Hate Mail - Who Cares If You Don't Listen?

That's the thing, I post these radio dramas because I love the form, you can walk around doing housework while they're on instead of vegetating on the couch, you can get up and exercise while they're on, the pictures are always right because you make them in your mind, the work is closer to the authors' intention and the range of work is so much broader than you get on TV and way, way, way broader than you'll get in the movies.  You lose so much more when you've got to pay for pictures and costumes and sets and locations.

You can listen or not,  I don't care I POST THEM BECAUSE I LIKE THEM.  If other people do, I love sharing.  I want everyone to have good things.  If one other person likes it, that's worth doing this.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Vivienne Harvey - DCI Stone - Blood

 

When sixteen year-old Jackson Bennett becomes the fourth teenager murdered on the notorious Bridgeton Estate, DCI Stone vows to bring his devastated family justice. Confronted with a case with no witnesses and a community with an inherent distrust of the police, Stone finds his priorities challenged as he struggles to catch a killer and reclaim the increasingly lawless estate. 

 DCI John Stone...Hugo Speer 

DS Sue Kelly...Deborah McAndrew 

Kenny McQueen...Gary Lewis 

Damien...Luke Broughton Danny...Luke Broughton

 Liza...Hollie-Jay 

Bowes Directed by Nadia Molinari.

 

I do like DCI Stone most of the time, though I hate leaning so heavily on one source for this. 

I'm not having a lot of luck in my searching for other things I want to post these days, partly because finding gems among the trash takes time that I don't have (damned wi-fi is still going in and out) and radio drama takes time, partly because I've had a lot of trouble with my hearing due to just one more joy of getting old, excessive ear wax.  I've learned more about ear wax and how disgusting it can be in the last week than I'd known in the past sixty years.  I'm desperate, I've started Lent early to see if a diet change will help. 

Why I Am In Favor Of "Cancelling" Republican-fascism In The Wake Of Trump's Attempt To Destroy American Democracy

WHAT is amusing about the screams of Republican-fascists of "cancel culture" is that they were the original practitioners of "cancel culture" in American during the 20th century.  They were the ones who put anarchists, communists, socialists in prison for publishing stuff they didn't like during the First World War and after, they were the ones who booted one of the few arguably great figures of American Socialism, Victor Berger out of the House of Representatives, the House going far beyond what has been done to the thug Marjorie Taylor Greene.  They were the ones who pretty much ran the red-scares, the blacklists, HUAC and the persecution of communists and those who were accused of communism and the usefully vague category of "fellow travelers" in the 40s-60s.  

Much of the stupidest of "free speech-press" advocacy was done in a reaction to conservative, capitalist, Republican and, now, Republican-fascist suppression of speech and publication and sending literature through the mail as well as getting it kicked off of the radio, TV and movies.   

I fell for that "free speech-press" stuff as did anti-anti-communists, because the anti-communist side was so full of American fascists (white supremacists and segregationists) and capitalists and opportunistic sons of bitches (the ideological grandparents of Cruz, Hawley, Jordan, Greene, etc.) I fell for it hard, along with the self-interested and opportunistic mythology that arose around the innocent victims of the red scares and purges and black-lists, though those who I really had and have affection for were mostly figures in show business who were hardly political, Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford.   

Far less appropriate figures whose passion narratives I was sold were the actual Communists who were mostly full blown Stalinists, whose moral character is indistinguishable from those who were full blown Nazis.  I have come to the point where I have no problem with the suppression of Stalinism anymore than I would the suppression of Nazism. That is as true today as it would have been if I had thought as hard about the meaning of the history of the 20th century dictatorships as I have since done.   I have no problem with that being "cancelled" kept off the air-waves, kept off the internet, kept out of the movies, or out of the US Mail.  I have no problem with people who favor that being held up to the disdain and derision it deserves.  Even those dear old commies of Hollywood-Broadway lore.  Though anything they happen to write or say or act which does not promote anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic ideology should not be suppressed, certainly not by the government, the only entity covered and prohibited by the First Amendment.

ANYONE WHO BELIEVES THAT THE SUPPORTERS OF GENOCIDAL, OPPRESSIVE GANGSTER REGIMES OF ANY IDEOLOGICAL PRETENTIONS HAVE A RIGHT TO TRY TO OVERTURN EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY IS AN ENEMY OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY, I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH SUPPRESSING THEIR PROMOTION OF THEIR IDEOLOGY. 

I have no problem with the "cancelling" or suppression of our domestic fascists, white supremacists, Republican-fascists and other enemies of egalitarian democracy, I AM A GREAT BIG SUPPORTER OF THE TOTAL SUPPRESSION OF FASCISM, NEO NAZISM, COMMUNISM AS THEY ATTEMPT TO GAIN POWER TO DESTROY EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY.   I am as big a supporter of the suppression of the total idiocy of anarchism because there is no faster route to gangster fascism than the lack of democratically controlled civil authority INCLUDING A WELL REGULATED POLICE FORCE AND MILITARY.    Reading the early writings of the anarchists, what would become fascists and Nazis and many of the early communists and socialists, tracing the evolution of those who held those ideological positions as they transitioned, often going from Marxist to fascist or Republican-fascist, in some cases right on to neo-Nazism gives you pause in believing the claims that they are really ideological opposites instead of the mere rivals in anti-democracy they are.   Reading Emma Goldman in her own words, in full, as was made possible by going online and reading her actual words, was a shocking and complete eye-opener for me.  Especially her adoration of the proto-Nazi, proto-fascist Nietzsche explicitly due to his negation of morality.   She was hardly a believer in equality, she was a friggin' snob and a total idiot untethered from reality.   And she was hardly the only one.  

I have pointed out before that I think the old-fashioned linear graph of political identity that has Nazism on one end and Communism on the other, with various other named ideologies working back or forward to a center of "democracy" is entirely wrong.  There are anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic promotions of gangsterism as government and there is egalitarian democracy.  Anything that isn't egalitarian democracy is merely, to one extent or another, the promotion of gangsterism, whether that be a medieval monarchy, an imperial system, the "dictatorship of the proletariat (yeah, right) or some form of fascism or Nazism.

Well, by conviction and by declaration I am a radical egalitarian democrat, I hold it to be the only really legitimate government, all others are not legitimate, the extent to which a democracy deviates from egalitarianism is the extent to which it is illegitimate, as can be seen in the Republican-fascist suppression of voter equality, that form of "democracy" is rampant under our antiquated Constitution.  

I hold that We The People have a right to have egalitarian democracy protected from liars and con men and decievers who would exploit our worst character flaws and fears to con us out of egalitarian democracy, that is what the entire Trump phenomonon was, a warning as to how susceptible American democracy is to that and our own domestic, longstanding and wildly successful indigenous fascist tradition.  A tradition that goes right back to the First and Second Continental Congresses, which is embedded in our Constitution by the self-interest of the slave holders and the Northern financial powers.  Due to that legal power and the longstanding habits of the American nation, those are the gangsters who will succeed where the meat-headed Marxists never had or will have a chance here.  We have every right to cancel their chances to do that again through the media WE OWE IT TO OURSELVES, TO EACH OTHER, TO OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN, NIECES AND NEPHEWS TO SUPPRESS ALL ENEMIES OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY, IT IS A MORAL DUTY THAT OUT WEIGHS THE IDIOTICALLY INADEQUATE LANGUAGE OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT.

Wha'd Ya Mean "the superstitions of the various sects of psychology"

In psychology it is a commonplace to glorify him [Gustave Theodore Fechner] as the first user of experimental methods, and the first aimer at exactitude in facts. In cosmology he is known as the author of a system of evolution which, while taking great account of physical details and mechanical conceptions, makes consciousness correlative to and coeval with the whole physical world.

 

William James, 1904 Introduction to the English translation of  Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode

 

Of all those who hold a faith in materialism and scientism, admitted or not, those who believe in psychology have, in my experience, a place second only to those who believe in Darwinism in their irrational and information resistant anger when someone who does not share their faith expresses his skepticism and doubt. I've gone way past skepticism in the matter of the "social sciences" to outright conviction that their status as sciences is wrong, dangerous and inappropriate and it always was. Other than a few discoveries and things that are better considered possible hints of the connection of physiology with our consciousness than solid facts such as are found in physics and chemistry, the entire history of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and, Lord save us, these days economics, are far better treated as lore with all the dangers of condescension for the proclamations of such of those who make proclamations. If you think that's exaggerated, look at the past years assertions of "Darwinian economics, in advising the Trump regime and that in Sweden on how to manage the pandemic and the recently self-promoted editorial on the same of that Harvard meat head of way too much influence, Larry Summers. 

 

The longer I read into the origins of the social sciences the more I think they are an (often ignorantly performed) act of ideological assertion and, in their history in universities and elsewhere, hegemony. First, perhaps in Germany and from their eminence in late 18th and 19th century, spread to the English speaking academic world. 

 

Here is one of the times William James, speaking as a founder of academic psychology in English language universities declared by fiat something I think he, by the time of 1904, may have wished to revise.

 

Psychology is to be treated as a natural science in this book. This requires a word of commentary. Most thinkers have a faith that at bottom there is but one Science of all things, and that until all is known, no one thing can be completely known. Such a science, if realized, would be Philosophy. Meanwhile it is far from being realized; and instead of it, we have a lot of beginnings of knowledge made in different places, and kept separate from each other merely for practical convenience' sake, until with later growth they may run into one body of Truth. These provisional beginnings of learning we call 'the Sciences' in the plural. In order not to be unwieldy, every such science has to stick to its own arbitrarily-selected problems, and to ignore all others. Every science thus accepts certain data unquestioningly, leaving it to the other parts of Philosophy{2} to scrutinize their significance and truth. All the natural sciences, for example, in spite of the fact that farther reflection leads to Idealism, assume that a world of matter exists altogether independently of the perceiving mind. Mechanical Science assumes this matter to have 'mass' and to exert 'force,' defining these terms merely phenomenally, and not troubling itself about certain unintelligibilities which they present on nearer reflection. Motion similarly is assumed by mechanical science to exist independently of the mind, in spite of the difficulties involved in the assumption. So Physics assumes atoms, action at a distance, etc., uncritically; Chemistry uncritically adopts all the data of Physics; and Physiology adopts those of Chemistry. Psychology as a natural science deals with things in the same partial and provisional way. In addition to the 'material world' with all its determinations, which the other sciences of nature assume, she assumes additional data peculiarly her own, and leaves it to more developed parts of Philosophy to test their ulterior significance and truth. 

 

William James: Psychology 1892

 

There is so much to unpack in only this one passage that demonstrates THAT THE ENTIRE ENTERPRISE OF THE EXTENSION OF SCIENCE PAST WHERE ITS METHODS COULD GO that it would take a whole series of posts just to get to the second layer of the problem. I think it's possible to locate the origin of the problem in this statement about the general culture of academic Western thought then and, probably bereft of training in philosophy among most holding credentials in most fields, far more so today.

 

Most thinkers have a faith that at bottom there is but one Science of all things 

This is a faith upon which both materialism and scientism are based, a faith which is generally entered into for an ulterior purpose, quite often that of atheism, or the desire that the entirety of the universe be knowable using familiar methods that are, in any case, intrinsically bound up with the abilities of people and, quite possibly, mitigated by our own biological limits as further complicated by the conditions of the consciousness which bounds our experience and our capacity to think about anything.  Though it is true that even religious believers or skeptics of materialism can share in that faith as much as the most hard bitten 19th century style materialist would.

 

Why they should think that is inextricably bound up in the success of physics and chemistry and to a far lesser extent in other areas of study which are susceptible to the most basic methods of science, careful observation, careful measurement and careful analysis and thinking about AND MAKING CLAIMS ABOUT what is observed and measured. Why anyone should conclude from that that things which cannot be subjected to those methods could be believed to follow the same regularities that are discovered by science is certainly a matter of faith, and as I said yesterday, what people believe is WHAT THEY CHOOSE TO BELIEVE.  

 

What is, in fact, the basis of the extension of what is ideally the limited and modest - though powerful - successes in the exact physical sciences were applicable to the enormously complex and largely unknowable experience of consciousness, what William James admitted in this same passage is the entirely unknowable consciouness of other beings who cannot articulate their experiences to us (as if people are really good at that, either)  and even more irrationally the far more complex phenomena of human societies and even extending to allegations about what people "think en masse" and the only slightly more observable or measurable phenomena of what they do when considered as a whole (both of those as a "thing" being fictions). 

 

There never was any reason to believe that there was any basic law that could be discovered by scientific method to make verifiable or refutable predictions to study human minds, human actions, human interactions on an individual or, greatly multiplying the variables and problems, small groups or entire societies and nations of people. That was all a matter of faith, for example, that of August Comte (often credited as the founder of sociology) whose lavishly bizarre materialism should have been a warning that he'd climbed up a nut tree instead of the one with such dangerous fruit as is found in the lore of Genesis 2 the fruit of which God warned against eating.  Only that tree is generally considered to be explanatory lore by thinking people of faith, that of Compt and his like are to be treated as a natural science by those who deny they hold any faith. 

I've long thought that William James was way too good a philosopher to have fallen for the building claims of psychology while realizing why someone like him may have done it.  I don't know the extent to which he was aware of Freud's bizarre declarations of our minds as minefields of irrationality WHICH IN ITSELF SHOULD HAVE LED TO THE CONCLUSION THAT ANY SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF IT WAS A SELF-CONTRADICTION, but I suspect he may have regretted his work in it by the end of his life.  But this is about the start of the problem, not the total mess that the "science" of psychology has been up to now, including the disastrous attempts to verify the published claims of psychologists in the past decade and earlier, the problems of non-verifiability, of appallingly bad methodologies and lavishly made claims published as science, and everything else that more than confirms the problems that will arise when corners are cut and liberties taken in the name of science. Considering the history of psychology after William James, not to mention that of modern physics, I think the same naive faith promoted in this paragraph can be seen in the end of it.

So Physics assumes atoms, action at a distance, etc., uncritically; Chemistry uncritically adopts all the data of Physics; and Physiology adopts those of Chemistry. Psychology as a natural science deals with things in the same partial and provisional way. In addition to the 'material world' with all its determinations, which the other sciences of nature assume, she assumes additional data peculiarly her own, and leaves it to more developed parts of Philosophy to test their ulterior significance and truth. 

There is no way to reliably make that leap from the observable and physical to the unobservable, unverifiably attested to experience of consciousness, which, if we can make one reliable assumption is that even the person experiencing it will not be good at trying to make an honest description of it AND THERE IS NO WAY TO VERIFY IF THEY ARE BEING ACCURATE OR HONEST IN THEIR DESCRIPTION OF THEIR INTERNAL EXPERIENCE.   There is no way to know if the same person would describe one event in their life the same way a week or a month or a year after they gave a first description of it, quite often time brings a different understanding of it.   If I had described something that happened when I was in 4th grade the day it happened, ten years later or today, I would expect I would have a far different understanding of it now than I did then, though the experience was freshest then.  Which of those would be the one worthy of scientific consideration?   Which of those incidents would other people who were there describe differently?  Which of those different incidents deserves scientific consideration as accurate?  

I think Fechner, William James and the rest of them may have found some interesting and perhaps useful things in some of the more basic measurements of human perception but those are a very limited thing and hardly universal.  But other than easily reportable and verifiable matters of basic perception of things like the numbers of dots on a piece of paper (where the dots could be counted and arranged reliably) and other things which are about human perception of a verifiable thing, psychology very fast goes totally beyond any reliable claims.  It is quasi-scientific at its most reliable, it quickly becomes dogmatic materialistic, scientistic faith after that.  Where the thing perceived cannot be reliably limited, described, controlled, they are trying to observe and measure the unknowable and the unreliably reported, it is a total fraud as is found when its claims are rigorously tested.   I certainly think it is extremely dangerous to accept the claims of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists or, Lord help us, economists within the application of the law, giving their pronouncements power to decide life and death.

If Actions Speak Louder Than Words Words Should Count More Than The Invisible Unverifiable Beliefs Of Serial Liars etc.

"I was allowed to believe things that weren't true."

MAGA Marge (Q Georgia) is taking advantage of the ubiquitous superstition that what we believe is not our choice when that is, in fact, how we come to believe things, through our choice.   I have wondered if there was a time before people chose to get sold on the superstitions of the various sects of psychology when people were expected to take responsibility for what they claimed was real, how they acted, how they felt, things that now are commonly believed to happen apart from our own acts of choice but I don't have the time to chase down enough evidence to make an argument that I could choose to accept or reject.   

Menteuse Marge who lied as she was trying to cover her ass on the floor of the house last night is matched in her resort to that superstition that she didn't choose to push lies that she liked through involuntary compulsion by the exoneration of Trump because it's claimed he believed the lies he incited insurrection and sedition with and so that makes what he did OK.  I have every confidence that the law of the United States and in the Anglo-American tradition has been so corrupted by that kind of permissiveness which is doled out to those who are advantaged and most certainly is not given to those of the underclass and unfavored people, will allow Trump out of the most criminal thing short of fomenting a war based on lies ever done by an American president based on his unknowable mental state.   For that we have nothing but his own claim and as everything he says is a lie, there is no reliable means of ascertaining whether or not his believing the lie is one of the few true things he's ever said.   

I've been entertaining myself by re-reading the Rumpole stories this past week, it was a mistake, the charm is gone, but one thing you do get is a more skeptical view of the legal system and the absurd belief that judges are any better at being impartial and fair than the general run of humanity.    For every judge who has stood up to Republican-fascism or, if not exactly to that then for the law as it's supposed to be, there are judges who allow obviously guilty insurrectionist real estate sellers to go to Mexico on a planned vacation or allows a legally adult neo-Nazi killer to violate their bail, repeatedly and to permit his lawyers to withhold information that they are required to give.  I think any judge who allowed any of the insurrectionists out while awaiting trial should be reviewed for possible removal from their positions.   As has been endlessly pointed out the entitled white criminals of the Trump mob have been given a different standard of justice than they would have been if they were black, accused and eventually, after months or even years in prison, found to be INNOCENT.   

Sometime during the demonstrations against police murder of Black men and women, I heard an interview with a young Black Woman being interviewed who did a very good, very accurate review of just a few of the outrageous wrongs done to Black People and she said that white people were lucky that Black people only wanted justice and not revenge.   That's the fire this time, that's the fire that had better be tended and what caused it addressed because there will be a fire next time fed by injustice.  Just as on the other end of justice, letting the Marjorie Taylor Greenes, the Trumpist fascists, the Republican-fascists, the Proud Boys the AmericaNazis of white supremacy to get off so easily as Trump and Taylor Greene expect to see a repeat of the Trump insurrection, only worse, stronger, more highly financed by billionaires and Hollywood millionaires ( I hope Little Ricky Schroeder finds himself unable to get work) and their foreign gangster allies, more skillfully gaming our broken, corrupt Constitution and the state the law is left in by precedent.    

There should be no more (R) after Republican-fascists in office, it should be (Q) from here on in.  EVERYONE WHO REMAINS IN THAT PARTY SHOULD WEAR IT, EVEN THOSE WHO VOTED TO KICK THAT QPUBLICAN OFF HER COMMITTEES.   The whole party is to blame, the old-money-"principled conservatives" as much as the Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Tommy Tubberville, Cruz and Hawley faction of it.   There are no "votes of conscience" that make up for the rest of their support for the support network of Republican-fascism that props up the overt Nazis.  

If we buy the nonsense that someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn't choose to believe what she believes, or claims to believe,that it is an involuntary act, then those who bask in the media driven sanctimony regarding their "votes of conscience" such as Susan Collins has been given on the rare occasion she cast an impotent vote of conscience that meant nothing.   They shouldn't get any praise for it, no more than MTG should be allowed to skate by consequences for her allegedly involuntary mental state and the actions that come from it. 

TO HELL WITH THE POSES  OF MORALITY FROM REPUBLICAN "MODERATES" AS THINGS HAVE DEVELOPED THEY AREN'T ANY BETTER THAN "GOOD GERMANS".   Certainly to hell with those who didn't vote to remove MTG from her committees or those who vote to let Mo Brooks, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, etc. off.  

John Danforth Does His Interpretation Of The Susan Collins Double Talking Two Step

 John Danforth, the rich dog food heir, former Republican senator, sponsor of Clarence Thomas, slanderer of Anita Hill, sponsor of Josh Hawley - before he belatedly figured he'd better dump his protegee once he involved himself in an insurrection is welcome to eat dirt and go to hell as far as I'm concerned.

I might agree that there are conservative, former Republicans who have done more than merely bemoan what their (only sometimes former) party has become, what it has done, some have actually earned something like my respect, though I wonder what took them so long, I saw this coming decades back.   But anyone who remains in that disgusting cult, anyone who lies about its recent past as if it was any better during the Brooks Bros. - Rehnquist Court putsch that put Bush II and Liz Cheney's father in office through the machinations of Jeb Bush and the corrupt election in Florida in 2000 and before as  Bush I was pardoning a raft of conservative Republicans to protect his own ass from criminal charges shows that they were all in on corruption up till it reached the Trump phase of rot.   John Danforth, ordained Episcopal priest, is one of the bigger hypocrites, that is clear from the fact that he was supporting the rich-boy fascist - who it was clear was a fascist - as he was an up and commer, as he promoted and sponsored Clarence Thomas, clearly a psychotic, Black-hating tool of a merely more seemingly genteel form, as he perjured his way onto the Supreme Court.

There Is No Such Thing As A Decent Republican In 2021 They Have Been On This Trajectory Since The 1950s.

I suppose I shouldn't complain about the internet service on my road being screwed up, there's a teacher on the road who's having to deal with that while teaching remotely.  She may have to go somewhere else to set up, all I have to do is grit my teeth as I'm prevented from doing online research for this pro-bono writing I attempt. 

Though I have found I'm still exhausted from the past year, maybe it's just as well that I haven't been writing thousand + word diatribes. 

In the little listening I have been doing through pirates of MSNBC, Chris Hayes raised one of the best issues I've seen raised in the last four years. It was riffing off of a quote from the Chamber of Commerce, Wall St. Republican Senator John Thune from one of the worst white supremacist states, South Dakota, he asked, 

"Do they want to be the party of limited government and fiscal responsibility, free markets, peace through strength and pro-life or do they want to the be party of conspiracy theories and QAnon?"

 

Chris Hayes, correctly, points out that no one, not even the Republican base wants that, which, due to it being tried and flopping, screwing the Republicans own rural racist base to the extent that Donald Trump hammered Jeb Bush to pieces in 2016, the Republican Party is, in fact and not idiotic "conservative theory" the party of white-supremacy and insurrection and is just fine with Marjorie Taylor Greene and QAnon, Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, etc. because they are motivated by their racism and their hatred and their largely whipped up media driven resentment in which they blame all the wrong people, exactly as the corporate media planned over the past sixty years. 

 

There are no decent Republicans in 2021. Not Liz Cheney, not Adam Kinzinger, not Lisa Murkowski or Mitt Romney. The last two got together with the disgusting fraud Susan Collins to try to destroy aid to the American People AID THAT, AS HAYES POINTS OUT IS EVEN POPULAR WITH SOME OF THE WORST REPUBLICANS BECAUSE THEY ARE DESPERATE. They may announce their disdain for the Taylor Greens, the Lauren Boeberts, maybe eventually even the Matt Gaetzs and others, but what they want is the flip side of a depraved party which is a danger to the United States. Mitt Romney has the distinction of having voted to remove Trump through conviction last year and he almost certainly will do that this year, the others not so much. 

 

As I noted recently as far back as the Republican Convention of 1964, the baseball hero Jackie Robinson was noting that the racists had taken over the Republican Party, the first one in which the white supremacists the Republicans took in as Democrats started passing civil rights for Black People and others into law, dominated the party.  His account from his memoir is worth reading and re-reading because everything that was obvious in this past election was already in place AND ON THE CONVENTION HALL FLOOR, PUT THEIR BY RACIST REPUBLICAN DELEGATES FIFTY-SIX YEARS AGO.  It was a trend that started even earlier, back in the 1940s when the Democrats really started making changes in light of the lessons from fighting Nazism.   

Anyone who is pretending that the Republican Party, a party that unites the money interests, the financier class, the increasingly tiny, flaky and work eaten stalwart Republican families that started out that way while Lincoln was still alive (hardly still extant in rural New England) and the Americanazis, the old line white supremacists, the more dangerous modern ones, often founded among the college credentialed and more amorally depraved and degenerate than the genteel racists of the Republican past.   I have had to recently point out to someone who bought his old PR that the posing elitist William F. Buckley was opposed to voting rights laws for the same reasons that today's Republicans sitting on the Supreme Court do, that Black People will vote. 

If You Will Insist

THE "new atheist" fad of the '00s wasn't really new, it was just a more superficial, TV era repeat of the old Brit style of atheism only without much if any reading or addressing anything, the leaders perhaps reviewing the writings of dear old Bertie Russell - at the high end, and what the American branch under Corliss Lamont, his alphabet soup of groups as managed by Paul Kurtz and his crappy "Prometheus" publishing company, the self discrediting CSICOP (now CSI to cover up its sTARBABY scandal) regurgitated from earlier atheists.   And that's the higher end of American-Britatheist invective.  The lower end such as was pushed by that old degenerate crook, Madalyn Murray O'Hare didn't seem to figure much in it, and she was the higher As Seen On TV end of that even lower level of old line Brit style atheism.  

I became quite a student of English language pop atheism and a little less of one in the atheist traditions of other languages over the past two decades.  I was, of course, as a typical college-educated American familiar with it, unreviewed, non-fact-checked.   I can say that of those I reviewed the most superficial was the Brit-American.  It never fact checks itself, stuff that was lied about in the 19th and 18th century is repeated and published as fact, though of every issue I looked into, none of them took long to refute.  Mostly that was the simplest, most basic matter of looking at the things cited by the atheists to see that in few if any cases did those books, articles, etc. say what they were claimed to say.  Some, such as the certainly spurious if not non-existent letters of Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine that the 19th century atheist propagandist Moncure D. Conway claimed to have read are still "cited" even though no one else seems to have ever seen them, their existence being otherwise unevidenced.   I suspect there may have been forged letters, made to sell to a rich atheist looking for such crap.  Only Conway doesn't seem to have bought them.  Or he may have just lied them into existence.  And that's only one small part of what I found when I looked for the primary documents claimed, cited and allegedly quoted.   Even the otherwise respectable atheist journalist or scholar seems to throw the most basic standards of honesty out the window when it comes to promoting their religious beliefs.  I would say as I did when I started going into that here, I couldn't care less what slaveholders like Jefferson and Madison said about Christianity, they didn't practice it.

This is all to say that the Britatheist who snarked about my piece about Thomas Aquinas never read it as she has never read a word of Aquinas.  She probably never even read something like ol' Bertie's typical Brit, anti-Catholic distortion of what he wrote, claiming that unlike that old phony Socrates, Aquinas always had a predetermined goal in his inquiry (as if Socrates ever questioned his own preferences, such as his Athenian ruling male elite snobbery.  I suspect old Bertie shared in it enough, translated to aristocratic Brit terms, so he never much noticed it permeates Socrates as Plato invented him.).  I think the Britatheist just knows that you're supposed to disdain Aquinas because he was, A. Catholic, B. not an English Catholic, C. Religious.  Her American buddies probably don't even know that much.  I wouldn't claim that current American atheists are stupider than the Brits are, just that the Brits have a more direct link to a tradition that invented the lies that get retold.

Thirty years ago I stupidly and ignorantly associated atheism with intellectualism, now I associate it with the opposite. Current atheism is a manifestation of anti-intellectualism at its most conceited.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Has The Protection Of "moderate" Republicans, All Republicans They Should Wear That Every Day

THE reason to show this is because it's a. Brian Tyler Cohen, as usual, makes good points and b. it shows the longest video of her more than merely implied threat against David Hogg, WHO WAS PUBLICLY ACKNOWLEDGED TO BE GETTING DEATH THREATS WHEN SHE DID THIS, having a crazy woman chasing him down the sidewalk as she was telling him she packs a gun with her.  What she did should be a felony, she shouldn't be allowed to own a gun, carry a gun, handle a gun under pain of being put in the booby hatch where she belongs.   Asa Hutchinson's refusal to support removing her from the Congress, the notable lack of Republicans supporting that clearly warranted move, especially considering her threats against members of the House and others, just shows that she is part of the mainstream of the Republican-fascist party, a party that she is a member of because they absorbed America's indigenous fascist class, the racist white supremacists.   It's going to be really telling if her clear antisemitism added to her racism doesn't get her thrown out just how dangerous the Republican-fascist party is.   It's not only pre-Civil Rights Amendment, it's back into the period of overt antisemitism. 

Hate Mail

 I don't care.  I'm done with all that crap.