Saturday, July 4, 2020
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Dr. Cheryl Black - William's Leap For Freedom
William's Leap for Freedom, hosted by Dion Graham, is an original one hour audio drama based on the life of freed slave William Wells Brown. The Audie-nominated performance was recorded live at the June 2010 NATF workshop in West Plains, Missouri and stars Mirron E. Willis as Wells Brown and features Barbara Rosenblat along with a multi-voice cast.
William's Leap for Freedom is a two part drama; a play within a play. This performance, was adapted for audio from the stage play, William Wells Brown's Leap for Freedom written for the stage by Dr. Cheryl Black of the University of Missouri Department of Theatre.
Dr. Black's play was written and produced in 2008 for the Missouri State Historical society's Missouri History in Performance Theater. In 2009 it was adapted for the National Audio Theartre Festivals by Renee Pringle of NPR, with assistance from mentor Sue Zizza.
Beginning with a fictionalized conversation between William Wells Brown and Mr. Polite, this audio dramatization then introduces part two of the play which features selected portions of The Escape or Leap for Freedom, as it relates to the tale of three slaves, Cato, Glen and Melinda. Brown often stated that this play specifically was autobiographical. The couple, Glen and Melinda, did exist, while Cato is Brown himself.
ABOUT WILLIAM WELLS BROWNWells Brown was born a slave in Lexington, Kentucky in 1814. It is said that his mother was the daughter of Daniel Boone and a black slave, while his father was known to be a member of the Wickliffe family of Kentucky and Louisiana.
Throughout his lifetime, Brown was a fugitive slave, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, an abolitionist, an anti-slavery lecturer, an historian, a medical doctor, and a poet.
Brown is the author of the first novel, the first drama, and the first travelogue published by an African American in the U.S. His particular life experiences gave him a thorough education and with that came an understanding of human nature, and of American culture and society, from 1814 through 1884.
In 1856, Brown decided to stop giving lectures at paid abolitionist engagements and instead began performing his dramas. Through drama he emphasized that all Americans, northern and southern, participated in deceptions necessary to support the system of slavery.
A popular form of drama at the time was the blackface minstrel. Using minstrel comedy in reverse, Brown was able to dispel familiar stereotypes and ridicule the perpetrators of those misrepresentations. In this way, Escape or Leap for Freedom is also a commentary on the minstrel style.
Brown consistently emphasized that blacks should use wit and trickery to fight against and survive their oppression, not heroic confrontation. His dramas emphasize the oppressive circumstances of black and white women; sexual violence against black women; the emasculation of black men; the hypocrisy of the religious community, and the paradox of a system of slavery in America, the so-called land of liberty.
Brown was known as a trickster among scholars. With guile, wit, and charm, he moved his white audiences to face issues without insulting them.
This production, directed by Pringle, with assistance from producer Sue Zizza was post produced by SueMedia Production's David Shinn.
"In what non-religious sense is human equality self-evident?"
Somewhere in my online drifting over the last couple of days I came across an assertion that Thomas Jefferson got his concept of "self-evident" truths from the natural science of his day. I don't know why he would have to have relied on that as our entire mental activity depends on a vast range of self-evident truths, which are self-evident only in the sense that we chose to believe what we saw and heard and, presumably later concluded for ourselves from our experience and from what those we chose to trust told us. I think his choice of the term "self-evident" in the famous phrase discussed, especially on the 4th of July, which commemorates that document that was to be forgotten once its aim of an independent republic had been achieved - the Constitution notably doesn't do much in the way of the assertion of self-evident equality and the self-evident endowment with unalienable rights, what they promised the common people who the mostly non-combatant founders hoped to get to fight for their independence from the British government. I don't know if he ever said where his inspiration for those words came from but self-evidence as an intellectual framing was available in a far older and far more stable form in the geometry that any educated person would have been familiar with, indeed the self-evident propositions of mathematics are what the less self-evident assertions of the natural sciences of Jefferson's time rested on. Certainly those of Newton and Descartes, Galileo and Copernicus did.
But, that aside, it's clear that the self-evidence of Jefferson's proposition would have made no sense at all unless they were based even more solidly on the assertions of the Jewish monotheistic articulation of God, God's intentions towards people and the world. There is no way in which his propositions can be asserted to be self-evident without that, nothing in geometry or physics or chemistry or the other sciences then or now can say about the matter of human equality and human rights. In short order science was used to make claims that the contrary was true, that humans were unequal - which Jefferson himself asserted as a matter of science, especially as his calculations of the benefits of slavery to his wealth became a topic of his correspondence - and that human freedom and rights were anything from merely a matter of social convention to a non-existent delusion of the chemical processes of our brains which, themselves, had no transcendent character that makes them any more significant than any other chemical reaction. Materialist scientism rusts out the claims of the Declaration of Independence, they don't support them in any way.
I hadn't intended to write this much but, there you go. I'm reposting the rest of this from a previous post.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, "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." This is the kind of thinking I would like to recommend. We don't know the nature of Jefferson's religious beliefs, or doubts, or disbeliefs. He seems to have been as original in this respect as in many others. But we do know he had recourse to the language and assumptions of Judeo-Christianity to articulate a vision of human nature. Each person is divinely created and given rights as a gift from God. And since these rights are given to him by God, he can never be deprived of them without defying divine intent. Jefferson has used Scripture to assert a particular form of human exceptionalism, one that anchors our nature, that is to say our dignity, in the reality outside the world of circumstance. It is no doubt true that he was using language that would have been familiar and authoritative in that time and place. And maybe political calculation led him to an assertion that was greater and richer than he could have made in the absence of calculation. But it seems fair to assume that if he could have articulated the ideas as or more effectively in other terms, he would have done so.
What would a secular paraphrase of that sentence look like? In what nonreligious terms is human equality self evident? As animals, some of us are smarter or stronger than others, as Jefferson was entirely in a position to know. What would be the nonreligious equivalent for the assertion that individual rights are sacrosanct in every case? Every civilization, including this one, has always been able to reason its way out of ignoring or denying the most minimal of claims to justice in any form that deserves the name. The temptation is always present and powerful because the rationalizations are always ready to hand. One group is congenitally inferior, another is alien or shiftless, or they are enemies of the people or of the state. Yet others are carriers of intellectual or spiritual contagion. Jeffereson makes the human person sacred, once by creation and again by endowment, and thereby sets individual rights outside the reach of rationalization.
My point is that lacking the terms of religion, essential things cannot be said. Jefferson's words acknowledge an essential mystery in human nature and circumstance. He does this by evoking the old faith that God knows us in ways we cannot know ourselves, and that he values us in ways we cannot value ourselves or one another because our intuition of the sacred is so radically limited. It is not surprising that the leader of a revolution taking place on the edge of a little-known continent, a an clearly intent on helping to create a new order of things would attempt an anthropology that would not preclude any good course history might take. Jefferson says that we are endowed with "certain" rights, and that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are "among these." He does not claim to offer an exhaustive list. Indeed he draws attention to the possibility that other "unalienable" rights might be added to it. And he gives us tht potent phrase "the pursuit of happiness." We are to seek our well-being as we define our well-being and determine for ourselves the means by which it might be achieved.
That epochal sentence is a profound acknowledgment of the fact that we don't know what we are. If Jefferson could see our world, he would surely feel confirmed in the intuition that led him to couch his anthropology in such open language. Granting the evils of our time, we must also grant the evils of his and the cultural constraints that so notoriously limited his vision. Yet, brilliantly, he factors that sense of historical and human limitation into a compressed, essential statement of human circumstance, making a strength and a principle of liberation of his and our radically imperfect understanding.
Marilynne Robinson: The Human Spirit And The Good Society
That was so well and beautifully said that I didn't want to break into it to comment.
So many places to start, perhaps first to point out to "the evils of his [Jefferson's times] and the cultural constraints that so notoriously limited his vision." His not only holding Black People in slavery but, also, raping and fathering children with a teenaged girl he held in slavery, his increasing both the number of those People he held in slavery and the intensity of scientific increase in their production, all of it dependent on and practiced through violence and the threat of violence. All slavery is a product of violence and the absolute opposite of the acknowledgement of the self-evident truths that the young Thomas Jefferson wrote as the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. It could have been that that document is the best thing about Jefferson, that year the best one he lived. And there were certainly other issues.
His articulation of the ideas he set out couldn't have been more impressive, especially under the analysis that Marilynne Robinson subjected it to and expanded in her recommendation of it. I have never read any better such articulation of the meaning of Jefferson's words, the only possible source of those ideas and their expansive potential that is, as well, dependent on his attribution of those human gifts to God.
As Marilynne Robinson asks, what would a secular, a scientific, a materialistic assertion of that idea look like? I am entirely certain that there could be no such secular, scientific, materialistic, atheistic articulation of that idea that wouldn't collapse into a rubble of internal contradiction. I am entirely certain that what she said is absolutely if not exactly self-evidently true, "lacking the terms of religion, essential things cannot be said."
And I think that her point that, "every civilization, including this one, has always been able to reason its way out of ignoring or denying the most minimal of claims to justice in any form that deserves the name," and, though she didn't state it, Thomas Jefferson's own biography proves that he certainly ignored his own claims, even if he didn't formally deny them, proves that anything short of a framing in which those truths are holdable to be "self-evident" even axiomatic will be a frame too weak to hold them up in practice. I absolutely have come to the conclusion that nothing short of a holding of divine will supporting them will work in any human society, under any humanly administered government.
I do think that the extent to which Americans, those who are devoted or casual secluarists or those who pretend to believe in Judeo-Christianity ignore or deny the moral obligation to respect those rights as a co-equal, concurrent endowment of God to all people will be the extent to which they give in to those tendencies. Jefferson doing so, with his words out there for all the world to see and to judge his actions by, proves that without that, even someone as able to articulate those claims as Jefferson was will give in to the temptation to ignore them.
I think that the ebb and flow of religious activity of the type that increases or decreases the explicitly religious foundation necessary for that truth to become not only self-evident but effecttively potent in real life can explain a lot about our national devotion to making those rights and their equal endowment real. The post-WWII period in the United States saw a sharp increase in religious activity among the liberal Protestant churches and there was, as well, a liberalizing movement in the Catholic religion that, I have come to believe, accounts for the liberalism of the 1960s. I believe our present day anti-democratic malaise is a product of that being made to be considered gauche among elites and that attitude trickling down the way to those who don't want to seem so. That de-religionizing has happened at the same time when the Mammonism of the TV hallelujah peddlers and radio ranters replaced (or were replaced in) mainline Protestantism and the neo-integralist backlash against Vatican II took hold of the Catholic Church in the John Paul II, Benedict XVI decades. That so many of the overt fascists on the courts are the product of that reactionary Catholic movement certainly accounts for their attacks on racial, gender and economic equality, even as those two arch-conservative popes issued encyclicals calling for the very things they attacked.
I am even prepared to think that the Supreme Court, ACLU driven campaign to de-religionize the public sphere has had more than a little to do with it. On top of that was their campaign to permit the media to tell any lie they chose to with impunity, and to bear false witness against those who were inconvenient or unprofitable to them, including the proponents of equality and equal justice and, especially, economic justice. Such liberals as supported that may well count as the biggest suckers in the history of the United States because under that regime of secular deregulated media things have gone to hell. It certainly wasn't the Gospel or The Law or the Prophets who brought us here, it wasn't Jefferson's greatest sentence of all of those he wrote which is entirely dependent on God to justify American democracy.
But, that aside, it's clear that the self-evidence of Jefferson's proposition would have made no sense at all unless they were based even more solidly on the assertions of the Jewish monotheistic articulation of God, God's intentions towards people and the world. There is no way in which his propositions can be asserted to be self-evident without that, nothing in geometry or physics or chemistry or the other sciences then or now can say about the matter of human equality and human rights. In short order science was used to make claims that the contrary was true, that humans were unequal - which Jefferson himself asserted as a matter of science, especially as his calculations of the benefits of slavery to his wealth became a topic of his correspondence - and that human freedom and rights were anything from merely a matter of social convention to a non-existent delusion of the chemical processes of our brains which, themselves, had no transcendent character that makes them any more significant than any other chemical reaction. Materialist scientism rusts out the claims of the Declaration of Independence, they don't support them in any way.
I hadn't intended to write this much but, there you go. I'm reposting the rest of this from a previous post.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, "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." This is the kind of thinking I would like to recommend. We don't know the nature of Jefferson's religious beliefs, or doubts, or disbeliefs. He seems to have been as original in this respect as in many others. But we do know he had recourse to the language and assumptions of Judeo-Christianity to articulate a vision of human nature. Each person is divinely created and given rights as a gift from God. And since these rights are given to him by God, he can never be deprived of them without defying divine intent. Jefferson has used Scripture to assert a particular form of human exceptionalism, one that anchors our nature, that is to say our dignity, in the reality outside the world of circumstance. It is no doubt true that he was using language that would have been familiar and authoritative in that time and place. And maybe political calculation led him to an assertion that was greater and richer than he could have made in the absence of calculation. But it seems fair to assume that if he could have articulated the ideas as or more effectively in other terms, he would have done so.
What would a secular paraphrase of that sentence look like? In what nonreligious terms is human equality self evident? As animals, some of us are smarter or stronger than others, as Jefferson was entirely in a position to know. What would be the nonreligious equivalent for the assertion that individual rights are sacrosanct in every case? Every civilization, including this one, has always been able to reason its way out of ignoring or denying the most minimal of claims to justice in any form that deserves the name. The temptation is always present and powerful because the rationalizations are always ready to hand. One group is congenitally inferior, another is alien or shiftless, or they are enemies of the people or of the state. Yet others are carriers of intellectual or spiritual contagion. Jeffereson makes the human person sacred, once by creation and again by endowment, and thereby sets individual rights outside the reach of rationalization.
My point is that lacking the terms of religion, essential things cannot be said. Jefferson's words acknowledge an essential mystery in human nature and circumstance. He does this by evoking the old faith that God knows us in ways we cannot know ourselves, and that he values us in ways we cannot value ourselves or one another because our intuition of the sacred is so radically limited. It is not surprising that the leader of a revolution taking place on the edge of a little-known continent, a an clearly intent on helping to create a new order of things would attempt an anthropology that would not preclude any good course history might take. Jefferson says that we are endowed with "certain" rights, and that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are "among these." He does not claim to offer an exhaustive list. Indeed he draws attention to the possibility that other "unalienable" rights might be added to it. And he gives us tht potent phrase "the pursuit of happiness." We are to seek our well-being as we define our well-being and determine for ourselves the means by which it might be achieved.
That epochal sentence is a profound acknowledgment of the fact that we don't know what we are. If Jefferson could see our world, he would surely feel confirmed in the intuition that led him to couch his anthropology in such open language. Granting the evils of our time, we must also grant the evils of his and the cultural constraints that so notoriously limited his vision. Yet, brilliantly, he factors that sense of historical and human limitation into a compressed, essential statement of human circumstance, making a strength and a principle of liberation of his and our radically imperfect understanding.
Marilynne Robinson: The Human Spirit And The Good Society
That was so well and beautifully said that I didn't want to break into it to comment.
So many places to start, perhaps first to point out to "the evils of his [Jefferson's times] and the cultural constraints that so notoriously limited his vision." His not only holding Black People in slavery but, also, raping and fathering children with a teenaged girl he held in slavery, his increasing both the number of those People he held in slavery and the intensity of scientific increase in their production, all of it dependent on and practiced through violence and the threat of violence. All slavery is a product of violence and the absolute opposite of the acknowledgement of the self-evident truths that the young Thomas Jefferson wrote as the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. It could have been that that document is the best thing about Jefferson, that year the best one he lived. And there were certainly other issues.
His articulation of the ideas he set out couldn't have been more impressive, especially under the analysis that Marilynne Robinson subjected it to and expanded in her recommendation of it. I have never read any better such articulation of the meaning of Jefferson's words, the only possible source of those ideas and their expansive potential that is, as well, dependent on his attribution of those human gifts to God.
As Marilynne Robinson asks, what would a secular, a scientific, a materialistic assertion of that idea look like? I am entirely certain that there could be no such secular, scientific, materialistic, atheistic articulation of that idea that wouldn't collapse into a rubble of internal contradiction. I am entirely certain that what she said is absolutely if not exactly self-evidently true, "lacking the terms of religion, essential things cannot be said."
And I think that her point that, "every civilization, including this one, has always been able to reason its way out of ignoring or denying the most minimal of claims to justice in any form that deserves the name," and, though she didn't state it, Thomas Jefferson's own biography proves that he certainly ignored his own claims, even if he didn't formally deny them, proves that anything short of a framing in which those truths are holdable to be "self-evident" even axiomatic will be a frame too weak to hold them up in practice. I absolutely have come to the conclusion that nothing short of a holding of divine will supporting them will work in any human society, under any humanly administered government.
I do think that the extent to which Americans, those who are devoted or casual secluarists or those who pretend to believe in Judeo-Christianity ignore or deny the moral obligation to respect those rights as a co-equal, concurrent endowment of God to all people will be the extent to which they give in to those tendencies. Jefferson doing so, with his words out there for all the world to see and to judge his actions by, proves that without that, even someone as able to articulate those claims as Jefferson was will give in to the temptation to ignore them.
I think that the ebb and flow of religious activity of the type that increases or decreases the explicitly religious foundation necessary for that truth to become not only self-evident but effecttively potent in real life can explain a lot about our national devotion to making those rights and their equal endowment real. The post-WWII period in the United States saw a sharp increase in religious activity among the liberal Protestant churches and there was, as well, a liberalizing movement in the Catholic religion that, I have come to believe, accounts for the liberalism of the 1960s. I believe our present day anti-democratic malaise is a product of that being made to be considered gauche among elites and that attitude trickling down the way to those who don't want to seem so. That de-religionizing has happened at the same time when the Mammonism of the TV hallelujah peddlers and radio ranters replaced (or were replaced in) mainline Protestantism and the neo-integralist backlash against Vatican II took hold of the Catholic Church in the John Paul II, Benedict XVI decades. That so many of the overt fascists on the courts are the product of that reactionary Catholic movement certainly accounts for their attacks on racial, gender and economic equality, even as those two arch-conservative popes issued encyclicals calling for the very things they attacked.
I am even prepared to think that the Supreme Court, ACLU driven campaign to de-religionize the public sphere has had more than a little to do with it. On top of that was their campaign to permit the media to tell any lie they chose to with impunity, and to bear false witness against those who were inconvenient or unprofitable to them, including the proponents of equality and equal justice and, especially, economic justice. Such liberals as supported that may well count as the biggest suckers in the history of the United States because under that regime of secular deregulated media things have gone to hell. It certainly wasn't the Gospel or The Law or the Prophets who brought us here, it wasn't Jefferson's greatest sentence of all of those he wrote which is entirely dependent on God to justify American democracy.
How Bizarre And Sordid Is This Monument Bullshit?
From Smithsonian Magazine:
The son of polygamist Mormons from Idaho, Borglum had no ties to the Confederacy, but he had white supremacist leanings. In letters he fretted about a “mongrel horde” overrunning the “Nordic” purity of the West, and once said, “I would not trust an Indian, off-hand, 9 out of 10, where I would not trust a white man 1 out of 10.” Above all, he was an opportunist. He aligned himself with the Ku Klux Klan, an organization reborn—it had faded after the Civil War—in a torch-light ceremony atop Stone Mountain in 1915. While there isn’t proof that Borglum officially joined the Klan, which helped fund the project, “he nonetheless became deeply involved in Klan politics,” John Taliaferro writes in Great White Fathers, his 2002 history of Mount Rushmore.
Borglum’s decision to work with the Klan wasn’t even a sound business proposition. By the mid-1920s, infighting left the group in disarray and fundraising for the Stone Mountain memorial stalled. Around then, the South Dakota historian behind the Mount Rushmore initiative approached Borglum—an overture that enraged Borglum’s Atlanta backers, who fired him on February 25, 1925. He took an ax to his models for the shrine, and with a posse of locals on his heels, fled to North Carolina.
The Stone Mountain sponsors sandblasted Borglum’s work and hired a new artist, Henry Augustus Lukeman, to execute the memorial, only adding to Borglum’s bitterness. “Every able man in America refused it, and thank God, every Christian,” Borglum later said of Lukeman. “They got a Jew.” (A third sculptor, Walker Kirtland Hancock, completed the memorial in 1972.)
Note the irony of the neo-Confederates sandblasting a "monument". Not to mention that the racist Borglum turned out to be a Jew-baiter as well.
I'll note that while the Smithonian article brings out what a sleaze he was, the general tone is more ironic than condemning. I think it ties in well with Trumps use of the atrocity in South Dakota, his and Borglum's motives in using it are identical.
From supporting the Klan to memorializing Lincoln: What are we to make of that trajectory? Anyone who creates an immensely popular sculpture by dynamiting 450,000 tons of stone from the Black Hills deserves recognition. Taliaferro says we like to think of America as the land of the self-made success, but the “flip side of that coin,” he says, “is that it’s our very selfishness—enlightened, perhaps, but primal in its drive for self-advancement—that is the building block of our red-white-and-blue civilization.” And no one represents that paradox better than Gutzon Borglum.
I'm not inclined to recognize that act as anything but a desecration of a natural wonder held sacred by people from whom it was stolen when gold by white gangsters was unfortunately found there. It should be as infamous as the Confederate monuments or those which were removed when the Nazis were deposed or Mussolini or the likes of the Ceausescu gangsters.
It would be ironic if in reaction to Trump's Republican-fascist chicken pox party there last night if it became associated with killing off lots of his supporters. Though they'll probably spread it to many innocent and even responsible people. Typhoid Trumpy.
The son of polygamist Mormons from Idaho, Borglum had no ties to the Confederacy, but he had white supremacist leanings. In letters he fretted about a “mongrel horde” overrunning the “Nordic” purity of the West, and once said, “I would not trust an Indian, off-hand, 9 out of 10, where I would not trust a white man 1 out of 10.” Above all, he was an opportunist. He aligned himself with the Ku Klux Klan, an organization reborn—it had faded after the Civil War—in a torch-light ceremony atop Stone Mountain in 1915. While there isn’t proof that Borglum officially joined the Klan, which helped fund the project, “he nonetheless became deeply involved in Klan politics,” John Taliaferro writes in Great White Fathers, his 2002 history of Mount Rushmore.
Borglum’s decision to work with the Klan wasn’t even a sound business proposition. By the mid-1920s, infighting left the group in disarray and fundraising for the Stone Mountain memorial stalled. Around then, the South Dakota historian behind the Mount Rushmore initiative approached Borglum—an overture that enraged Borglum’s Atlanta backers, who fired him on February 25, 1925. He took an ax to his models for the shrine, and with a posse of locals on his heels, fled to North Carolina.
The Stone Mountain sponsors sandblasted Borglum’s work and hired a new artist, Henry Augustus Lukeman, to execute the memorial, only adding to Borglum’s bitterness. “Every able man in America refused it, and thank God, every Christian,” Borglum later said of Lukeman. “They got a Jew.” (A third sculptor, Walker Kirtland Hancock, completed the memorial in 1972.)
Note the irony of the neo-Confederates sandblasting a "monument". Not to mention that the racist Borglum turned out to be a Jew-baiter as well.
I'll note that while the Smithonian article brings out what a sleaze he was, the general tone is more ironic than condemning. I think it ties in well with Trumps use of the atrocity in South Dakota, his and Borglum's motives in using it are identical.
From supporting the Klan to memorializing Lincoln: What are we to make of that trajectory? Anyone who creates an immensely popular sculpture by dynamiting 450,000 tons of stone from the Black Hills deserves recognition. Taliaferro says we like to think of America as the land of the self-made success, but the “flip side of that coin,” he says, “is that it’s our very selfishness—enlightened, perhaps, but primal in its drive for self-advancement—that is the building block of our red-white-and-blue civilization.” And no one represents that paradox better than Gutzon Borglum.
I'm not inclined to recognize that act as anything but a desecration of a natural wonder held sacred by people from whom it was stolen when gold by white gangsters was unfortunately found there. It should be as infamous as the Confederate monuments or those which were removed when the Nazis were deposed or Mussolini or the likes of the Ceausescu gangsters.
It would be ironic if in reaction to Trump's Republican-fascist chicken pox party there last night if it became associated with killing off lots of his supporters. Though they'll probably spread it to many innocent and even responsible people. Typhoid Trumpy.
You're Probably Wrong About Confederate Monuments
This guy does what so few video makers at Youtube do, he gives extensive documentation. I especially liked his reading of the GAR demand that the Confederate monument at Gettysburg be removed, from the 1880s.
Friday, July 3, 2020
Late Hate Mail
The total incompetence of Associate-professor of Biology P. Z. Myers comparing a cell wall to a "wall" of driftwood that accumulates on a beach couldn't be more obvious. The sticks and logs that accumulate on a shoreline don't interact with the other sticks and longs on a shoreline except,perhaps, to have their further progress up shore stopped by them. They don't do much of anything once there except decay. Once they've been stopped by each other, they really can't be said to do anything, they don't interact, they don't allow in or exclude molecules or smaller particles. THEY DON'T EVEN CONTAIN ANYTHING. They certainly don't contain the lake, the lake isn't there because of them, its continued existence as a lake doesn't depend on the "wall" working in any way. The lake doesn't divide into another lake due to the accumulation of molecules and structures within the driftwood wall. The wall doesn't split and reform - even arguably resealing itself around two new bodies of water. One stick in the driftwood wall cannot be said to have a functional relationship with any other stick not touching it as the molecules and structures within even the walls of the "simplest" organisms must have in order for it to function as a part of a living organism or part of one.
I would argue that to consider a driftwood accumulation on the shore of a body of water to be "complex" a complex unity is a rather naive and superficial way to, look at it. It is certainly, in no way, complex in the same way that the containing membrane of a single-cell organism is. The improbability of it forming by random chance events is certainly far less than the incredible improbably of a viable, working organism's cell wall forming and working by random chance.
Certainly the complex molecules that would have had to form, persist, come come together in proximity to each other for them to spontaneously form into a cell wall that just happened to contain other molecules of the same or, perhaps, even grater improbability so as to form the first living organism on Earth are far less likely to have been there and come together in just the right way at just the right time under just the right conditions AND TO HAVE WORKED PERFECTLY THE VERY FIRST TIME IN ORDER TO METABOLIZE, INTERNALLY GENERATE THE COMPONENTS OF REPRODUCTION - WITH NO TELEOLOGICAL PURPOSE FOR ANY OF THAT HAPPENING - AND SUCCESSFULLY REPRODUCING is far, far more remotely likely than the dead parts of many thousands, tens of thousands, and more large, complex, multicellular organisms falling into a body of water and floating on top until the waves of water pushed them ashore.
In every way P.Z. Myers' analogy is incompetent and stunningly stupid, coming from someone with his credentials and position.
I would argue that to consider a driftwood accumulation on the shore of a body of water to be "complex" a complex unity is a rather naive and superficial way to, look at it. It is certainly, in no way, complex in the same way that the containing membrane of a single-cell organism is. The improbability of it forming by random chance events is certainly far less than the incredible improbably of a viable, working organism's cell wall forming and working by random chance.
Certainly the complex molecules that would have had to form, persist, come come together in proximity to each other for them to spontaneously form into a cell wall that just happened to contain other molecules of the same or, perhaps, even grater improbability so as to form the first living organism on Earth are far less likely to have been there and come together in just the right way at just the right time under just the right conditions AND TO HAVE WORKED PERFECTLY THE VERY FIRST TIME IN ORDER TO METABOLIZE, INTERNALLY GENERATE THE COMPONENTS OF REPRODUCTION - WITH NO TELEOLOGICAL PURPOSE FOR ANY OF THAT HAPPENING - AND SUCCESSFULLY REPRODUCING is far, far more remotely likely than the dead parts of many thousands, tens of thousands, and more large, complex, multicellular organisms falling into a body of water and floating on top until the waves of water pushed them ashore.
In every way P.Z. Myers' analogy is incompetent and stunningly stupid, coming from someone with his credentials and position.
Excellent Post
The estimable rustypickup called RMJ's excellent post on the St. Louis couple who made themselves infamous by confronting peaceful marchers, who weren't even marching to their fabulous "gilded crypt" with loaded guns "a sermon for this Independence weekend" and such it is.
Repubican-fascists And Their Adoration of War Criminals
If you think calling Republicans "Republican-fascists" is unfair, watch this.
A man convicted of war crimes who accepts a pardon for those crimes is admitting to them. The American media, ESPCIALLY ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA, Hollywood and right-wing "news" promotes war criminals as heroes. That's exactly what fascist countries, the Nazis did and do. Just as Republicans glorify traitors and champions of slavery and racism.
They are the indigenous American fascist party. They have been for a very long time, now.
A man convicted of war crimes who accepts a pardon for those crimes is admitting to them. The American media, ESPCIALLY ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA, Hollywood and right-wing "news" promotes war criminals as heroes. That's exactly what fascist countries, the Nazis did and do. Just as Republicans glorify traitors and champions of slavery and racism.
They are the indigenous American fascist party. They have been for a very long time, now.
Thursday, July 2, 2020
My experience of long holiday weekends is that people don't read blogs so I'm not going to bother writing much till Monday. I hope everyone has a safe holiday, we had rain here so I'm not so worried about the idiots lighting the woods on fire with their damned fireworks. I hate the 4th of July for those damned things. I'll be cursing the damned Republicans for legalizing them here, again.
Probably The Stupidest Thing I've Heard An Atheist Ideologue Scientist Say About The Problem Of The Origin Of Life
This is still my favorite example of how the atheist-ideologue-scientist's mind grasping for an answer to the improbability of their origin of life scheme will grasp at any straw, or driftwood, to try to avoid dealing with it. The now largely forgotten P. Z. Myers (he was really big in blogland and the atheism industry back then) was trying to make the issue of a containing membrane in the first organism go away by, among other things, mistaking the issues of "complexity" with complex functionality. Atheists, especially those in science, are really shitty at thinking about things like what words mean and what they don't mean and when meanings might seem similar but aren't, really. He's hardly alone, I've shown, over and over again, that scientist-ideologues of atheism are always inserting their ideology directly into science and the teaching of science without anyone noticing, we're so used to that happening, or objecting to it.
This was such an obviously stupid metaphor for the containing membrane of a one-celled organism ONE MADE BY A FACULTY MEMBER IN A BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF AN ACCREDITED AMERICAN UNIVERSITY! that the group posting it is Myers' sworn enemies, the intelligent design industry.
I will note that Myers slips in a dig at those who believe in intelligent design, claiming that most of them don't have any training in biology. But that's certainly as true of those who believe in his atheist scheme of non-design. There are people who promote intelligent design who are more eminently qualified than Myers in biology, some of them holding probably more prestigious faculty positions in accredited universities which are not bastions of intelligent design. I would like to know who the audience who were listening to and chuckling along with PZ were because I'd bet that most of them know crap about biology. NO ONE WHO KNEW ANYTHING ABOUT THE BIOLOGY AND CHEMISTRY OF CELLULAR WALLS COULD HONESTLY NOT CRINGE AT WHAT HE COMPARES THOSE TO. A cell wall is functional, not merely accidental and inert. His comparison with a wall of debris on a lake shore and a human constructed wall, made for a functional purpose, was as logically inept as it was just plain stupid and lazy.
Dave Holland Quintet - How's Never
I don't see any difference.
Let's try a music video.
Steve Johnson, vibes
Robin Eubanks, trombone
Chris Potter, sax
Dave Holland, bass
Nate Smith, drums
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
Oliver Messiaen - Visions de l'Amen: - I. Amen de la Creation
Ralph van Raat and Hakon Austbo pianos
Continuing on with Hans Kung About The Radicalism Of The Gospel
Finishing Hans Kung's listing of ways in which God and reality are presented as the ultimate of radicalism. This is his third heading.
3. Love means renunciation; there is a warning against exploitation of the weak. A resolute renunciation of all that hinders readiness for God and neighbor is required. Expressed forcibly, it means even cutting off one's hand if it leads to temptation. Jesus however expects renunciation, not merely of negative things - of lust and sin - but also of positive things - of rights and power.
Typical of Jesus is voluntary renunciation without accepting anything in return. This can be expressed in concrete examples:
Renunciation of rights in favor of other person; going two miles with someone who has forced me to go one mile with him.
Renunciation of power at my own expense: giving my cloak also to someone who has already taken my coat.
Renunciation of counter-force: presenting the left cheek to someone who has struck me on the right.
These last examples especially show ore clearly that even that Jesus' requirements must not be understood as laws. Jesus does not mean that, while there can be no reprisals for a blow on the left cheek, it may be right to hit back after a blow in the stomach. Certainly these examples are are not meant to be taken merely symbolically. They are very typical borderline cases (frequently formulated in a somewhat exaggerated Eastern style) which might at any time become reality. But they are not to be understood in a legal sense, as commands that do just this and to do it constantly. Renunciation of force does not mean a priori renunciation of any resistance. According to the Gospel accounts, Jesus himself certainly did not present the other cheek, but protested when he was struck. Renunciation must not be confused with weakness. With Jesus' requirements, it is not a question of ethical or still less ascetic achievements which might make sense in themselves, but of blunt requests for the radical fulfillment of God's will in each particular case to the advantage of our fellow man. All renunciation is merely the negative aspect of a new positive force.
From this standpoint even the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament seem to be - in the Hegelian threefold sense - "canceled" (aufgehoben) discarded and yet preserved, elevated to a higher plane through the radical "higher righteousness" proclaimed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.
We must certainly not only have no other gods beside him, but must love him with our whole heart, our whole soul and our whole mind and our neighbor and even our enemy as ourselves;
We must not only not use God's name pointlessly, but we must not even swear by God.
We must not only make the Sabbath holy by resting, but must be active in doing going on that day.
We must not only honor father and mother in order to have a long life on earth, but - for the sake of true love - show them respect even by leaving them.
We must not only not kill, but we must refrain from angry thoughts and words.
We must not only not commit adultery, but we must avoid even adulterous intentions.
We must not only not steal, but we must even renounce the right to reparation for the wrong we have suffered.
WE must not only not bear false witness, but we must be so absolutely truthful that "Yes" means simply "Yes" and "No" means simply "No".
We must not only not cove our neighbor's house but we must even put up with evil. We must not only not covet our neighbor's wife, but must even refrain from seeking a "legal" divorce.
Was not the Apostle Paul right - here too in striking agreement with the Jesus of history - to claim that love is the fulfilling of the law? And according to Augustine, it may be stated more forcibly, "Love and do as you will." There is no new law, but a new freedom from the law.
But precisely in the light of all this, the question arises; was Jesus himself content with words, with appeals? Did he prefer a congenial, noncommittal, inconsequential, pure theory to practical action? What did Jesus do in the last resort? Did he put his own theory into practice?
So many things jump out of that, I mean other than an observation that I'm certainly nowhere close to fulfilling much of any of it. I look at what Kung said in regard to the extension on the Commandment against stealing, we must even renounce the right to reparation for the wrong we have suffered and can well imagine how that would be used in contemporary American politics around the pending issue of reparations. I will note that while that may make especially good sense when addressing people who have not been enslaved, it takes on a very different cast when it is told to people who have been enslaved, legally or on a de facto basis. And, I will point out, while it may require those with a right toreparation to renounce that right, there is not a statement that the OBLIGATION of those who have benefited from the enslavement of others has that obligation wiped out.
The claim is often made that Christians have constructed an easy way, a way of them getting off for doing evil - especially in the misunderstood theory of the Catholic sacrament of confession - but this passage shows that couldn't be farther from the truth. Jesus doesn't set out an easy road to salvation, it is the most radical one, the one with requirements as steep as its aspirations. It is exactly the kind of thing that I noted in the two interpretations of "freedom" and "liberty" which can either be taken to mean freedom to be selfish or freedom to be selfless, both individually as well as in the entire society. And I think egalitarian democracy, requiring similar renunciations of power and privilege, even what get called "rights" when those impinge on the greater rights of others is obviously related to what is said here. I think in this we find why Habermas named, specifically, the Christian doctrine of love as the only source of nourishment of the positive aspects of modern egalitarian democracy and the personal freedom which can either bless it, if exercised in lines similar to those Kung laid out here, or it can destroy it if taken in the "enlightenment" secular view of freedom and "rights" which allow those with natural or legally bestowed power and privilege to tyrannize those beneath them and to cheat those among them that they can get away with cheating.
3. Love means renunciation; there is a warning against exploitation of the weak. A resolute renunciation of all that hinders readiness for God and neighbor is required. Expressed forcibly, it means even cutting off one's hand if it leads to temptation. Jesus however expects renunciation, not merely of negative things - of lust and sin - but also of positive things - of rights and power.
Typical of Jesus is voluntary renunciation without accepting anything in return. This can be expressed in concrete examples:
Renunciation of rights in favor of other person; going two miles with someone who has forced me to go one mile with him.
Renunciation of power at my own expense: giving my cloak also to someone who has already taken my coat.
Renunciation of counter-force: presenting the left cheek to someone who has struck me on the right.
These last examples especially show ore clearly that even that Jesus' requirements must not be understood as laws. Jesus does not mean that, while there can be no reprisals for a blow on the left cheek, it may be right to hit back after a blow in the stomach. Certainly these examples are are not meant to be taken merely symbolically. They are very typical borderline cases (frequently formulated in a somewhat exaggerated Eastern style) which might at any time become reality. But they are not to be understood in a legal sense, as commands that do just this and to do it constantly. Renunciation of force does not mean a priori renunciation of any resistance. According to the Gospel accounts, Jesus himself certainly did not present the other cheek, but protested when he was struck. Renunciation must not be confused with weakness. With Jesus' requirements, it is not a question of ethical or still less ascetic achievements which might make sense in themselves, but of blunt requests for the radical fulfillment of God's will in each particular case to the advantage of our fellow man. All renunciation is merely the negative aspect of a new positive force.
From this standpoint even the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament seem to be - in the Hegelian threefold sense - "canceled" (aufgehoben) discarded and yet preserved, elevated to a higher plane through the radical "higher righteousness" proclaimed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.
We must certainly not only have no other gods beside him, but must love him with our whole heart, our whole soul and our whole mind and our neighbor and even our enemy as ourselves;
We must not only not use God's name pointlessly, but we must not even swear by God.
We must not only make the Sabbath holy by resting, but must be active in doing going on that day.
We must not only honor father and mother in order to have a long life on earth, but - for the sake of true love - show them respect even by leaving them.
We must not only not kill, but we must refrain from angry thoughts and words.
We must not only not commit adultery, but we must avoid even adulterous intentions.
We must not only not steal, but we must even renounce the right to reparation for the wrong we have suffered.
WE must not only not bear false witness, but we must be so absolutely truthful that "Yes" means simply "Yes" and "No" means simply "No".
We must not only not cove our neighbor's house but we must even put up with evil. We must not only not covet our neighbor's wife, but must even refrain from seeking a "legal" divorce.
Was not the Apostle Paul right - here too in striking agreement with the Jesus of history - to claim that love is the fulfilling of the law? And according to Augustine, it may be stated more forcibly, "Love and do as you will." There is no new law, but a new freedom from the law.
But precisely in the light of all this, the question arises; was Jesus himself content with words, with appeals? Did he prefer a congenial, noncommittal, inconsequential, pure theory to practical action? What did Jesus do in the last resort? Did he put his own theory into practice?
So many things jump out of that, I mean other than an observation that I'm certainly nowhere close to fulfilling much of any of it. I look at what Kung said in regard to the extension on the Commandment against stealing, we must even renounce the right to reparation for the wrong we have suffered and can well imagine how that would be used in contemporary American politics around the pending issue of reparations. I will note that while that may make especially good sense when addressing people who have not been enslaved, it takes on a very different cast when it is told to people who have been enslaved, legally or on a de facto basis. And, I will point out, while it may require those with a right toreparation to renounce that right, there is not a statement that the OBLIGATION of those who have benefited from the enslavement of others has that obligation wiped out.
The claim is often made that Christians have constructed an easy way, a way of them getting off for doing evil - especially in the misunderstood theory of the Catholic sacrament of confession - but this passage shows that couldn't be farther from the truth. Jesus doesn't set out an easy road to salvation, it is the most radical one, the one with requirements as steep as its aspirations. It is exactly the kind of thing that I noted in the two interpretations of "freedom" and "liberty" which can either be taken to mean freedom to be selfish or freedom to be selfless, both individually as well as in the entire society. And I think egalitarian democracy, requiring similar renunciations of power and privilege, even what get called "rights" when those impinge on the greater rights of others is obviously related to what is said here. I think in this we find why Habermas named, specifically, the Christian doctrine of love as the only source of nourishment of the positive aspects of modern egalitarian democracy and the personal freedom which can either bless it, if exercised in lines similar to those Kung laid out here, or it can destroy it if taken in the "enlightenment" secular view of freedom and "rights" which allow those with natural or legally bestowed power and privilege to tyrannize those beneath them and to cheat those among them that they can get away with cheating.
Why I Do Not Worship Random Chance As A Creator God - It's Just TOO Improbable - Hate Mail
I will revise and correct a paragraph from the post you didn't like to make you like it even less.
But that would get us back to just how improbable random chance assembling even the first organism so as it came to life, a persisting, containing membrane structure just happening to contain the right chemicals and structures [each of those structures certainly requiring an equally improbable random-chance assemblage, as well] so as to begin metabolism and maintenance of the organism before we get to the more incredible unlikelihood of random chance allowing its reproduction on the first and only try it would get to do that successfully, ending up with at least two of itself - if it reproduced to three, that first time or more, the chances against that happening rise incredibly fast.
If its unlikelihood happening once is measured as one times ten to some very large exponent of times. if the first act or reproduction resulted in more than one organism as a result, I would guess the first term in that equation would go up by the numbers of reproductions which would, of course, increase the resultant improbability on a very, very steep curve.
And that doesn't bring up the improbabilities involved with such things as the original organism internally reproducing things like those complex molecules and structures in the numbers allowing it to split into two or more viable organisms.
The internal mechanisms for allowing that internal reproduction of components - and to what random-chance, undetermined end? - is among the most improbable of the many improbabilities of the first organism arising by mere random chance. So far we've only imagined the organism reproducing beneficial internal structures and molecules, organisms, as well, generate those that endanger its continued life, but that's only an observation to show that there are random chances against it working, as well.
And, since we are supposed to detest teleology in biology as well as physics, why would it do that? Why would it split in a totally unprecedented way (there would be no such thing as precedent for that first organism)? What are the chances of those thing happening by random chance? If you imagine the scenario I described here - and I don't see how even the most daffy of abiogenetic ideologues could not believe that had to have happened - how could you maintain that all of the events preceding AND ALLOWING FOR SUCCESSFUL reproduction would have just happened without that result being anticipated?
No, it's totally implausible that that happened by mere random chance. God making it happen any number of times is far more plausible, the chance of it happening if God chose it to happen is one in one, not some integer times ten to an incredibly huge and ever underestimated exponent of times.
Atheists are always playing the plausibility game based on the chance of something happening. Well, you want to play that game, game on. I'm more than willing to look at their claims for just how much they are claiming happened by chance.
But that would get us back to just how improbable random chance assembling even the first organism so as it came to life, a persisting, containing membrane structure just happening to contain the right chemicals and structures [each of those structures certainly requiring an equally improbable random-chance assemblage, as well] so as to begin metabolism and maintenance of the organism before we get to the more incredible unlikelihood of random chance allowing its reproduction on the first and only try it would get to do that successfully, ending up with at least two of itself - if it reproduced to three, that first time or more, the chances against that happening rise incredibly fast.
If its unlikelihood happening once is measured as one times ten to some very large exponent of times. if the first act or reproduction resulted in more than one organism as a result, I would guess the first term in that equation would go up by the numbers of reproductions which would, of course, increase the resultant improbability on a very, very steep curve.
And that doesn't bring up the improbabilities involved with such things as the original organism internally reproducing things like those complex molecules and structures in the numbers allowing it to split into two or more viable organisms.
The internal mechanisms for allowing that internal reproduction of components - and to what random-chance, undetermined end? - is among the most improbable of the many improbabilities of the first organism arising by mere random chance. So far we've only imagined the organism reproducing beneficial internal structures and molecules, organisms, as well, generate those that endanger its continued life, but that's only an observation to show that there are random chances against it working, as well.
And, since we are supposed to detest teleology in biology as well as physics, why would it do that? Why would it split in a totally unprecedented way (there would be no such thing as precedent for that first organism)? What are the chances of those thing happening by random chance? If you imagine the scenario I described here - and I don't see how even the most daffy of abiogenetic ideologues could not believe that had to have happened - how could you maintain that all of the events preceding AND ALLOWING FOR SUCCESSFUL reproduction would have just happened without that result being anticipated?
No, it's totally implausible that that happened by mere random chance. God making it happen any number of times is far more plausible, the chance of it happening if God chose it to happen is one in one, not some integer times ten to an incredibly huge and ever underestimated exponent of times.
Atheists are always playing the plausibility game based on the chance of something happening. Well, you want to play that game, game on. I'm more than willing to look at their claims for just how much they are claiming happened by chance.
Here We Are Where We've Been Before, Where We Will Be
By heritage and personal experience of human folly, I expected this pandemic to be terrible, it's been terrible and it is getting worse and I now think it will be worse than I can now imagine. Especially as it will have new strains of viral disease helping it kill in the coming flu season. And they're talking about finding another meat-industry enhanced virus that has pandemic potential.* In such times the worst of human character plays a controlling part, it really shows up the strong link between what people mistake as "freedom," "liberty" if they want to get all Founding Fathers, and selfishness. Virtually every awful thing conservatives, Republicans, the secular play-left advocate or claim as a "right" is done through a claim of "freedom" especially when they say "liberty".
The language of rights and liberty is wide open to be a cover for selfishness, those words are as capable of enabling the most stupid selfishness as well as being used to describe the right for people to do and advocate for the most unselfish, generous and rational behavior. Unselfishness being, so often, ungratifying to the self, as well as harder than what is more gratifying it has the general character of being a tougher sell to a large number of people. That is the secret to the success of American-style conservatism, really of European style libertarianism and conservatism, that 18th century style of "liberalism" that frees the rich to enjoy and enhance their wealth, that is in opposition to the more traditional American liberalism that had the name before then which is based on generous, "liberal" provision to the least among us.
It also plays out in FOX, Sinclair, the right wing media, the Republican-fascist politics which they sponsor appealing to the stupidest, most selfish inclinations of people in order to gull and swindle them. In the case of this pandemic disease, the anti-mask, anti-shut-down, anti-responsibility being peddled to their Republican-fascist viewers, many of them in the age cohort most vulnerable to the disease - that gulling and swindling them is getting them killed or putting them in danger of being seriously, disastrously ill. And if not them their nearest and dearest as well as anyone else they come in contact with.
The "liberty" the "freedom of the press" that is enshrined in the irresponsibly inspecific First Amendment should rationally and rightly be indicted for its major role in permitting the disastrous course the American Covid-19 pandemic. From the racism promoted through it about the pandemic to Trump peddling his adult Chicken Pox party style rallies, to literally everything else about what has made, especially the "red states" most influenced by that kind of criminal irresponsibility shows that the traditional, post-war interpretation of the First Amendment, by "liberal" as well as Republican-fascist courts is extremely dangerous. If you think regulating the press so it doesn't spread homicidal lies is an infringment on personal freedom, getting intubated as last ditch resort to trying to keep you alive IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO HAVE ONE AVAILABLE DUE TO THE REPUBLICANS AND MEDIA SPREADING THE PANDEMIC is somewhat more of an inhibition of your personal style.
I wish I'd copied the doctor's tweet about wearing a mask and taking other precautions or get intubated by a novice doctor in an unrelated field who did their last semester online. It was a good one.
* I've always told people as they promoted promiscuity and things like anal sex as being kew-el and transgressive and fashionable that even though they may have the stupid belief that AIDS ended (it didn't, in anything except the ability of rich people to, as of now, control its severity) that there was absolutely no guarantee that another deadly pandemic couldn't arise through the same means that AIDS developed into one through risky sex, needle exchange and blood donations by infected people in the period before the virus is even noticed. It wasn't a welcomed message among gay men in the 1980s, even as they saw the new disease killing men, even as it was clear that there was a link between promiscuous sex in places like bath houses and sex bars and the disease. So much of what we're seeing about the assertions of "freedom and liberty" so much of the denial of reality among the Republican-fascists and their criminally irresponsible media was seen by those of us observing the early years of the AIDS pandemic. Only differnece is that there is no homophobic content in the irresponsible misinformation about this present pandemic to complicate things. Though that might have had anti-"liberal" anti-North-Eastern, anti-Democratic bigotry as a media and Republican-fascist promoted and exploited stand in.
The potential of the factory farming or even small farming of animals for the meat and egg industry giving rise to novel viruses, involving ever so many more animals kept in ways to insure that they take in each others virus carrying body fluids and breath, is even more obvious a means of that happening. The workers and those they come in contact with take in those viruses too. Unless the entire human population takes up a vegan diet, this is hardly going to be the last one. The next one could come from any meat or egg producing operation anywhere in the world. I would expect there are many that arise that way which don't kill people dramatically so they are never intensively studied or named. I don't anticipate that veganism will rise greatly - the online cooking shows certainly aren't doing a lot to promote a diet that doesn't contribute to the generation of pandemic viruses. Which I have to say, I find enormously frustrating. But there it is. The worst of human follies can be carried in what we assume is the simplest of pleasures.
The language of rights and liberty is wide open to be a cover for selfishness, those words are as capable of enabling the most stupid selfishness as well as being used to describe the right for people to do and advocate for the most unselfish, generous and rational behavior. Unselfishness being, so often, ungratifying to the self, as well as harder than what is more gratifying it has the general character of being a tougher sell to a large number of people. That is the secret to the success of American-style conservatism, really of European style libertarianism and conservatism, that 18th century style of "liberalism" that frees the rich to enjoy and enhance their wealth, that is in opposition to the more traditional American liberalism that had the name before then which is based on generous, "liberal" provision to the least among us.
It also plays out in FOX, Sinclair, the right wing media, the Republican-fascist politics which they sponsor appealing to the stupidest, most selfish inclinations of people in order to gull and swindle them. In the case of this pandemic disease, the anti-mask, anti-shut-down, anti-responsibility being peddled to their Republican-fascist viewers, many of them in the age cohort most vulnerable to the disease - that gulling and swindling them is getting them killed or putting them in danger of being seriously, disastrously ill. And if not them their nearest and dearest as well as anyone else they come in contact with.
The "liberty" the "freedom of the press" that is enshrined in the irresponsibly inspecific First Amendment should rationally and rightly be indicted for its major role in permitting the disastrous course the American Covid-19 pandemic. From the racism promoted through it about the pandemic to Trump peddling his adult Chicken Pox party style rallies, to literally everything else about what has made, especially the "red states" most influenced by that kind of criminal irresponsibility shows that the traditional, post-war interpretation of the First Amendment, by "liberal" as well as Republican-fascist courts is extremely dangerous. If you think regulating the press so it doesn't spread homicidal lies is an infringment on personal freedom, getting intubated as last ditch resort to trying to keep you alive IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO HAVE ONE AVAILABLE DUE TO THE REPUBLICANS AND MEDIA SPREADING THE PANDEMIC is somewhat more of an inhibition of your personal style.
I wish I'd copied the doctor's tweet about wearing a mask and taking other precautions or get intubated by a novice doctor in an unrelated field who did their last semester online. It was a good one.
* I've always told people as they promoted promiscuity and things like anal sex as being kew-el and transgressive and fashionable that even though they may have the stupid belief that AIDS ended (it didn't, in anything except the ability of rich people to, as of now, control its severity) that there was absolutely no guarantee that another deadly pandemic couldn't arise through the same means that AIDS developed into one through risky sex, needle exchange and blood donations by infected people in the period before the virus is even noticed. It wasn't a welcomed message among gay men in the 1980s, even as they saw the new disease killing men, even as it was clear that there was a link between promiscuous sex in places like bath houses and sex bars and the disease. So much of what we're seeing about the assertions of "freedom and liberty" so much of the denial of reality among the Republican-fascists and their criminally irresponsible media was seen by those of us observing the early years of the AIDS pandemic. Only differnece is that there is no homophobic content in the irresponsible misinformation about this present pandemic to complicate things. Though that might have had anti-"liberal" anti-North-Eastern, anti-Democratic bigotry as a media and Republican-fascist promoted and exploited stand in.
The potential of the factory farming or even small farming of animals for the meat and egg industry giving rise to novel viruses, involving ever so many more animals kept in ways to insure that they take in each others virus carrying body fluids and breath, is even more obvious a means of that happening. The workers and those they come in contact with take in those viruses too. Unless the entire human population takes up a vegan diet, this is hardly going to be the last one. The next one could come from any meat or egg producing operation anywhere in the world. I would expect there are many that arise that way which don't kill people dramatically so they are never intensively studied or named. I don't anticipate that veganism will rise greatly - the online cooking shows certainly aren't doing a lot to promote a diet that doesn't contribute to the generation of pandemic viruses. Which I have to say, I find enormously frustrating. But there it is. The worst of human follies can be carried in what we assume is the simplest of pleasures.
Tomorrow is the day that Blogger pulls a change on us, I have no idea how that's going to go. I will continue writing things, I don't know if I'll still do it in this format, if the new Blogger allows me to, I'll probably keep it up. I have heard that it makes posting Youtubes harder, though I'd expect it will be possible to post links the way I post most of the radio dramas so maybe it won't be so bad. We'll see.
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
Sad that the really great Carl Reiner has died at 98. He's one of the few people in the comedy field who maintained the hard work of being funny for more years than I can remember. Unlike almost every other person in the comedy world, he didn't peter out before he died.
I'm sad for us, not him. He gave us all those years, how much more could he have been expected to give? I believe he's in a state of eternal happiness, he having given so much of that to us. I don't have any reason to doubt that for him.
I'm sad for us, not him. He gave us all those years, how much more could he have been expected to give? I believe he's in a state of eternal happiness, he having given so much of that to us. I don't have any reason to doubt that for him.
Elizabeth Warren Responds to Mike Pence's Misleading Coronavirus Press Conference
Another day in the pandemic, another day when I've got a fever and sore throat and am thinking about getting close enough to the guy who delivered some meds for a relative to sign for it last week. He had on a mask and gloves, I didn't, he caught me by surprise and I didn't think to tell him he was going to have to wait till I suited up. It's probably not Covid-19 but who knows.
And the news is that they've found another humanly transmissible virus from in and around the pork industry. Damned carnivores are going to get us all killed.
John Roberts Is A Shifty Operator, Not A Principled Believer In Egalitarian Democracy Or Even Good Government
My take on the Louisiana abortion decision, a quite unexpectedly pro-choice (pro-choiceish, really) decision joined in by John Roberts, an opponent of the rights of women to own their own bodies, is that Roberts is biding his time. He is trying to avoid the even bigger electoral disaster that his Republican-fascists can already anticipate in 2020, losing the entire Congress and the Executive branch, perhaps his fascist majority on the Court as Sheldon Whitehouse has access to the records of Bret Kavanaugh's serial perjuries to the Senate which will certainly result in Kavanaugh being removed from the Court or forced off of it and who knows what else. Personally, I'm looking forward to the operations of Chuck Grassley and the other Repubublicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mitch McConnell to be exposed too. One of my wishes is that Grassley live to realize that his name in history will be as a villain, a dishonest, sleazy, sanctimonious hypocrite who is a real life Henry F. Porter who sounds annoyingly like the annoying James Stewart. And for the people of Iowa to understand that they have put him there as much as I hope for the people of Maine to realize what they did by allowing themselves to be duped by Susan Collins. I hope to see her live to be humiliated and to realize she will never live down her exposure for what she has always been.
I don't trust John Roberts at all, he is a dedicated ideological fascist - as everyone who the fascist Federalist Society* promotes for the judiciary - an opponent of egalitarian democracy, a willing servant of oligarchy and the status quo of unequal power and wealth. The Court decision to allow Trump to destroy the Consumer Protection Bureau's independence from Trump and other Republican-fascists, it is a crack that Roberts and the other fascists made in the wall of separation for agencies designed to act independently something which will certainly, if not stopped, destroy the very concept of independent agencies, one of the backbones of much of the progress made since the Roosevelt administration started those to address the disaster Republican-lassiez faire economics had wrought in the Great Depression.
Roberts is playing a longer game than any one decision will figure in, he is biding his time for a time when his desire is fulfilled in having an intelligent, disciplned version of Trump whose stupidity and flagarant corruption and incompetence is endangering the goal of his entire professional life.
The solution is to reign in the Supreme Court, to have a Democratic president, a Democratic Congress refuse to allow anything short of a unanimous Court to nullify laws duly adopted and enacted by the deliberations of hundreds of legislators and members of the Executive. That the Supreme Court regularly does that now on a 5-4 ruling, often with the most absurd and dishonest of sophistry being their excuse, ignoring everything from the impassioned testimony of people in real life to carefully complied mathematics and scientific fact is a crime against reason and experience. The Court, having given itself that power - it is no where in the Constitution, in Marbury v Madison, it didn't dare use it again for a century except in the execrable Dred Scott decision one of the main contributors to the terrible Civil War. In the 20th century all hell broke loose that way, it's high time to reign in the out of anyone's control court and cut it down to a servant of egalitarian democracy. Roberts should find himself in the fascist minority on an expanded court - one which has members who are not only dedicated to egalitarian democracy but who also know enough math and science so they have a clue about the testimony and record they are supposedly basing their opinions on. And he should have one that knows it cannot destroy legislation except on a unanimous basis. It is a hell of a lot easier to overturn bad legislation after an election, AN HONEST ELECTION, than to wait for the fascists to die from the court. The Supreme Court attack on honest elections is the absolute proof that they cannot be allowed to continue as they have been.
* The endorsement of the Federalist Society, among others, should become poison to a nominee for the courts. They are poisonous to equality and democracy.
I don't trust John Roberts at all, he is a dedicated ideological fascist - as everyone who the fascist Federalist Society* promotes for the judiciary - an opponent of egalitarian democracy, a willing servant of oligarchy and the status quo of unequal power and wealth. The Court decision to allow Trump to destroy the Consumer Protection Bureau's independence from Trump and other Republican-fascists, it is a crack that Roberts and the other fascists made in the wall of separation for agencies designed to act independently something which will certainly, if not stopped, destroy the very concept of independent agencies, one of the backbones of much of the progress made since the Roosevelt administration started those to address the disaster Republican-lassiez faire economics had wrought in the Great Depression.
Roberts is playing a longer game than any one decision will figure in, he is biding his time for a time when his desire is fulfilled in having an intelligent, disciplned version of Trump whose stupidity and flagarant corruption and incompetence is endangering the goal of his entire professional life.
The solution is to reign in the Supreme Court, to have a Democratic president, a Democratic Congress refuse to allow anything short of a unanimous Court to nullify laws duly adopted and enacted by the deliberations of hundreds of legislators and members of the Executive. That the Supreme Court regularly does that now on a 5-4 ruling, often with the most absurd and dishonest of sophistry being their excuse, ignoring everything from the impassioned testimony of people in real life to carefully complied mathematics and scientific fact is a crime against reason and experience. The Court, having given itself that power - it is no where in the Constitution, in Marbury v Madison, it didn't dare use it again for a century except in the execrable Dred Scott decision one of the main contributors to the terrible Civil War. In the 20th century all hell broke loose that way, it's high time to reign in the out of anyone's control court and cut it down to a servant of egalitarian democracy. Roberts should find himself in the fascist minority on an expanded court - one which has members who are not only dedicated to egalitarian democracy but who also know enough math and science so they have a clue about the testimony and record they are supposedly basing their opinions on. And he should have one that knows it cannot destroy legislation except on a unanimous basis. It is a hell of a lot easier to overturn bad legislation after an election, AN HONEST ELECTION, than to wait for the fascists to die from the court. The Supreme Court attack on honest elections is the absolute proof that they cannot be allowed to continue as they have been.
* The endorsement of the Federalist Society, among others, should become poison to a nominee for the courts. They are poisonous to equality and democracy.
Freedom As A Gift From God Is Far More Logically Coherent Than Atheist-Materialist Treatment Of The Problem Of The Mind
I am a little disappointed that though I had to take a day off from writing something important my usual messengers of materialism didn't note something that I'd thought of, that someone could claim that that same problem I noted determinism is for the atheist-materialist-scientistic view of life can be a big problem for a believer who believes in free thought, free will. Determinism is anathema when it comes to physics and cosmology in quantum mechanics (rather hilarious because doing those depends on an inherent determinacy in natural phenomena) but it is an absolute necessity when they want to dispose of human and other minds which cannot be made to fit into their requirements of causal determination as an explanation of the universe of our experience. Minds that escape the determinism they like are an intolerable fact of the very same experience upon which the science they deify depends - there is no place that science is known to exist except in human minds, science cannot be significant, it can't be true independent of the significance of minds and their capacity for knowing truth independent of any physical causation determining the outcome of our thoughts.
The problem for materialism, for the scientism that rests on that materialism and the atheism which is supported by both is that materialism is perhaps the only ideological position which, when treated rigorously, checking it for both logical coherence and consistency, MATERIALISM CAN ONLY BE TRUE IF IT IS FALSE.
But, an atheist, scientistic materialist might then say, for a believer in the signficiance of minds, the capacity for minds to know truth, to be free of the determiancy of physical causality, determinacy is no less of a problem.
How can human minds escape a divine determinacy such as that hated so much by those who use the "fine tuning" that cosmologists - a good number of them atheist materialists, even some of them devotees of scientism - tell us makes our particular life allowing, intelligence sustaining universe is so wildly improbable.*
The answer for a materialist may be insoluble, remembering that materialism is, by fiat of the materialists, a monist system, whatever "material" is, matter-energy, it must be the only constituent of reality. But if you believe God created the universe you have already made the materialists only allowable thing subordinate to Who created it, who made it as it is, who is not bound by whatever determinism that God created the physical universe appears to us to follow.
God would be quite able to create a universe in which those improbabilities which human science and mathematics may well merely impose on reality are not the all powerful thing that materialists elevate them to be in their deification of math, science, material causation. The universe may not be monistic or dualistic or even poly-istic. It may be far different. And I would imagine you could come up with many ways in which such a reality could account for free minds, free thoughts, free observations of reality and conclusions about it, because God is not bound by physical causality or even the logical coherence which is the human sense of an order to things, in so far as we can know them. Freedom of thought may well be explanable as a gift to us from God where it can't ever be explained (or rationally disposed of) by atheist materialism.
Almost a century ago, A. S. Eddington, fresh from his producing confirmation that Einstein was on to something with his new physics and writing what Einstein said was the finest explanation of it, said:
It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has had no control. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational and we can never succeed in formulating them.**
And that's conceiving such uncalculable "laws" laws that "have not their origin in the mind" in terms congenial to physics, such "laws" would be a totally different thing than the things we call "laws" which are a product of humanly conducted science. If such unimaginable entities are a force in the universe, they would certainly not have the same character as those things which we can conceive of as laws in terms of observation as treated by mathematics and the other methods of that thing which is produced by mutual consent by humans, science.
I think science should have stuck to questions about the understanding and manipulation of the phenomena of nature which it could honestly deal with - though I think exempting the world of science from questions of morality was probably an even worse mistake than allowing it to become the tool of atheist ideological desire. As it is, we have a large number of very eminent and professionally successful scientists who impose their ideology on the cultural view of science and inject it directly into science, itself. The number of scientists who are obsessed with getting rid of God is rather shocking when you think of it. Hawking is supposed to have called cosmology a "religion for atheists," and so it is as practiced by many, abiogenesis is a biological quest to do the same thing, one which is even more obviously so. And those are only two of the areas of science saturated with the desires ideological claims and restrictions of some of the most eminent of scientists, prohibiting finding anything that would violate that atheist desire.
That is certainly why Robert Oppenheimer implored his colleagues that if they couldn't refute David Bohm, they "must agree to ignore him." It should be shocking that such an eminent scientist with such an eminent position in the scientific establishment could make such a demand of his scientific colleagues a and not be dressed down by them for violating the alleged fearless and objective quest for truth no matter where that leads them. But they didn't, violating that value of science will not get you in trouble, violating the anti-scientific imposition of atheist-materialism will, though there seems to be a bit of room for doubting scientism which is one of the most plainly stupid of claims which cannot sustain itself since the ideology of scientism is not open to scientific examination, itself.
* And, I'll add here, from what I've seen of that thinking the enormous improbabilities that they calculate vastly underestimate instead of cover the probability of life as we know it and see it around us. But that would get us back to just how improbable random chance assembling even the first organism so as it came to life, a persisting containing membrane structure just happening to contain the chemicals and structures so as to begin metabolism and maintenance of the organism before we get to the more incredible liklihood of random chance allowing its reproduction on the first and only try it would get to do that successfully, ending up with at least two of itself - if it reproduced to three, that first time or more, the chances against that happening rise incredibly fast. I love thinking about that problem, nothing shows the idiocy of materialist, scientistic atheism for what it is like thinking about that problem they inevitably don't consider or they could not maintain their naive faith. I wonder if it would be possible to come up with a probability of a random chance that could get that random chance to produce such an incredibly improbable thing happening once, as opposed to random chance that would not produce that ever. Live by the math, die by the math.
** I would call your attention to Eddington's phrase for the proper and only legitimate object of science, "the phenomena of nature." I think any scientist, atheist-materialist or not would have to agree that humanly preceived phenomena are what science was invented to look at and analyze so as to understand them. Phenomena only become such as they are seen, perceived, by minds, our human minds in the case of science. That vicissitude of science insures that to pretend that that fact isn't totally determinative of the nature of what science can tell you about anything will lead you astray. Yet the ideological requirements of deveoped atheist-materialist-scientism demands that that absolute requirement of science be denied or, since it can't be refuted, ignored. I doubt that the outcome of that will be true, certainly not in most or even many cases.
To pretend that our experience is irrelevant at any second to science is one of the most insane of the host of delusions of current scientific culture. I cannot think that the insistence that that can be done is not part of the same ideological program that the above descries. It fits in with the rest of it too well for it to have other motives.
The problem for materialism, for the scientism that rests on that materialism and the atheism which is supported by both is that materialism is perhaps the only ideological position which, when treated rigorously, checking it for both logical coherence and consistency, MATERIALISM CAN ONLY BE TRUE IF IT IS FALSE.
But, an atheist, scientistic materialist might then say, for a believer in the signficiance of minds, the capacity for minds to know truth, to be free of the determiancy of physical causality, determinacy is no less of a problem.
How can human minds escape a divine determinacy such as that hated so much by those who use the "fine tuning" that cosmologists - a good number of them atheist materialists, even some of them devotees of scientism - tell us makes our particular life allowing, intelligence sustaining universe is so wildly improbable.*
The answer for a materialist may be insoluble, remembering that materialism is, by fiat of the materialists, a monist system, whatever "material" is, matter-energy, it must be the only constituent of reality. But if you believe God created the universe you have already made the materialists only allowable thing subordinate to Who created it, who made it as it is, who is not bound by whatever determinism that God created the physical universe appears to us to follow.
God would be quite able to create a universe in which those improbabilities which human science and mathematics may well merely impose on reality are not the all powerful thing that materialists elevate them to be in their deification of math, science, material causation. The universe may not be monistic or dualistic or even poly-istic. It may be far different. And I would imagine you could come up with many ways in which such a reality could account for free minds, free thoughts, free observations of reality and conclusions about it, because God is not bound by physical causality or even the logical coherence which is the human sense of an order to things, in so far as we can know them. Freedom of thought may well be explanable as a gift to us from God where it can't ever be explained (or rationally disposed of) by atheist materialism.
Almost a century ago, A. S. Eddington, fresh from his producing confirmation that Einstein was on to something with his new physics and writing what Einstein said was the finest explanation of it, said:
It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has had no control. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational and we can never succeed in formulating them.**
And that's conceiving such uncalculable "laws" laws that "have not their origin in the mind" in terms congenial to physics, such "laws" would be a totally different thing than the things we call "laws" which are a product of humanly conducted science. If such unimaginable entities are a force in the universe, they would certainly not have the same character as those things which we can conceive of as laws in terms of observation as treated by mathematics and the other methods of that thing which is produced by mutual consent by humans, science.
I think science should have stuck to questions about the understanding and manipulation of the phenomena of nature which it could honestly deal with - though I think exempting the world of science from questions of morality was probably an even worse mistake than allowing it to become the tool of atheist ideological desire. As it is, we have a large number of very eminent and professionally successful scientists who impose their ideology on the cultural view of science and inject it directly into science, itself. The number of scientists who are obsessed with getting rid of God is rather shocking when you think of it. Hawking is supposed to have called cosmology a "religion for atheists," and so it is as practiced by many, abiogenesis is a biological quest to do the same thing, one which is even more obviously so. And those are only two of the areas of science saturated with the desires ideological claims and restrictions of some of the most eminent of scientists, prohibiting finding anything that would violate that atheist desire.
That is certainly why Robert Oppenheimer implored his colleagues that if they couldn't refute David Bohm, they "must agree to ignore him." It should be shocking that such an eminent scientist with such an eminent position in the scientific establishment could make such a demand of his scientific colleagues a and not be dressed down by them for violating the alleged fearless and objective quest for truth no matter where that leads them. But they didn't, violating that value of science will not get you in trouble, violating the anti-scientific imposition of atheist-materialism will, though there seems to be a bit of room for doubting scientism which is one of the most plainly stupid of claims which cannot sustain itself since the ideology of scientism is not open to scientific examination, itself.
* And, I'll add here, from what I've seen of that thinking the enormous improbabilities that they calculate vastly underestimate instead of cover the probability of life as we know it and see it around us. But that would get us back to just how improbable random chance assembling even the first organism so as it came to life, a persisting containing membrane structure just happening to contain the chemicals and structures so as to begin metabolism and maintenance of the organism before we get to the more incredible liklihood of random chance allowing its reproduction on the first and only try it would get to do that successfully, ending up with at least two of itself - if it reproduced to three, that first time or more, the chances against that happening rise incredibly fast. I love thinking about that problem, nothing shows the idiocy of materialist, scientistic atheism for what it is like thinking about that problem they inevitably don't consider or they could not maintain their naive faith. I wonder if it would be possible to come up with a probability of a random chance that could get that random chance to produce such an incredibly improbable thing happening once, as opposed to random chance that would not produce that ever. Live by the math, die by the math.
** I would call your attention to Eddington's phrase for the proper and only legitimate object of science, "the phenomena of nature." I think any scientist, atheist-materialist or not would have to agree that humanly preceived phenomena are what science was invented to look at and analyze so as to understand them. Phenomena only become such as they are seen, perceived, by minds, our human minds in the case of science. That vicissitude of science insures that to pretend that that fact isn't totally determinative of the nature of what science can tell you about anything will lead you astray. Yet the ideological requirements of deveoped atheist-materialist-scientism demands that that absolute requirement of science be denied or, since it can't be refuted, ignored. I doubt that the outcome of that will be true, certainly not in most or even many cases.
To pretend that our experience is irrelevant at any second to science is one of the most insane of the host of delusions of current scientific culture. I cannot think that the insistence that that can be done is not part of the same ideological program that the above descries. It fits in with the rest of it too well for it to have other motives.
Sunday, June 28, 2020
Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It - The Basic Contradiction of Determinacy In Conventional Science
I must have been extra tired yesterday becaue I could have pointed this out. While re-reading the post about Bohm and his blackballing by the upper reaches of physics because his mathematical quest for truth, which is what theoretical physics is, he came to conclusions that there was something other than random-chance behind things - to put it in one word, "DETERMINACY" which in context implies the will of a mind, the Creator, God, shows an enormous inconsistency in the very ideology that the physicists, Robert Oppenheimer, Wolfgang Pauli, the circle of Neils Bohr, etc. were upholding in blackballing, ignoring him at the command of Oppenheimer, into obscurity to, they were confronting only one side of the double-edged sword that determinacy is for atheist-materialist-scientism.
The irony in that is that the same determinacy which is poison to the atheist-materialist-scientistic ideology of physics IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY IN THE BIOLOGICAL AND LIFE SCIENCE FOR ATHEIST-MATERIALIST-SCIENTISIM TO HAVE ANY PLAUSIBILITY BECAUSE IT REDUCES ANIMAL CONSCIOUSNESS WHICH CAN ONLY BE SIGNIFICANT, THE EXTENT TO WHICH IT ESCAPES THE CLOSED, POINTLESS MAZE OF MATERIALISM TO ABSOLUTE DETERMINACY.
The very same ideology that demands indeterminacy rule in physics lest these determined atheists may run into something that implies things are as they are by the will of the Creator, MUST have determinacy to, likewise, not be confronted with "the hard problem" of atheist-materialist-scientism, human and animal consciousness on the other end. In that, the ideology of materialism runs smack into itself as it did in the cosmologists' calculations that led to those enormous, truly enormous numbers requiring multiplying ten to very, very large powers to express concerning the improbability of our universe and its potential to generate intelligent life - the motive for high-end physics to invent jillions of universes either simultaneous in time or in an never ending universe bouncing in and out of existence, to make those numbers go away.
That, as Shedrake and Vernon and others have pointed out, demoting human minds to the condition of the program controlling robots destroys any confidence that our ideas, including those of Oppenheimer, Pauli, Bohr and their colleagues to meaningless artifacts of determinacy, including their insistence on blackballing a colleague for finding determinacy where it is not only inconvienient but poison to their ideology and their pretensions of finding some objective truth (it can only not be a pretense if their minds are free acting observers) may be what drove David Bohm to the radical form of free thinking of J. Krishnamurti, a freedom which, as well, corrodes the world of the atheist-materialist devotees of scientism. I don't know how far in that direction Bohm's engagement with Krishnamurti went or, in fact, how far Krishnamurti was willing to go with him, but it certainly presents the common received basic POV of a post-war physicist with an enormous problem.
No, science went wrong in the 19th century when it adopted an ideology unrelated to the strict observation of nature treated mathematically and confirmed by others performing rigorous observation of nature. That started in the 18th century, as the ideologies mentioned took hold in that most ironic of ideological namings "the enlightenment". That light has led farther astray as much as it led farther to the truth. Maybe if physics hadn't become such a steep hill to climb up and there was a requirement that its priesthood engage with rigorous philosophical discourse some of that might have been avoided. At least in so far as they were open to philosophy which didn't, as well, get so sidetracked. The atheist-materialist-scientistic world view may have started in the repute science gained for its common usefulness but its infuence infected a lot more than science, especially as other disciplines hankered after the repute, fame and resources that science attracted to itself. Lots of philosophy has descended into the same decadence, some theology, even.
The irony in that is that the same determinacy which is poison to the atheist-materialist-scientistic ideology of physics IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY IN THE BIOLOGICAL AND LIFE SCIENCE FOR ATHEIST-MATERIALIST-SCIENTISIM TO HAVE ANY PLAUSIBILITY BECAUSE IT REDUCES ANIMAL CONSCIOUSNESS WHICH CAN ONLY BE SIGNIFICANT, THE EXTENT TO WHICH IT ESCAPES THE CLOSED, POINTLESS MAZE OF MATERIALISM TO ABSOLUTE DETERMINACY.
The very same ideology that demands indeterminacy rule in physics lest these determined atheists may run into something that implies things are as they are by the will of the Creator, MUST have determinacy to, likewise, not be confronted with "the hard problem" of atheist-materialist-scientism, human and animal consciousness on the other end. In that, the ideology of materialism runs smack into itself as it did in the cosmologists' calculations that led to those enormous, truly enormous numbers requiring multiplying ten to very, very large powers to express concerning the improbability of our universe and its potential to generate intelligent life - the motive for high-end physics to invent jillions of universes either simultaneous in time or in an never ending universe bouncing in and out of existence, to make those numbers go away.
That, as Shedrake and Vernon and others have pointed out, demoting human minds to the condition of the program controlling robots destroys any confidence that our ideas, including those of Oppenheimer, Pauli, Bohr and their colleagues to meaningless artifacts of determinacy, including their insistence on blackballing a colleague for finding determinacy where it is not only inconvienient but poison to their ideology and their pretensions of finding some objective truth (it can only not be a pretense if their minds are free acting observers) may be what drove David Bohm to the radical form of free thinking of J. Krishnamurti, a freedom which, as well, corrodes the world of the atheist-materialist devotees of scientism. I don't know how far in that direction Bohm's engagement with Krishnamurti went or, in fact, how far Krishnamurti was willing to go with him, but it certainly presents the common received basic POV of a post-war physicist with an enormous problem.
No, science went wrong in the 19th century when it adopted an ideology unrelated to the strict observation of nature treated mathematically and confirmed by others performing rigorous observation of nature. That started in the 18th century, as the ideologies mentioned took hold in that most ironic of ideological namings "the enlightenment". That light has led farther astray as much as it led farther to the truth. Maybe if physics hadn't become such a steep hill to climb up and there was a requirement that its priesthood engage with rigorous philosophical discourse some of that might have been avoided. At least in so far as they were open to philosophy which didn't, as well, get so sidetracked. The atheist-materialist-scientistic world view may have started in the repute science gained for its common usefulness but its infuence infected a lot more than science, especially as other disciplines hankered after the repute, fame and resources that science attracted to itself. Lots of philosophy has descended into the same decadence, some theology, even.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)