Blah, Blah, Blah. . . . Last hate mail for now

DIGGING deep in the crap pile I'm deleting, I do suspect I know where the lie that I disrespect Bob Dylan came from but it is based on nothing I ever said about him and certainly nothing I wrote about him online.   He is one of the finest songwriters in the ample canon of American song writers, certainly more profound than the show-tune writers, good as some of those are.   I'd place him on the highest end of of that category along with some of the great blues composers, some of the greatest of the country writers, up there with a very short list of great American poets and with some of the finest prose writers. 

My brother, last year, introduced me to his 2012 album which I'd missed and I kicked myself for not listening to it before.  A pirate CD.   Sure his voice was shot but those songs, the stories told and those longer ones implied, some of those epic in length.   The biggest problem with Bob Dylan is that he's better than his most slavish of worshipers and pop-level critics realize.   He's right up there and a lot of that is probably because he doesn't believe it, himself.  Not believing the publicity about yourself is probably necessary to have the guts to keep writing like that so long, the guts to still take chances instead of going for what's predictably respectable. 

 

Update:  Oh, I don't think the pop-level critics and slavish fans know he ranks with the best because most of them don't have that much of an appreciation of the best until they get permission from some article in The New Yorker or some PBS show.   And even then they still prefer white bread. 

Hate Mail

IT'S pretty hilarious having the accusation that you think you're smart being thrown at you by an atheist-materialist devotee of scientism because if there's one attribute that binds the members of that tribe together it is the assertion that they're the biggest smarty-pants of all times, going 4XXXXXXXL. . . in that sizing system.   Having one make that accusation against someone else is the best joke I've heard this week, the second best one being so blue as to not be appropriate for Lent.

I don't think think about it.  If it's true it's nothing I achieved by hard work and dint of effort so it's nothing I can take credit for.  People used to ask me how I learned to speak French in high school, something that's a mystery to me because it wasn't by constant practice and application.  I think I just must have had a knack for it like "good spellers" have for spelling, the difference is that I'm not stuck up about it and I don't look down on people who don't know a second language.  Not unless they monoglotally diss Esperanto while so unabled. 

It was contemplating the evil of the no doubt very smart Henry Kissinger that I came to the conclusion that there are many, many very smart people the world would be better off without, it was thinking about others who no one would consider to be very smart that the corollary to that finished the thought - that there are no good people the world would be better off without.  I have never been that impressed with intelligence ever since figuring the first one out sometime in the 1970s.   I don't think I was ever very impressed with my own.

Intelligence is only good if it is guided by goodness for good ends, without that it is everything to despise and fear.  Intelligence guided by selfishness and arrogance will probably be what gets us killed, not a little of that intelligence in the form of scientific, engineering and business acumen.  The only hope we have is goodness, with that constantly applied even a lack of knowledge might not matter, we just might make it by the skin of our teeth.

What Cannot Be Known Cannot Be A Scientific Argument So Resorting To It Is One Of The Internal Contradictions of AMS

WELL, keep in mind what I pointed out on the fact that every argument that human beings are capable of making or understanding is dependent on what they can know at the time the argument is made and heard.  Positing the atheist-materialist-scientistic false promissory note that someday that argument will be made and heard that explains it all is here, according to modern physics and mathematics which are the best which we have available, less credible than the claim that "somehow in heaven, somehow it will be even, some new equation given" because modern physics and mathematics hold that we can't attain that level of certainty about ultimate questions.  Which the arrogant atheist ideologue Sean Carroll had used against him when he claimed that a theory of everything was imminently had.  I'd say by who but . . . it's Lent and bragging isn't appropriate.

Unless, in the now, today, in 2021 you can answer those questions of how the materialist model of the brain, or "DNA" or "natural selection" or the "laws of the material universe" can do those things in regard to the brain making structures to "be" ideas before the ideas are present in the brain, there is every reason to disbelieve in materialism because if our minds escape the confines of materialist faith then it is invalid because it holds EVERYTHING must conform to it.  Considering all of the above, a belief in materialism in the 20th and 21st century is so quaintly 19th century as to be regarded with amusement.   So I am appropriately amused by atheist-materalist-scientism.  I'm thoroughly up to date in that regard. 

Update: Oh dear, "how is saying it's going to be known in heaven any better . . .

A. physics deals in physical matter, not in heavenly things, mathematics may well be an aspect of earthly experience, too.  I think it was Wittgenstein who said that he wasn't exactly certain that mathematics can be assumed to be valid everywhere in our universe.   If he wasn't why should I be?

B.  It is the belief of many in the Christian tradition that such mysteries of our life here will be knowable in heaven so making that speculation within that system is consistent, it is not consistent with modern atheist-materialist-scientism because their system does not allow making such claims and having them be internally consistent. 

What Did You Give Up? Answer To A Question

I don't give up foods for Lent.  A while back, having become interested in finding recipes from the too little known Ruthenian Catholic Rite tradition, I got onto a Greek Orthodox source that talked about the stingency of the most severe form of Orthodox fasting for Lent, that for monastics and found to my amusement that other than that I use about a tablespoon of olive oil a day for the nutrients in it, I pretty much practice that year round now that I've become a vegan.  I exceeded the lesser levels of it as a plan vegetarian most days of the year.  

I could give up chocolate, which would be easier.  I am one of the few people in the world, it seems, who isn't that fond of chocolate.  I had a great aunt who used to give up candy for Lent but she ate fudge freely declaring that fudge wasn't candy.  Eating it would be more of a penitential act for me, on the same level as eating Circus Peanuts, something that vegetarianism took care of going on sixty years ago.

I have tried to give up vices, it's easier to give those up especially as the list of those you can indulge in grows less, though the ones still there are held onto more dearly so that might work.  The hardest one to give up is sarcasm in response to stupid stuff people throw at me.  

I refuse to believe coffee is a vice.  

People Who Don't Understand How Time And Priority Work

A pop-level or low-level critic is pissed off that I noted that Blazing Saddles ripped off Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down published six years earlier and which was certainly known to some of those involved in producing Blazing Saddles.   In answer to a volunteer involuntarily proving a point that the erudite RMJ made about the crap that passes for criticism in comments here, here's what the ripped off author said about that as recently as last October.  He was hardly the only one who noticed. 

I met Stanley in the early seventies. I stopped off to see him in Los Angeles after he contacted me about my books. Ivan Dixon, the late actor, and I were on the way to see Quincy Jones about his possible co-producing my western, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, the “antecedent” of “Blazing Saddles,” as a result of Richard Pryor introducing the book to the studio that produced it. Stanley wanted to tag along. He wanted to call Jones an “Uncle Tom.” I refused his request.

At first, Stanley wrote some articles that lauded my literary output. Even stuck his neck out by writing in The Village Voice that “Blazing Saddles” was a rip off of my surrealistic western, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, a connection that is still being made. Andrew Bergman, one of the scriptwriters for the film, wrote a letter to The Voice denying such a connection. What Bergman failed to mention was that Richard Pryor was his co-writer. Pryor read my novel in Berkeley and wrote a letter to the late actor D’Urville Martin, in which he said he was considering making a film based on the book. Alison Mills, an actress and filmmaker, whose novel, Francisco, was published by Steve Cannon and me, mentioned in the book that a friend of hers, who worked at the studio that produced “Blazing Saddles,” told her that they were reading my book.

Update:  Yeah, he's always had problems with anyone who respects Black artists, and Women, really most other than straight, white men working in other places than New York and Hollywood.

Update:  You don't disprove the point made in the last update by whining that I capitalized Black and Women.  

Hate Mail

It's Lent, I cannot give your comment the level of mockery that it deserves.  Something about wet adult diapers.  Try again after Easter Week is over.

Update:  I've had requests to post the story mentioned below.  My writing teacher said to not post it without it being copy righted because someone might steal it and make money off of it - he knows I'm nearly destitute from what I wrote about being a music teacher in the time of Covid.  

I remember that Blazing Saddles made huge amounts of money by ripping off Ishmael Reed and know that would really piss me off.  And the story is more than 45 pages long.   I'm looking into it. 

Hate Mail - I'd Love To Revive Those Questions That You Couldn't Answer The Last Time, Why Wouldn't I Want To Do That?

ALL OF our arguments, including the best possible and entirely theoretical, therefore not existing, argument that any human being living in time can make, are contingent on the information available to them at the time they make it.  The atheist-materialist-scientistic never to be honored promissory note of materialism, that some day the ultimate materialistic explanation of questions unanswered in our time will be had in atheist-materialist-scientific terms is to make a claim that cannot be sustained today or at any time, else the claim of the contingency of all knowledge, a necessary component of scientific method, is invalid.  If that contingency is breached, the scientific method, on which that claim rests is invalid.   The problem then is who knows what future will bring?

 

Arguments are constructed of either fact or on what we believe or want to believe, and there are no real bright lines separating those.  In the end everything we believe,true or not is believed on the basis of choosing to believe it.   That's just the fact of it. And lo we inevitably walk a narrow way.  Which is why I prefer the Jewish intellectual tradition and believe it is the best human beings have come up with, to date.  

 

The quality of the argument and conclusions drawn through it are variable depending on the things those arguments are made of and the conclusions are made on them despite their quality. To pretend anything else is to make really lousy claims in arguing about what I just wrote, though that is often done.

When I wrote the statement that psychology is a pseudo-science, along with sociology, anthropology and economics, I did so because to claim that science can treat any of those,  the matters supposedly treated by those academic cesspools of ideology,  have the same qualities and characteristics as numbers and of celestial bodies and other physical objects, atoms, molecules, elements, chemicals, etc. that are convincingly and successfully treated with the methods of science.

Since all of those social-pseudo-sciences rest on that assumption made about human and, even more stupidly asserted, other minds are like physical objects and numbers made in psychology I will only deal with that.

To claim that our minds are subject to the same limits and forces that would seem to govern physical objects is to claim that our thoughts, our ideas, our perceptions are manifestations of physical entities, objects, generally claimed to be in our brains, the product of molecules and structures the body constructs of molecules in our brains.

Several years back I went through an exercise of, for a year, here and in places where materialist ideologues gathered online, posing what I then and still believe is an ultimate and fatal problem for that belief, I asked many people for a year and never, once got an answer that worked to back up their contentions that our ideas, other actions of our minds could possibly be the product of physical structures constructed out of matter and material patterns in our brains. I got not one answer that worked when looked at with even a slight level of rigorous challenge.

The problem deals with ideas which never were present in our brains before we had the idea, until we first thought them.

If our ideas are physical constructs, the brain would have to make new structures to be new ideas, different ideas could not have the same structure or they would be identical ideas. There would be no possibility of novel ideas arising in our minds without new and, for us, unprecedented structures being made by our brain, the idea-structure for that idea could not be present in our brain until it was constructed to BE the new idea.

How, before that idea was in the brain, could:

The brain know it needed to construct a structure to be that idea.

How would the brain know what it needed to make to be that idea without the idea there to inform it of what to make.

How could the brain know how to make that structure without the idea being present to instruct the brain on what the final structure was to be.

How could the brain, once a structure was built, know if it had built the right structure to be that idea if that idea-structure was the only type of thing present in the brain. (Trial and error, one of the atheist dodges in part of the argument wouldn't work because there would be nothing to make comparisons with.   You have to have those to do trial and error.  Anything there for comparison would be a structure made by the brain, liable to all of the problems stated here.)

Whatever a materialist comes up with to support their claim must work in the real time in which we have ideas novel to us or, indeed, in the human species. One of the dodges, the incantation of the magical word "DNA" doesn't work because all DNA does is make strings of amino acids - which are liable to all of the questions already asked above - which fold by elaborate actions within cells to become biologically active proteins. That process is sufficiently time-consuming that it couldn't possibly be how it happens, our experience of coming up with novel ideas is so much faster.

"Natural Selection" another of the magic phrases of materialism certainly doesn't work because it would have to work through DNA and trial and error and even more cumbersome mechanisms that take place over many generations instead of seconds. And "Natural Selection" is too stupid to evaluate what it makes for their truth, it only works through comparative success in producing offspring.  If some dopey Darwinist wanted to make that claim for natural selection, I wouldn't be surprised if some moron like Daniel Dennett might try, it would be fun to press them on where the question of truth fits into it.

In order for any mechanism of materialism to work to fill in the chasm between our experience of having a new idea and a proposed mechanism of how it's supposed to happen, maintaining the claim that ideas are physical structures manifested as epiphenomena has to claim that that proposed mechanism has, a priori, to contain all of the ideas we generate, all that we will ever generate int the future, all of the structures to be those ideas (we have many ideas that have no physical substrate external of us, we make up a lot of things in our minds which are no less ideas) internally within the physical systems and structures to be those mechanisms.

To claim that "DNA" does it is to claim that the molecule "DNA" (and there is no one such molecule, there is only the general structure of DNA) has to internally have, present within its structure all of the ideas that it constructs or to claim "DNA" is to merely displace the problems the materialist model of our minds poses for our brains. 

 

To come up with in this argument is as stupid as a materialist such as Francis Crick, when he faces with the incredible improbability of life arising by random chance events on Earth, merely claiming it must have come here from elsewhere.  Giving it a dumb pseudo-Greek neologism as a smokes screen.   Where the same problems would have had to be faced if someone was impolite enough to push his face in the mess that makes. 

 

He was one of the arrogant mid-20th century materialist ideologues who figured solving the "hard problem" for materialist, scientistic ideology would be a cinch for someone as clever as him. I believe his colleague Watson believed something of the sort, too, fresh from their fame at having published the structure of DNA.

Every time I come back to this problem the more obvious it is that our minds cannot be the mere epiphenomena of material structures and material causation.  There is every reason to not believe that our minds are material, if they are not material then they do not likely reside as mere dependents on our brains.  They would have to transcend it or they would not be able to do what they do.   If that is the case, the entire basis of psychology,etc. as "science" is a pudding-headed misconception of the hopes and wishes of atheist-materialist-scientistic ideologues and those who choose to be their suckers. 

Update:  No, trying to make trial and error part of the creation process wouldn't work because the idea of an ideal or even acceptable outcome would inevitably require an idea of what that would be in relation to the "idea-structure" that was present in the materialist-brain.   How that was supposed to work only brings you back to the beginning in my list of problems with the whole model.

To claim "DNA" or "natural selection" is the creator of all possible human ideas, all possible animal ideas is to merely give those two "things" the power that traditional theology sometimes attributes to God.  You are merely setting those up as divine idols, being a (golden) moon calf too stupid to understand that's what you've done.  Atheists are always doing that and not understanding that's what they did and habitually do.  I used to fall for the claim that atheists were intellectually superior, now I think they're just half-baked.

I'm told I can't write - Hate Mail part of an ongoing series

I'M TOLD I can't write. I'm told that for years.

 

I say I never claimed to be a writer. I've said that over and over again.

Last fall I decide to ask my only close relative who writes for a living,  telling her that I write stuff.    

 

She didn't know I've been writing stuff online for going on fifteen years.  The only person in my family who knew that before is my brother and he NEVER looks at what I write online.  He's my brother, after all.  A prophet not getting any respect in his home town is nothing compared to an Irish Catholic brother who thinks, "meh".

She was surprised, said I had potential.

I remind her of my age.  Surely it's too late.

She says I should try a writing class, see what the teacher says.

I remind her of Covid.  She sends me a URL for an online adult-ed class in creative writing, more or less daring me to take it.

I do. I get the list of assigned writing. The first one was to write a short story about football, I consider dropping out of the course, ask the teacher if I can write about something else. Tell him I don't know much about football except I hate it. He tells me to write a story about what's wrong with football. I tell him I never knew much about it except I hate it, he says research it.

Research is my weakness. I love to research stuff I don't know anything about. I look up stuff about football and find out I hate it as much as I thought I did but I find out some stuff about it to use in the story.  Only one scene is about that.

 

I hate football stories with their cloying sentimentality, I talk to the teacher about that and he says, Write one like

that but which twists that convention a different way, one that expresses your hatred of of football. 

 

[Update: I forgot, he said you should never go against how you really think even in fiction, that you have to have the courage of your convictions.  Might be a good tip.]

 

So I did, it ended up being 45 pages long, he said almost no one else had one five pages long.  No heroes winning games or making valiant efforts, the team doesn't win the season, the kid doesn't end up playing football, he hates it as much as I do but he's a lot less rude about it.  All of the football jocks in it are assholes.  The coach ends up leaving the game and being the better for it, he's the central character of the story. It's told from his POV.

I'm thinking of posting it but the teacher says, Make sure you've got your rights protected.   I don't know how to do that. Maybe I should research it.  He said it's not a bad story, it has potential.

He likes my writing. I tell him I'm not a writer, he says anyone who writes is a writer. 

 

He's published, he teaches writing at the college level. He shares my disdain for people who make their living writing as pop-level critics. "Critics are people who can't write and want to discourage everyone else from doing it." I told him Virgil Thomson said a similar thing about failed composers who went into music criticism.  He said,  Great minds think alike.   I almost point out that's a cliche, but he was making a joke by using a cliche.  He's big on not using cliches,  I don't point out that if you don't want those you shouldn't ask for stories about football.

 

Maybe I was wrong about me not being a writer but I don't know. He's the professional. 

 

He said he includes that football assignment because if there are men taking the class it's something they can relate to.  It could be worse, he could have asked for a romance story.  Maybe the women who are most of the students for the class are smarter than the men who take it.  Too smart for those.  He didn't ask us to write a critical piece.  He respects his students too much.

So You Figure I Don't Know My Harry Potter, I'll Bet You Only Watched The Movies

I READ all of the Harry Potter books, I read the first four or five of them numerous times to two of my nieces and the last two at least once to them.  I started when the older one had read the first one at the age of five (she's the best read person I know under the age of 70) and the younger one didn't read yet.   Editing things I didn't want them to think about on the fly like making fun of Dudley's obesity, some of the other things I didn't want to expose them to thinking about.   

They liked me doing the voices, Hagrid's presumably "Onslow" voice, McGonnagal's burr, Dobby's beleaguered squeak, Snape's quiet, low level menacing sneer, Voldamort's hiss (had to change it for when he was a kid and teenager, tough character to figure out) - kids that age aren't as cynical as they'd be older and they were a captive audience.  Uncle Anthony wouldn't let them watch TV.  The older one asked me to record some of it for her - she's applying to law school this year.  She said she liked the way I read them.  I don't know if I can do the voices anymore.

I'd match my knowledge of the books against you any day though, as I said, I didn't watch the movies.  I haven't read any of them since the day I read the last chapter of Harry putting his kids on the Train to Hogwarts to my nieces the last time.  I picked up one of them in the English edition and looked at it but figured I was done with them.  Maybe I'd read one of them in another language if I had it.  I really liked the German translation of book 1 and the French translation of book 3, though I don't know why Snape became "Rogue" in the French translation.   Bet you didn't know that, Mr. Pop Culture IQ.

Lent Continues

Dear God, thinking about Good Friday and the longer and lesser crucifixion of this illness and our own cross we will die on, the one we all will have, no matter how we avoid it, help us through it to the end, help us through it to our lesser resurrection in YOU, lesser in comparison to the one on Easter but everything to us in our limited lives.  Even more than my little salvation is the final Resurrection of all life in you, eternally.  Without that mine would be worse than nothing. 

Few Days Late But I Figure It's About Time I Started Doing Lenten Penance Here

Dear God outside of time and causation,  please heal those things I did that can't be fixed in time and causation, the mean things said, the mean things done. Repair those, working them out in the process or end of all things in you.  Heal those I've wronged better than new, and so me as well.  Or better, us.