Saturday Night NOT Radio Drama - Doug Roland - Seeing Through

 

 

Tereek - Stephen Prescod

Artie - Robert Tarango 

Tereek -- a young man trying hard not to reveal his lack of a home -- is desperately looking for a bed for the night, texting friends in hopes that he can crash with them. But just when something comes through, he finds himself helping out Artie, a deaf-blind man waiting for a bus home.

The encounter is anything but straightforward, not only due to their differences in abilities but also their different temperaments and ages. But as Tereek helps Artie navigate a ride home, he learns to see the world through another perspective beyond his own -- and broadening his horizons in the process. 

Writer-director Doug Roland's Oscar-shortlisted short drama -- executive produced by Marlee Matlin and in partnership with Helen Keller Services -- is a deceptively simple narrative that takes place over one evening between two characters. But this chance encounter -- captured with visual storytelling that's both natural, unforced and still deftly crafted -- uncovers riches of empathy, along with a profound revelation about how people can offer fellowship, help and care to one another, even in the simplest of ways.

Actor Steven Prescod's subtle yet precise performance captures Tereek's arc as a young man unmoored, looking out for himself because he has to. And that might cost him his humanity, especially when he snarls at a homeless man visibly less well-off than himself. But as he helps Artie move through the world, he takes on Artie's perspective and becomes his "brother's keeper," opening him up in both feeling and sensibility at a juncture in life where he may close himself off permanently.

A friend recommended this to me the other day.  It and the film made about how they found the deaf-blind actor to play Artie, Robert Tarango,  I thought about what a dramatic production for deaf-blind people could be like, what it would mean if you couldn't hear or see it.  I don't know but it would be interesting to hear them tell us, I haven't found any place where anyone has.  New things to think about, especially for someone whose favorite form is audio theater.  

Storm Warning

I WAS talking with one of my siblings about the time our father gave up coffee for Lent and got so grouchy that our mother forbade him from ever going without coffee again.  She said the same thing to me when I talked about giving it up during a period of low income, she insisted on buying my coffee for me to tide me over. 

My sibling told me something I didn't know, that it was a pact my father and the parish priest made that Lent and that my mother wasn't the only one who didn't want to put up with the results,  a number of parishioners told the priest to never try it again.   As he was one of the most popular priests in the history of the parish, a really nice and jolly guy,  the change must have had to get really bad.  

Going Holy Week and Easter Week without answering hate mail is going to be a real strain for me but at least you won't have to put up with the withdrawal.  At least I've got coffee now.

Let's Give This Senile Senior Judge What He Mistakenly Thinks He Wants

LIFE LONG Republican-fascist scumbag, Judge Laurence Silbermann had an 80s moment last week when he used a recent dissent to rail against the "liberal media"

"Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets," Silberman, wrote. "And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction. The orientation of these three papers is followed by The Associated Press and most large papers across the country (such as the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe). Nearly all television — network and cable — is a Democratic Party trumpet. Even the government-supported National Public Radio follows along."

The 85-year-old Silberman,, who was appointed to the court in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan, then quoted former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev who argued that the media was trying to impose socialism.

"'When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries,' Leonid Brezhnev, Remarks to the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers' Party (Nov. 13, 1968)," Silberman, wrote. "Thus, one [sic] a country has turned communist, it can never be allowed to go back."

 

To which I say this coot is way out of step with his fellow Republican-fascists because if people could sue newspapers and media for lying about them, the biggest beneficiaries of it would be Democrats and liberals who are lied about with impunity, especially on the basis of NPR, The NYT, the WaPo, the Boston Globe . . . reporting what "people are saying" and as "opinion journalism". If Hillary Clinton could have sued the New York Times for carrying false reporting about her in the 1990s, she would have been president. If Al Gore, John Kerry, a host of Democratic candidates for other offices could have sued media that lied about them, if media could be prevented from lying about policies that Democrats favored, we would be in territory that Lyndon Johnson hoped for this country instead of the Nixonian, Reaganite, Trumpian hell hole we've been in.

 

It was one of the major turns in American right-wing politics when they realized that the suppression of publication that they had used to suppress smut (when they weren't profiting off of it, but Murdoch doesn't enter into till they let the smut king come here to turn the country into a toilet mouthed sewer) and to go after those most pathetic and ridiculous of paper tigers, the American commies, worked to suppress the right-wing lies that would be a boon for the Republican party. When they realized that the Sullivan Decision freed the media that was largely owned by Republicans and some wealthy families who stood to gain from Republican policies favoring the rich, any "liberals" among them easily intimidated from too much criticism by merely saying they weren't being fair to fascists and nice to Nazis they realized that far from being a problem for them, "free speech" and especially "free press" was their golden opportunity to directly destroy egalitarian democracy by feeding the public a steady diet of lies.

That is the reason that neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, Murdoch style media, the even more overtly Putin allied media are the biggest fattest champions of "free speech" EVEN TO THE EXTENT THAT WHEN MEDIA EXERCISE THEIR FREEDOM OF THE PRESS BY KICKING VIOLENCE ADVOCATING AND LYING FASCISTS OFF OF PRIVATELY OWNED MEDIA THAT THEY WHINE ABOUT BEING DEPRIVED OF THEIR "FREE SPEECH" TO EVEN INCITE INSURRECTION, USING ACLU STYLE "FREE SPEECH" BABBLE WHICH SUCKERS IN THE MEDIA FALL FOR.  Probable virtual Putin assert, Glenn Greenwald's act consists mostly of that these days. 

So, the senile old coot, after a lifetime of service to Republican-fascism is merely behind the times, thinking back to the time before Republicans made what was, perhaps, a more corrupt bargain that was perhaps even more profitable to them than the one they made with the Dixiecrats and America's indigenous form of Nazi style fascism, white supremacy and Jim Crow, the bargain they made with the smut peddlers and the ACLU to free them andtheir owned media to lie with impunity, knowing that the owners of the American media would lie for them and that they could whip the kind of "liberals" in the media into doing their bidding by whining and crying that they weren't being fair to them.  THAT is the history of the American free press in the era after the Sullivan Decision.  If you want to knock the legal knees out from that, including the Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United, etc. decisions,  I can go along with that.  It's just that this senile Republican-fascist wouldn't like it if he really got what he wished for. 

Hate Mail - Mop Up - Notice, There Will Be No More Hate Mail Till After Easter Week - I've Got To Salvage Something Of Lent

THE OLD STUPID atheist joke that may have come from Bertrand Russell (I know he said it but never bothered to see if he was merely mouthing some earlier atheist) that Christians are atheists about the gods of classical paganism and they just go them one step farther is quite stupid, in so far as the classical gods are not the same sort of "thing"* that God is and if they were familiar with the Bible and classical religion they might know that.  It is one of the intellectual shortcomings of the atheist tradition that it so often substitutes ridicule for argumentation and disproof.

Well, in saying that I believe time is progressive, that we are supposed to be part of, participate in and experience going from before till after until we leave the realm of time that modern physics has tied to the material universe, existing in the change from past to future and that the future will, in turn, become past and move on.   I'm rejecting "conservatism" as much as I am "modernism" all "isms" as ideological constructs founded on a past that doesn't even keep up with the present and soon get old and, found to be inadequate, are surpassed.  

The modernism of Descartes and his contemporaries fell way to later 17th and 18th century modern thinkers, who, while they may have admired the progress in the establishment of science that Descartes and his predecessors and contemporaries invented weren't willing to let things rest there.  

In turn the "enlightenment" era thinkers, as their thinking was found inadequate gave way to 19th century thought, especially the "romanticism" that started in the 18th century and was, itself left behind in a more self-consciously self-named "modernism" which, builidng, ironically enough on some of the more pathological decadence of all of those already mentioned, now finds itself to be considered inadequate.   

"Post-modernism" may have already outdone those in the ephemeral character of its shelf-life, if there really ever was such a "thing" as "post-modernism".  It has seemed to me to have fallen aside even as the last adherents of mid-20th century "modernism" are not going gently into that dark night which their nihilism should have prepared them for as the fate of their own ideology as they are content to consider all other things and even entire populations of human beings.  

That's the thing about modernists, scientistic-atheist-materialists,  they require that you stop your criticism just short of their own ideology, of applying the same tools of critical destruction that they demanded as necessitating the destruction of their rivals and predecessors.  That they need to do that points out one of the most dishonest aspects of their ideology, they do not want a no-holds-barred, "objective" (there is no such thing as objectivity, it is a delusion), etc. intellectual inquiry.  As Richard Lewontin once pointed out to Carl Sagan, if you want that kind of thing you should go watch the action at a New York Orthodox study hall.  

If you are upset that I reject modernism because you believe that must necessitate that I want to return to some past you aren't understanding what I said at all.  A. "conservatism" is an aspect of modernism, one that may, at times, be as ill informed as other modernist thinkers as its character because they are thoroughly modern.  Especially those who allege themselves to be "classical liberals" by which they appeal to the libertarian atrocity that stole the name from a more actually enlightened liberalism based on the Mosaic commandments to do justice and economic justice to the poor and despised.  B. I have never rejected liberalism if by that you mean what someone like Marilynne Robinson asserts was the original English language meaning of that tied into the supply of ample charity to those who need it by those who can afford to give it or even by those who can't spare it (there are no economics more radical than that taught by Jesus, not even the one taught by Moses), C. I believe any "ism" human beings are capable of formulating by intention or by accident is imperfect and will, with time, dissolve into the lost past, any attempts to continue them into the future more likely to risk distorting that future for the worse than in moving things in a better direction. D. I believe that, similarly, no human articulation of religion is perfect enough to begin to be adequate and should never be conceived of as durable and unchanging.  Christians certainly have no right to claim such a status for their religion as the Gospel builds on that guarantee in Isaiah that I started this with of a new heaven and a new earth quite unlike any that human beings have managed to create with their ever new and improved ideologies and denominational declarations.

* I think it's one of the defects of human language that we are forced to talk about God who is not a thing as a thing, an object susceptible to understanding and treatment like other things.  The same defect, certainly in English, leads us to talk about people and animals as if sentient creatures were the same sort of things that non-sentient objects are from which perhaps comes the habit of regarding people as objects of utility or uselessness that the entire Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition can well be seen as dissenting from, any part of those that accommodates itself to the objectification of people as a deviation or betrayal of the central aspect of the Abrahamic or at least Mosaic religion. 

Update:  Well, there are different possibilities as to why God would have created the universe.   Maybe your question as to what was in it for God is assuming that God did it for selfish reasons - how human - when it's possible existence was a gift God gave to we, God's creatures who God called into existence.  I believe that, in so far as modern cosmology seems to expect there to be an end of the universe, that it's possible that all of existence, those things which now exist, are yet to exist, have existed and ended will all be reconciled "saved" as it were.  Of course if modern cosmology made convincing arguments that the last hundred fifteen years or so got it wrong and the universe is eternal other explanations will be possible.   The atheist claim that it would put a nail in the coffin of God is as ridiculous as the claim that the current cosmology does.  I am a lot less confident that current cosmology is the last word than I am in the idea that the universe has purpose and that the long arc of history bends in the direction of justice.  I mean, atheists are always arguing things out of what believing things get you.  The idea that the universe has a life friendly purpose gets you a hell of a lot more than the atheist-materialist-scientistic nihilistic one which gets you depravity and meaninglessness and a freedom that is less than being the ruler of hell, which the purposeless Darwinian struggle and bloodshed get you.   That's a neo-Nazi desideratum because that's the kind of thing that benefits from it, in the end. 

If you don't ask "who benefits" from these ideological claims being widely bought you are a chump.  That's what all ideological activity is based in, the reason that people choose to believe what they believe.  I wouldn't trust a materialist completely, not even those I have deep affection for.  

You should be ashamed of [fill in whatever here]. . . Hate Mail

OH, NO I'm shameless on that point.  I will tell you that I'm a lot more embarrassed that I didn't catch that I typed "ensure" when I meant "assure" the day before yesterday, in fact I assure you of that.  

The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. famously said, "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."  Well, one of the things about there being a UNIverse is that there is one universe.  The "moral universe" is the same universe that all of the rest of it fits into.  I believe what MLK said, I choose to believe it just as nihilists choose to disbelieve that and with that disbelief they choose the nihilistic depravity that comes with that rejection.  That is why I made the remark about Nietzsche that I did the other day, no one who chooses Nietzsche has any credibility in asserting any form of morality.  I looked over a couple of lists of those who either admitted to being influenced by him or are credibly considered to have been influenced by him demonstrates that even their better natures were damaged by the kind of thing that Nietzsche asserted.  

Anyone who repeats or pretends to believe that assertion by MLK is expressing the idea that the universe has purpose of a very specific kind and if you believe that about one aspect of it, you cannot deny that other, I would assert all, aspects of it are similarly moved in a particular direction.  I could go into the problems that merely seems to be for the concept of freedom but that would take a hell of a long series of posts.  I believe that the reality of morality requires that our minds be free and that freedom is one aspect of why we have importance within the framing of morality.  I believe any life which demonstrates volition is contained within that framing, perhaps all of reality does. 

If you choose to believe that the universe is meaningless, then you have disconnected the very concept of meaning from any claim to it being real or important.  THAT seems to me to lie behind the horrific reality of the Trump phenomenon, FOX news, the refusal to accept realities such as that wearing a mask during a pandemic of air borne disease is moral and requiring them is a duty of legitimate governance AND LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE DENIAL OF REALITY.  Such denials of reality are a result of the rejection morality as a real force in the universe, something real through the installation of morality as a feature of our one universe, one as real as subatomic particles, perhaps more certainly real than the Higgs particle so much beloved by those who foolishly think that such things can have a known reality separate from the minds and lives of those who "know" them.

Those lists of those people who were heavily influenced by Nietzsche are chock full of those whose lives and work, were, I believe, blighted through their choices of believing in materialism, in scientism, in atheism. Many of the writers, composers and scientists and even a few of the philosophers on those lists, the ones I'm familiar with, probably couldn't have come up with a deep explanation of why they made that choice, for a lot of them I don't think it went much farther, in the beginning, than wanting to fit into the respectable side of an academic-so-called intellectual milieu as a means of entering the middle or upper classes.  A lot of them, I think, wanted to feel free to screw around with their students or other people, some of them wanted to feel free to do other things that morality would inhibit.  It's clear that the neo-fascists want to debase the population in general because people without a sense of morality or reality are easier to cheat, gull and control. 

I would be the first person to acknowledge that the effects of that are deeply embedded in many, perhaps most of the Christian Churches, in many Synagogues (especially, ironically, it would seem Orthodox ones) in many of the denominations of Islam (again those considered most Orthodox seemingly some of the worst).  All of those are human institutions, all human institutions are liable to immorality and its near cousin, moral failing on account of ignorance, lazy thinking and the retention of bad habits, bad habits retained by a failure of moral self-criticism as often as not.  I know from reading a lot more theology over the past decade that far from being uncritical, the best of theology practices what might be the most rigorous program of internal criticism in all of intellectual literature.  If you want an example of that, I would point you to Hans Kung's Does God Exist which will both give you a rigorous criticism of a belief in God from the viewpoint of various opponents of religion, including Nietzsche, as well as point you to more of that than you're likely to ever get from your typical English language popular treatment of the topic.  Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy is froth compared to it.

One of the unadmitted aspects of modern thought is that it is riddled with a dyspeptic and depressingly pathological negativity and a hostility to the humane and the life affirming. 
That is what I think is given away by the academic attempts at coming up with a replacement for morality which seems to always lead to a list and schedule of who it's OK to kill being a part of every one of those I'm aware of.  Peter Singer and the other academic utilitarians are a living demonstration of the tender mercies of the wicked being cruel.   Is it any wonder the lack of morality among Republican governors is tied into the concept of "herd immunity" which is a superstition based in Darwinist materialism, thinking of human lives in terms of animal husbandry?  The way Nazis though to the slaves they worked to death, the physics of how to keep crematoria burning on calculations of human fat so as to save money on coal?

In Lieu Of A St. Patrick's Day Post - Hate Mail

I ONLY watched a little of the 1970s series of TV plays The Glittering Prizes based on a novel by Frederic Raphael. It was about the school days and lives in years later of a group of Cambridge University graduates, that was something that was already getting old for me back then. As the gorgeous Tom Conti played Adam Morris, the moral center of the stories, it's kind of funny that I didn't watch the whole thing. As it is, other than finding just about every character but him and Morris's wife repugnant to one extent or another, it didn't make that much of an impression on me.  I couldn't stand the mandatory gay character, I felt like shooting him when the stupid queen got himself arrested through entrapment.  I never felt much sympathy for people who got into trouble looking for anonymous sex.  I was also a bit tired of that tired old plot device by then, too, probably. 

 

I do, though, remember the last of the six shows in the series, A Double Life, which I think might the the only one I watched in its entirety, in which the stupidity and selfishness of many of the characters was coming home to roost and Adam Morris and his wife were trying to hold onto their idealism as the liberal assumptions of the 1960s were crashing all around them. What I remember most is the opening in which Morris is addressing a tiny crowd of elderly Jews on why he didn't support Zionism or, at least, opposed the policies of the Israeli government against the Arab population. 

 

What you said about the moral responsibility of "monotheist religion" for all atrocities in response to what I said reminded me of a scene from that to lead me to see if it was Youtubed and, guess what, it is. Here it is.

 

 

 

If you listen to the whole thing you will, I hope, notice a complete disconnect between the conclusions of Morris as to who was ultimately to blame and the quote from Bertrand Russell, given as,  

 

If we could be certain that eternal bliss could be obtained for all mankind by exterminating the Jews then there could be no reason for not exterminating the Jews.

 

A quote which I can't place in the Russell canon, though I wouldn't be at all surprised if he said something like that, the old fart loved to get the kind of attention that saying such things would have gotten him.  

 

And also notice the requisite Russell style condemnation of God and so religion as being the most depraved thing of all, which was part of the general denigration of monotheistic religion, a requirement to be intellectually and socially respectable in the milieu that would have watched the shows. The fact is that without God Adam Morris is quite at a loss to explain his morality, its validity, why he has any right to assert to other people he has a right to advocate that they be governed by it. That's a central and fatal problem with all such assertions of morality.

 

As it's been about 45 years since I saw it and I don't have a script, I think I'm right in remembering Morris has a discussion with his cynical teenage son, almost the same age he was in the first of the series as he tells his old Jewish aristocratic father why he thought giving up a millenia old tradition was a good thing. In the discussion it's apparently news to the middle-aged idealist that his son has become a devotee of the nihilism of Nietzsche, though it would be interesting to go into that in light of the assertions made to the tiny audience of unconvinced elderly Jews and the rancorous discussion he has with them, his rejection of Russell's utilitarian assertion of what it would take to make it morally justified to murder all of the Jews (utilitarianism as well as other atheist ersatz replacements for morality always seem to devolve into writing up lists and schedules of who to kill) and his son's further rejection of the Jewish tradition of morality of which his father* who also died in the last show was an already faded representative of. Perhaps someone who has the script or the whole show might want to send me some ideas on that.

 

I seem to recall that the series end in Morris saying that he can only cope by carving out an imaginary refuge from the essential contradictions between his various stands, the disappointments of life, the failing idealistic yearnings he has had. I seem to remember that's how it ended, though it has been more than forty years and I'm sure I only saw it once. 

 

Lost in the whole thing was the fact that literally every sin that can be asserted against the Children of Israel in Scripture is known to us by their own confession of guilt and that every sin that can be laid against Christians allegedly acting out of Christianity is a sin against the Gospel, too.  You can't say that if the utilitarians came up with what would satisfy them as  "certainty" that killing all the Jews would result in their genocide against Jews they would not have a logical justification of that in their own phony substitution for morality.  It is one of the recurring topics on this blog how one, after another, after another iteration of atheist-materialistic ideology has come up with a reason for the most appalling evil up to and including genocide.  I have infuriated many by pointing out that a belief in natural selection, the quintessential ideology of the atheist-materialist-modernist educated class and even of religious types who want to be respectable with that realm of existence is rife with assertions of the salubrious effects on the future of one genocide or another.  I would wonder if Raphael ever dealt with that fact in his many published works. 

 

* Eric Porter, whose acting style seemed to clash with that of the younger actor, though maybe that was intentional given the context.

 

Update:  Ha, ha, on me.  Reading this through I realized I'd misremembered four decades out.   Eric Porter didn't play Morris's father, he played the Brit-fascist who Adam Morris goes to interview.  It was Leonard Sachs who played the father. 

 

 

 

I Am Mightily Pissed Off Over This And Will Always Be

LAST NIGHT'S Rachel Maddow show had these two excerpts from the Director of National Intelligence report on Putin interference in the 2020 election.  

 

A key element of Moscow's strategy this election cycle was its use of people linked to Russian intelligence to launder influence narratives including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden-through US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, some of whom were close to former President Trump and his administration.

and 

Derkach, Kilimnik, and their associates sought to use prominent US persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to US officials and audiences. These Russian proxies met with and provided materials to Trump administration-linked US persons to advocate for formal investigations; hired a US firm to petition US officials; and attempted to make contact with several senior US officials. 

 

Why aren't the "US media organizations" and "prominent US individuals" made public so we know how to judge their credibility on this or any other issues. What are the "media conduits to launder" Putin's narratives "to US officials and audiences." Who were the "US persons" Trump administration-linked WHAT WAS THE "US FIRM" HIRED TO PETITION US OFFICIALS"?

 

Any of those referred to in the report who acted in this way, were open to those sources of lies to be inserted not only into the Republican-fascist press but also directly into the United States government, the Congress, the Executive, who knows, into the Judicial branch - AFTERALL, IT WAS THE SUPREME COURT THROUGH THEIR "FREE SPEECH-FREE PRESS" RULINGS WHO OPENED US UP TO THIS ANTI-DEMOCRATIC CORRUPTION. All of that means that it isn't just the right of We The People to know the identity of those guilty of crimes against democracy, we have an absolute need to know who are active agents of foreign gangsters, including those in our domestic billionaire-millionare gangster class who worked hand in glove with the gangster dictator of Russia, those working for and with him in other countries, almost certainly such gangsters who have done what the Republican-fascists wanted to do here, gain absolute control of the United States government.  

 

I want this rubbed in the face of John Roberts, Alito, Thomas, etc. those who through the Republican-fascist dominated Supreme Court opened us up to this corruption, I want them to be forced out of power through their knowing or at least informed collusion with this effort. They were warned what they were doing in Citizens United and a series of other Republican-fascist-billionaire-millionaire enabling corruptions of our elections going back to Buckley v Valeo, on behalf of one of our more genteel fascist families and the goddamned ACLU who supported ALL of those rulings and others corrupting American demoracy.  

 

 

If you "choose to believe" something, it means you don't really believe it. - Hate Mail

WHEN I said that I chose to believe that the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition of monotheism was true I was being provocative but I was also being honest about things and how things are.   I choose to believe in physics, chemistry, well-supported areas of biology,  I choose to believe in evolution while I most certainly don't believe in natural selection,  I choose to believe that the assertions and proofs of the quite separate realm of  mathematics are generally true in some, though not all, of the applications to things in the physical sciences, though I most certainly do not believe that the so-called social sciences have any level of demonstrable reason for believing that their mathematical manipulations relate to anything much that is real.    If mathematicians and scientists were honest the would admit that what they know they would not accept as being known without a long series of choices to believe things being in place by the time they arrived at their first bit of scientific knowledge.   

Philosophers would be far more honest if they admitted there is not only NO sharp distinction between belief and knowledge but there is the most intimate of relations between the action of believing and knowing, knowing, as we talk about it, being a product of belief at the earliest of ages, I would say predating our first sentient use of words and language.  Social scientists are seldom honest enough to even admit the scientific illegitimacy of most everything they do and teach so maybe they're a lost cause, the odd one here and there excepted.

The assertion that things happen by random chance, that nature is not aimed at goals and that the progressive conception of reality is a delusion is nothing that is knowable through science, mathematics or philosophy, the millenniums arguing about that have produce nothing except a few temporary periods where one or the other conception has seemed to get the upper hand, I think that the idea that the materialists who invented and asserted those conceptions, including those pagans who conceived of their gods as aspects of the material universe (Paul had interesting things to say about that in Romans, by the way) . . . that those guys had somehow escaped the realm of expressing ideas from the realm of belief  is unbelievable considering how consonant their exposition of the universe and reality is with their hostility to revealed religion as found in the Jewish-Christian-Islamic and other traditions which believe in a God (generally from those I'm aware of an expression of the single God who is definitely NOT an aspect of the material universe but its Creator).  

What you assert is the real, right sciencey, modernistic knowledge of the universe is not scientific, it is ideological, as modernism is an ideological framing in itself, a materialistic, scientistic, atheistic one.  What atheists misrepresent as superior thinking on that account merely expose themselves as the victims of their own allergy to rigorous examination of their own thinking, testing themselves for the sins they accuse religious believers of because, brother, you guys are as bad as the worst of the fundamentalist Bible thumpers in that regard. 

Update:  Back during my long period of agnostic cowardice I fell into the place of being impressed with G.E. Moore's A Defense of Common Sense which, in light of philosophy's inability to come to a single universal truth established to the claimed requirements to be considered as "known," threw up his hands and said that there were things known by "common sense" that are known to a higher degree of reliability than the kinds of things that philosophers had been disputing the reality of like forever.   I wasn't as impressed with his clear motive in the paper of using his claims to assure his fellow Brit atheist philosophers (and the general run of academic philosophers) that he was safely atheistic - they are generally less pluralistic in their ideological purity than even many religious people are, certainly not within their profession. 

I think after that long, long period of philosophers running up against the impossibility of their being able to find a single thing they can hold to be known absolutely, the problem is with their claimed requirements for holding that.  I think it's a problem that does, in fact, go back to Socrates as Plato likely invented him, of running up against the idealized conception of pure knowledge as it runs smack into the limits of our minds.  I think the standards of Western Philosophy along that line are what is unsupported and likely is a product of uninformed imagination and unacknowledged wishful thinking based on a dislike of religion. 

Let me turn to one of my favorite dear old commies, I. F. Stone who I think said it best in his wonderful book The Trial of Socrates.

 Socrates demands not only perfect definitions of the shoe and the horse but - more difficult - a perfect definition of knowledge, itself.  Here is how Socrates puts it to Theaetetus,  who is perhaps the least wide-awake of all of the submissive yes-men given Socrates in the Platonic canon:

Socrates:  Then he [the shoemaker] does not understand knowledge of shoes if he does not know knowledge.

Theaetetus: No

Socrates:  Then he who is ignorant of knowledge does not understand cobbler or any other art.

Theaetetus:  No

Any bright Athenian could have made the obvious objection to this stratospheric nonsense:  A shoemaker need not to be a philosophizer, and a philosopher is not necessarily a good shoemaker.  Indeed, the customer who brought a piece of leather to the cobbler was interested not - as a philosopher would say - in universals but in particulars.  He wanted a pair made to fit his particular feet, not some metaphysically perfect definition of a shoe.  Then as now, the right foot was not the same as the left.  So no shoes even in the same pair were identical, however perfect the definition of "shoe."  And the customer wanted his particular pair made in such a way as best to utilize the particular piece of leather he had chosen.  At every point the "particular" was more important than the "universal."  In one vital aspect the shoemaker is ahead of the philosopher.  The shoemaker can make a shoe.  But the philosophers still can't turn out an absolutely perfect definition - either of shoes or of knowledge.  Insofar as their respective crafts are considered, the shoemaker is clearly the better craftsman than the metaphysician.  

I don't think there is any obligation on the part of anyone to wait around another 2.5 thousand years to see if they're going to come up with one before admitting that what they claimed about the nature of knowledge as compared to belief was worth less than a load of bullshit which at least could be composted and used to fertilize crops.

From The Lectionary For Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent

Thus says the LORD:
Lo, I am about to create new heavens
    and a new earth;
The things of the past shall not be remembered
    or come to mind.
Instead, there shall always be rejoicing and happiness
    in what I create;
For I create Jerusalem to be a joy
    and its people to be a delight;
I will rejoice in Jerusalem
    and exult in my people.
No longer shall the sound of weeping be heard there,
    or the sound of crying;
No longer shall there be in it
    an infant who lives but a few days,
    or an old man who does not round out his full lifetime;
He dies a mere youth who reaches but a hundred years,
    and he who fails of a hundred shall be thought accursed.
They shall live in the houses they build,
    and eat the fruit of the vineyards they plant.

 Isaiah 65:17-21

Needless to say we haven't come close to that yet, we still await that extent in change, though I wonder what Isaiah would make of our world.  

The Jewish idea of time as being progressive, as opposed to the materialistic-pagan view of reality as static, is one of those things I chose to believe when I chose to believe.  That is that I chose to consider it as a reality even as materialists reject it for those kinds of unstated, unadmitted ideological motives I mentioned earlier today.  

The consequences of choosing to believe that there is change, that change is possible, that change is the will of God who created the universe and life for a reason and towards an end are not guaranteed to be adopted, you have to also accept the Jewish idea of justice, which extends to not only all of humanity but to animals and all of creation, as well, something that is often laid aside or neglected or denied by even those who put on a display of piety and orthodoxy but a belief in God at least makes that a coherent possibility,  there is a reason for morality being moral and that is because it is what The Creator wants, a part of the reason for the creation of the universe and life.  Without that all of the many materialistic replacements for morality, relativism, utilitarianism, the ridiculous substitution for those biological-materialistic atavism often as ill defined as asserted and far more open to the corruption of selfish and hateful motives than the Jewish-Christian-Islamic conception of reality mentioned above.  In fact, they can't even get started with providing a reason that anyone, even accepting the ersatz replacement of non-selfish assertions of ethics, should feel any obligation to act unselfishly if they figure they can work it to their ends, in the end. 

A traditional barroom style atheist would call the vision of Isaiah "pie in the sky"  but at least there is some mention of pie for all in that desideratum as opposed to what atheism offers.   Atheism can't even tell someone why they should figure they have a right to "live in the houses they build, and eat the fruit of the vineyards they plant," nor give the rich and powerful who can steal the product of the labor of those beneath them an absolute reason they shouldn't .  Overcoming the universal and original sin of selfishness takes a lot more than the entire history of academic, intellectual, atheist-materialist-scientistic creation of replacements for revealed religion, it takes an acceptance of a very specific idea of God.

 

Can't blieve I missed that Chick Corea had died last month

 

 

Hope he's making great music. 

More Sins Of My Old Age - Sorry, No Sex Is Involved

AS I have gotten older and looked more critically at the assumptions of my youth, many of which, by the way, are not attributable to my parents or the Church but to the far more seductive popular and academic cultures I experienced, those last two in perhaps rapidly diminishing order of influence, I've found a lot of it to be total bullshit and often stuff I was too vapidly passive in accepting to understand it being embedded in ideological influences grown subtle through their infiltration of the general culture.

A couple of years or so ago I wrote a post about the mathematical demonstration that just about anyone with Western European biological heritage (including many, many of us who are counted as People of Color) almost certainly have Charlemagne the eighth century emperor as one of our ancestors, in direct line of biological inheritance. That demonstration is based in the rapidly increasing humber of great, great, great, grandparents we all have, which that many generations ago would be larger than the total population of Europe, so the chances are that that many marrying, many concubine keeping gangster king was among them.

My conclusion about that wasn't the common stupidity of being proud to have had royalty in my ancestry (I don't see that as being any more to be proud of than having those we admit are organized criminals in my lineage - who, by the way, we must also have) but to realize that, there being many more Jews in Europe at the time than eighth century "Emperors of the Romans" that it is an even greater mathematical certainty that every Nazi, every antisemite would have Jewish blood coursing through their hateful veins, every Jew would almost certainly have Crusader pogromists in their ancestry. Or the love of Mike, even every Irish person is likely to have English ancestry.

And that same line of mathematical reasoning certainly brings us all the way back to Africa where every single white supremacist must trace their lineage and their direct biological inheritance for almost every significant aspect of their genetic and other biological heritage.

Of course everything in this line of mathematically derived fact about notions of human heritage even as it must increase our consciousness of the unity of the human species must also be destructive of notions of ethnicity, of biological and cultural separateness and appurtenance to anything like a "pure" heritage. It renders any such notion of "purity" or separateness a mathematical absurdity. It is one of the remarkable things about the dishonestly named "enlightenment" that it didn't decrease such notions of separateness but it seems to have taken up earlier notions of such bullshit and give it a gloss coat of sciency approval and promotion. The late 18th century through to today is rife with such stuff, even today when its destructive side is threatening, certainly, assertions of human equality and the legitimate conception of democracy which can only be a product of the assertion of and practice of equality.

Another of the things in my experience that have led me into thinking about this was the increasingly disturbing recognition of some commonalities between the popular culture of my youth and adulthood and Nazism, something which I had thrown in my face continually during my long researches into the commonalitiy of Nazi ideology and Darwinism. The Nazi notion of Volk and its many uses in Nazi propaganda derived from 19th century romantic linguistics and anthropology (so pseudo-science) both of which were generally tied up in the most intimate ways with racism and beliefs of people in their own racial superiority over either generally understood or designated "others" who were inferior and always presented as a least a rival and, mostly, dangers to the "pure" Volk. That kind of thinking was certainly not peculiar to those who spoke German and mistakenly believed themselves to have no Jewish or Slavic or Romani ancestors, the English language folk had their own version of it as did, in fact others. Especially in what developed into Nazism, all of that tied into ridiculous, ahistorical beliefs and distorted historical beliefs about the "Holy Roman Empire" of which Charlemagne was the first crime family boss. As noted there are similar neo-Nazi, neo-fascist lines of comic book historical belief in relation to Byzantium, the real "Roman Empire" surviving into the medieval, feudal period. 

 

History told wrong is a dangerous thing, but, then, all lies are. People don't generally tell lies for the purpose of doing good, though our "enlightened" Founders were too stupid to make that distinction when talking of "freedom of the press" and "free speech."  Those told in the pseudo-sciences and its invasion to even within the real scientific study of evolution are as if not more deadly.

You could write a library of books dealing with both the absurdity of such notions of The Folks, "folk culture" many of the various neologisms created with that four letter word. What I've become interested in is the common origins and consequences of notions of "folk culture" between the right and the secular alleged left which, of course, became more associated with commies in the United States.

I think in my early research and thinking about this the separation of the two is largely illusory, certainly at the beginning stages. The motives of the early collectors of folk lore, folk music, folk stories, folk culture, especially their ideological motives is certainly interesting because in a lot of cases it came from the same notions of post-"enlightenment" 19th century romanticism and the desire to raise some form of biological heritage into a guide star to find some unspecific and ill defined truth or force of nature, to find something to replace the "God shaped hole" in the soul of modernism. I think that the hostility to religion, and if not religion then the egalitarian nature of The Law, The Prophets and, most of all, The Gospel, is the rather crumbly foundation stonework of all of it. The notion that there is some material substrate that finds its expression in the absurdly believed in atavistic nature of "the folk" "folk culture" that must yield some more general truth is intimately tied up with a rejection of revealed religion. A good part of the expression of that took the form of the desire to reestablish a totally ahistorical 19th century notion of the original "Germanic" paganism, "Druidism", various notions of "the old religion" and in places such as Italy, that took the form of an absurd, romantic version of the real Roman empire (the whole notion of neo-classicism is, oddly, part of the same thing, I suspect) and in France some bizarre mix of that with feudal Christianity, tied in with romantic notions of the French monarchy. Where they could lay claim to the central power of the classical period they used that, where that was lacking, they made something up out of local materials trying to come up with some pure "natural" replacement for God. When you're looking to make yourself feel superior to other people you use whatever chance happened to give you.

As you can see, I'm still at the early stages of research and thinking about this, how far I'll get with it, I don't know, Darwinism which I've been working on for going on twenty years, is hardly exhausted as something to look at and its foundational literature is far smaller and in fewer languages.

One thing that I've found is I can't listen to Pete Seeger and The Weavers and Almanac Singers anymore with anything like enjoyment. I've become deeply suspicious of such stuff and pop culture in general.  I suspect that the academic promotion of and elevation of pop culture is for more monetary motives and that it's easier to write about something with such a thin substrate to it.  I've read enough real research to know bullshit when I see it.