Not a dedication but a question for Stupy.
Saturday, January 4, 2020
Almost Forgot It's Saturday Night Radio Drama Due to The Holiday Schedule - Katie Hims - Dragonfly
Topics BBC Radio Drama, Dragonfly by Katie Hims
Specially written for David Bower and Sophie Woolley .
Cal is expecting a baby with his girlfriend Sophie. As deaf parents, in amongst the excitement, they have a few concerns . But every time Sophie has a scan at the hospital Cal is sick. His behaviour becomes more and more uncharacteristic . Sophie begins to worry when Cal finds letters from an old girlfriend and decides he has to go and see her .
Cal has to resolve the past before he can move forward as a Father and fully enjoy Sophie's pregnancy. In order to get there he has to return to the place he grew up in - Rochdale - and re-examine his past.
CAL...David Bower
SOPHIE Sophie Woolley
TARA. ..Sarah McDonald Hughes
HABERJAN Amerjit Deu
BRIAN Eric Potts
NURSE Zoe Iqbal
A signed film of the production can be accessed via the Radio 4 website.
I'm posting this blind because I kept thinking it was a different day and I forgot to audition a play to post this week. I hope we all enjoy it.
I Don't Tear Up Easily But That Got To Me
One of the things I thought was most telling about the kinds of witnesses who appeared before the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees in regard to the Trump impeachment was that the bravest, most forthright, most principled and most idealistic of them were, by and large, those from the diplomatic side of things and decidedly not from the more well known and as-seen-on-TV lawyers and lawmen.
I had an emotion that in these awful times I hardly ever do when a week or so ago, I was discussing the hearings with an old friend, I got choked up as I talked about the testimony of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, Lt. Col Alexander Vindman and Dr. Fiona Hill* as great examples of new Americans who have far more of a devotion to the ideals that the United States are asserted to be of by and for than a number of those whose old family connections and wealth get them jobs of higher rank.
I would include in that category of honorable public servants other witnesses, Ambassador William Taylor, David Holmes and Jennifer Williams. But the testimony of the three immigrants who have devoted themselves to the ideals that are the only real reason to feel anything like patriotism for any country but which is the abiding mythos of the United States, they really got to me.
The contrast between them and the lawmen of far greater TV-radio fame and repute, Robert Mueller, James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, etc. couldn't be more telling as to the culture of careerism, cynical self-preservation and promotion and manipulation of politics in the FBI, the Department of Justice, etc. and, I would assert, that bleeds right into the judicial branch and right up to the Supreme Court. Rod Rosenstein deserves his glass-eyed dummy standing behind Barr as he lied about the Mueller Report to be how anyone ever thinks of him, again. Mueller deserves to be remembered as the reluctant witness unwilling to stick his neck out for the rule of law, Comey for his duplicity in the 2016 election, he alone may have put Trump in office for obviously partisan and, perhaps, misogynistic reasons.
* And I'll tell you, if the Lt. Col. hadn't made a point of insisting on his title being used with the Republican scumbags, I wouldn't use it. I'm generally allergic to military titles and even most civilian titles of rank and honor. They earned the right to ask us to use them. The lawmen didn't.
I had an emotion that in these awful times I hardly ever do when a week or so ago, I was discussing the hearings with an old friend, I got choked up as I talked about the testimony of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, Lt. Col Alexander Vindman and Dr. Fiona Hill* as great examples of new Americans who have far more of a devotion to the ideals that the United States are asserted to be of by and for than a number of those whose old family connections and wealth get them jobs of higher rank.
I would include in that category of honorable public servants other witnesses, Ambassador William Taylor, David Holmes and Jennifer Williams. But the testimony of the three immigrants who have devoted themselves to the ideals that are the only real reason to feel anything like patriotism for any country but which is the abiding mythos of the United States, they really got to me.
The contrast between them and the lawmen of far greater TV-radio fame and repute, Robert Mueller, James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, etc. couldn't be more telling as to the culture of careerism, cynical self-preservation and promotion and manipulation of politics in the FBI, the Department of Justice, etc. and, I would assert, that bleeds right into the judicial branch and right up to the Supreme Court. Rod Rosenstein deserves his glass-eyed dummy standing behind Barr as he lied about the Mueller Report to be how anyone ever thinks of him, again. Mueller deserves to be remembered as the reluctant witness unwilling to stick his neck out for the rule of law, Comey for his duplicity in the 2016 election, he alone may have put Trump in office for obviously partisan and, perhaps, misogynistic reasons.
* And I'll tell you, if the Lt. Col. hadn't made a point of insisting on his title being used with the Republican scumbags, I wouldn't use it. I'm generally allergic to military titles and even most civilian titles of rank and honor. They earned the right to ask us to use them. The lawmen didn't.
People It's OK To Hate With The Help Of Show Biz
This is a follow up to my comments earlier this week about how even the highest forms of dramatic art, not to mention the simplistic, manipulative, heart-tugging-mind-dulling junk is about the worst possible way to present something that stands in for history.
Listening to the Polka Party as I do my housework, I remember that I'd meant to address one of Simels' comments that made it through the filters. I noted that he hated Poles, which he didn't deny, he said, "ever hear of the Warsaw ghetto". Which, of course, is about the extent of his knowledge of what happened in Poland under Nazi occupation. By that I mean he knows the name and maybe has some notion of what it was, he probably saw a TV movie about it or heard some bit of lore around that as-composed-for-a-movie concerto by Richard Addinsell. What Simps doesn't know about much of anything other than the mid to low-brow part of white American-Brit pop culture is pretty much comprehensive.
The show-biz presentation of what happened in the Warsaw Ghetto is as one-dimensional and false as anything it "does" and, I maintain, dishonors those who died there, were sent to their deaths from there and who resisted and survived it. Show-biz, fiction, etc. might go down easier than reading rigorous history but they always falsify things. Show biz, dramatic, novelistic "histories" are, uniformly, lies.
In that idiocy Simps has many a fellow stultified bigot, I've written about that officially denoted current atheist idea of a genius, Stephen Fry making a similar slam against Poles, in his case it was related to his typical Brit anti-Catholic bigotry. Simps also hates Catholics, probably that feeding his hatred of Poles, too.
I think both cases prove how dangerous getting everything you mistakenly think you know about something from from show-biz is. The history of Poland in the 1930s and 1940s is especially complex* in that they faced first imminent threats from two powerful, genocidal regimes on both sides, Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union, both of which were publicly intending to invade it, the Soviets to absorb it into their country, the Nazis not making it any secret that they intended to kill all of the Poles as well as the Jews and Roma and replace them with "Aryans" leaving only those Poles who they deemed sufficently "Aryan" to allow to live. Their plans to maintain a set number of Slavs to be slaves to the Aryans, working them to death, managing their numbers should be considered a living genocide.
That a number of Polish communists, some of whom were Jewish openly favored Soviet invasion and domination certainly didn't help things. It certainly didn't make the lives of Jews who didn't favor Stalin any less dangerous. I can't, for the life of me, considering what their history of being jerks no matter what else they are, understand the vestiges of sentimental affection for commies in 2020. I've mentioned before that even during his life, when someone proposed to Marx that he was a Marxist, he didn't want anything to do with those assholes. They didn't get any better over time. Communism should be tossed on the same trash heap of history that Nazism and fascism belong on.
As in those countries whose resistance under Nazi occupation are the stuff of exaggeration in movies and popular books, the story of Polish resistance to the Nazis is a mixed thing. There were Poles who hid Jews, in not a few cases sacrificing their entire families in the effort to protect them, there were some who hid them without discovery by the Nazis or betrayal. There were Poles who worked with Polish Jews in the resistance - in some cases both were betrayed by those parts of the resistance who were Communist and working with those who favored Soviet annexation of Poland, though there were communists who didn't. There were Poles who out of cowardice or mercenary motives cooperated with the Nazis, denounced Jews, who blackmailed Jews who were concealed by false documents, etc. In every real nightmare you're going to find the full range of human behavior. There's nothing specific to any country or any language group or any other division of humanity that sets them apart. You could say the same thing about France under Nazi occupation or the Netherlands, etc. I don't remember Simps or Fry slamming the French or the Dutch over the history of collaboration with the Nazis in their history.**
But to uniformly blame the Poles for what the Nazis did in their country is especially obscene. especially considering one of the results of the Nazi occupation was the decades of Soviet occupation that followed. It strikes me as obscene in a way that bringing up The Stern Gang and Irgun and their collaboration with, sometimes the Nazis and sometimes Stalin's side as not being at all unfair. Nor is their stated intention to make Israel a totalitarian state. Likud is their successor, Yitzhak Shamir was a member of Irgun. But that's unmentionable.
* The title of this short piece from The Atlantic, "The Truth About Poland's Role In The Holocaust," make me reluctant to link to it - there is nothing that short that can approach being "The Truth" but it's a good, fast introduction to how complex and varied it was.
** I wonder what a list of the number of books and magazine articles going over the French, Dutch, etc. collaboraton as opposed that of Polish collaboration would show. It was certainly not because the Polish Government in Exile and the non-Communist Polish resistance were any less vigorous than that in France or Holland. From the Atlantic article:
In contrast, the Polish Government in Exile based in London sponsored resistance to the German occupation, including some to help Jews in their native land. Jan Karski, who acted as an emissary between the Polish underground and the government in exile, was one of the first to deliver eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to Allied leaders like President Franklin Roosevelt in the hope of spurring rescue. On the ground in occupied Poland, the Zegota group (the clandestine Council to Aid Jews) saved several thousand people by supplying false papers and organizing hiding places or escape routes. And courageous individuals such as Gertruda Babilińska risked their lives to save Jews with whom they had personal connections. Babilińska was the nanny for a Polish Jewish family. After the death of the parents, she cared for the family’s young son by posing as his mother. Despite false papers giving him an assumed Christian identity, the child’s circumcision put both “mother” and child at risk of discovery and death at all times. Through Babilińska’s ingenuity and audacity, both survived the war and eventually moved to Israel, in accordance with the wishes of the child’s murdered parents.
If Simps gets to here while looking for stuff to cherry-pick, I'd bet this is more about this subject than he's read in his seven plus decades, I'll bet it's still more than Stephen Fry has.
Listening to the Polka Party as I do my housework, I remember that I'd meant to address one of Simels' comments that made it through the filters. I noted that he hated Poles, which he didn't deny, he said, "ever hear of the Warsaw ghetto". Which, of course, is about the extent of his knowledge of what happened in Poland under Nazi occupation. By that I mean he knows the name and maybe has some notion of what it was, he probably saw a TV movie about it or heard some bit of lore around that as-composed-for-a-movie concerto by Richard Addinsell. What Simps doesn't know about much of anything other than the mid to low-brow part of white American-Brit pop culture is pretty much comprehensive.
The show-biz presentation of what happened in the Warsaw Ghetto is as one-dimensional and false as anything it "does" and, I maintain, dishonors those who died there, were sent to their deaths from there and who resisted and survived it. Show-biz, fiction, etc. might go down easier than reading rigorous history but they always falsify things. Show biz, dramatic, novelistic "histories" are, uniformly, lies.
In that idiocy Simps has many a fellow stultified bigot, I've written about that officially denoted current atheist idea of a genius, Stephen Fry making a similar slam against Poles, in his case it was related to his typical Brit anti-Catholic bigotry. Simps also hates Catholics, probably that feeding his hatred of Poles, too.
I think both cases prove how dangerous getting everything you mistakenly think you know about something from from show-biz is. The history of Poland in the 1930s and 1940s is especially complex* in that they faced first imminent threats from two powerful, genocidal regimes on both sides, Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union, both of which were publicly intending to invade it, the Soviets to absorb it into their country, the Nazis not making it any secret that they intended to kill all of the Poles as well as the Jews and Roma and replace them with "Aryans" leaving only those Poles who they deemed sufficently "Aryan" to allow to live. Their plans to maintain a set number of Slavs to be slaves to the Aryans, working them to death, managing their numbers should be considered a living genocide.
That a number of Polish communists, some of whom were Jewish openly favored Soviet invasion and domination certainly didn't help things. It certainly didn't make the lives of Jews who didn't favor Stalin any less dangerous. I can't, for the life of me, considering what their history of being jerks no matter what else they are, understand the vestiges of sentimental affection for commies in 2020. I've mentioned before that even during his life, when someone proposed to Marx that he was a Marxist, he didn't want anything to do with those assholes. They didn't get any better over time. Communism should be tossed on the same trash heap of history that Nazism and fascism belong on.
As in those countries whose resistance under Nazi occupation are the stuff of exaggeration in movies and popular books, the story of Polish resistance to the Nazis is a mixed thing. There were Poles who hid Jews, in not a few cases sacrificing their entire families in the effort to protect them, there were some who hid them without discovery by the Nazis or betrayal. There were Poles who worked with Polish Jews in the resistance - in some cases both were betrayed by those parts of the resistance who were Communist and working with those who favored Soviet annexation of Poland, though there were communists who didn't. There were Poles who out of cowardice or mercenary motives cooperated with the Nazis, denounced Jews, who blackmailed Jews who were concealed by false documents, etc. In every real nightmare you're going to find the full range of human behavior. There's nothing specific to any country or any language group or any other division of humanity that sets them apart. You could say the same thing about France under Nazi occupation or the Netherlands, etc. I don't remember Simps or Fry slamming the French or the Dutch over the history of collaboration with the Nazis in their history.**
But to uniformly blame the Poles for what the Nazis did in their country is especially obscene. especially considering one of the results of the Nazi occupation was the decades of Soviet occupation that followed. It strikes me as obscene in a way that bringing up The Stern Gang and Irgun and their collaboration with, sometimes the Nazis and sometimes Stalin's side as not being at all unfair. Nor is their stated intention to make Israel a totalitarian state. Likud is their successor, Yitzhak Shamir was a member of Irgun. But that's unmentionable.
* The title of this short piece from The Atlantic, "The Truth About Poland's Role In The Holocaust," make me reluctant to link to it - there is nothing that short that can approach being "The Truth" but it's a good, fast introduction to how complex and varied it was.
** I wonder what a list of the number of books and magazine articles going over the French, Dutch, etc. collaboraton as opposed that of Polish collaboration would show. It was certainly not because the Polish Government in Exile and the non-Communist Polish resistance were any less vigorous than that in France or Holland. From the Atlantic article:
In contrast, the Polish Government in Exile based in London sponsored resistance to the German occupation, including some to help Jews in their native land. Jan Karski, who acted as an emissary between the Polish underground and the government in exile, was one of the first to deliver eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to Allied leaders like President Franklin Roosevelt in the hope of spurring rescue. On the ground in occupied Poland, the Zegota group (the clandestine Council to Aid Jews) saved several thousand people by supplying false papers and organizing hiding places or escape routes. And courageous individuals such as Gertruda Babilińska risked their lives to save Jews with whom they had personal connections. Babilińska was the nanny for a Polish Jewish family. After the death of the parents, she cared for the family’s young son by posing as his mother. Despite false papers giving him an assumed Christian identity, the child’s circumcision put both “mother” and child at risk of discovery and death at all times. Through Babilińska’s ingenuity and audacity, both survived the war and eventually moved to Israel, in accordance with the wishes of the child’s murdered parents.
If Simps gets to here while looking for stuff to cherry-pick, I'd bet this is more about this subject than he's read in his seven plus decades, I'll bet it's still more than Stephen Fry has.
Friday, January 3, 2020
Betty Carter - Geri Allen - Stardust - Memories of You
There's nothing finer than this. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissel are undervalued. Memories of You is one of my all time favorite songs and these two are some of my all time favorite performers.
Oh, just noticed, it was Andy Razaf who did the lyrics to this one, as I recall. Sorry.
Hate Mail - Simps The Bigot Accusing Me Of Agreeing With Bill Barr's Hypocritical Use Of Religion
27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
29 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. 30 And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31 So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets.[Not to mention hired the unqualified Jeffery Epstein] 32 Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!
33 “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? 34 Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. 35 And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.
Matthew 23:26-35
I think he said it pretty well. I was probably writing about what a piece of crap Barr was before Stupy ever heard of him, while he was writing ad-flyer copy. I condemned Notre Dame University for giving him a platform they certainly knew he'd use to lie from.
Update: I once cared that Stupy was posting cherry-picked, often elided, dishonestly represented passages from what I post at Eschaton. Recently I realized that he was making himself obnoxious to them by doing it so I figured it wasn't all bad. Not that I'm expecting anything will roust them from their lotus-land like lethargy, lolling lulled like lethe lickers. I'm told they find alteration annoying also, as well as assonance.
29 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. 30 And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31 So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets.[Not to mention hired the unqualified Jeffery Epstein] 32 Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!
33 “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? 34 Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. 35 And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.
Matthew 23:26-35
I think he said it pretty well. I was probably writing about what a piece of crap Barr was before Stupy ever heard of him, while he was writing ad-flyer copy. I condemned Notre Dame University for giving him a platform they certainly knew he'd use to lie from.
Update: I once cared that Stupy was posting cherry-picked, often elided, dishonestly represented passages from what I post at Eschaton. Recently I realized that he was making himself obnoxious to them by doing it so I figured it wasn't all bad. Not that I'm expecting anything will roust them from their lotus-land like lethargy, lolling lulled like lethe lickers. I'm told they find alteration annoying also, as well as assonance.
Hate Mail
Can't tell you the exact day, though I seem to recall it was a Saturday, but I remember the exact occasion that I stopped using the words "folk" and "folks" as often as I used to in an attempt to sound more, you know, folksy.
It was the day I was looking up the issues of the Nazi's official paper the Völkischer Beobachter, that disproves the claim made by one of the dumber Science Blogs science professionals* of Darwin's Defenders that the Nazis banned Darwin and a related claim that is floating around in the online folklore of the sciency and atheist that they banned Haeckel. They didn't, those are both post-WWII lies of the kind that those who buy them never, ever fact check.
Anyway, I realized how much of that "folk" talk was part of the same stream of romantic so-called scientific lore that fed Nazism.
It put me off the word, entirely. And, to an extent, the romanticized conception of folklore. I see it in sort of the same way that dear, dear Jack Levine saw "modernism" as transcribed by me and posted right below the title of this blog. There's a heck of a lot of baggage that comes with that lore, some of it innocuous, some of it fun, some of it interesting but much of it dangerous. Nothing is so dangerous about it as forming absurdly romantic and unrealistic conceptions of a past built out of it. The regionalism that poisons American democracy is built of such stuff, much of it as filtered through the ignorant and bigoted minds on the make of those in the entertainment industry.
The past, past culture, is something that should be evaluated with a cool eye to leave behind what is best left behind and to keep what's worth keeping. A lot of it isn't. And you should never imagine you're doing what's impossible, recreating the lives and even the minds of those in the past. You can't. You can't help but mix yourself in with what they left and if you're not careful you'll mix stuff from them that you shouldn't into your imagination.
* Ever since I found out Jeffry Epstein and his pimpess-girlfriend were among the main backers of the old Science Blogs, I can't stop thinking of the stable of new-atheist sci-guys who had blogs there as "Jeffy's Kids".
Such Is The Stuff That Bigotry Is Made Of
Anyone who believes that IQ is anything but a scientific superstition and delusion either doesn't know what it's claimed to be or they are an idiot. Or they're a self-interested social-scientist or someone who wants to use their bogus claims for no good purpose. Idiots in the scribbling profession have the shield of their general stupidity and ignorance, the social scientists have no such excuse. IQ is as much a constructed fiction as natural selection is and almost as dangerous. Originally, it was conceived, in France as a tool of trying to improve peoples' knowledge, under the use of those who adopted it, it immediately became a tool of eugentic-racism and discrimination. And, surprise, surprise, it became so by linking it to natural selection. The two, together, with the use they've been put to from the time of their invention are a good starting point to study the dangers of that kind of scientific malpractice. Especially as those are absorbed by the a-scientific general culture, journalism and the law and politics.
Bret Stephens is a bigoted idiot. His list of geniuses in his NYT op-ed the other day is a really dumb one for making the claims he made. Sarah Bernhardt, Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Rosalind Franklin, Benjamin Disraeli and Karl Marx.
Several of them are undoubtedly geniuses, Einstein, Disraeli, Marx are all genuine geniuses. I didn't say they were all swell guys, but these three produced work of genuine genius.
One was very fine scientist who was cheated by sabotage and theft by a member of her lab working with a rival, Rosalind Franklin.
One Sarah Bernhardt, was a legendary actress but who knows if she'd get laughed out of the audition room today. I suspect that her acting would seem as ridiculous today as some of the recorded acting from seventy years ago does. .
And one was a writer who would probably be more famous for recording his symptoms on paper than as a literary genius in a less freak-show oriented milieu than 20th century modernism is, Kafka. I read a lot of Kafka when I was young. I don't consider him a genius, I consider him mentally ill, a literary Adolf Wölfli.
Most of them came from either solid middle-class or affluent childhoods. Bernhardt, the daughter of one of the highest class prostitutes in Paris had the good luck to have had her father, of unknown heritage, support her, whether from a sense of obligation or blackmail, who knows. She went to good schools from which she started her career as an actor. We have little to no record of her acting except a recording of her voice and silent movies from when she was very old. I imagine her in her prime as a kind of more melodramatic Marie Bell, but that's just my imagination.
Kafka, Einstein, and Marx were beneficiaries of the rigorous German educational practices and the milieu of wider German culture of their times. The role of that cannot be ignored and it's not due to genetics nor is it attributable to Ashkenazi Jewish culture - I wouldn't even call it attributable to "German culture" but to decisions made by those who wanted to make Germany a united world power. The results of those who had the benefit of it - which they would have had to choose to take advantage of - however that might have also figured into individual cases, can't be generalized on the basis of ethnicity.
Oddly, I'm not that versed in Marx's earliest biography but none of those figures seems to have been that steeped in the heritage they are assigned to. When I saw Einstein's name as used by Stephens, all I could think of was the time he said it was unfortunate that for Germans he wasn't considered a Swiss Jew and for the English he wasn't considered an example of German science. I wonder what he'd have said of the use that Bret Stephens made of him.
Disraeli is the closest any of them come to being a "self-made" man though his upbringing was certainly not without educational opportunities nor was it an example of Ashkenazi culture, his father's family being Sephardi and even his father's nominal religious Judaism ended when he had a fight with the Rabbi and converted to Anglicanism, which the young Benjamin entered when he was still young. He went on to read the law instead of to a university and then went on to writing trashy popular novels and then to politics. He certainly had an interesting life, none of which makes the point Stephens wants to use him for. But you can't try to tease out the life and culture and thinking of a person, especially one who has produced work of genius, to claim some genetic or "cultural" attribution of it.
The idea that any of these people are a product of an identifiable "ethnic" genetic or cultural heritage is as absurd as I mentioned yesterday in noting that every one of us certainly has a very similar genetic heritage and it isn't until you get back into the untraceable past in all of our African parents that you can talk about something like a narrow range of that. AND THAT "PURE" HUMAN HERITAGE WILL NEVER, EVER BE DEFINED ADEQUATELY TO LEGITIMATELY CALL THE RESULTS "SCIENCE". Only, that kind of pure science is never done except within a very limited part of physics and chemistry and in biology only in a few areas such as physiology and by then the systems are so complex that I'm really stretching the definition. When it comes to any aspect of behavior and any part of the unobservable, untraceable past, the claim is as delusional and superstitious as a belief in IQ. I have seldom seen such absurdly simplistic appeals to ethnicity, culture or "genes" that wasn't malignant in both its effect and in its intent.
The extent to which we are still in the late 18th, 19th century, romantic period of science is rather discouraging. We should have junked the idea of "pure ethnicity" as soon as people thought about how many ancestors they'd have had to have in even the absurdly short time period such claimed definitions are made in. The fact is that all of us are the product of so many things, including our own thinking, that the illusions of what we call "culture" are ridiculous. The differences among writers, actors, political theorists, even people in the exact sciences and ESPECIALLY those in the inexact sciences of the same general heritage, ethically and cultural, is probably great enough to make any talk of attributing such characteristics to ethnicity ridiculous.
"Genius" is such an elusive thing, based on individuality that to make a general claim for it - WHICH IS WHAT A GENETIC CLAIM WOULD HAVE TO BE - flies in the face of what it is. I would certainly never think that the great historian and one of my heroes, Howard Zinn, had much in common with many of the figures he shared much of his family, local, cultural and chronological background with, someone who wrote about many of the same things. Irving Kristol, roughly his contemporary, comes to mind.
Given the time it would be possible to come up with many long lists of people who are of the same definable background who are too different to find much in common among them. I'd guess you could come up with lists of people from the same family who were very different. That kind of generalized classification of ethnic "types" is dangerous and stupid and never was valid. It isn't science, it's malicious folk lore. It is the stuff that bigotry is made of.
Bret Stephens is a bigoted idiot. His list of geniuses in his NYT op-ed the other day is a really dumb one for making the claims he made. Sarah Bernhardt, Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Rosalind Franklin, Benjamin Disraeli and Karl Marx.
Several of them are undoubtedly geniuses, Einstein, Disraeli, Marx are all genuine geniuses. I didn't say they were all swell guys, but these three produced work of genuine genius.
One was very fine scientist who was cheated by sabotage and theft by a member of her lab working with a rival, Rosalind Franklin.
One Sarah Bernhardt, was a legendary actress but who knows if she'd get laughed out of the audition room today. I suspect that her acting would seem as ridiculous today as some of the recorded acting from seventy years ago does. .
And one was a writer who would probably be more famous for recording his symptoms on paper than as a literary genius in a less freak-show oriented milieu than 20th century modernism is, Kafka. I read a lot of Kafka when I was young. I don't consider him a genius, I consider him mentally ill, a literary Adolf Wölfli.
Most of them came from either solid middle-class or affluent childhoods. Bernhardt, the daughter of one of the highest class prostitutes in Paris had the good luck to have had her father, of unknown heritage, support her, whether from a sense of obligation or blackmail, who knows. She went to good schools from which she started her career as an actor. We have little to no record of her acting except a recording of her voice and silent movies from when she was very old. I imagine her in her prime as a kind of more melodramatic Marie Bell, but that's just my imagination.
Kafka, Einstein, and Marx were beneficiaries of the rigorous German educational practices and the milieu of wider German culture of their times. The role of that cannot be ignored and it's not due to genetics nor is it attributable to Ashkenazi Jewish culture - I wouldn't even call it attributable to "German culture" but to decisions made by those who wanted to make Germany a united world power. The results of those who had the benefit of it - which they would have had to choose to take advantage of - however that might have also figured into individual cases, can't be generalized on the basis of ethnicity.
Oddly, I'm not that versed in Marx's earliest biography but none of those figures seems to have been that steeped in the heritage they are assigned to. When I saw Einstein's name as used by Stephens, all I could think of was the time he said it was unfortunate that for Germans he wasn't considered a Swiss Jew and for the English he wasn't considered an example of German science. I wonder what he'd have said of the use that Bret Stephens made of him.
Disraeli is the closest any of them come to being a "self-made" man though his upbringing was certainly not without educational opportunities nor was it an example of Ashkenazi culture, his father's family being Sephardi and even his father's nominal religious Judaism ended when he had a fight with the Rabbi and converted to Anglicanism, which the young Benjamin entered when he was still young. He went on to read the law instead of to a university and then went on to writing trashy popular novels and then to politics. He certainly had an interesting life, none of which makes the point Stephens wants to use him for. But you can't try to tease out the life and culture and thinking of a person, especially one who has produced work of genius, to claim some genetic or "cultural" attribution of it.
The idea that any of these people are a product of an identifiable "ethnic" genetic or cultural heritage is as absurd as I mentioned yesterday in noting that every one of us certainly has a very similar genetic heritage and it isn't until you get back into the untraceable past in all of our African parents that you can talk about something like a narrow range of that. AND THAT "PURE" HUMAN HERITAGE WILL NEVER, EVER BE DEFINED ADEQUATELY TO LEGITIMATELY CALL THE RESULTS "SCIENCE". Only, that kind of pure science is never done except within a very limited part of physics and chemistry and in biology only in a few areas such as physiology and by then the systems are so complex that I'm really stretching the definition. When it comes to any aspect of behavior and any part of the unobservable, untraceable past, the claim is as delusional and superstitious as a belief in IQ. I have seldom seen such absurdly simplistic appeals to ethnicity, culture or "genes" that wasn't malignant in both its effect and in its intent.
The extent to which we are still in the late 18th, 19th century, romantic period of science is rather discouraging. We should have junked the idea of "pure ethnicity" as soon as people thought about how many ancestors they'd have had to have in even the absurdly short time period such claimed definitions are made in. The fact is that all of us are the product of so many things, including our own thinking, that the illusions of what we call "culture" are ridiculous. The differences among writers, actors, political theorists, even people in the exact sciences and ESPECIALLY those in the inexact sciences of the same general heritage, ethically and cultural, is probably great enough to make any talk of attributing such characteristics to ethnicity ridiculous.
"Genius" is such an elusive thing, based on individuality that to make a general claim for it - WHICH IS WHAT A GENETIC CLAIM WOULD HAVE TO BE - flies in the face of what it is. I would certainly never think that the great historian and one of my heroes, Howard Zinn, had much in common with many of the figures he shared much of his family, local, cultural and chronological background with, someone who wrote about many of the same things. Irving Kristol, roughly his contemporary, comes to mind.
Given the time it would be possible to come up with many long lists of people who are of the same definable background who are too different to find much in common among them. I'd guess you could come up with lists of people from the same family who were very different. That kind of generalized classification of ethnic "types" is dangerous and stupid and never was valid. It isn't science, it's malicious folk lore. It is the stuff that bigotry is made of.
The Disasters Of State
I doubt the people involved in making the movie Wag the Dog foresaw an American gone insane in which a Donald Trump would follow its cynical plotline in real life, though I can imagine David Mamet being less bothered than the others if that happened - guy's a total asshole. But I doubt even he believed the U. S. would become insane enough to play out the satire that he merely co-wrote. Well, we have and that's not their fault, they merely provided the catchy phrase that I'm sure Trump knows and, who knows, maybe he sat through the movie when his mind wasn't as far gone as it is now. I doubt the people involved in creating "reality TV" ever believed that it would have the damaging effect on so many voters as it clearly has, I doubt that even the people who had Trump on their ersatz "news" programs as entertaining outrageousness realized the disaster they were peddling like Campbell's Soup or geezer whoopie pills.
I doubt that the majority of those in show biz know much more than how to get an audience, when that works.
I've already heard people speculate that "Israel" was involved in Trump's choice to kick over the hornet's nest - if it will get Netanyahu out of criminal charges. Beats me but I suspect it's more likely to get Trump off the hook, clearly the reason he did it. I'd have to see documentary evidence that anything but Trump's attention deficient, improvised scheming for his own benefit had a thing to do with it.
For fuck sake, we're talking Trump. I doubt it has anything to do with Israel, I can imagine the large majority there understand how much more dangerous life is for them today than two days ago. It's probably closer to understand that in terms of how far Trump is willing to go to save his own criminal ass, who he is willing to get killed. I think in that he's at least as willing to get hundreds of thousands, even millions killed as Bush I was in inciting the Gulf War and his sonny boy's regent, Cheney, was to get his hands on Iraqi oil. And about that replacement of Saddam Hussein, a bad guy, how's that worked out for us and the wider world?
I think the primary beneficiaries of this will be the pro-Iranian factions within Iraq and Syria and ISIS who will certainly take advantage of the chaos just as they did from the various other terrible decisions taken in that region.
As to the many people who are pointing out the guy Trump had assassinated, Qassem Solemani, was a really, really bad guy, yeah, Trump wasn't going to get himself out of being tried in the Senate by killing a good person.
The biggest thing today is if the American news media will rally round the thug as they did in those two previous Republican uses of the lives of Iraqis and Iranians and others in the Middle East and my bet is that they will prop up Trump. I think the media is mostly about the financial interests of those who own and run it and they'll be looking out for those. I didn't think I'd need to say it again so soon but I think what we'll see is that most insightful quote of George M. Cohan, one of the most honest and mildly cynical rules of show biz, "Many a bum show has been saved by the flag," and there's no bigger bum of a show than Trump.
As entertainment addled America buys this, who knows how many hundreds of thousands if not millions will die. Some of them Americans, but there's no draft so most of us can just watch the show.
I doubt that the majority of those in show biz know much more than how to get an audience, when that works.
I've already heard people speculate that "Israel" was involved in Trump's choice to kick over the hornet's nest - if it will get Netanyahu out of criminal charges. Beats me but I suspect it's more likely to get Trump off the hook, clearly the reason he did it. I'd have to see documentary evidence that anything but Trump's attention deficient, improvised scheming for his own benefit had a thing to do with it.
For fuck sake, we're talking Trump. I doubt it has anything to do with Israel, I can imagine the large majority there understand how much more dangerous life is for them today than two days ago. It's probably closer to understand that in terms of how far Trump is willing to go to save his own criminal ass, who he is willing to get killed. I think in that he's at least as willing to get hundreds of thousands, even millions killed as Bush I was in inciting the Gulf War and his sonny boy's regent, Cheney, was to get his hands on Iraqi oil. And about that replacement of Saddam Hussein, a bad guy, how's that worked out for us and the wider world?
I think the primary beneficiaries of this will be the pro-Iranian factions within Iraq and Syria and ISIS who will certainly take advantage of the chaos just as they did from the various other terrible decisions taken in that region.
As to the many people who are pointing out the guy Trump had assassinated, Qassem Solemani, was a really, really bad guy, yeah, Trump wasn't going to get himself out of being tried in the Senate by killing a good person.
The biggest thing today is if the American news media will rally round the thug as they did in those two previous Republican uses of the lives of Iraqis and Iranians and others in the Middle East and my bet is that they will prop up Trump. I think the media is mostly about the financial interests of those who own and run it and they'll be looking out for those. I didn't think I'd need to say it again so soon but I think what we'll see is that most insightful quote of George M. Cohan, one of the most honest and mildly cynical rules of show biz, "Many a bum show has been saved by the flag," and there's no bigger bum of a show than Trump.
As entertainment addled America buys this, who knows how many hundreds of thousands if not millions will die. Some of them Americans, but there's no draft so most of us can just watch the show.
Thursday, January 2, 2020
Geri Allen, "Our Lady" - Live at Berklee Commencement Concert 2014
Geri Allen, piano
Terri Lyne Carrington, drum set
Maurice Chestnut, tap dancer
Oooh, Simps Found A Typo - That Means Nothing I Say Is True By The Law Of The Play Yard
One of the first things I learned while blogging is that the man who acts as his own editor has a blogger as a client.
Another thing I've learned along the way, post in haste, repent in editing.
Another was, "Whatever".
You know I haven't won the lottery because if I had I'd have hired an editor by now.
I'd also hire a research assistant, I'm sure there's a lot of supporting evidence I don't manage to find, especially in those lines of research in which I just find confirmation of my conclusions in the primary documentation as happened in researching these Darwinism posts. I think I'm right that no one who has attempted to refute what I said has ever depended on the primary documents but had to make recourse to secondary and tertiary claims about the primary documents. Those levels are full of ideological lies, it's the primary documents that expose the truth, especially when the ones who produced that lied, themselves. Darwin was not innocent of that practice, himself.
Online, they mostly just lie without citations.
Another thing I've learned along the way, post in haste, repent in editing.
Another was, "Whatever".
You know I haven't won the lottery because if I had I'd have hired an editor by now.
I'd also hire a research assistant, I'm sure there's a lot of supporting evidence I don't manage to find, especially in those lines of research in which I just find confirmation of my conclusions in the primary documentation as happened in researching these Darwinism posts. I think I'm right that no one who has attempted to refute what I said has ever depended on the primary documents but had to make recourse to secondary and tertiary claims about the primary documents. Those levels are full of ideological lies, it's the primary documents that expose the truth, especially when the ones who produced that lied, themselves. Darwin was not innocent of that practice, himself.
Online, they mostly just lie without citations.
As We Descend Into Iowa Caucus Bullshit News
I ran across one of the Bernie or Busters who I generally avoid online spewing in the same old angry-teenager way about how Bernie was done dirty in 2016, going on and on and on about his greatest claim to having been cheated, touting his performance in the goddamned friggin' CAUCUSES!.
It can be anticipated that I'll be railing against the anti-democratic, 19th century idiocy of the Democratic Party not abolishing the caucuses in favor of the far more democratic use of primaries in its presidential nomination process. Caucuses never, ever have the same participation as a primary, that, alone is an excellent reason for the Democratic Party to require states to participate in the nomination through a primary and to refuse to seat delegates chosen through the caucuses that so many states, mine included, have idiotically retained.
That the dumb bunny who is going on and on about that comes from Washington State makes her whining especially stupid. Washington state has proved, beyond any doubt, that the most democratic form of election in use in the United States is a general election done by mail. It proved that if the Democratic Party wants to have the nominee be the choice of the most voters it would be done through a primary by registered Democrats done by ballots sent through the mail. In 2016, as I recall, they had both a caucus which had a minuscule participation and a primary which had a much larger turn out. Bernie Sanders was able to rally his cult to come out and win the caucus, but he lost the far larger vote in the non-binding primary election.
The caucuses should be abolished in favor of primaries, the primaries should be conducted by the Democratic Party WITH FULL TRANSPARENCY OF PROCESS and done by mail-in ballots sent to only registered Democrats who have been a registered Democrat for six months or more before the ballots are sent out, or since they turned 18, if they are younger than 19. They should get rid of the ratfucking that can be done through open primaries and states that allow same-day party declaration - I personally, with my own eyes saw Greens screwing with the Democratic primary in 2000 and 2016 using both of those. I still say Democrats should flood the Green Party and shut it down, they're a Repubican Trojan-horse of the "left" and it's becoming clear that Bernie Sanders followers are the same thing.
And while they're at it, they should displace Iowa and New Hampshire's "first in the nation" status. The nominating primary should be nation-wide, no region dominating, a Democrat in Alabama or Wyoming having the same share of the decision as one in Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina. One could be conducted in a far shorter window of time than the current atrocity of a nominations process.
It can be anticipated that I'll be railing against the anti-democratic, 19th century idiocy of the Democratic Party not abolishing the caucuses in favor of the far more democratic use of primaries in its presidential nomination process. Caucuses never, ever have the same participation as a primary, that, alone is an excellent reason for the Democratic Party to require states to participate in the nomination through a primary and to refuse to seat delegates chosen through the caucuses that so many states, mine included, have idiotically retained.
That the dumb bunny who is going on and on about that comes from Washington State makes her whining especially stupid. Washington state has proved, beyond any doubt, that the most democratic form of election in use in the United States is a general election done by mail. It proved that if the Democratic Party wants to have the nominee be the choice of the most voters it would be done through a primary by registered Democrats done by ballots sent through the mail. In 2016, as I recall, they had both a caucus which had a minuscule participation and a primary which had a much larger turn out. Bernie Sanders was able to rally his cult to come out and win the caucus, but he lost the far larger vote in the non-binding primary election.
The caucuses should be abolished in favor of primaries, the primaries should be conducted by the Democratic Party WITH FULL TRANSPARENCY OF PROCESS and done by mail-in ballots sent to only registered Democrats who have been a registered Democrat for six months or more before the ballots are sent out, or since they turned 18, if they are younger than 19. They should get rid of the ratfucking that can be done through open primaries and states that allow same-day party declaration - I personally, with my own eyes saw Greens screwing with the Democratic primary in 2000 and 2016 using both of those. I still say Democrats should flood the Green Party and shut it down, they're a Repubican Trojan-horse of the "left" and it's becoming clear that Bernie Sanders followers are the same thing.
And while they're at it, they should displace Iowa and New Hampshire's "first in the nation" status. The nominating primary should be nation-wide, no region dominating, a Democrat in Alabama or Wyoming having the same share of the decision as one in Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina. One could be conducted in a far shorter window of time than the current atrocity of a nominations process.
Every chauvinistic bigot wants the thing they identify with to be the exception and they're always shocked and angered when they find that the wider world doesn't see things the way they demand that they do. Chauvinism is an expression of retained mental habits, bad habits that people who grow up leave behind when they're about five.
States do not have rights, states have no right to exist. States are legitimate only to the extent they have the consent of those governed by them and the extent to which they equally respect real rights, the rights of People. States that don't do that have no right to persist, they deserve to be dissolved. There are no exceptions to that. That it's hard to get rid of bad states is not to be mistaken as the state having a right to exist.
With Trump it should be clear how easy it is for even a supposed democracy whose founding ideology opposes such stuff to fall under the control of a man who believes L'état, c'est moi, and to sucker a dangerous percentage of dupes into going with that.
States do not have rights, states have no right to exist. States are legitimate only to the extent they have the consent of those governed by them and the extent to which they equally respect real rights, the rights of People. States that don't do that have no right to persist, they deserve to be dissolved. There are no exceptions to that. That it's hard to get rid of bad states is not to be mistaken as the state having a right to exist.
With Trump it should be clear how easy it is for even a supposed democracy whose founding ideology opposes such stuff to fall under the control of a man who believes L'état, c'est moi, and to sucker a dangerous percentage of dupes into going with that.
What's With The "States Rights" Stuff?
As, during the past several weeks, I was reviewing my notes and typing out the proof that the Nazi eugnic-genocides were founded on what they found in Darwin's theory which is not "evolution" as is so ubiquitously not understood but natural selection, I realized that the Nazi conception of life and politics that allowed them to take Darwin's theory and use it to kill millions rested on other aspects of "enlightenment" culture and science of the time and which, like natural selection, is still imagined to be an aspect of nature and still carries the same potentials for genocidal violence it did then. It's destroying American democracy and that in many other countries, right now. And the Nazis are hardly alone in doing that.
Right before the New Year, I was planning on attacking another of those scientifically imagined entities, one that mixed with natural selection in such a deadly way, the ethno-nationalistic notion of "Aryanism". That's why I linked to and mentioned the Guardian article about the mathematical proof that pretty much everyone who were identified as "European" or at least a large majority of them would have had the Carolingean Emperor Charlemagne (748-814) as one of their ancestors because of the numbers of ancestors of those generations we all have and because the theoretical number of those would exceed the size of the human population.
I pointed out in passing that if "all of us" or even almost all of us would almost certainly have one man, Charlemagne, as one of our myriads of ancestors of that time, we would all, including every last Nazi, have Jews in our ancestry, there having been many more than one Jew in the same available population to have provided us with our ancestry in those and even earlier generations.
The chances of every last Nazi having Jewish ancestry would be a virtual certainty as would every last Jew of European ancestry, today, having distant ancestors who participated in pogroms at the time, we would, all of us have crusaders in our ancestry as well as people in the groups they murdered on their way to the middle east, Jews, Roma, Orthodox Christians, etc. And if not in our direct line, we certainly share the same ancestors they did. We are all cousins, at least. The concept of ethnic purity as a biological concept is as mathematically incompetent as Richard Dawkins' "first bird to call out" horse shit biological theory. Both fail on that absolute requirement of all real science, that it have mathematical and logical integrity.
The idea of ethnic purity depends on ignorance for it to be maintained, and loads of scientists who should have been able to comprehend the mathematical disproof of it by the time they were fifteen are devout believers in it. Look at the very accomplished mathematical scientists who have, such as Karl Pearson. What is especially telling is that with the generation of Darwin who correctly speculated that all human beings had an origin in Africa, there should have been no force more ready to give up the superstitions of racism but his theory of natural selection, based in the ethic of the British Class system by way of Malthus, produced some of the most vicious and genocidal scientific racism the world has ever seen. Darwin's racism, given his theory depends on a glacial rate of biological change within and among species, should have disappeared when he came up with his ideas but he was a full blown, if less vulgarly expressed scientific racist, I think becoming more so for his development of his theory.
The extent to which the Nazi conceptions of such things resulted in their mass murders couldn't possibly be less important than the bogus scientific theory of natural selection they, neo-Darwinistically, slapped it together with. ,They found that so easy because, as can be seen in the relationship of Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, etc. such scientific racism was endemic to the theory. The variety of it they chose had an older, somewhat independent though not entirely unrelated existence. The theory of "Aryianism" is a particularly vile creation of the "enlightenment" one which finds a rather curious tie in with "the rights of states to exist" in the 19th century French pseudo-scientific thinker and writer, Ernst Renan who anticipated those Nazis who attempted to rewrite the Bible by making Jesus an "Aryan," by almost eight decades. Only Renan did it under the influence of secular-French culture in the post-revolutionary period. He was also one of the early popularizers of the notion of "rights of states to exist". Which is as basic a misconception as ethnic nationalism and as dangerous. Virtually every instance of mass murder by countries has involved some, notion that "the state" had a right to kill lots and lots of people, you don't have to mix some idiotic 19th century reification of natural forces with it for it to be deadly, the gangsters who call themselves "Marxists" used such an idea as an excuse for mass murder mixing it in with some of the more flaky notions of social science that arose in the early to late 19th century.
Ethno-nationalistic fascism is certainly not limited as to its variety. Any ethnicity can play that game. And it's always dangerous. Renan has a kind of contemporary intellectual descendant in Jean Raspail, the author of a novel, Le Camp des Saints, which is very popular with white-supremacists and, very oddly, neo-Nazis. Raspail mixes his decidedly French flavored nationalist-racist paranoia with neo-integralist Catholicism and monarchism. I seem to recall he's a fan of the heretical Society of Pius X. The extent to which Christianity, which never had any business having a kingdom of this world, was mixed with political entities, be they Roman emperors or feudal monarchs or even republics it became associated and mixed up in those same things. But that's a very long series of posts and we've got Trump to deal with. Among Trump's band of bandits who love them some Raspail are Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Julia Hahn and Steve King. William F. Buckley loved the book as did the vile patron of so many of our media crypto-Nazis, Jeffrey Hart. For those who think there's a real difference between "conservatism" as the word is used by Republican-fascism and contemporary fascism.
I could write at length on both of those pillars of the pseudo-scientific contribution to the age of genocide we have been during the late "enlightenment" period as I have on natural selection, Darwinism's contribution to it. It would be possible, at least as a means of debunking their scientific legitimacy the extent to which those make claims of scientific validity. The notion of "states rights" is not scientifically definable or justifiable - it's more of a basic category error kind of thing. But it is mixed in with notions of nationalism, ethnic purity and identity and gives them a particularly potent potential for getting lots of people discriminated against, expelled and killed. That such a noble conception such as human rights is can be so easily confused into something so vile as the word is so often used to protect and promote, is certainly worth thinking through to see if that cancer can't be removed from it because it will certainly kill human rights. Those are either enjoyed equally, or they are destroyed.
Right before the New Year, I was planning on attacking another of those scientifically imagined entities, one that mixed with natural selection in such a deadly way, the ethno-nationalistic notion of "Aryanism". That's why I linked to and mentioned the Guardian article about the mathematical proof that pretty much everyone who were identified as "European" or at least a large majority of them would have had the Carolingean Emperor Charlemagne (748-814) as one of their ancestors because of the numbers of ancestors of those generations we all have and because the theoretical number of those would exceed the size of the human population.
I pointed out in passing that if "all of us" or even almost all of us would almost certainly have one man, Charlemagne, as one of our myriads of ancestors of that time, we would all, including every last Nazi, have Jews in our ancestry, there having been many more than one Jew in the same available population to have provided us with our ancestry in those and even earlier generations.
The chances of every last Nazi having Jewish ancestry would be a virtual certainty as would every last Jew of European ancestry, today, having distant ancestors who participated in pogroms at the time, we would, all of us have crusaders in our ancestry as well as people in the groups they murdered on their way to the middle east, Jews, Roma, Orthodox Christians, etc. And if not in our direct line, we certainly share the same ancestors they did. We are all cousins, at least. The concept of ethnic purity as a biological concept is as mathematically incompetent as Richard Dawkins' "first bird to call out" horse shit biological theory. Both fail on that absolute requirement of all real science, that it have mathematical and logical integrity.
The idea of ethnic purity depends on ignorance for it to be maintained, and loads of scientists who should have been able to comprehend the mathematical disproof of it by the time they were fifteen are devout believers in it. Look at the very accomplished mathematical scientists who have, such as Karl Pearson. What is especially telling is that with the generation of Darwin who correctly speculated that all human beings had an origin in Africa, there should have been no force more ready to give up the superstitions of racism but his theory of natural selection, based in the ethic of the British Class system by way of Malthus, produced some of the most vicious and genocidal scientific racism the world has ever seen. Darwin's racism, given his theory depends on a glacial rate of biological change within and among species, should have disappeared when he came up with his ideas but he was a full blown, if less vulgarly expressed scientific racist, I think becoming more so for his development of his theory.
The extent to which the Nazi conceptions of such things resulted in their mass murders couldn't possibly be less important than the bogus scientific theory of natural selection they, neo-Darwinistically, slapped it together with. ,They found that so easy because, as can be seen in the relationship of Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, etc. such scientific racism was endemic to the theory. The variety of it they chose had an older, somewhat independent though not entirely unrelated existence. The theory of "Aryianism" is a particularly vile creation of the "enlightenment" one which finds a rather curious tie in with "the rights of states to exist" in the 19th century French pseudo-scientific thinker and writer, Ernst Renan who anticipated those Nazis who attempted to rewrite the Bible by making Jesus an "Aryan," by almost eight decades. Only Renan did it under the influence of secular-French culture in the post-revolutionary period. He was also one of the early popularizers of the notion of "rights of states to exist". Which is as basic a misconception as ethnic nationalism and as dangerous. Virtually every instance of mass murder by countries has involved some, notion that "the state" had a right to kill lots and lots of people, you don't have to mix some idiotic 19th century reification of natural forces with it for it to be deadly, the gangsters who call themselves "Marxists" used such an idea as an excuse for mass murder mixing it in with some of the more flaky notions of social science that arose in the early to late 19th century.
Ethno-nationalistic fascism is certainly not limited as to its variety. Any ethnicity can play that game. And it's always dangerous. Renan has a kind of contemporary intellectual descendant in Jean Raspail, the author of a novel, Le Camp des Saints, which is very popular with white-supremacists and, very oddly, neo-Nazis. Raspail mixes his decidedly French flavored nationalist-racist paranoia with neo-integralist Catholicism and monarchism. I seem to recall he's a fan of the heretical Society of Pius X. The extent to which Christianity, which never had any business having a kingdom of this world, was mixed with political entities, be they Roman emperors or feudal monarchs or even republics it became associated and mixed up in those same things. But that's a very long series of posts and we've got Trump to deal with. Among Trump's band of bandits who love them some Raspail are Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Julia Hahn and Steve King. William F. Buckley loved the book as did the vile patron of so many of our media crypto-Nazis, Jeffrey Hart. For those who think there's a real difference between "conservatism" as the word is used by Republican-fascism and contemporary fascism.
I could write at length on both of those pillars of the pseudo-scientific contribution to the age of genocide we have been during the late "enlightenment" period as I have on natural selection, Darwinism's contribution to it. It would be possible, at least as a means of debunking their scientific legitimacy the extent to which those make claims of scientific validity. The notion of "states rights" is not scientifically definable or justifiable - it's more of a basic category error kind of thing. But it is mixed in with notions of nationalism, ethnic purity and identity and gives them a particularly potent potential for getting lots of people discriminated against, expelled and killed. That such a noble conception such as human rights is can be so easily confused into something so vile as the word is so often used to protect and promote, is certainly worth thinking through to see if that cancer can't be removed from it because it will certainly kill human rights. Those are either enjoyed equally, or they are destroyed.
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
Geri Allen Trio, Dark Prince
Geri Allen, piano
Ralph Armstrong, bass
Ralph Penland, drums
I was wondering what to post for the first music video of the year and went with the late, treat Geri Allen. I can't tell if the other credits are accurate, the eyes aren't what they once were and they weren't great even then.
Wish I'd said that.
In reaction to my questions about which were the first Popes to call themselves "Christian" or "Catholic" someone asks, "how about the first one to call himself the pope?"
I didn't find that in my quick search but I found a source that says the first use of the title "Pope" wasn't for a Bishop of Rome, it was for a Bishop of Alexandria, Pope Heraclas who died in 248 and that the title wasn't used in Rome till several centuries after that. You can learn something every day. Though I'd usually want to get confirmation of that, it's a holiday.
Update: Someone must read me because someone asks: "Now that it's a new year are you going to post Simels comments again?"
To which I say, why would I want to go backwards in the most backward possible way? No, I think I'll make use of any voluntary idiocy that I think useful in the way I've been doing it. I was hoping to never mention him or Duncan or the geriatric jr. high again but they do have their uses as bad examples on the soi disant "left" as do The Young Turks (Cenk's run for congress doesn't seem to be the cake-walk the young Turk seemed to think it would be for him) and Majority Report etc. That's the "left" the real left has got to finally get shut of or we'll never win again. Anything that is in the general direction of imagining itself as "Marxism" is death to the real left.
I didn't find that in my quick search but I found a source that says the first use of the title "Pope" wasn't for a Bishop of Rome, it was for a Bishop of Alexandria, Pope Heraclas who died in 248 and that the title wasn't used in Rome till several centuries after that. You can learn something every day. Though I'd usually want to get confirmation of that, it's a holiday.
Update: Someone must read me because someone asks: "Now that it's a new year are you going to post Simels comments again?"
To which I say, why would I want to go backwards in the most backward possible way? No, I think I'll make use of any voluntary idiocy that I think useful in the way I've been doing it. I was hoping to never mention him or Duncan or the geriatric jr. high again but they do have their uses as bad examples on the soi disant "left" as do The Young Turks (Cenk's run for congress doesn't seem to be the cake-walk the young Turk seemed to think it would be for him) and Majority Report etc. That's the "left" the real left has got to finally get shut of or we'll never win again. Anything that is in the general direction of imagining itself as "Marxism" is death to the real left.
Beginning Of Year Post As A Corrected-Expanded End Of Year Post - Charlie Pierce, You Are Right
I saw this morning that I posted a rough draft of this post instead of a more finished one, so I'm posting it with corrections today. Sorry.
This is the year now in which we decide for the foreseeable future what kind of government we want. But, while we’re making up our woolly minds about it, the world is rolling on. Australia literally is burning down. In Europe, the EU is falling apart and people are slapping on armbands again. The Middle East is what it’s been for 40 years—a hot, angry region in which we truly have no place and no idea what to do there. This is a really bad time for American democracy to be deciding whether it wants to go into the future merely as an extended exercise in performance art.
Optimism is not exactly something that’s just lying around on the floor, waiting to be picked up. It’s something we have to work for again. It’s a heavy lift, but a necessary one. All we have as we enter 2020 is, well, us. In 1979, I was just starting out in this racket and there was so much I didn’t know about anything. As 2019 ends, I have come to wonder if everything I’ve learned is wrong. An open question for the opening of the new year. Comfort and joy to you all from all of us.
Charles Pierce As 2019 Ends, I Have to Wonder Whether Everything I've Learned Is Wrong Optimism is something we have to work for again.
I am sure I would risk offending if I were to say outright that modern thought is a failed project. Still, clearly it partakes as much of error as the worst thinking that it has displaced.
Marilynne Robinson: The Death of Adam: Darwinism
The Robinson quote gives the estimable Mr. Charles Pierce his answer. It is also an example of what I said yesterday morning about several slogans of our most piously recited secular-civic faith which is as good an example of the failed project, modernism, as anything.
By "modernism" I'm, of course, not talking about "modern music" ("modernism" doesn't really work for music) or as much the visual arts, though any which use text and some that doesn't might have some modernism in their content. I'm talking about the scientific-secular world view which dominates everything and has for generations.
I didn't realize the other day when I said that some figured I wanted to return to some pre-"enlightenment" past in my criticism of modernism, they couldn't be more wrong.
The "enlightenment" is a highly flawed, deeply mistaken response to what came before it - all human intellectual movements are flawed and deeply mistaken responses, none of those in the past is worth trying to repeat, though there may be much to learn from them in a positive sense as well as in what not to retry.
There is a lot wrong with the project called "enlightenment" that is closely related to modernism, and the extent to which our notions of democracy and democratic government have been glued to it, that has been a source of huge problems, many of which are reaching maturity right now.
We fetishize something we call "freedom" and as in several of the other words I've noted problems with, "freedom" is one of the most seriously in need of consideration. There is nothing good about a libertarian, libertine, freedom such as we are governed by in the post-WWII period. A lot of that was expressed in the literature, the fiction, the movie-scripts, the drama of the post-war writers who so inform our imagination - many of them were suckers for some of the dumbest of propaganda, especially involving "freedom" of the kind that doesn't make us free.
I find it incredible that we have the perfect example of a specimen of complete personal freedom such as the kind we imagine we hanker after in "democracy" in the post-war, modernist period in Donald Trump and that example of this kind of dystopian freedom isn't more fully understood after this many years of seeing him in action.
He is a man who has done exactly what he has wanted to, using his daddy's gangster money and money they've conned and stolen from banks which - no doubt due to heavy government subsidy - have allowed him to go on a spree of borrowing, bankruptcy, borrowing from other, ever more shady lenders - living large, what is called in one of the most detestable of post-war ballads "The good-life." Only not so much on having friends as people eager to benefit from association with him and who he uses before he discards them.
I could go on and on and on describing how the 12-year-old boy brat good-life of Donald Trump and how the law, big business, the whole edifice of unillegalized theft and graft which is the crown of curremt capitalist-liberalism - the mature form of that "enligthenment" 18th century secular horror that goes by the word "liberalism" - support him. It's a decades long, two-generations and counting quintessence of total libertarian freedom as only rich, white, Americans can perfect it, though rich white and a few non-whites in the wider world of 2100 billionaires can provide other examples of the type.
And most telling of all, Donald Trump, the Donald Trump that millions of Americans voted for, is a 100% creation of the freest of free-presses in the freest of free-speech regimes in history, under the Warren Court, ACLU notion of free speech-free press.
That his major vehicle to the presidency was something called a REALITY SHOW, "reality" as a show, a "REALITY" which was a totally phony, scripted presentation of the gangster-businessman that he played in "real life" only as propped up by gangster lawyers and others and as supported by the national and, especially New York City media. The phony "reality" scripted and planned to attract the most easily gulled eyes to sell advertising, using all of the deceptive methods of the PR and ad industry to do that.
Yet people were shocked at how fast the post-truth nature of the Trump years have been made normal to those trained by TV viewing to accept such "reality."
Jesus says, in the Gospel of John, "You will know the truth and the truth will make you free." The truth isn't generally compatible with a libertarian notion of freedom, it's a harsh and often unwelcomed thing, not the seductive, attractive crap that the entertainment and infotanement media provide us. We were warned that if we want freedom in any livable and important meaning of the word, it was going to be on such terms as the truth sets, not what was most pleasing. That well known passage is closely followed by, "Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin." And so we are enslaved by the seductions presented to us as seen on TV.
Modernism, many of its assumptions, from the most obviously scuzzy and sleazy to its loftiest sounding mistakes is unsustainable, it is certainly destructive of egalitarian democracy, economic justice and a livable environment. The very language of it corrupts even the most lofty seeming of terms.
That definition of "freedom" and, even more so "liberty" not to mention such other things as "relativity" are dangerously flawed. And then there's "justice."
So is the bizarre notion of "fairness" in which some of the worst desires of some of the worst of us are to be allowed and permitted and promoted and encouraged out of "fairness" not to mention the use of the term by the media in order to promote Trumpian lies, especially when called "balance". Which is a method of the "press" the media lying for its own benefit. Just as an example, there is no rational "fairness" given to those who want to destroy equality. There is nothing fair about giving those who would destroy the rights and lives of innocent people the chance to succeed in doing so. There is no right for those who want to destroy the rights and lives of others the chance to try to.
There is nothing nice about being nice to Nazis in that idiotic, irresponsible, post-war ACLU way, there is nothing fair about being fair to fascists, and they are the ones who make that so because they are not for fairness and they are certainly not for niceness. It is not moral to give such people any chance to do what they want to do, egalitarian democracy is not under any moral obligation to give them the chance to destroy egalitarian democracy. And if the law cannot sort that out then the law needs to be changed for that which can sort it out. Even if we have to dump the entire legal code and the theory that supports the mentally defective thing we've got there now.
Those are what brought us here.
We are living the inversion of values that Nietzsche predicted would come with the triumph of materialist-atheist-scientism, the death of God, which he welcomed. And which is going to kill us all - as Mr. Pierce asks, have you been watching Australia this month?
It doesn't work and there is no going back. We couldn't if we wanted to and we shouldn't want to. What modernism replaced didn't work, we have no choice but to go on to a future learning the disaster we have wrought in the name of freedom and fairness. Though those were only ever a cover up for the interests of the billionaire owners and the millionaire employees of the media. They sounded better than what they were really up to.
I'm not optimistic that we will change fast enough to avoid our own extinction and certainly not the extinction of myriads of other species. But we have to try, we have an obligation to try.
Trump is still there, so is Boris Johnson and Viktor Orban etc. Putin, the puppet master of the West under unlimited free speech-free press is still jerking us around as we still pretend it's the late 18th century. We are still stuck in the same thing the 18th century slave-owners, sharp businessmen and crooked lawyers and bankers of then gave us and we are suckered into not fixing it. We've still got the Electoral college and the travesty of the anti-democratically constructed Senate. We have retained the unconstitutional government by Court that the Supreme Court gave itself with no vote from The People or The Peoples' representatives.
Like Charles Pierce, I grew up with a lot of the same things learned and, yes, they were wrong. That's why we're in such trouble.
This is the year now in which we decide for the foreseeable future what kind of government we want. But, while we’re making up our woolly minds about it, the world is rolling on. Australia literally is burning down. In Europe, the EU is falling apart and people are slapping on armbands again. The Middle East is what it’s been for 40 years—a hot, angry region in which we truly have no place and no idea what to do there. This is a really bad time for American democracy to be deciding whether it wants to go into the future merely as an extended exercise in performance art.
Optimism is not exactly something that’s just lying around on the floor, waiting to be picked up. It’s something we have to work for again. It’s a heavy lift, but a necessary one. All we have as we enter 2020 is, well, us. In 1979, I was just starting out in this racket and there was so much I didn’t know about anything. As 2019 ends, I have come to wonder if everything I’ve learned is wrong. An open question for the opening of the new year. Comfort and joy to you all from all of us.
Charles Pierce As 2019 Ends, I Have to Wonder Whether Everything I've Learned Is Wrong Optimism is something we have to work for again.
I am sure I would risk offending if I were to say outright that modern thought is a failed project. Still, clearly it partakes as much of error as the worst thinking that it has displaced.
Marilynne Robinson: The Death of Adam: Darwinism
The Robinson quote gives the estimable Mr. Charles Pierce his answer. It is also an example of what I said yesterday morning about several slogans of our most piously recited secular-civic faith which is as good an example of the failed project, modernism, as anything.
By "modernism" I'm, of course, not talking about "modern music" ("modernism" doesn't really work for music) or as much the visual arts, though any which use text and some that doesn't might have some modernism in their content. I'm talking about the scientific-secular world view which dominates everything and has for generations.
I didn't realize the other day when I said that some figured I wanted to return to some pre-"enlightenment" past in my criticism of modernism, they couldn't be more wrong.
The "enlightenment" is a highly flawed, deeply mistaken response to what came before it - all human intellectual movements are flawed and deeply mistaken responses, none of those in the past is worth trying to repeat, though there may be much to learn from them in a positive sense as well as in what not to retry.
There is a lot wrong with the project called "enlightenment" that is closely related to modernism, and the extent to which our notions of democracy and democratic government have been glued to it, that has been a source of huge problems, many of which are reaching maturity right now.
We fetishize something we call "freedom" and as in several of the other words I've noted problems with, "freedom" is one of the most seriously in need of consideration. There is nothing good about a libertarian, libertine, freedom such as we are governed by in the post-WWII period. A lot of that was expressed in the literature, the fiction, the movie-scripts, the drama of the post-war writers who so inform our imagination - many of them were suckers for some of the dumbest of propaganda, especially involving "freedom" of the kind that doesn't make us free.
I find it incredible that we have the perfect example of a specimen of complete personal freedom such as the kind we imagine we hanker after in "democracy" in the post-war, modernist period in Donald Trump and that example of this kind of dystopian freedom isn't more fully understood after this many years of seeing him in action.
He is a man who has done exactly what he has wanted to, using his daddy's gangster money and money they've conned and stolen from banks which - no doubt due to heavy government subsidy - have allowed him to go on a spree of borrowing, bankruptcy, borrowing from other, ever more shady lenders - living large, what is called in one of the most detestable of post-war ballads "The good-life." Only not so much on having friends as people eager to benefit from association with him and who he uses before he discards them.
I could go on and on and on describing how the 12-year-old boy brat good-life of Donald Trump and how the law, big business, the whole edifice of unillegalized theft and graft which is the crown of curremt capitalist-liberalism - the mature form of that "enligthenment" 18th century secular horror that goes by the word "liberalism" - support him. It's a decades long, two-generations and counting quintessence of total libertarian freedom as only rich, white, Americans can perfect it, though rich white and a few non-whites in the wider world of 2100 billionaires can provide other examples of the type.
And most telling of all, Donald Trump, the Donald Trump that millions of Americans voted for, is a 100% creation of the freest of free-presses in the freest of free-speech regimes in history, under the Warren Court, ACLU notion of free speech-free press.
That his major vehicle to the presidency was something called a REALITY SHOW, "reality" as a show, a "REALITY" which was a totally phony, scripted presentation of the gangster-businessman that he played in "real life" only as propped up by gangster lawyers and others and as supported by the national and, especially New York City media. The phony "reality" scripted and planned to attract the most easily gulled eyes to sell advertising, using all of the deceptive methods of the PR and ad industry to do that.
Yet people were shocked at how fast the post-truth nature of the Trump years have been made normal to those trained by TV viewing to accept such "reality."
Jesus says, in the Gospel of John, "You will know the truth and the truth will make you free." The truth isn't generally compatible with a libertarian notion of freedom, it's a harsh and often unwelcomed thing, not the seductive, attractive crap that the entertainment and infotanement media provide us. We were warned that if we want freedom in any livable and important meaning of the word, it was going to be on such terms as the truth sets, not what was most pleasing. That well known passage is closely followed by, "Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin." And so we are enslaved by the seductions presented to us as seen on TV.
Modernism, many of its assumptions, from the most obviously scuzzy and sleazy to its loftiest sounding mistakes is unsustainable, it is certainly destructive of egalitarian democracy, economic justice and a livable environment. The very language of it corrupts even the most lofty seeming of terms.
That definition of "freedom" and, even more so "liberty" not to mention such other things as "relativity" are dangerously flawed. And then there's "justice."
So is the bizarre notion of "fairness" in which some of the worst desires of some of the worst of us are to be allowed and permitted and promoted and encouraged out of "fairness" not to mention the use of the term by the media in order to promote Trumpian lies, especially when called "balance". Which is a method of the "press" the media lying for its own benefit. Just as an example, there is no rational "fairness" given to those who want to destroy equality. There is nothing fair about giving those who would destroy the rights and lives of innocent people the chance to succeed in doing so. There is no right for those who want to destroy the rights and lives of others the chance to try to.
There is nothing nice about being nice to Nazis in that idiotic, irresponsible, post-war ACLU way, there is nothing fair about being fair to fascists, and they are the ones who make that so because they are not for fairness and they are certainly not for niceness. It is not moral to give such people any chance to do what they want to do, egalitarian democracy is not under any moral obligation to give them the chance to destroy egalitarian democracy. And if the law cannot sort that out then the law needs to be changed for that which can sort it out. Even if we have to dump the entire legal code and the theory that supports the mentally defective thing we've got there now.
Those are what brought us here.
We are living the inversion of values that Nietzsche predicted would come with the triumph of materialist-atheist-scientism, the death of God, which he welcomed. And which is going to kill us all - as Mr. Pierce asks, have you been watching Australia this month?
It doesn't work and there is no going back. We couldn't if we wanted to and we shouldn't want to. What modernism replaced didn't work, we have no choice but to go on to a future learning the disaster we have wrought in the name of freedom and fairness. Though those were only ever a cover up for the interests of the billionaire owners and the millionaire employees of the media. They sounded better than what they were really up to.
I'm not optimistic that we will change fast enough to avoid our own extinction and certainly not the extinction of myriads of other species. But we have to try, we have an obligation to try.
Trump is still there, so is Boris Johnson and Viktor Orban etc. Putin, the puppet master of the West under unlimited free speech-free press is still jerking us around as we still pretend it's the late 18th century. We are still stuck in the same thing the 18th century slave-owners, sharp businessmen and crooked lawyers and bankers of then gave us and we are suckered into not fixing it. We've still got the Electoral college and the travesty of the anti-democratically constructed Senate. We have retained the unconstitutional government by Court that the Supreme Court gave itself with no vote from The People or The Peoples' representatives.
Like Charles Pierce, I grew up with a lot of the same things learned and, yes, they were wrong. That's why we're in such trouble.
Tuesday, December 31, 2019
My Last Word On This For The Year
If countries have a "right to exist" then all of those awful countries I named have a "right to exist" the Großdeutsches Reich would have to have had a "right to exist" and my parents as well as all of the other millions who fought to destroy it were committing an immoral act. And if Simps doesn't want to admit what they did was right he can fuck himself into the flames of hell with his own head which he doesn't seem to have much of a need of, in any case. And that goes for his tag team buddies, too.
States can have legitimacy, based on the just consent of the governed, states cannot have rights. The government, the ruler of a state doesn't have a right to hold an office, they have the privilege to serve as public servants. And it's too dangerous to even consider it a privilege, it should be considered a temporary obligation based on honorable performance of their chosen obligations. We'd all be safer if that was the language that was used instead of the misapplication and misunderstanding of the language of "rights". I will note, in a quick review of the concept of "states right to exist" the use of the term is pretty dodgy, vague and very popular with some pretty shady characters.
Israel is just another country, it's not in any way a special entity. It has been a country under the increasingly strong hold of fascism since about 1977, as the Jewish scholars in that open letter warning of just such a thing predicted in 1948. They were right. Something I came to see with the assassination of the last decent PM they had Yitzhak Rabin. I will never, ever say that the Likud state has any right to exist anymore than I would say the Kim regime or the Saudi state has a right to exist. I don't even hold that the United States holds such rights, The People hold rights and, as it says in the founding document of my country, the United States,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.
Governments are artificial entites created by people, they are not created by God, people have the ability to lend legitimacy to a government of, by and for, THE PEOPLE, The People do not have the power to create rights. That is clear in the argument because it notes that The People have the right to dissolve a state and form a new one.
The People have the rights, the state does not. There are problems with some of the text but that is something they got absolutely right.
Update: "Post-modernism" is another such term that is inapt. Post-modernism is a development of the secular-scientistic modernism I'm talking about and it was, as well, anticipated in many respects by Nietzsche, who I despise but who understood as just about no one else did the consequences of buying the ideas of the enlightenment, which produce such darkness. I'm talking about scrapping the things that led to those.
Update 2: Stupy tried to make a syllogistic argument, the results are hilarious. I'd post it but I don't want to add to the level of ignorance and irrationality, the world is overburdened with those.
Update: "Post-modernism" is another such term that is inapt. Post-modernism is a development of the secular-scientistic modernism I'm talking about and it was, as well, anticipated in many respects by Nietzsche, who I despise but who understood as just about no one else did the consequences of buying the ideas of the enlightenment, which produce such darkness. I'm talking about scrapping the things that led to those.
Update 2: Stupy tried to make a syllogistic argument, the results are hilarious. I'd post it but I don't want to add to the level of ignorance and irrationality, the world is overburdened with those.
How Are You Celebrating The New Year?
Thought I might put up a calendar. But I'll wait till tomorrow morning. I wouldn't want to jinx things by anticipating it. I'd hate to wake up and find out it was still 2019.
Maybe I'll go crazy and write the new year on my first ten checks. By the time I've used them maybe I'll get used to writing it. And you guys think I don't know how to have fun.
I will not be staying up though I suspect the idiots around here will be setting off fireworks. I will not be muttering "Imagine" though I might be muttering something saltier.
If Democrats win the election with a half-decent candidate, I'll celebrate on the day Trump is out and on the lam. I hope to see him perp walked with a chorus line of his cronies and corrupt brats.
Maybe I'll go crazy and write the new year on my first ten checks. By the time I've used them maybe I'll get used to writing it. And you guys think I don't know how to have fun.
I will not be staying up though I suspect the idiots around here will be setting off fireworks. I will not be muttering "Imagine" though I might be muttering something saltier.
If Democrats win the election with a half-decent candidate, I'll celebrate on the day Trump is out and on the lam. I hope to see him perp walked with a chorus line of his cronies and corrupt brats.
End Of Year 2019 - Charles Pierce - You Should Stop Wondering - Your Suspicion Is Correct
This is the year now in which we decide for the foreseeable future what kind of government we want. But, while we’re making up our woolly minds about it, the world is rolling on. Australia literally is burning down. In Europe, the EU is falling apart and people are slapping on armbands again. The Middle East is what it’s been for 40 years—a hot, angry region in which we truly have no place and no idea what to do there. This is a really bad time for American democracy to be deciding whether it wants to go into the future merely as an extended exercise in performance art.
Optimism is not exactly something that’s just lying around on the floor, waiting to be picked up. It’s something we have to work for again. It’s a heavy lift, but a necessary one. All we have as we enter 2020 is, well, us. In 1979, I was just starting out in this racket and there was so much I didn’t know about anything. As 2019 ends, I have come to wonder if everything I’ve learned is wrong. An open question for the opening of the new year. Comfort and joy to you all from all of us.
Charles Pierce As 2019 Ends, I Have to Wonder Whether Everything I've Learned Is Wrong Optimism is something we have to work for again.
I am sure I would risk offending if I were to say outright that modern thought is a failed project. Still, clearly it partakes as much of error as the worst thinking that it has displaced.
Marilynne Robinson: The Death of Adam: Darwinism
The Robinson quote gives the estimable Mr. Pierce his answer. It is also an example of what I said this morning about all of our most piously recited secular-civic faith which is as good an example of the failed project, modernism, as anything. By "modernism" I'm, of course, not talking about music ("modernism" doesn't really work for music) or as much the visual arts, though any which use text might have some modernism in their content. I'm talking about the scientific-secular world view which dominates everything and has for generations.
I didn't realize the other day when I said that those who figured I wanted to return to some pre-"enlightenment" past believed that's what I meant, they were wrong. The "enlightenement" is a highly flawed, deeply mistaken response to what came before it - all human intellectual movements are flawed and deeply mistaken responses, none of those in the past is worth trying to repeat, though there may be much to learn from them in a positive sense as well as in what not to retry.
We fetishize something we call "freedom" and as in several of the other words I've noted problems with, "freedom" is one of the most seriously in need of consideration. There is nothing good about a libertarian, libertine, freedom such as we are governed by in the post-WWII period.
I find it incredible that we have the perfect example of a specimen of complete personal freedom such as the kind we imagine we hanker after in "democracy" in the post-war, modernist period in Donald Trump and that example of this kind of dystopian freedom isn't more fully understood after this many years of seeing him in action.
He is a man who has done exactly what he has wanted to, using his daddy's gangster money and money they've conned and stolen from banks which - no doubt due to heavy government subsidy - have allowed him to go on a spree of borrowing, bankruptcy, borrowing from other, ever more shady lenders - living large, what is called in one of the most detestable of post-war ballads "The good-life." Only not so much on having friends as people eager to benefit from association with him and who he uses before he discards them.
I could go on and on and on describing how the 12-year-old boy brat good-life of Donald Trump and how the law, big business, the whole edifice of unillegalized theft and graft which is the crown of cirremt capitalist-liberalism (the mature form of that "enligthenment" 18th century secular horror that goes by the word "liberalism" support him. It's a decades, two-generations and counting quintessence of total libertarian freedom as only rich, white, Americans can perfect it, though rich white and a few non-whites in the wider world of 2100 billionaires can provide other examples of the type.
And most telling of all, Donald Trump, the Donald Trump that millions of Americans voted for, is a 100% creation of the freest of free-presses in the freest of free-speech regimes in history, under the Warren Court, ACLU notion of free speech-free press.
That his major vehicle to the presidency was something called a REALITY SHOW, a "REALITY" which was a totally phony, scripted presentation of the gangster-businessman that he played in "real life" only as propped up by gangster lawyers and others and as supported by the national and, especially New York City media. The phony "reality" scripted and planned to attract the most easily gulled eyes to sell advertising, using all of the deceptive methods of the PR and ad industry to do that.
Yet people were shocked at how fast the post-truth nature of the Trump years have been made normal to those trained by TV viewing to accept such "reality."
Modernism, many of its assumptions, from the most obviously scuzzy and sleazy to its loftiest sounding mistakes is unsustainable, it is certainly destructive of egalitarian democracy, economic justice and a livable environment.
That definition of "freedom" and, even more so "liberty" not to mention such other things as "relativity" are dangerously flawed
So is the bizarre notion of "fairness" in which some of the worst desires of some of the worst of us are to be allowed and permitted and promoted and encouraged out of "fairness" not to mention the use of the term by the media in order to promote Trumpian lies, especially when called "balance". Which is a method of the "press" the media lying for its own benefit.
Those are what brought us here.
We are living the inversion of values that Nietzsche predicted would come with the triumph of materialist-atheist-scientism, which he welcomed. And which is going to kill us all - as Mr. Pierce asks, have you been watching Australia this month?
It doesn't work and there is no going back. What modernism replaced didn't work, we have no choice but to go on to a future learning the disaster we have wrought in the name of freedom and fairness. Though those were only ever a cover up for the interests of the billionaire owners and the millionaire employees of the media. They sounded better than what they were really up to.
I'm not optimistic that we will change fast enough to avoid our own extinction and certainly not the extinction of myriads of other species. But we have to try, we have an obligation to try.
Trump is still there, so is Boris Johnson and Viktor Orban etc. Putin, the puppet master of the West under unlimited free speech-free press is still jerking us around as we still pretend it's the late 18th century. Goddamned slave-owner-businessmen-banker founders.
Optimism is not exactly something that’s just lying around on the floor, waiting to be picked up. It’s something we have to work for again. It’s a heavy lift, but a necessary one. All we have as we enter 2020 is, well, us. In 1979, I was just starting out in this racket and there was so much I didn’t know about anything. As 2019 ends, I have come to wonder if everything I’ve learned is wrong. An open question for the opening of the new year. Comfort and joy to you all from all of us.
Charles Pierce As 2019 Ends, I Have to Wonder Whether Everything I've Learned Is Wrong Optimism is something we have to work for again.
I am sure I would risk offending if I were to say outright that modern thought is a failed project. Still, clearly it partakes as much of error as the worst thinking that it has displaced.
Marilynne Robinson: The Death of Adam: Darwinism
The Robinson quote gives the estimable Mr. Pierce his answer. It is also an example of what I said this morning about all of our most piously recited secular-civic faith which is as good an example of the failed project, modernism, as anything. By "modernism" I'm, of course, not talking about music ("modernism" doesn't really work for music) or as much the visual arts, though any which use text might have some modernism in their content. I'm talking about the scientific-secular world view which dominates everything and has for generations.
I didn't realize the other day when I said that those who figured I wanted to return to some pre-"enlightenment" past believed that's what I meant, they were wrong. The "enlightenement" is a highly flawed, deeply mistaken response to what came before it - all human intellectual movements are flawed and deeply mistaken responses, none of those in the past is worth trying to repeat, though there may be much to learn from them in a positive sense as well as in what not to retry.
We fetishize something we call "freedom" and as in several of the other words I've noted problems with, "freedom" is one of the most seriously in need of consideration. There is nothing good about a libertarian, libertine, freedom such as we are governed by in the post-WWII period.
I find it incredible that we have the perfect example of a specimen of complete personal freedom such as the kind we imagine we hanker after in "democracy" in the post-war, modernist period in Donald Trump and that example of this kind of dystopian freedom isn't more fully understood after this many years of seeing him in action.
He is a man who has done exactly what he has wanted to, using his daddy's gangster money and money they've conned and stolen from banks which - no doubt due to heavy government subsidy - have allowed him to go on a spree of borrowing, bankruptcy, borrowing from other, ever more shady lenders - living large, what is called in one of the most detestable of post-war ballads "The good-life." Only not so much on having friends as people eager to benefit from association with him and who he uses before he discards them.
I could go on and on and on describing how the 12-year-old boy brat good-life of Donald Trump and how the law, big business, the whole edifice of unillegalized theft and graft which is the crown of cirremt capitalist-liberalism (the mature form of that "enligthenment" 18th century secular horror that goes by the word "liberalism" support him. It's a decades, two-generations and counting quintessence of total libertarian freedom as only rich, white, Americans can perfect it, though rich white and a few non-whites in the wider world of 2100 billionaires can provide other examples of the type.
And most telling of all, Donald Trump, the Donald Trump that millions of Americans voted for, is a 100% creation of the freest of free-presses in the freest of free-speech regimes in history, under the Warren Court, ACLU notion of free speech-free press.
That his major vehicle to the presidency was something called a REALITY SHOW, a "REALITY" which was a totally phony, scripted presentation of the gangster-businessman that he played in "real life" only as propped up by gangster lawyers and others and as supported by the national and, especially New York City media. The phony "reality" scripted and planned to attract the most easily gulled eyes to sell advertising, using all of the deceptive methods of the PR and ad industry to do that.
Yet people were shocked at how fast the post-truth nature of the Trump years have been made normal to those trained by TV viewing to accept such "reality."
Modernism, many of its assumptions, from the most obviously scuzzy and sleazy to its loftiest sounding mistakes is unsustainable, it is certainly destructive of egalitarian democracy, economic justice and a livable environment.
That definition of "freedom" and, even more so "liberty" not to mention such other things as "relativity" are dangerously flawed
So is the bizarre notion of "fairness" in which some of the worst desires of some of the worst of us are to be allowed and permitted and promoted and encouraged out of "fairness" not to mention the use of the term by the media in order to promote Trumpian lies, especially when called "balance". Which is a method of the "press" the media lying for its own benefit.
Those are what brought us here.
We are living the inversion of values that Nietzsche predicted would come with the triumph of materialist-atheist-scientism, which he welcomed. And which is going to kill us all - as Mr. Pierce asks, have you been watching Australia this month?
It doesn't work and there is no going back. What modernism replaced didn't work, we have no choice but to go on to a future learning the disaster we have wrought in the name of freedom and fairness. Though those were only ever a cover up for the interests of the billionaire owners and the millionaire employees of the media. They sounded better than what they were really up to.
I'm not optimistic that we will change fast enough to avoid our own extinction and certainly not the extinction of myriads of other species. But we have to try, we have an obligation to try.
Trump is still there, so is Boris Johnson and Viktor Orban etc. Putin, the puppet master of the West under unlimited free speech-free press is still jerking us around as we still pretend it's the late 18th century. Goddamned slave-owner-businessmen-banker founders.
Absolutely Needed Before The Iowa Caucus - A Constitutional Amendment Banning People Over 75 As President
Joe Biden says he would consider a Republican for his running mate
And don't get me started on Bernie and Bloomberg. It would also mean that Trump would have to resign if that went into effect and he gets in again. You can throw in the Supreme Court, too. It's absurd that those people with a foot in the grave get to make the impossible to fix judicially made law for the next three generations. Or we could just get rid of government by judiciary.
We Will Adapt Giving Up Our Most Treasured Slogans and Habits Or Democracy Is Done For
I have become increasingly alarmed at how the habits of Constitutional law and culture of the "First Amendment" kind have left us totally open to attack using lies, slander, libel and coordinated neo-Nazi-fascist-post-Marxist attacks. Democracy cannot live with allowing the liberties to media, social media, individuals to do what computers and the internet and media consolidation has made possible. We will either find a way to accommodate the right of the media to tell the truth to that new reality or the granted freedom to lie with impunity will destroy that right to tell the truth along with all of the other necessary components of egalitarian democracy.
This piece from Chris Hays show is especially alarming, showing how the neo-Nazi Gorka has hold of the mind of the mentally deficient media-created Trump, which controls our news media which doesn't change its habits to meet that reality.
Our legal and cultural habits have not really even accommodated themselves to the mid-20th century media, the Supreme Court and other precedents set then have already brought us to this crisis made even worse by the internet. We will either change those habits and laws drastically to meet the dangers to democracy or democracy is finished. And it can't be done while maintaining those free-speech-free-press absolutist postures because those are what got us here.
This piece from Chris Hays show is especially alarming, showing how the neo-Nazi Gorka has hold of the mind of the mentally deficient media-created Trump, which controls our news media which doesn't change its habits to meet that reality.
Our legal and cultural habits have not really even accommodated themselves to the mid-20th century media, the Supreme Court and other precedents set then have already brought us to this crisis made even worse by the internet. We will either change those habits and laws drastically to meet the dangers to democracy or democracy is finished. And it can't be done while maintaining those free-speech-free-press absolutist postures because those are what got us here.
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