Saturday Night Radio Drama - Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes

 

 

Set in Sixties Illinois, Something Wicked This Way Comes is the memorable story of two boys, James Nightshade and William Halloway. It tells the story of the evil that grips the boys' small Midwestern town with the arrival of a "dark carnival" one autumn midnight. The carnival is a thrilling and chilling world featuring a mirror maze that reflects a person's older or younger self, depending on their desires, and a magic carousel that leaves its riders a year older when it plays Chopin's Funeral March forwards and with each rotation, but makes them a year younger when it rotates backwards. Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes is dramatised by Diana Griffiths and stars Theo Gregory as Will and Josef Lindsay as Jim.

The adaptation of a story of Ray Bradbury I posted a few weeks back was popular.   I figured I'd give the people what they want again.

It's funny to hear them do mid-western yank accents.  They sort of almost get them. 

You might want to listen soon, these tend to get taken down from Youtube pretty fast, only to reappear under a different name.

 Sick today.  Going to lie down.  I'll post a drama later, perhaps a good re-run and maybe some writing.  Some of it might be tick bite paranoia, I don't really think it's that, probably just spring allergies out of hand.  Maybe teasing the troll will make me feel better .

I expect that if he lives to be old enough, Duncan will go back to being a Republican like Orson Bean did as a cranky old coot. 

I'd Love To Know What The Favorite Movies And TV Shows Of Killer Cops Are Because I'll Bet We Could Find The Cause Of Their Prediliction To Kill Black People In Them

ABOUT THE WEEK BEFORE LAST I confessed that I love to do research, to go looking for answers to questions, to fact check ideas I've been told or taught about history, biography, etc. Writing blogs over the past fifteen years, almost and before that getting into blog brawls has been a chance to indulge myself. I really went into the wrong line of work, I'd have loved to be a research librarian. For one thing, especially in the age of card files and the necessity of looking at books you'd walk and climb through a large library to find, I'd have probably been in better shape. Sitting on a piano bench the hours it takes to play one isn't exactly a serious cardio workout.

Not that I don't like the new technology, when it works. Machine search, word and phrase search capabilities are a lot more efficient at locating the parts of books or documents that will provide you with answers, those things you half remember from reading something decades ago but which would take forever to find. Especially those things you read at the university library fifty miles away but, now, available to you from Archive.org or Project Gutenberg along with lots and lots of public domain and pirated books and documents that may not have been held by the university library in an ink on paper copy. I have repeatedly warned people that now that those capabilities have become available that a lot of the former ideological mythology of, for example, the old and then the "new left" was doomed to discovery.

I have warned Darwinist ideologues and those who bought into the post-WWII constructed myth of the eugenics-free, innocent Darwin that that myth is doomed because all you have to do to have that lie shattered is to read his words, read the ideas by the likes of Galton and Haeckel and Greg he endorsed and supported as science, read the understanding of Darwinism by the next generation such as Karl Pearson and the German scientists he cited and collaborated with on "racial science" and his own children, especially Leonard Darwin and you have the direct link from Darwin sitting in his home in Britain and the Nazi's Final Solution, argued out, even at the infamous Wannsee Conference in explicitly Darwinist claims of natural selection. The necessity of the creation of a similar false front for the rightly infamous Ernst Haeckel, a proto-Nazi, as has flowed out of a certain University of Chicago scribbler and alleged scholar, so as to prop up the post-WWII plaster saint Darwin, ignoring or lying about Haeckel's writing that Darwin endorsed as science is either a death knell for the post-war myth or for the last shred of intellectual integrity in the same period.

And what I said about that could certainly be said about a large number of other things, much of the lefty mythology which we grew up with, many of its heroes, the oligarchy - corporate media created and promoted myths of the cult of the "Founders" "the Constitution" the "First (or Second, depending on which side of the lies you want to argue) Amendments" the smash-hit Broadway lies of Hamilton being a part of that, all of those are either seriously damaged or totally obliterated by reading the original sources and admitting what they mean. Either those myths go or you give up any pretense of morality and integrity in the scholarly or, uh, "artistic" endeavors that have wrought or promoted those lies. 

 

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In the days before I finally got shut of TV, one of the shows I used to watch was Sneak Previews, the one where Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed movies. I don't know why I watched it, I'd pretty much given up going to the movies about the start of that show. I still liked some, a few of the few adult level movies being made in the 60s and 70s, I guess, generally not the block busters. As I recall I generally agreed more with Siskel than Ebert, I think I'd have liked him better as Ebert seemed kind of prickly. Though I think you'd probably end up being more the listener than the talker with either one. Which is good too. It might come as a surprise but I'm considered a bit taciturn in real life, it's when I feel like I have to say something that people think I'm a mean little bastard.

When I was having the brawl here, and elsewhere over the movie Birth of a Nation, unambiguously a movie that incited violence and got people killed as it was the stated inspiration for the early revival of the most infamous of American terrorist groups, the Klu Klux Klan - people didn't want Hollywood getting the credit for doing that and doing it knowingly. But that's the history.

In preparing my arguments I went to the website that has a number if not all of Roger Ebert's movie reviews and I found the one that he did on Birth of a Nation and found that he indulged in one of the most dishonest of all dodges in those in the scribbling profession, as he was, in the journalistic racket that he worked in, denying any moral responsibility for the foremost force in doing evil, predictably, knowingly, obviously on purpose. He claimed that the movies, far from having a role in promoting such evils as it inspires merely reflects those evil tendencies that are already there in society. He said:

Griffith and "The Birth of a Nation" were no more enlightened than the America which produced them. The film represents how racist a white American could be in 1915 without realizing he was racist at all. That is worth knowing. Blacks already knew that, had known it for a long time, witnessed it painfully again every day, but "The Birth of a Nation" demonstrated it in clear view, and the importance of the film includes the clarity of its demonstration. That it is a mirror of its time is, sadly, one of its values.

To understand "The Birth of a Nation" we must first understand the difference between what we bring to the film, and what the film brings to us. All serious moviegoers must sooner or later arrive at a point where they see a film for what it is, and not simply for what they feel about it. "The Birth of a Nation" is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s “The Triumph of the Will,” it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil.

But it is possible to separate the content from the craft? Garry Wills observes that Griffith's film "raises the same questions that Leni Riefenstahl's films do, or Ezra Pound's poems. If art should serve beauty and truth, how can great art be in the thrall of hateful ideologies?"

The idea that art or, as I'd put it when it comes to movies "art", can, on the basis of "art" be divorced from the real life consequences that come from it is the same kind of intellectual dishonesty that was practiced by the cult of the Founders which gained its greatest traction as the white segregationists resisted the small gains made against American apartheid, the de facto continuation of the slave power in the same decades that that movie was being used as a recruiting tool for the KKK, there were reports of it being used that way well into the present, I wouldn't be surprised if it still is used for that as I'm sure Trimph des Willens is used to cement neo-Nazism into some semblance of cohesion and provide encouragement which was the purpose of making the movie, it wasn't any friggin' technical exercise, and, as I'm sure, a lot of our killer cops love to watch Dirty Harry movies - just as I have every conviction that a lot of serial killers probably watch movies and TV shows that they find encouragement and, perhaps, instruction from.

Ebert did, in fact, exonerate Clint Eastwood in similar terms that he granted absolution to D. W. Griffeth, absolving him from the most regressive of Republican-fascist politics, the racist content of his movies, as if those can be divorced from his Republican-fascist act of reducing the first Black President to a mute chair so the old asshole could ridicule and yell at him without risking being answered to the delight of the party of the Dixiecrats and neo-fascists.

I think films are more often a mirror of society than an agent of change, and that when we blame the movies for the evils around us we are getting things backward. "Dirty Harry" is very effective at the level of a thriller. At another level, it uses the most potent star presence in American movies -- Clint Eastwood -- to lay things on the line. If there aren't mentalities like Dirty Harry's at loose in the land, then the movie is irrelevant. If there are, we should not blame the bearer of the bad news.

Ebert, typical of the professionally interested journalist, doesn't, of course, come to the logical conclusion that watching Dirty Harry presented as a hero (the self-conscious intention of Eastwood and his director and the writer (hilariously considered a "liberal") could inspire a killer cop to become one, carrying out what Harry clearly wanted to do.  That the movie had an effect on those who saw it, which is certainly something that the people who make movies knows they do.   I would bet that Ebert would not hesitate to claim that movies had a beneficial effect on society when their messaging promotes, for example, racial equality.   Such people clearly want to have it both ways.

 

In exonerating the fascism of Clint Eastwood's movies, Ebert relied heavily on pretending that the things that that most controlled of all, um, "art forms" in which every single second, every shot, every line, every recorded second, every product placement, etc. is done to achieve an effect on the audience, using the basest aspects of their assumed characters, appealing to that no less than a tobacco company or beer or vodka company does the same in their creative branches that produce advertising WITH THE INTENT OF HAVING AN EFFECT ON THE BEHAVIOR OF THOSE WHO SEE AND HEAR THEM.

One of the things I've learned in writing this and my previous blogs and working for another blogger is that a lot of the distinctions we have become accustomed to making are artificial. The one between journalism and show biz is one the breaching of which was noticed by Karl Krauss as far back as the decade when Birth of a Nation was produced. In the period of TV and, especially cabloid and online "news" that distinction has disappeared in everything but the admission of it. I don't think it was ever anything like a bright line separating them. The pretense that there was one is exactly that, a pretense. It's one of many pretenses that becomes dangerous with the advance of technology, which, with the ability of computerized information tracking and word search and classification technology allows a level of audience manipulation that the old time ad men could only dream of. One of the earliest to understand the political uses of that was the Republican-fascist direct-mail guy, Richard Viguerie (I learn from the internet this morning, in hilarious coincidence, his middle name is "Art") and his methods have gone way, way past where he took them, way past where they merely harvested the insanity that was already there into today world where lies can be fed through suggested links to those identified by algorithm as being fertile ground for the poisonous fungi that racists, fascists, corporate manipulators, white supremacists, misogynists, etc. want to plant there. Doing what Griffiths certainly did in planting the seeds of the KKK well past where it had gone before it had the help of the movies and the idiotic belief that what the movies say is true or, even stupider, innocent of its effects. 

 

The First Amendment is no help in fighting this, it is too inspecific in that it enables lies and hate speech, racism (I'd guess that if they could do that intentionally the slave holding majority of the "Founders" would have retained that "right") it privileges them by not specifying that what people have a right to say and publish is the truth, the common good, equality.  Fiction and falsehood should not be put on the same level with them as our Constitution so recklessly does and which today's civil liberties industry has made even more dangerously ubiquitous, the journalistic and other scribbling and media professions as guilty as hell in that, too. 

 

What they might have assumed could be done in that area safely or manageably in the ink on paper age has certainly gone the way of silent films, it was, in fact, an outmoded assumption long before that.  

 

Update:  I should have noted that Ebert, as a journalist of the type he was, a movie reviewer, certainly had no right to pretend that the media has no power to change peoples behavior.  His entire career was to encourage people to pay money to go see movies or to discourage them from paying money to go see movies.  Otherwise there is no reason for anyone to read his reviews or the newspapers to publish them or the movie theaters and studios to pay money to put advertisements for the movies on the same pages with his review.   I might have liked Roger Ebert and agreed with him, especially in many of his positive reviews, but when he exonerated the movies in the typical post-WWII civil libertarian way, he was a complete hypocrite. 

Dave Holland Quintet - How's Never

 

 

Chris Potter, Sax

Robin Eubanks, Trombone,

Steve Nelson, Vibes

Dave Holland, Bass

Nate Smith, Drums 

When I posted this years ago I was told bass solos are booorrrring!   Proving that a lot of people have the attention span of a not too smart 12 year old. 

Checking In At Twelve Thirty PM It's Demanded That I "Prove It"

LACKING THE TIME TO WRITE, I'll let Eddington say it.  From The Nature Of The Physical World:

I have sometimes been asked whether science cannot now furnish an argument which ought to convince any reasonable atheist. I could no more ram religious conviction into an atheist than I could ram a joke into the Scotchman. The only hope of "converting" the latter is that through contact with merry-minded companions he may begin to realise that he is missing something in life which is worth attaining. Probably in the recesses of his solemn mind there exists inhibited the seed of humour, awaiting an awakening by such an impulse. The same advice would seem to apply to the propagation of religion; it has, I believe, the merit of being entirely orthodox advice.

We cannot pretend to offer proofs. Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself. In physics we are generally content to sacrifice before the lesser shrine of Plausibility. And even the pure mathematician — that stern logician — reluctantly allows himself some prejudgments; he is never quite convinced that the scheme of mathematics is flawless, and mathematical logic has undergone revolutions as profound as the revolutions of physical theory. We are all alike stumblingly pursuing an ideal beyond our reach. In science we sometimes have convictions as to the right solution of a problem which we cherish but cannot justify; we are influenced by some innate sense of the fitness of things. So too there may come to us convictions in the spiritual sphere which our nature bids us hold to. I have given an example of one such conviction which is rarely if ever disputed — that surrender to the mystic influence of a scene of natural beauty is right and proper for a human spirit, although it would have been deemed an unpardonable eccentricity in the "observer" contemplated in earlier chapters. Religious conviction is often described in somewhat analogous terms as a surrender; it is not to be enforced by argument on those who do not feel its claim in their own nature.

 

I'll note that when Eddington said that he was giving his Gifford Lectures which has been described as "the most prestigious honor in Scottish academia."  So he was teasing his audience.  I would guess it was kind of a dare for them to not laugh. 

Spirituals At Noon - Geri Allen Trio plays Mary Lou Williams' Holy Ghost

 

Geri Allen - piano 

Billy Johnson - bass 

Mark Johnson - drums

I'm thinking of reviving the posting of Spirituals At Noon, I did that series one summer and then politics intervened.   This time I'll expand the content included to include things not sung.    Here is Mary Lou Williams playing it.

 

Mary Lou Williams, piano

Bob Crenshaw, bass (barely audible in this recording, unfortunately)

I will note that one source online lists Larry Gales as the composer, though I'd be surprised if Geri Allen made a mistake in attribution. 
 

I Can't Believe I Was Such An Idiot As To Ever Expect Anything Productive To Come From Making Common Cause With Such Idiots

THE OVERWHELMING FACT OF THE GENERAL STRIKE OF 1926 is that it was pretty much a route and a complete disaster for the British workers and the Labour Party.   It ended up with the workers it was alleged to have been called to benefit being far worse off, it led to the weakening of the Labour Party in ways it took Republican-fascists in the United States many decades to achieve through the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court.  It was absurdly ambitious in its imagining and stupidly romantic as all romantic gestures as politics are stupid.  

When I was a secular lefty, which is, by the way, far LESS RADICAL than I am now, I read the secular lefty saint and martyr Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet on the concept and history of general strikes and was struck that her analysis started with showing that no less a figure in the secular lefty pantheon than Engels gave reasons to be skeptical of the idea as a means of making any progress.

“The general strike, in the Bakuninists’ program, is the lever which will be used for introducing the social revolution. One fine morning all the workers in every industry in a country, or perhaps in every country, will cease work, and thereby compel the ruling class either to submit in about four weeks, or to launch an attack on the workers so that the latter will have the right to defend themselves, and may use the opportunity to overthrow the old society. The proposal is by no means new: French and Belgian socialists have paraded it continually since 1848, but for all that is of English origin. During the rapid and powerful development of Chartism among the English workers that followed the crisis of 1837, the ‘holy month’ – a suspension of work on a national scale – was preached as early as 1839, and was received with such favour that in July 1842 the factory workers of the north of England attempted to carry it out. And at the Congress of the Alliancists at Geneva on September 1, 1873, the general strike played a great part, but it was admitted on all sides to carry it out it was necessary to have a perfect organisation of the working-class and a full war chest. And that is the crux of the question. On the one hand, the governments, especially if they are encouraged by the workers’ abstention from political action, will never allow the funds of the workers to become large enough, and on the other hand, political events and the encroachments of the ruling class will bring about the liberation of the workers long before the proletariat gets the length of forming this ideal organisation and this colossal reserve fund. But if they had these, they would not need to make use of the roundabout way of the general strike in order to attain their object.”

 

You can go on to read her long, well researched, well reasoned, pamphlet which I take as an attempt to do exactly what she said could not be done in the second section of it, reason your way to a conclusion as to the chances of it being successful or a disaster with any degree of reliability.

In the unreal sphere of abstract logical analysis it can be shown with exactly the same force on either side that the mass strike is absolutely impossible and sure to be defeated, and that it is possible and that its triumph cannot be questioned. And therefore the value of the evidence led on each side is exactly the same – and that is nil. Therefore, the fear of the “propagation” of the mass strike, which has even led to formal anathamas against the persons alleged to be guilty of this crime, is solely the product of the droll confusion of persons. It is just as impossible to “propagate” the mass strike as an abstract means of struggle as it is to propagate the “revolution.” “Revolution” like “mass strike” signifies nothing but an external form of the class struggle, which can have sense and meaning only in connection with definite political situations.

If anyone were to undertake to make the mass strike generally, as a form of proletarian action, the object of methodological agitation, and to go house-to-house canvassing with this “idea” in order to gradually win the working-class to it, it would be as idle and profitless and absurd an occupation as it would be to seek to make the idea of the revolution or of the fight at the barricades the object of a special agitation. The mass strike has now become the centre of the lively interest of the German and the international working-class because it is a new form of struggle, and as such is the sure symptom of a thoroughgoing internal revolution in the relations of the classes and in the conditions of the class struggle. It is a testimony to the sound revolutionary instinct and to the quick intelligence of the mass of the German proletariat that, in spite of the obstinate resistance of their trade-union leaders, they are applying themselves to this new problem with such keen interest.

But it does not meet the case, in the presence of this interest and of this fine, intellectual thirst and desire for revolutionary deeds on the part of the workers, to treat them to abstract mental gymnastics on the possibility or impossibility of the mass strike; they should be enlightened on the development of the Russian Revolution, the international significance of that revolution, the sharpening of class antagonisms in Western Europe, the wider political perspectives of the class struggle in Germany, and the role and the tasks of the masses in the coming struggles. Only in this form will the discussion on the mass strike lead to the widening of the intellectual horizon of the proletariat, to the sharpening of their way of thinking, and to the steeling of their energy.

 

AND THAT WAS BEFORE A GENERALLY POSITIVE CONCLUSION FOR THE GENERAL STRIKE, IN THE ABSTRACT. 

 

Subsequent history would show that when Marxists took power, one of their first targets were real trade unions.  The really successful Russian revolution of 1917 resulted in their violent suppression and a level of bloodshed that never happened in places with even very imperfect democracies.  The blood shed by the American labor movement was far less and it ended up getting workers something, albeit too little and too temporarily and too easily discredited by the commies who tried to take the credit for that progress.   Marxism in real life has been a disaster for the real left.  I suspect that is something Eddington realized, certainly after he knew what was going on in Russia and then the Soviet empire after the Revolution of 1917.  Western lefties who ever looked to Marxism - always an anti-democratic ideology - as a source of strength and ideas were worse than idiots. 

 

The political program of the secular left is made up by, often,  very smart people who are monumentally stupid about real life, it is very well researched, very well written, written for persuasion of, especially, other very smart people but it is absurdly impractical for anything much in the real world. I think it has been when trade unions and political parties have been in the control of such smart idiots that they have failed most spectacularly because most people don't find their conclusions are going to do much of anything for them.  Unfortunately that's only the best of them, a lot of the worst of the lefty movement are idiots who use ideology as a weapon to protect tiny little patches of turf which are, more often than not, entirely imaginary to start with. 

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I did notice that her pamphlet was translated by one Brit Communist, Patrick Lavin the year before the General Strike,  I found out who he was by googling his name and coming across an obituary of his Communist Grand daughter Deborah Lavin on the Communist Party of Great Britain magazine website. Apparently, among the things she disapproved of were transgender people (shades of Jordan Peterson) and environmentalists, or so I gather from reading about her there.  Rather hilariously, for my purposes in researching her grandfather in regard to the General Strike, one of her complaints was this:

 

Clearly, Extinction Rebellion was given carte blanche to close down swathes of central London for over a week, and the question to ask is: when has an anti-war, pro NHS or housing demo been given similar freedom?

Sure, there were 1,000 arrests, but except for the handful of demonstrators who disrupted the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), the police operated a catch and release policy, so that all the arrested were back demonstrating with hours.

This piece of theatre alone should show even the most political naive, that the Extinction Rebellion leadership is working hand in glove with the bourgeoisie, but for those a little slower on the uptake, there was also the stage-managed appearance via train of Saint Greta Thunberg of Sweden.

 

Funny kind of carte blache that leads to 1,000 arrests. She managed to sound a lot like Donald Trump and the Murdoch crew at FOX and a fanatical commie all at once. Or maybe she's jealous for them being able to do something the Brit commies could never pull off today.

I don't know how much her grandfather's translation of the pamphlet had to do with the Marxist faction of those who called the doomed General Strike, that might be interesting to know. She also seems to have had an enormous interest in the trivia of lefty history, in a way intellectual lefties have that in common with the kind of baseball fan who knows the record book and everything about it. I'd like to know the last time the party that she apparently gave her life to did anything that amounted to anything. Something you can ask of their even more pathetic counterparts in the United States, the kind of people who mount and frequent the Left Forum and carry out the romantic mythology of the General Strike and call for it to be tried here, where it has even less of a chance of working than it did there or in Germany which, despite being so ready for the revolution, Luxemburg was murdered and Nazism did, in fact, come. Deborah Lavin's obit is entitled "Onwards and Upwards," I'd call the irony cruel if not for the fact it's rather hilariously revealing of what a bunch of idiots such smart guys are. 

 

But, the sun is out today, I have fava beans to plant and weeds to pull.   Have run fuming that I have not retracted my slam against the sacred General Strike as most people who might hear that phrase wonder what it means. 

Another Profile From Our Indigenous Criminal Class

IF THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS replace Liz Cheney (R-F WY) with Elise Stefanik, (R-F NY) because apparently there is a line way past the line where anyone should be willing to go but which Cheney finally will not go beyond, you should know that the lying Stefanik is a yet another prep-school to Ivy product, specifically the Albany Academy for Girls and, yes, another one of those, the most elite of them all,  Harvard.

People who read me know that I have given good reason to despise the institutions of elite prep schools and the Ivys and Ivy equivalents because they have provided the country with a ruling class that this Stefanik fits right into, and that's just the Republican-fascist side of its product.   I'm not overly enthused about a lot of the Democrats who have graduated from Harvard, Yale, etc. with a few exception.   Like the Catholic preps, colleges and universities that turn out more than their share of white collar criminals, if I hear someone did the prep-Ivy thing, I start to wonder what crimes they're engaged in committing against the American People and around the world. 

Jack Teagarden - Meet Me Where They Play The Blues

 

 

I can't track down the players on this recording but I'm sure it's posted somewhere online.  Jack Teagarden sings and plays trombone.  That I'm sure of. Just came into my head and I wanted to hear it again.

I WAS TEASING YOU when I wrote that run-on sentence, I do that when I'm answering the hate mail, intentionally doing what you complain about.  Admit it, you enjoy having something trivial you can complain about when you don't get what's being talked about but you know you wouldn't like it if you could get it.  And I knew you'd whine about that run-on sentence and I'd be able to tell you this.

It's raining, I should be in the garden and I got bored.  Other than drinking coffee twisting your noses is the only vice I've got.

Hate Mail

THE RECENT DEATH of Prince Phillip certainly reminded people that Elizabeth II is certainly in the last years of her long life and long reign as Queen of England. You'd have to be in her age cohort to have an adult memory of a Britain with someone other than her as the monarch of that constitutional monarchy and an old person to have any memory of her father as King at all.

With her death will come the coronation of Charles or, if he, no spring chicken, either, dies before his mother or otherwise doesn't succeed her, his son William, as king in a quasi-sacramental religious ceremony in which the Christian Church of England will crown the next monarch as Christian monarchs have been crowned, I would guess since the first monarch declared Christianity as the state religion of their empire or country, which was Armenia, when King Trdat adopted it as the state religion in 301 AD, well before Constantine adopted Christianity for the Roman Empire, a good day for Christians, socially, politically, legally,  who were far less likely to get killed or dispossessed or imprisoned or tortured, a far more arguably bad day for the Gospel of Jesus who declared that his kingdom was not of this earth. Morally, the establishment of Christianity as a state religion anywhere can certainly be counted as something of a catastrophe.

I'll leave it to you to read about King Trdat, who may have actually been a bloodier and more ruthless guy than Constantine. If his behavior after his conversion was any less violent, cruel, capricious and ruthless than his behavior before is hard to say. One thing is clear about his post-conversion conversion, a result of him being cured of sickness, legendarily brought on by his slaughter of a bunch of what were, sort of, nuns when the prettiest of them refused to marry him, he didn't buy much into the teachings of Jesus.

The Gospel is often a hard fit to modern, egalitarian democracy, its morality and especially its radical justice and economics has never been put into practice by even the best of democratic rulers with the best intentions, being the chief executive of any state, especially a major military power is a guarantee that they will not be able, on behalf of the nation, to turn the other cheek or to meet opposition with love and forgiveness.

As can be seen in the Republican-fascist Christians among Catholic hierarchs, clergy, religious and lay people, among those who are called "evangelicals" and others, policies and laws that would attempt to even somewhat approximate the actual teachings of Jesus would meet with their rejection, their violent opposition, their use of the media to use that against politicians who would attempt to do that, even as they are already doing that against Joe Biden who has, actually, been engaged in doing something like that, while not putting it in terms that violate the artificial secularism enforced by the Constitution and the demand of secularists. A lot of us who have actually read some of Catholic social justice teaching can see how much of what he is doing actually leans in that direction, though much of it as written is indistinguishable from a secular articulation of the same thing. I think it would be as accurate to say that the Catholic social teaching he may be influenced by is UCC or Episcopal or Presbyterian social teaching. I would dare say that a lot of it would be reflected in official teachings of even many of the reactionary denominations that are officially opposed to Joe Biden BECAUSE THOSE TEACHINGS ARE BASED IN THE LAW OF MOSES, THE PROPHETIC TRADITION, THE GOSPEL AND THE APOSTOLIC BOOKS and early documents of the Church. I recently listened to an interview with the Orthodox writer and philosopher David Bently Hart in which he said a lot of what he believed in that regard was in the earliest Patriarchal writing, such as those of Basil of Ceaserea. whose brother Gregory of Nyssa and their sister St. Macrina the Younger have influenced me. Others, such as Marilynne Robinson have made a very good case for the influence of the radical economics of Moses through the influence of John Calvin on, especially, the liberalism of New England and the former liberalism of the upper mid-west, down as far as Kansas - now obviously a thing of the past.

What can be said of a modern egalitarian democracy having an uneasy, if not necessarily unwelcome or unproductive relationship with the Gospel is even more true of late classical, medieval and later monarchies, perhaps up to the period in which the last of real political power was taken from some of the European monarchs in the 20th century. The trappings of Christianity, the relationship of civil state and church that are a hall mark of the Medieval up to the early modern period in Europe and elsewhere were a cover for what was and still is a largely non-Christian culture.

The teachings of Jesus as set out in the Gospels, as attested to in the other books of the New Testament are about as radical as can be and as unlike most of so-called European and American "Christianity" as could be. Other than a few sexual prohibitions left over and rather vaguely defined in ancient scriptures AND A VERY SELECTIVE READING AND APPLICATION OF THOSE and a totally non-scripture based prohibition on abortion and contraception, the most Christian identifying of Americans and others don't have much truck with what any of the Bible says and certainly nothing much even about those as contained in the quoted words of Jesus.

I said the other day that every sin that can honestly and accurately be laid on official organized Christianity and Christians would, unambiguously, be a violation of the teachings of Jesus and his closest followers as recorded in the Scriptures, whether or not it could be said to be a retention of pre-Christain paganism is an interesting idea, though I think it would be more honest and productive to say it is a retention of human fallibility, human corruption, maybe even something like a Calvinist notion of human depravity, since professed Christians are as capable of doing that as any old-world pagans were. 

 

I think there has been a actual and positive effect to the Christianization of Europe and other places along with those sins, I think the effect has, in many ways, been slight and always endangered but that it is real.   

If there has been any improvement due to monarchs, those with worldly power, common people at least believing themselves to be under SOME measure of restraint due to what Jesus said, what Paul and James, Peter, the Prophets, the Jewish Scriptures taught, it has certainly not been an entire success. Any improvements due to being exposed to those things have been real - the ending of casual, legal infanticide, for example, the end of human sacrifice - but they are not more than tendencies. I don't think things get better when those tendencies are discouraged. I don't see any evidence at all that the vestiges of that moral restraint are very reliable or lasting among those whose families gave up religion in their or the previous generation, I don't think it's more than a retained cultural or family predilection in such cases, though there are some for which that is stronger than others. I don't think you can rely on that nation-wide, certainly not world-wide.

I'll break in here to note that the ultra-conservative use of sexual prohibitions as found in, for example the Torah Holiness Code - which applied primarily to the priests - to condemn LGBTQ people is matched by, in most cases, by totally ignoring the explicit teaching of Jesus against straight people getting divorced and remarried. That is something that straight people, married to someone who they didn't want to be married to someone or wanting to marry someone else have allowed themselves to totally ignore though it was about the only place in which Jesus actually forbade something on sexual grounds AND THAT IS IGNORED BY THOSE WHO PRETEND TO BELIEVE HE WAS GOD WHO SPOKE WITH THE AUTHORITY OF NO LESS THAN GOD. Even in the Catholic church which has retained a ban on remarriage after a divorce have always allowed the rich and powerful to have their marriages "annulled" and, in modern times, have expanded that to include most people who have the money to bring a petition for annulment and don't get an opposing spouse from having one. I have a close relative who had their marriage annulled and the process was about as convincing as any phony legal pantomime. Yet "evangelicals" practice such divorce-remarriage adultery (and the kind that dispenses with the divorce) at an impressive rate as they seek to impose their interpretation of the words of Paul (who very well may not have meant what they and the KJV translators thought he meant) and the Jewish Scriptures to impose their preferences on other people. 

 

So, no.  I don't feel any shame about saying that, "pagans" and atheists and agnostics in the modern era have benefited from the even yet to be more closely matched following of the teachings of Jesus by the law and politics and in societies.  If the Golden Rule, the command to do to the least among us what we would do to The Lord, etc. were put into place with the official establishment of Christianity, there would have been no slavery, no subjugation of women, no discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, there would have been no poverty, there would have been nothing like the level of injustice in the United States any single year of its existence.   The most appalling injustices and evils have been allowed here, legally and on a de facto basis under the secular Constitution from the start, let's talk slavery as a start.   The very Constitution that you claim requires the atheist dream of anti-religion in all official and quasi-official matters was the Constitution that LITERALLY PERMITTED AND EMPOWERED SLAVERY IN EXACTLY THE WAY THAT JESUS NEVER PERMITTED THE EVILS YOU ATTRIBUTE TO CHRISTIANITY.   If Christianity has to wear those evils and be discredited by it, the secular Constitution of the United States is even more discredited due to that fact. 

Update:  Don't be absurd.  As recently as last Monday I commented somewhere saying "that Nazi nun, "Mother Angelica."   Oddly, the place I left it made the same mistake you do, the National Catholic Reporter is an independent, often critical and quite often quite radical magazine,  The National Catholic Register is a far-right rag associated with the Nazi nun's EWTN cabloid crap channel.  I can't imagine me ever making a positive quotation or reference to the Register though I might point out some depravity or other it publishes.

Geri Allen Flying Toward the Sound

 

 

Geri Allen, composer, piano

In This Ending Is A Beginning And A Little Fun At The Close

THIS IS THE CONCLUSION of Eddington's lecture, The Concept of Structure

To sum up. The physical universe is a structure. Of the X of which it is the structure, we only know that X includes sensations of consciousness. To the question: What is X when it is not a sensation of any consciousness known to us? the right answer is probably that the question is a meaningless one - that a structure does not necessarily imply an X of which it is the structure. In other words, the question takes us to a point where the form of thought in which it originates ceases to be useful. The form of thought can only be preserved by still attributing to X a sensory nature - a sensation in a consciousness unknown to us. What interests us is not the positive conclusion, but the fact that in no circumstances are we required to contemplate an X of non-sensory nature. 

 

The temptation of someone brought up in the materialism of the common type is to assume that when he said "X includes sensations of consciousness" is to think he means that consciousness is totally contained in the physical universe, that consciousness shares in the limits of physical objects, when I don't think that's exactly what he does mean. Every time I reread Eddington on these topics, it's clear he was making extremely subtle and powerful arguments that take up little regarded distinctions that are all important to understanding what we can discern of things. In a later section of the book Eddington talks about the possibility that there are physical laws which are "irrational"* ever precise in his language, as a mathematician and logician, he clearly means that human reason and logic and observation and all the other tools of our intelligence cannot deal with them and so such laws would forever be unknowable to us. The modesty with which the man Einstein said had written the best book explaining his theories in regard to the percentage of the universe we likely had dealt with, even at the highest levels of knowledge is only one of the things that set him apart from the materialists vulgar and more sophisticated who were his ideological opponents.

The fact that the concept of structure affords an escape from dualism has been recognised especially in the philosophy of Bertrand Russell. Although I have quoted it in three earlier books, I feel obligated to quote again a passage from Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919) which has greatly influenced my own thought;

"There has been a great deal of speculation in traditional philosophy which might have been avoided if the importance of structure, and the difficulty of getting behind it, had be realised. For example, it is often said that space and time are subjective, but they have objective counterparts; or that phenomena are subjective, but are caused by things in themselves, which must have differences inter se corresponding with the differences in the phenomena to which they give rise. Where such hypotheses are made, it is generally supposed that we can know very little about the objective counterparts. In actual fact, however, if the hypotheses as stated were correct, the objective counterparts would form a world having the same structure as the phenomenal world . . . In short, every proposition having a communicable significance must be true of both worlds or of neither ; the only difference must lie in just that essence of individuality which always eludes words and baffles description, but which for that very reason is irrelevant to science."

This is written independently of the new scientific theories, which were then in an early stage; but it illuminated the philosophic trend which was beginning to appear in them. It is interesting to compare the scientific position in 1919 with the position in 1939. In 1919 it was a fair inference that physical knowledge must be knowledge of structure, although in the form in which it was then presented it did not look much like it. In general the structural knowledge did not appear in physics explicitly; it was thought of as the kernel of truth which would outlast the changing theories which enhulled it. In the intervening years the importance of digging out the structure from its inessential trappings became recognised, and it was noticed that the Theory of Groups in pure mathematics the necessary technique had been developed. Moreover, the idea of structure, which had previously been rather vague, was found capable of exact mathematical definition. Consequently to-day it is not merely a truth hidden in our physical knowledge but physical knowledge in its current form that we recognise as structural. 

 

[Update:  I unintentionally clipped the paragraph in which I point out that Eddington could have very intentionally been tweaking his sometimes colleague, sometimes adversary, Bertrand Russell, perhaps getting back for that 1929 review I quoted from yesterday, by pointing out that the germ of his views in The Concept of Structure and its consequences for materialism were contained in Russell's own work and found its own intellectual scaffolding in pure mathematics, Russell's realm perhaps even more than Eddington's.] 

 

I read an interesting paper by Matt Stanley last night, about the attacks on Eddington by one of the more popular atheist loud-mouths of the 1930s, a now largely forgotten man named Chapman Cohen and Eddington's response. And the paper went into what Eddington said and his political and religious motives, as well as his motives as a physicist. I was a little hesitant to read it because I don't think Cohen was particularly interesting as compared to some of Eddington's more competent critics but it turned out to be important. I think the paper gives a lot of insight into Eddington's motivation, not least of which was his fear of Marxism - certainly in the form developing in the thuggish gangsterism of Leninism and Stalinism in the foremost example of Marxist political success, the Soviet Union. 

 

The tendency of an American lefty, when you read about Eddington's reaction to the legendary General Strike is to isolate that as a purely democratic trade union phenomenon, imagining trade unions as known to us in the post-WWII period, ignoring that there were real, true believing Marxist and Leninists involved in the General Strike who wanted, very much, for Britain and all countries to emulate what the Marxists in Russia, then the Soviet empire were doing. By the time of these lectures the mass murders of both Lenin and Stalin were well reported in Western media, the planned starvation of Ukraine, the purges, the show trials - which had the overt support of Western Marxists. The stupidity of the linear graph of political identity that political scientists popularized that showed Marxism on the other end of some imaginary teeter-totter with "centrism" at the pivot and Nazism on the other end is something I'd like to know if someone as capable of seeing through the falseness of many graphic abstractions as Eddington was commented on. The true identification of Marxism, as it is, as it has been every place where it gained power was that it was the kissing cousin of Nazism (the Hitler Stalin Pact proved that), of fascism, of nationalist fascism and, as it has developed, the most appallingly vicious capitalism, which has largely replaced any pretense of socialism in today's Marxist paradises.   And today a lot of materialist-atheist true believers in scientism are ready to declare themselves "libertarians" who are Republican who have kinky predilections and worry about getting arrested or regulated.  I think that with few if any exceptions they are not egalitarian nor are they especially fond of democracy except when it can be worked the way they like it. Nor are they especially interested in anything like the common good. The atheist cover ideology of "skepticism" contains a lot of them.

 

All of that had a background to Eddington's public lectures that I admit I had not much considered, being more interested in them for the consequences for current atheist-materialist-scientistic hegemony. But I have never thought any of that was as divorced from politics and the moral basis of egalitarian government and democracy.  

There are a lot of interesting things to note about this paper and its subject matter,  one of those I'll point out is how Chapman Cohen and his buddies seem to have taken to blasting the concept of freedom of thought in the atheist-secularist house organ The Freethinker, apparently obsessively and at great length.**  That is one of the central incongruities, hypocrisies and phony advertisements that you run into continually in dealing with materialists and atheists and devotees of scientism.  I don't think it's at all unrelated to the propensity of materialists and, so, determinists to go for anti-democratic forms of government, everything from free-market "liberalist" corporate states to Marxism and fascism and Nazism.  I don't think the determinism forced as a conclusion by their ideologies of materialism or "naturalism" or "physicalism" (the paper wants to distinguish among them but I think that's a mistaken notion) and the often fawning love of dictators among them is likely unrelated.

I will disagree strongly on one thing in this paragraph from Stanley's paper, 

Thus determinism was already a significant issue for him [Eddington] even before it was a widespread problem in twentieth-century physics, and the constellation of religious and political values underlying his science popularizations provides a compelling explanation for why that was the case. According to Eddington, Heisenberg’s principle denied classical determinism because it eliminated the foundational elements of the Laplacian calculator: precise measurements of position and velocity. Thus the innate human intuition that one has free-will needed no special defense. Instead, the traditional objection (the tyranny of deterministic physics) was simply gone, so for the first time since Descartes volitionists started on an equal footing with determinists.

 

Since, as I pointed out yesterday, all of the determinists, all of the materialists, from those who were crude determinists to today's merely less seemingly crude eliminative positivists are at the distinct disadvantage that the very thing they want to deny or demote to a mere side effect of chemical causation in brains is the very thing they are using to come up with everything they are using to do it with, their minds, it has to be there for them to do what they want to do whereas the idealists didn't have that fact as a problem for their position.

 

I would point out another thing, if we are all determined by the molecules and "forces" that control their movements and all of our thoughts are determined by those molecules and not by any metaphysical realm of existence, then their deteriminism has exactly the same total lack of truth value to it as the idealism or, to use the phrase in the quote, "volitionism" and are therefore equal and other people adopting one or another should be a matter of total indifference to the convinced materialist determinist. But they obviously are not indifferent and insist that their position has a value that their position would logically deprive it of. The idealist, the "volitionist" those who assert the reality of freedom of thought are not at any such disadvantage. Their preference is for something that is true and their desire is supported by the moral position that the truth is good and the untrue is not.  That materialists have not come to terms with these defects in their position, there is every reason to believe they are full of soup or full of  themselves, really, under materialism, what's the difference?

 

* Eighteen years ago I was responsible for a remark which has often been quoted:

 

" It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has had no control. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them."

 

This seems to be coming true, though not n the way that then suggested itself. I had in mind the phenomena of quanta and atomic physics, which at that time completely baffled our efforts to formulate a rational system of law. It was already apparent that the principle laws of molar physics were mind-made - the result of the sensory and intellectual equipment through which we derive our observational knowledge 0 and were not laws of governance of the objective universe. The suggestion was that in quantum theory we for the first time came up against the true laws of governance of the objective universe. If so, the task was presumably much more difficult than merely rediscovering our own frame of thought.  

 Since then microscopic physics has made great progress, and its laws have turned out to be comprehensible to the mind; but.as I have endeavored to show, it also turns out they have been imposed by the mind - by our forms of thought - in the same way that the molar laws are imposed. Meanwhile a new situation in regard to laws of objective origin has arisen, because the systems of physics is no longer deterministic. The totality of mind-made law does not impose determinism. It is in the undetermined behaviour, for which room is left within the complete scheme of physical law at present recognised, that the governing laws (if any) of the objective universe must appear. Eighteen years have therefore not brought us any nearer to a formulation of the objective laws of governance; the only difference is that what I ten described as possibly irrational l behaviour is now described as undetermined behaviour.  

 

**  The same thing can be seen today in the antics of one Marxist member of the NYC Central Labor Council, Mike Gimble whose Left Forum program to rehabilitate Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism led me to read about his book condemning the entirety of 20th century physics (including some pretty primitive materialist celebrity scientists) for its idealism as opposed to his preferred dialectical, 19th century materialism.  As I found in the Amazon description of it (I assume author written, who else would bother?) 

This book is a response to the myths created by an idealistic theory called "Relativity". Physics and cosmology has been in a disastrous crisis for almost a century. Mathematics is not physics, yet it is treated as such. The fourth dimension exists only in mathematical equations, not in reality. Black holes do not exist. Space is not curved. There is no fundamental "God particle" from which all matter is built. Objects do not carry their own time. Above all, consciousness does not determine reality. That is the old metaphysics masquerading as science. In addition, this book is a Marxist answer to Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku's psuedo-scientific creationist theories. Here is the endorsement by Glenn Borchardt, Ph.D, author of "The Scientific Worldview" and Director of the Progressive Science Institute: "I want to congratulate you on the excellent piece of work! I definitely like your critique of Hawking and Kaku. It puts these jokers in their place. A great job! You have done so much that is needed to expose the BS that goes for physics and cosmology today. "Above all, consciousness does not determine reality. That is the old metaphysics masquerading as science." 

 

Clearly the 19th century is still alive in the consciousness of these throw-backs, determining their reality. 

 

I hope he didn't do too much to damage important union efforts by non-Marxists. I think the labor movement paid way, way too much for the participation of the Marxists and the other atheist-ideologues. They and the larger left would be a lot better off if they'd been categorized with the fascists and Nazis and other anti-democratic ideologues.