Bercow, it's better than Rumple in court - I am at a total loss as to why American lefties adore the ineffective, disastrously bad Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as they routinely and reflexively despise and dismiss the far more effective, far more competent and far more successful Nancy Pelosi in the United States.   And, I would say, that being the Democratic opponent of Republican-fascism under the American system is far harder than being even the Labour opposition leader in the Brit system.  Though some might argue that.  

Perhaps Pelosi's gender is the deal breaker for them. 

Jeremy Corbyn and I agree on lots of things, maybe more things than I agree with Nancy Pelosi on - though I'm not sure that's true.   I fall on the extreme left of the American political scale, single-payer healthcare, free access to education, . . .  In my more candid moments I'd admit to wanting to see the elite private institutions of the country, private prep-schools and elite private universities either taxed to support public education and opportunity or nationalized.  I want billionaires and multi-millionaires taxed into levels where their wealth is not a danger to democracy,  I am an extreme leveler, which is the most radical of political position.  But politics is either about what is possible or it is play-time pretense.  I am afraid that for, especially, many of the more affluent lefties in the United States as in Britain and elsewhere, it is all a matter of entertainment for the elite left, which, by that, turns out to be no left at all. 

Before I have To Go

A friend of mine who knows more about Italian surnames than I do pointed out to me that the issue mentioned below carries even more irony than I'd realized because the surname "Isgro" is a Southern Italian-Sicilian name, exactly the group of non-Jewish Europeans most targeted by nativist racists and scientific racists of the late 19th and early 20th century with racist invective.  Being Italian, she pointed out to me that the largest official lynching in the United States was in New Orleans when 19 Italians were lynched by a mob that included future mayors of New Orleans and a future Governor of Louisiana.   I haven't had time to fact check that, yet, but she's enough of a scholar that I trust her word.  I did find this at History.com (not my first go to for fact checking, but I'm rushed)

The act of vigilante justice was decried by the Italian government, which demanded the lynch mob be punished. But many Americans, swept up on a tide of anti-immigrant sentiment, applauded the killings. An editorial in the New York Times called the victims “desperate ruffians and murderers. These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins…are to us a pest without mitigations.”


The lynch mob—composed of some of New Orleans’ most prominent residents, including future mayors and governors—went unpunished. Though the grand jury said the crowd included some of “the first, best, and even the most law-abiding, of the citizens of this city,” it claimed that none of the killers could be identified.

I wonder if Nick Isgro knows that history, I wonder if he'd care about it if he did. 

Hate Mail

I will never take back calling him Stephen Mitler, not under any circumstances. 

Hate Update: "You will, Oscar, you will,"  James McNeill Whistler

Oh, he'll be using it himself before the week is out, he's always copying me. 

The Figleaf Cover of "Moderate" Republicanism Comes Off

The fraud of "moderate" Republicanism is crumbling in Maine, the home of "moderate" Republicanism and its two flagship examples, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe

Mike Isgro is the scumbag Mayor of Waterville,  Maine,  the same town that had the scumbag ex-38% governor of Maine Paul Lepage* as Mayor, Isgro became controversial last year when, fresh on what the students who had survived the Stoneman Douglas High School went through, Isgro issued a disparaging tweet against one of them, David Hogg.  There was a recall effort in Waterville to get the scumbag Isgro removed as Mayor, which didn't work (which, considering Waterville's scumbag Mayoral history isn't surprising) but which also led to much condemnation of him.  There was some wishy-washy disapproval from some Republicans who knew their election depended on getting independent and Democratic votes and the niceness voices in the Democratic Party made some typical noises in that direction, as well.

“Barring the unlikely event that this tweet was somehow manufactured, Nick Isgro should be ashamed of his comment,” said Maine Democratic Party Chairman Phil Bartlett in the release. “Simply put, it is not representative of the people of Waterville.

Well, the failure of the recall sort of discredits the idea that he isn't representative of the people of Waterville, which seems to be surpassing Lewiston as the town most associated with hate in my state.    If there's one thing I've come to conclude, when a district or municipality or state returns someone like Isgro to office or refuses to remove them, they deserve to have people judge them by whoever it is they have chosen to represent them.

Phil Bartlett was proven wrong in this part of his remark, too

“Isgro’s remarks reveal a dark strain of ideology within the Maine Republican Party — one that is not shared by the vast majority of Maine Republicans, but one that seems to have found a home within the party nonetheless. That’s why today we call on the Maine Republican Party to condemn Isgro’s remarks instead of hiding from them, and urge Republicans across the state to stand up against this type of hatred and bigotry.”

We can know that that was wrong because the Maine Republican Party, far from distancing themselves from Nick Isgro elected him to be the Vice-Chair of the Maine Republican Party in January.   What I just said about Waterville goes more so for the Maine Republican Party who not only knew what Nick Isgro is, a younger version of Paul LePage if not worse, they elected him knowing full well what he had tweeted, it was certainly among the reasons they elevated him to that position.

Now the scumbag Nick Isgro is tweeting again, spreading some especially ironic Republican racist slogans, tying immigrants to the spread of disease while being, himself an anti-vaxxer friendly libertarian on the matter of mandatory vaccination and the Republicans are doing their ritual dance of trying to pretend they aren't associated with the guy who THEIR PARTY chose, fully knowing what he is.

Republican leaders in Augusta are taking two approaches in responding to controversial statements made last week by Maine GOP vice chair Nick Isgro falsely linking immigrants to the outbreak of once-eradicated diseases: some are condemning Isgro's remarks, others are avoiding them altogether. Isgro, meanwhile, is standing by his assertion that Americans should be free to not vaccinate their children against disease.

In a series of tweets sent from the Maine Republican Party's official account last week, Isgro declared that it's time for a "serious talk" about vaccinations and migration.

He went on to say that migrants crossing the border from countries lacking vaccinations had caused "certain diseases to return."

As a longtime student of American eugenics and its conjoined twin, scientific racism - racism that makes itself accepted by adopting the esteem science is held in - it is especially ironic to read someone with an Italian surname spouting exactly the same things in 2019 that a century ago American bigots, KKK members, and other associated WASP nativists in Maine and elsewhere would have said about immigrants from Italy, perhaps his grandparents or great grandparents.  But when someone has no more morals than Paul Lepage (about whose heritage the same point could be made) or, for that matter, any Republican of Irish heritage, they are likely to be Republicans.  As we can fairly judge a town that retains a Nick Isgro as Mayor under those circumstances above, we can fairly come to other conclusions about the character of such people, hypocrisy on top of lying and spreading hate is a smallish thing.

Republicans in 2019 are the party of the Isgros, the LePages, the Trumps, the Stephen Millers [Mitler] it is the party of racism and bigotry and negativism as certainly as it was in the 1884 when the pride of Maine Republicans, James G. Blaine, a deeply corrupt gilded-age scumbag, lost the presidency by one of his spokesmen shooting his mouth off about "Rum, Romanism and rebellion".   The "dark strain" that Isgro exhibits has been there since at least the Grant administration, it has seldom not been the dominant strain of the Republican party, the party of criminals and, with the Goldwater-Nixon Southern Strategy, it took in the Democratic Party's worst and similar faction.

There is no "moderate" Republican Party, there are, arguably, a few deeply compromised people who are less depraved than its mainstream but they're the kind of people who not only make reluctant deals with devils, they make common cause with them.  The only good Republicans in 2019 are ex-Republicans.  And some of those you have to wonder why it took them so long to leave the criminal gang.

*  As I've pointed out before, LePage had the support of both of the queens of Maine "moderate" Republicanism,  Snowe's first husband, Peter Snowe was his political godfather.

Hate Mail

If Devin Nunes, scumbag Trump water boy, loses his lawsuit against Twitter or if he loses any of the other lawsuits he's saying he's going to bring for clearly political reasons, or if his lawsuits are thrown out,  he should have to pay the court costs or other damages of those he is suing frivolously.  He should be required to pay the costs from his own wealth, not that of the fascist billionaires and millionaires who would bail him out.  What he's doing in order to cover up his sleazy behavior while a member of the House of Representatives and a Chairman of a major committee is in no way the kind of thing I think should be reinstated in United States law. 

Devin Nunes should be under investigation, I hope he either is or soon will be, to see if he either broke any laws or if he broke any rules of the House that could result in him being punished for his antics.  Frankly, I'd love to see him being sentenced for what he's known to have done, if only it were illegal in law instead of merely in fact.  He is a beneficiary of the regime of lies that is destroying the United States, that is being used by Republican-fascists to destroy equality and democracy.   Nothing I said would support what he's doing.  

Update:  How Stupid Is Yo' Devin Nunes?  

One of the parody Twitter accounts he claims he's suing went from 1,000 followers to, at last count about 150,000 in one day. 

Oh. And If You're Not Pushing Ranked-Choice Voting In Your State Here's Your Reminder Of Why Maine Is Adopting It

He was the first choice of Republican-fascists in Maine, and the last choice of 62% of Maine voters but winner-takes-all and the idiocy of easy ballot access gave that idiotic piece of racist shit to us for eight years. 

Ranked-choice voting, not perfect but the most easily gotten way of preventing LePage brain-eating disease from taking over your state. 

Update:  I feel fairly safe in saying there is not a state legislature in the country which doesn't have lunatics in it.  New York's certainly does.    I would point out that despite the idiocy of Republican Rep. Richard Pickett of Dixfield, the bill to provide female inmates with menstrual products passed out of committee and will certainly become law in Maine.  Only I doubt he knows how a bill becomes law because he's extremely stupid. 

Whiny Disappointed Republican-Fascists Are Too Funny To Not Mention

From National Catholic Reporter:

Gonzaga University College Republicans "deserved better from Ben Shapiro," said the Spokesman-Review in a March 15 report that detailed the well-known conservative commentator had declined to speak at the school despite dogged efforts by the campus group to gain that permission.

In November, the Jesuit university's student development office turned down the College Republicans' request to have Shapiro speak on campus, citing concern that the well-known pundits' "appearances routinely draw protests that include extremely divisive and hateful speech and behavior which is offensive to many people, regardless of their age, politics or beliefs."

Editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, former editor-at-large of Breitbart News and host of the podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show," Shapiro is known for controversial and conservative views on politics, abortion, gun ownership, race and the LGBT community. 

In early February, school officials posted a statement on the university's website saying an appeal by the College Republicans to reverse the November rejection had been approved, paving the way to Shapiro's appearance.

Despite the group's garnering pledges and donations to pay Shapiro's $30,000 speaking fee and $20,000 to stage his talk at Gonzaga's McCarthy Athletic Center, the Shapiro-affiliated Young America's Foundation declined the invitation, the Spokesman-Review reported.

The publication reported that the Young America's Foundation told Gonzaga's College Republicans that a smaller venue was preferred to the roughly 2,200 seats available at the McCarthy Center so that if the facility did not fill, it would not appear Shapiro's address was weakly attended.

 "It wouldn't look full, in their mind," College Republicans president Olivia Johnston told The Spokesman-Review, asking: "Is the content of the message more important or is a full room more important?"

[Dan Morris-Young is NCR West Coast correspondent.]

I'd do a full commentary but I've got to go to work.  I can say this is the one and only thing that that snivley little ass, fakest of fake intellectuals of the unlightenment,  Ben Shapiro has ever done that was worthwhile. 

Public Humiliation Of The Powerless And Often Blameless Is Terrible And Should Be Distinguished From Feeling Ashamed For Real Wrongs

Back during Ken Starr's massively publicly funded role as a Republican political operative pretending to be engaged in law enforcement, his  hunt to find something, anything he could find to end Bill Clinton's presidency, when the idiot "House managers" including such human garbage as Lindsay Graham, Henry Hyde, James Sensenbrenner, James Rogan,  Bill McCollum, Asa Hutchinson, George Gekas, Steve Chabot, Chris Cannon, Charles Canady, Steve Buyer, Ed Bryant, and Bob Barr, a ship of fools who screwed the country while being paid for it and who were so stupid that that number of them couldn't get Bill Clinton convicted and who I am naming because they should have suffered a fraction of the shaming that they put her through, were stupid enough to put the videotaped deposition of Monica Lewinsky into evidence in the Senate and, so, on American TV.

It was the first time I saw and heard Monica Lewinsky in the entire scandal and I was impressed that not only was she much smarter than the inquisitor who was trying to trap her into saying something useful to the Republican assholes who mounted the entire series of fake Clinton scandals, with the help of some in the FBI and the billionaires and multimillionaires who funded the effort, Monica Lewinsky came across as a likable young adventuress who, while I would wish she'd been more careful in her personal choices, unlike those named and referenced above, had no truly evil motive in what she did.  Well, other than the adulterous nature of it.

She seemed to me, even at my age back then, to have been a kid who had done something really dumb, having been seduced with the excitement of celebrity and trappings of power around an American president and who was manipulated by those who were, unknown to her, acting as Republican-fascist operatives, but who was not really any dumber than I might have been at that age.   I liked her.

The only two people in the whole thing I came away liking more than I had before were Monica Lewinsky and Hillary Clinton, the wronged party.  The entire thing should have been a private affair among three people, Hillary Clinton, Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, instead the Republican lie machine, cabloid TV and hate talk radio and the massive Ken Starr racket to waste public money and cheapen the country that it was.

How many of the real shits in that story,  Ken Starr, Lindsay Graham, Henry Hyde, James Sensenbrenner, James Rogan,  Bill McCollum, Asa Hutchinson, George Gekas, Steve Chabot, Chris Cannon, Charles Canady, Steve Buyer, Ed Bryant, and Bob Barr, who wasted tens of millions of public dollars trying to undo the results of elections in which, unlike with those of Bush II and Trump, the actual winner of the election won, have been held up to shame and public ridicule.  I ask that even as I point out as a gay man, myself,  the hypocrisy of the most powerful and hypocritical faggot in America right now,  Lindsay Graham, has probably done everything that he held up Monica Lewinsky as doing and I'll bet most if not all of them have been on the other end of that or a similar transaction in their private lives, some of them probably in their congressional offices.  Remember that scumbag fake man of faith, Henry Hyde had already been exposed as an adulterer who probably gave the woman stupid enough to get involved with him little more than a set of pink luggage.  Though none of them were subpoenaed into talking about their sex lives for the edification of Republican fascists and cabloid liars and pieces of shit like Jay Leno (watch the video below if you want to know why I mention that piece of slime).  You give me the money and resources they spent, I'll bet I'd find out about them more than the tiny little scandal which was the entirety of what they found on either of the Clintons and that was with Bill doing his best to hand them stuff.

That's why I liked hearing John Oliver's interview with Monica Lewinsky in his show about the current culture of shaming in both its good and its outrageously bad manifestations.  One thing that he didn't really point out enough is that most, in fact all of the outrageously bad uses of public shaming against powerless people happen through the very media that put Monica Lewinsky through what she went through and they do it through the very legal rulings that I've railed against here, those that allow the media to lie about people and destroy them in nationwide and world-wide broadcasts and through the internet.  Oliver's example of the "aunt from hell" incident is one of so many that could named, I always remember the destruction of Shirley Sherrod, Richard Jewell after the Olympic bombing in Atlanta,  of ACORN, and so many other incidents that all spring from the permission given by the Supreme Court for the media to lie and to spread lies.

Here is John Oliver's piece on it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm entirely in favor of the emotion of shame, when it is appropriate to the things felt shamed over and when it has some use in ending bad behavior.   I'm Irish, I know shame is one of the greatest of human emotions and one of the most beneficial.  I think one of the problems is that we're using the wrong words, to an extent.   The kind of thing that John Oliver is pointing out is more like a lynch mob to destroy and torture people than it is an honest examination of conscience and repentance.  One is public with the intention to use someone, like Monica Lewinsky, and to destroy her in that use, to torture her, to humiliate her.  That's not the same thing as someone feeling ashamed for their own actions which they conclude they should regret.  And even then, "shame" isn't always the word for that.   For the merely dumb things I did when I was in my early 20s, I feel embarrassment and humiliation,  for the mean, cruel things I did, like the kind of things that were done to Monica Lewinsky,  for those, I feel shame.

Rallying Against Hate Is Only As Good As Your Determination To Cut Off The Sources Of Hate And Murder

Checking the news in my home state online I see a headline Hundreds Rally Against Hate In Lewiston.  Considering the fact that Lewiston has seen more than its share of hate crimes in our state, that's kind of encouraging.  Kind of. 

A crowd of several hundred turned out for a vigil against hate in Lewiston's Kennedy Park on Sunday.  Speakers included Gov. Janet Mills, the mayors of Lewiston and Portland, Muslim city councilors and faith leaders from the Muslim and Jewish communities.

They condemned the attack on the mosques in New Zealand last week that killed 50 people and left dozens more injured. They also urged non-Muslims to stand up against white supremacy and Islamophobia.

Dequa Dhalac is the first African American and Muslim member of South Portland's City Council. "Racism, hatred and white supremacy is a global terrorist threat and it should be called for what it is and we need to end it," she said.

Which is good but it is entirely inadequate when the hundreds who went to that rally are drowned out by the thousands and millions who listen to FOX and the fascists-to-"balance"-"liberals" on CNN (Lou Dobbs spread anti-Latino hate there for years) and the ubiquitous hate-talk radio messages from a myriad of networks spreading syndicated hate, online hate sources, the source of everything from covert to overt encouragement to hate and kill Muslims, Black People, Latinos,  LGBT people, Women (don't forget the most frequent target of hate murder) and other "others".  

The absurd claim that to suppress the fascist media that encourages the mass murderers, something we know from so many of them naming their inspirations, is to endanger those who would rally in their meager numbers to oppose discrimination, hate, inequality and mass murder is one of the stupidest poses of moderny America.   If we're too stupid to distinguish between the encouragement to violence as opposed to the encouragement to peace, the encouragement promoting discrimination as opposed to the promotion for equality we should all stop pretending to favor democracy over despotism because any people too stupid to notice the difference are incapable of democracy.  

If we are not going to take action to effectively suppress the hate-talk that inspired the Australian mass murderer in New Zealand, if we are not going to take action to disarm the mass murderers in the FOX and online-hate media audience, all of these good and well meaning people at these rallies are not only wasting their time, they are covering up the real source of the hate media driven mass murders and actively preventing its ending.   

Hate speech has to be reduced to the idiocy of single, unamplified voices ranting in a bar or a street corner where they will not have the artificial credibility of coming out of a TV or radio.   As it is, instead of coming out of a nutcase that the bar tender will tell to go home and sleep it off because he's bothering the sane customers, it's on the TV above the bar, it's in the corner of the waiting room on the TV there.  

Rupert Murdoch and his media empire are the foremost source of this stuff, the insight I have already mentioned that the three countries where he is most influential,  Australia, Britain and the United States have all been pitched into neo-fascistic sewer politics is directly attributable to his media empire.   And what you can say about that you can say about other media companies that carry it,  Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc. even though they don't originate it.  It is not going to stop without stopping those sources of it.  

As I'm typing this I have the source of that story, the NPR affiliated Maine Public Broadcasting on the radio.  They just ended a piece about this with the disclaimer from the Trump regime discounting his role in the New Zealand killings, repeating his flacks saying it's "unfair" to attribute any role in it to him.  Well, that's a lie spread by NPR on behalf of Trump, we know that because the mass murderer in New Zealand NAMED TRUMP AS AN INSPIRATION TO HIM,  THERE IS NO MORE RELIABLE SOURCE FOR THAT INFORMATION THAN THE KILLER, HIMSELF. 

Why No St. Patrick's Day Post?

The way the United States does St. Patrick's Day disgusts me, the polluting rivers green, the green beer, . . .  If they'd make it a day to remember his slavery and his role as one of the first abolitionists that would be worth it.  My copy of Harold Johnson's book Firewater: How Alcohol Is Killing My People (And Yours) came in yesterday, I'm reading that and it has put me entirely out of the mood.   

Maybe I'll celebrate St. Finbarr in September, most of my people came from Cork.   

If I had some potatoes I'd make some colcannon but I only have cabbage.  At my age I've got to watch the carbohydrates.   Wish I had some boxty, haven't thought about boxty in a while.   That would put me in the mood.  I'll grow potatoes this year. 

More

I am tired of people claiming that Men, and it is almost always Men and it is almost always White Men who murder people are in some way psychologically damaged or psychologically predisposed to kill people in ways that they are inspired to from the media. 

I don't give a half-pint of spit what their alleged mental state is or is not, I care that they kill people and what inspires them to do it. 

As with the original dodge in this matter that most of the imbibers of hate media and, especially, violent hate media don't go on to take automatic weapons and kill people is irrelevant BECAUSE THE ONES IN THE AUDIENCE, IN THE "MARKET SHARE" OF VIOLENT AND HATE SPEWING MEDIA DO DO THAT.   Whenever there is a TV show or movie or shock-jock pushing the envelope who is addressing millions there is certainly someone in the listeners who is so disposed, it's likely when the audience is in the hundreds or tens of thousands, it is not improbable when it is an obscure figure with a cult following that it is just those with such a predisposition who will seek such voices of violent hatred out.   And the clean finger-nailed, elegantly dressed, often-asked-on-talk-shows graduates of Ivy League Law Schools who advocate allowing that poison to be spewed out over the country are as guilty as the shock-jocks and the people who make their expressed desires real in real life.  The assholes who repeat their slogans on play-lefty blogs are too.   I think this is going to quickly develop as a test as to whether or not real liberals are capable of learning from real life.  Play-lefties have already failed that test, they failed it from the start.  They always were libertarians or the dupes of the fascists. 

Hate Mail - The Difference Between Candice Owens And The Young Jodie Foster Is Pretty Much Everything

In a comment someone complained that I'd singled out the black-face for white supremacists, Candice Owens, as an inspiration of the New Zealand mass murderer.   The short answer to that is that I didn't single her out THE MAN WHO MURDERED, AS OF NOW 50 INNOCENT PEOPLE AT THEIR PLACE OF WORSHIP NAMED HER AS INSPIRING HIM.    We don't need anyone else to do that because he identified her as one of his sources of inspiration along with the Norwegian neo-Nazi who murdered so many in Norway and Donald Trump.  

The comment said:

Imagine if the jackasses in the press were seriously considering what role Jodie Foster played in John Hinckley's attempt to murder Reagan. Yeah, just as dumb.

Well, guess what, we know FROM WHAT JOHN HINCKLEY SAID inspired him, the role that Jodie Foster AS AN ACTOR played in the movie Taxi Driver, a passive child-prostitute who became the obsession of the character the actor Robert de Niro played:

The film stars Robert DeNiro as the main character, Travis Bickle, a violent taxi cab driver alienated from society. Bickle becomes interested in a woman named Betsy who works for a presidential candidate, and tries to attract her attention, but is unsuccessful. Rebuffed by both society and the object of his affection, Bickle decides to assassinate the presidential candidate so that he may win Betsy's admiration. He is never able to get close enough to the candidate, however, to complete his assassination attempt. Bickle then becomes interested in saving Iris, a young prostitute played by Jodie Foster. He goes to the hotel where twelve-year-old prostitute brings her customers, and shoots her pimp, the hotel manager, and a client, rescuing Iris from the horrible environment. At the end of the movie, Travis Bickle holds a bloody finger to his temple, acting like a man who is blowing his own brains out. In the context of the movie, however, it is a gesture of triumph. Travis Bickle is a hero.

The difference is that Jodie Foster was acting in a movie and Candice Owens is pretending to be some kind of "commentator and political activist" in supposed real life. 

He doesn't seem to want  to reinforce my point that what when the media presents unreality, whether in a movie which is supposed to be taken as fiction by its audience or in the tsunami of lies that comes from the Republican-fascist friendly or controlled media INSPIRES PEOPLE TO TAKE UP GUNS AND KILL PEOPLE AND INJURE PEOPLE AND TERRORIZE PEOPLE.  But that's exactly what he did.  That is in opposition to the "free speech - free press" slogans that the idiot, atheist-secular play-left invented and which neo-Nazis now have adopted and find so useful, in and out of the American Supreme Court.  

The claims that violent, hate-spreading media is harmless is bullshit pushed by ideological pseudo-science and the pseudo-liberal legal establishment, it was always as false as the same pseudo-scientific establishment also worked for the advertising industry to find better ways of them doing what the hate speech and promotion of violence does, influencing the behavior of the people who hear it.  It's as obviously untrue because of the long history of the successful use of speech and press and,in the modern era, the most easily imbibed forms of media made possible by electricity and technological advancement.  It was always a facile, obvious and self-interested lie that was sold to the biggest suckers of the 20th century, post-war American and English speaking liberals who bought it as sold by the same propaganda-ad campaigns as now sell anti-Muslim and other kinds of active hatred. 

Candice Owens works in the hate-speech industry, acting as the black-face pushing white supremacist tropes and slogans.  Only she doesn't claim to be an actor.   That her mass murderer admirer had a similar and far worse reaction to John Hinckley's when he couldn't distinguish reality from movie-making make-believe isn't a surprise.  He had access to far worse weapons and his target wasn't a single politician, it was a group of more than a billion and a half people. 

Update:  Rereading the description of the movie, I wonder if it's possible that John Hinckley's real obsession was really with deNiro and he's just in denial.  He certainly had the most striking and eroticized role in the movie. 

Hate Mail - Yeah, That Topic

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life . . . 

Charles Darwin:  On the Origin of Species, 1st edition 1859*

There is a challenge to name a Holocaust survivor who has similar views to mine, Off the top of my head I could name Henry Friedlander, the survivor of Auschwitz who came to the United States, obtained his education and became an historian of the Holocaust and who disagreed that it should be considered exclusively as the Nazis campaign to murder all Jews.   Controversially but, if you read his evidence and thinking, he came to the same conclusion that I did that that campaign of murder cannot be honestly or safely held apart from the entire range of Nazi genocides and the pre-Nazi thinking by the class of people in regard to supposedly salubrious murder by the actual people who formed Nazism in 1919 and who took it up in the next twenty-six years.  I would include those who continue it past the war and up till today.  Today's white supremacists and neo-Nazis are still citing Darwin and if not him some understanding of natural selection.  When the Sociobiology Study Group published their declaration that warned that it was a revival of pre-war eugenics in 1976, they were absolutely right.   Up till then most of what was said in that line could be found in the writings of the likes of the neo-Nazi William L. Pierce.  Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology made it not only respectable but part of the indoctrination of the college credentialed.

I wasn't planning on writing about this and cannot find Friedlander's book "The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia To The Final Solution" but there is a short paper online From Euthanasia To The Final Solution, which I would not be surprised if he prepared as a lecture outlining his book.   In it he proves quite conclusively that the industrial murder of Jews and Roma cannot be separated from the T4 program that preceded the death camps and which not only provided a model of murder to size up from, the death camps imported those who had murdered the disabled as technical experts in how to do it.   It is quite harrowing to see how easily the medical professionals who became mass murderers of first disabled people in institutions, starting with infants and children up to the age of three and then, with Hitler's direct instruction, older children and adults and, having gained that experience, had no problem murdering Jews, Roma and others in the death camps.  I believe it is in the paper that the ever downward spiral into sadism, amoral depravity and even what some Nazis considered crime in the staffs of the death camps, it was wondered if the medical men so hardened and corrupted would be able to administer the more acceptable form of murder "the good death" "euthanasia" in Germany, itself.

In so far as my challenger, your problem with me isn't your claim that I don't claim the "centrality" of the murders of Jews by the Nazis, I think your problem is that I don't practice pretending those were the only genocide victims of the Nazis who matter.   That vulgar practice is, as I've pointed out, the adoption of the classification of people on a scale of value that is something which the Nazis practiced as few others have, something which they gained directly from the theory of natural selection, Darwinism, not in my words, in their own words, in their scientific claims, in their popularization of science.  It is a cruel irony that some supposed scholars of this topic and some of those who use it politically practice the same kind of thinking that led the Nazis to murder to start with.  After studying the literature and primary source material, I'm not shocked at that as natural selection was made the primary framing under which people think about biology.  I think that this type of genteel Nazified thinking will always arise as long as Darwinism is the enforced way to think about these things.

It is a habit of thought that German Darwinists shared with those in Britain, Canada, the United States and elsewhere, it was a habit of thought that Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed from the bench of the Supreme Court in the infamous Buck v. Bell case in which he used laws requiring the mandatory vaccination of school children as a legal excuse to sterilize people he, in his patrician, Boston Brahmin disdain for those he considered inferior to himself.  As I've pointed out before, that fact is something the defending lawyers at the Nuremberg Trials were able to point out to the presiding judge, Francis Biddle who had been Holmes' personal secretary and confidant for many years.

It is ironic to students of the down-side of Darwinism that Holmes was an  enthusiastic fan of Darwin, who certainly read The Descent of Man. He must have known that Darwin was something of an anti-vaxxer who complained that smallpox vaccination kept alive too many members of the underclass who went on to have children, children who would have died if vaccination wasn't invented as a boon to humanity.  Darwin's son Leonard also railed against mandatory vaccination when he stood for election to Parliament, luckily, he lost.  My research has led me to believe that the Darwin-Wedgewood family weren't against smallpox vaccination on the basis of danger to health, I haven't found an instance of one of them suffering from small pox, they opposed it because it kept too many people in the underclass alive.  I could go and have on and on giving examples of Darwinist in the period up to the war and beyond beyond who have come up with the most depraved of claims based in claims of inequality that are the basis of natural selection as well as claims about the benefits to the survivors that come with the deaths, especially killings, of human beings named and unnamed, individually and in groups.  I've never found that anywhere in the Gospels and Epistles.

*  That, in a single sentence is the basis of eugenics and its most infamous form, Nazi genocide.  That is the view of life which Darwin presented as a form of grandeur and which is still presented as such.  This is from the passage that even cold Darwinist scientists wanting to wax poetic will pluck out of the book (which most of them haven't ever read) skating over what it really means and what it has really meant in application in real life.  Rudolph Hess said that "Nazism is nothing but applied biology."

Update:  I've pointed out to him before that Torquemada was from a prominent family of conversos, that lying asshole knows about as much about the Spanish Inquisition as he does the topic of Riemann Xi function.   I doubt he knows more than he learned from that Monty Python episode.