Ethel Ennis - Love For Sale

 

 

Lullaby For Losers

 

 

Ethel Ennis - vocals 

Hank Jones - piano 

Eddie Biggs - guitar 

Abie Baker - bass 

Kenny Clarke - drums

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Tuesday's Child

Tuesday's Child 

 

Tuesday     Jeany Spark
Tuesday 11     Rose Hilton Hille
Tuesday 3     Rosa Yevtushenko
Frank     David Seddon
Peggy     Lisa Stevenson
Maggie     Carolyn Pickles
Ruby     Ami Metcalf
Nish     Paul Bazely
Oliver 20     Joel MacCormack
Oliver 55     Michael Bertenshaw
Dan     Harry Jardine
Melinda     Georgie Fuller
Boss     Sean Murray
Director     Jessica Dromgoole
Writer     Katie Hims
 

I don't think I posted this part of Katie Hims multiple part series, Listening To The Dead about a family with the trait of hereditary mediumship, sometimes realized, sometimes not.  It was the series that introduced me to Katie Hims, a very good writer of radio drama.

. . . the Taliban, the AK-47 toting terrorists who took over Afghanistan in 1992, stringing up decapitated corpses in town squares and shoving women into the confines of their homes. Nobody paid much attention then, and perhaps never would have, had the Taliban not become host to Osama bin Laden.

FROM WHAT I LISTEN TO ON YOUTUBE, this interview and question session with Rafia Zakaria from Powell Books  came up in the sidebar this morning.   It's important, helping to explain the problems of women in other countries, including Pakistan and Afghanistan AND IN THE UNITED STATES and the role that white supremacy along with the white supremacy embedded in Western military and foreign policy plays in making things worse.   

Her central point, that it is Women in other countries with other cultures and Women of Color here who are best situated to determine what is most needed by them and even feminists from the West cannot do that for them is one I first wrote about a long time ago.*   Her point about the ubiquitous Western practice of analyzing crimes against women as indicting an entire country, region and culture while never making the same critique of a man in Nebraska murdering his wife to the same extent is certainly worth thinking about hard.  As I've mentioned here a number of times the FBI has estimated that about four women a day are murdered in the United States because they are women, a terror campaign that we are so used to we cannot seem to see that for what it is, the same kind of thing that will be reported as an indictment against Islam or Hinduism or some other, "other."

I wouldn't think the title of her current book, Against White Feminism is the most helpful one because Zakaria is a feminist and she is not targeting feminists who are white but the habits of white supremacy but her choice is hers to make.  The explanation that she reads at the beginning of the video and later in it expands on is to some extent made necessary by it.  Her critique of racism and white privilege is too important to let the title get in the way and the title will be grabbed onto by media liars to attack her and her important ideas.  We can't change that they will lie but we can avoid giving them the tools to do it more easily. 

 

I had known Zakaria from her columns, especially in The Guardian,  this one talking about the disdain of the New York literary world for her because she lived in Indiana made me smile in recognition.  Though I never aspired to be that kind of writer and I pretty much saw through the NYC lit'rary scene before reading her.  I think there are few places in the United States more impervious to listening to people outside it than the NYC literary and media scene.  I suspect that one of the reasons she's able to say important things like she does is because she never got taken in by it.   Her review of Directorate S by Steve Coll is one I should have remembered because it starts with these paragraphs. 

"No man who has read a page of Indian history will ever prophesy about the Frontier. We shall doubtless have trouble there again.” So wrote Lord Curzon, then viceroy, in 1904. The British were by then a little weary of the burdens of empire; they were having trouble with the tribespeople of the Frontier, who seemed uninterested in the sort of governance the colonialists wished for them. The smugly racist Curzon blamed it on the “fanaticism and turbulence” that “ferment in the blood” of the Pashtun. The neocolonialists of today cannot explain things away so easily. As Steve Coll documents in Directorate S, the current war has for ever altered the fates of all three countries involved – the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan – and, after 15 years, there is no end to the “trouble” in sight.

Directorate S, from which the book gets its title, lies buried deep in the bureaucracy of the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), Pakistan’s spy agency. Ensconced thus, the directorate works to “enlarge Pakistan’s sphere of influence in Afghanistan”. It goes about this task, Coll explains, by supplying, arming, training and generally seeking to legitimise the Taliban, the AK-47 toting terrorists who took over Afghanistan in 1992, stringing up decapitated corpses in town squares and shoving women into the confines of their homes. Nobody paid much attention then, and perhaps never would have, had the Taliban not become host to Osama bin Laden.

I can't help but wonder if a lot of the punditry and talking head babbling about this now isn't about as expert and interested as the same about Olympic figure skating show downs between Russia and Canada when people who never pay attention to it otherwise suddenly become experts in it.  I saw figures on how much the American networks have spent on covering the  Afghanistan war over the past several years and I think there is a clue in that which matches what Zakaria says about the inability of white western feminists to speak for women not them, such women and their lives will not be the primary focus or interest of anyone other than them.  Her is Lorainne Ali from the Los Angles Times:

By contrast, covering U.S. conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and other locales around the globe has been a sporadic effort at best. The media parachute in when our troops invade countries overseas or leave them in defeat, while remaining largely absent for the slog in between. When a major story broke out in combat zones, it was commonplace in these interim years for outlets to use Al Jazeera or Al Arabiya reporting and camera footage from places where they weren’t — like Kandahar Province, Fallujah and other hotspots where our troops risked and lost their lives. Beyond the grim spectacle of “shock and awe” and the killing of Osama bin Laden, if you watched the nightly news — or even 24-hour cable news — in the last two decades, you might be forgiven for believing America’s last major war took place in Vietnam. That’s how intermittent the attention has been.

Watching this weekend as Afghanistan fell under Taliban rule, again, was horrifying — particularly the footage of victorious fighters pouring into Kabul unchallenged, and the humanitarian crisis unfolding around the airport, which may well indicate even greater terror and dread throughout the rest of the country. But for all the valiant efforts of those on the ground there relaying the news, much of American TV seemed ill-prepared to take on such a grave and complex series of events. CNN scrambled to dig up experts on foreign policy and conflict such as Fareed Zakaria, who looked like he was on vacation in a cabin in upstate New York. Viewers learned that MSNBC does in fact have an Iran bureau chief, Ali Arouzi, though you might not have known it as recently as last week. They patiently explained that this disaster has been building for more than a decade, over four different presidencies — something one might have expected to glean from, say, watching the news.

I would like to see an analysis of how much time the TV networks spent on the war in Afghanistan in the previous 20 years as compared to any number of lesser stories, including garbage in pop culture and I will bet you that it wouldn't make the top hundred in minutes spent on it.  That is the trash that the free press puts into the minds of Americans and we wonder why they can't think.  

George Packer and his ilk can fuck off and fall into obscurity, if he got what he deserves. Not a position in the pundit class.  There should be no pundit class.  "Pundit" should be taken as someone the media puts up as an expert because they went to the came college or have professional and so social connections.  Pundits should all fuck off and die and so should the media that elevates scum to that rank rank. I will add as an afterthought.  I don't think Rafia Zakaria and Lorainne Ali are in much danger of becoming pundits.  Wrong color, wrong gender (mostly),  know too much.

* It was an important day for me when I realized a billion and a half Muslims didn't care about what I thought and that there was no more reason for them to care anymore than most Westerners care what they think.

The Trump Regime And The Pentagon Suppressed Information That Would Have Foretold What Happened In Afghanistan Because It Was Already Happening

SINCE HE KNOWS MORE than I do and he says it so well, if you want to figure out why President Biden refused to stay in Afghanistan longer than Trump's deal stated, Gil Barndollar notes he had two choices, that or a major escalation which would have been no guarantee of success or that it wouldn't have resulted in the same thing happening, with more dead and the United States mired in the Bush II era folly later.   People forget that Joe Biden came to Congress as part of the Vietnam era anti-war generation, we've seen this before and unlike the American media and the pundit class, some of us don't forget that. 

I will note that his bio says he had actually been to Iraq as a member of the military.   Sometimes that seems to make a big difference in the level of realism in what gets said about something. 

The suppression of bad news in the Trump years and big media ignoring the war for even longer is responsible for the shock at how fast it unraveled.  

I would like to know how many of the Americans who remained even after they were encouraged to leave had been there to make money and how many of them were doing work for the Afghan People, I'm betting most of them got in the trouble they're in now through their own greed and refusal to face reality, though they may have been gulled into complacency by the Trump regime suppression of evidence, too.

Bob Dylan - Farewell Angelina - Joan Baez

 

Correction - If I corrected all of those I'd need another blog and twice as much time

 NOTE:  In editing my first post yesterday cut out two essential words.  The passage was important enough that I have fixed it and repost it here.

If we can't end inequality here, the idea that we could impose an end of it in Afghanistan was absurd.  That it was the Bush II regime which put two of the major figures in the reimposition of American apartheid through the destruction of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts on the Supreme Court, Roberts and Alito,  that claimed they could do it only shows what a mockery of a sales job for the war it was.

Democracy is made of The People who make the government. Legitimate government is made from what The People who make it want it to be.

THE FLEEING BY NIGHT of the Afghani government and the melting away of its Army in the face of the Taliban, not to mention the corruption and ineffectiveness of the government for two decades but, also,  the largest army in the country that the United States payed, trained, equipped and  propped up proves one thing, there was no prospect of an egalitarian democracy there even after the many years of ''nation building," a phrase that should elicit the most extreme skepticism in the light of this history.  

One of the former American military people I've heard in the last week said that much of the military accomplishment in Afghanistan was always a lie because much of the Afghani army's reported success what was reported as their accomplishment was actually done by allied militaries but reported as done by the Afghan army.   She also, I will note, paid her respect for the Afghani soldiers who she said were hard fighters but it's clear that didn't stop what has happened.  

Forms of government are generally named for who makes them, who the power is.  Dictatorships are made by dictators, monarchies are made by monarchs and their families, oligarchy, plutocracy, and other forms of gangster government are named for those gangsters who make the government and are  the governors.  Some of those gangster governments are named by the gangsters who try to give them a basis in their professed faith, Marxism, Nazism, various theocracies.  Though those are mostly cover for the actual gangsterism that is the basis of exerting control and its motive,  it's how you get Marxist governments that are organized on the basis of Victorian era capitalism on steroids, power flowing out of the gang, the "Communist Party."  Marx generally has little to do with it, perhaps if he's in hell he's being tortured by what they have and still continue to do in his name.   I doubt that the "Islamic Republic" that will for a time hold general sway in Afghanistan will be in keeping with the actual teachings of the Koran anymore than the "Most Christian Kings" and "Holy Roman Emperors" based their rule on the teachings of Jesus, Paul and James.  All non-democracies are merely rule by a gang mob, the biggest gangster at the top of it.  That's as true for it being Henry VIII or Kim Jong-un. 

I have written extensively on the extreme danger when there is an ideology that the gangsters really believe in, such as the Nazis belief in natural selection, that's, to some extent, a more complex form of gangster government operating from a self-serving superstition.  If the current Taliban is another of those remains to be seen.

The dangers of political science in misnaming things comes from a general misunderstanding of the most basic distinctions of governments based on mere words that hide more than they clarify.  

Those distinctions most well known in the definition of good government by Abraham Lincoln, government of The People, by The People, and FOR THE PEOPLE as a whole.   He was defining good government based on political and legal equality of all of The People, what I support as "egalitarian democracy,"  the only legitimate government.  And, it should be noted he implied that his hope for it was as an example for The People, everywhere on the Earth.  It is the sole legitimate form of government in so far as it is possible for human beings to form legitimate governments, imperfect in the extreme but, stealing and turning a line from someone I have little respect for in this regard, Winston Churchill, it's the worst except for all of the other ones, though I doubt he meant egalitarian democracy.  And it has to be set apart from and above other forms of government which are, as well, called "democracy" but being inegalitarian don't share in its legitimacy because it is not based in the thing Jefferson noted grants whatever degree of legitimacy any government can have, "the consent of the governed." 

I have complained before that the word "democracy" is importantly and, I now believe, dangerously used for different things which are, to an extremely important extent, contradictory.   The number of dictatorships in the 20th century that have called themselves "democratic" is an example of that danger.  Also and maybe even more dangerously are the contradictory meanings of the word "liberal."   

The original Athenian democracy was nothing of the sort if you are talking about anything a modern democracy should emulate.  It was an agreement among a small minority of ruling elite men of inherited position as members of old, unenslaved to some extent aristocratic Athenian families, adult males only, who ran things and held power over all of the Women, resident foreigners, and a large number of enslaved people and in time the imperially governed.   That is nothing like a tolerable modern meaning of "democracy" WHICH IS EGALITARIAN OR IT IS MERELY A FORM OF GANGSTERISM in which a minority lords it over everyone.  

The 18th century concept of "liberal democracy" in which the government allows freedom from restraint to the rich business and merchant and, lest anyone forget, slave owning classes whether by legalized ownership of human beings or by wage slavery, is just an updated version of the gangster governance of classical Athens.  Its major reform from that being that the ruling class is merely based on the accumulation of wealth, not of family history.  It is one of the most dangerous things in how using the words "democracy" and "liberalism" can be confusing, using the same word that allows wage slavery and leaving the poor to a Malthusian concept of "the law of nature" to mean that as well as the egalitarian good will and universal generosity meant in the original meaning of "liberalism" as liberal provision for the least among us.  To call the original American system "democratic" on the basis of there being a vote by white, male citizens (originally only those owning a certain amount of property) is an anachronism, it is no more a legitimate government than any other such restricted system no matter that there is a vote by that elite and exclusive governing class.

Democracy is made of The People who make the government.  Legitimate government is made from what The People who make it want it to be. Without them wanting equality and democracy, a government based in the best judgement based in the good will and good thinking of The People in all in an effective majority, legitimate government, egalitarian democracy not only will not happen, it cannot happen no matter what form it is given.  That accounts for the many failures of democracy in the period of the dismantling of so many colonial governments in which there is said to be their first and last free election before the habits of gangster government are reverted to.  The government being made from what The People who make it want, that goes for bad government as well as good government.  

In many places the existence of egalitarian democracy is at the mercy of the morality of the majority who live there or of a coalition of those of good will in that majority with those who hold the same desire in minorities.  It is ridiculous to think that in any place egalitarian government, legitimate government can be had without that coming together of people of good will and realistic assessment of the reality they live in.   American liberals. even those whose liberalism is based in economic justice, are distressingly lacking in one or the other as we are constantly learning.   I have confessed again and again that I was totally unrealistic about the possibilities of what could happen in the 2020 election, the Democrats, especially the Black Voters of South Carolina, thank God, understood what was possible better than I did. It is not surprising that the subjugated people in one of the worst governed of our states would have to be so realistic whereas a white male from New England, once again, longed for what was not to be.*  If the Biden administration is the turning point away from Trumpian, Republican-fascism they are the people who saved legitimate government here.  If Republican-fascism wins over it, egalitarian democracy in our time is done for.

That difference between liberal-democracy and legitimate egalitarian-democracy is what accounts for the knee capping of any aspiration for egalitarian democracy by the original slave-power in the United States working hand in glove with the rich anti-democrats of the Northern states, Alexander Hamilton one of the sleaziest of them but also John Jay, who with Alexander Hamilton sold the mine field of the Constitution filled with booby traps to kill off democracy, the Electoral College, the anti-democratically constituted Senate - the current worst danger to democracy under the American system, the Supreme Court sandbagging even the duly adopted laws protecting egalitarian democracy, is not contained in the document, that is a power the non-elected "justices" gave themselves by fiat.  As I mentioned yesterday, the idea that the United States under a Supreme Court imposed president, George W. Bush, was going to go to other countries on the other side of the world, depose their dictatorships and impose modern democracy on them by force was one of the most outrageous examples of American arrogance and hypocrisy in recent history.  

The fact is that nowhere where The People do not both want equality on the basis of their good will and trust in each other and the desire to know what is real from fiction, is egalitarian democracy possible. 

What happened both in the disaster of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein and in the final denouement of the Bush invasion of Afghanistan should be the final nail in the coffin of such "democratic" pretenses to cover imperial interventions in other countries as if we could make them, in a majority want egalitarian democracy.  We have a hard enough time fighting to make one here, we are fighting for its and our lives here, in the United States in 2021, we had better get that fight won or egalitarian democracy just might perish from the Earth in 2023.

The original sin of the American Constitution is that it was made by aristocrats who wanted to be unhampered by government to enrich themselves and exercise their personal desires (in the way of Athenian oligarchic democracy) but who did not want The People to govern, though that promise is what they made to those who fought the revolution that put them in power to do what they wanted.  I think we got only as much democracy as those aristocrats did not dare to withhold or thwart. The rest has been the constant struggle which comprises the only good that there is in the history of the United States.  We were fools to not have gotten rid of those things which have repeatedly thwarted egalitarian democracy STARTING WITH THE POWER THE COURT GAVE ITSELF TO, BY A SIMPLE MAJORITY, OVERTURN LAWS MADE BY THE DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED BRANCHES.  That power which the Rehnquist and even more so the Roberts Courts to destroy equality is matched in dangerousness by the power they used to impose George W. Bush as an president in the putsch orchestrated by Jeb Bush and the Florida Republican Party.  Getting rid of the Electoral College is as important since in our benighted system which any president, legitimate or not, names the members of that dangerous court.  The anti-democratic Senate's further ratfucking of democracy through the filibuster is another such danger that must be changed.  

Those are the things the United States can give to the struggle for egalitarian democracy around the world, serving as both a source of the aspirations of Lincoln for legitimate government and the many examples both leading to that and away from that which embodies our government and culture. 

Egalitarian democracy is made OF The People, By The People, and For ALL OF THE PEOPLE wherever it can possibly exist.  To think that Americans can make that for anyone else is as absurd as the claim that we have secured that for ourselves.  The past 20 years in Afghanistan have been a dangerous and foolish and arrogantly racist delusion, dangerous for the people who died in the war, dangerous for those who assumed what was propped up by the United States and its largely European, Canadian, etc. allies could last beyond the always limited time period when it could be propped up from abroad.  The origin of that danger was the delusion that it could be done, a lot of that flowing from the racist dismissal of the minds and lives of people with brown skin who don't speak English, thinking we could substitute our thinking for their determination of what happens where they live, among themselves, that is inherent to the ruling class of the United States, in that period in Dick Cheney and George W. Bush and the American media and its pundit clique of clackers. 

* Another reason for getting rid of not only the Iowa Caucus but also the New Hampshire Primary as setting the stage for the Democratic nomination.

Oh, Do I Have To Explain Sexual Hypocrisy To You As Well? - Hate Mail

OH GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK, the use of sex as an inducement and recruitment vehicle is hardly an exclusive or even characteristic feature of religion, it's ubiquitous.  The many recruitment posters peddling the sexual attraction of a man in uniform for the American military, as secular an institution and armed forces elsewhere prove that. The military is, at all times and places a political institution.  And that's what the friggin' Taliban is, it's a means of achieving quite worldly power and wealth for those in it and its backers.  Look at the corrupt gangsters,  Zia Al Haq and Hawaz Sharaif's encouragement of Islamic fundamentalism as a political tool in about the same way that America's first truly pagan president, Trump used Christian fundamentalists and Catholic integralists in the same way.  I would bet you a billion dollars if I had it that Catholics and Protestant fundamentalists in the military who could be counted on to spout conventional morality at the drop of a hat are screwing around as much as the least pious among them and using their uniform to get it.

I would bet if you could read their thoughts that most of the Taliban are about as devout believers in the moral teachings of Islam as Sam Harris is, just as I am sure that the Catholics on FOX and a good percentage of the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops reject Catholic social teaching, the parables of Jesus and the warning of punishment for not doing good for the least among us. 

I once heard a football coach talking about how he motivates boys to do awful things to themselves and each other, going to awful practices in the heat of summer, hurting themselves, eating themselves into obesity, destroying their brains, he said "The fastest way to a boy's heart isn't through his stomach, it's through his jock strap."  And that is, in fact, the case with even the most "Christian" of jocks with few exceptions (and pardon me if I'm skeptical even in most of those professed instances)  figuring that their being on the team entitles them to sex, as well as the many irreligious ones.  

I would bet you that on every sports team at every Catholic school, the elite as well as the blue-collar, the most prestigious as well as the who-heard-of-it, there are very few who go long without sex which their own profession of faith holds is a mortal sin.  Bret Kavanaugh didn't seem to be very influenced by the Catholicism of the Jesuits at his prep school as he was on the team.  And most of them expect their membership on the team entitles them to get sex. 

The use of sex as a motivator of men AND WOMEN is ubiquitous.  And even when it is illegal it is hardly abolished in its entirety.  The difference with the Taliban is that their gangster cult has a code that makes them as ready to practice it as the entirely atheist North Korean military-political class.  It's among the good reason for rejecting both. 

I'd listen to Muslim Women who oppose forced marriage on that before some twerp from America who doesn't know his own ass from his elbow and who probably couldn't find either Afghanistan or Rome on a map without coaching.

A Lot Of The Exaggerated Expectations And So The Current Panic And Confusion About The Covid Vaccines Was Due To Bad And Incomplete Reporting

LISTENING TO DR. PETER HOTEZ at this clip from MSNBC should be required for any in the media who talks about the Covid booster shots which will be available.  Dr. Hotez said that for people like him who knew something about the issue understood that the decision to accelerate a second dose of the two-dose vaccines last winter and spring was because of the late Trump regime surge in deaths from the virus, to gain a strategic foothold on the pandemic but it was not something that would tend to lead to long lasting effectiveness of the vaccine.  He said that the need for a third shot eight months after the second one was predicted and predictable at the time.  

People are being gulled into thinking anything the best of those involved can do is guaranteed to be a one-time and permanent solution when there is little likelihood that is going to be the case.  I remember some experts in the field predicting that this could turn into a situation like the annual flu season when annual shots might be needed to control it, or, rather, TO ATTEMPT TO CONTROL IT. 

Having a scum like Kilmeade and Bartiromo and Trump using vaccination as a political pawn is something that cannot be allowed to continue.  If Rupert Murdoch hasn't since, happily, died and gone to hell, I'll bet he will be among the first to get a third shot as he made sure he was among the first to get any.  And the same is true for Trump, Bartiromo and Kilmeade.  I'm sure the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court will make sure they are too, even as they permit the media to lie hundreds of thousands and maybe millions into dying for the political advantage of the Republican-fascist party.  

The Biden administration should make sure that all of its messaging gives people the whole truth, even that which the ignorant won't have an easy time of understanding because holding back on that will have consequences too, making people more vulnerable to the Republican-fascist, Murdoch style media manipulation of the facts when those come to fruition.  And they will, in time.

The Pest And The Blightest

SINCE TAKING UP THE HOBBY of checking to see what educational establishments credentialed the Republican-fascists I've found that, in contrast to the  general population those who fill the elites ranks of the media (propaganda) and legal and political sectors (tools and apparatchiks)  are by far the products of elite prep schools, the Ivy League and equivalent university level credentialing syndicate.   It is disturbing how many of them went to allegedly religious, especially Catholic prep schools and universities - one thing is clear, either they have not taught their charges Catholic social teaching or they have not taught it well. No more than the secular ones taught the principles of egalitarian, elected democracy.  I think it is a far cry from the working class Catholic school in the town next to mine also run by Sisters of St. Joseph which got closed decades ago because it could afford to remain open when they had to really pay the teachers.  There is a real difference between the two things that get called :"Catholic schools." 

The latest one I've looked in is Maria Bartiromo whose credentialing to be a fascist mouthpiece came from the Catholic girls school Fontbonne Hall Academy, C. W. Post (which also credentialed her fellow FOX fascist Brian Kilmeade aka the stupidest one on the stupid couch and the guy who trolls me) and the private New York University. 

I am beginning to wonder if they should do some of those 1950s sociological studies of ghettos and ethnic neighborhoods as generators of criminality on the elite educational racket because the elite schools and Ivy class schools credential a pretty shockingly large percentage of the worst of those these days.  

Update:  If you want to see what an immoral skank Bartiromo is AS THE POPE JOINS OTHERS TO PROMOTE VACCINATION AND THE CRYPTO-FASCIST CARDINAL AND ANTI-VAXXER RAYMOND BURKE LIES IN THE HOSPITAL ON A VENTILATOR :

Something's up with my computer, again.  Time for me to look for another junker to tinker with.   Sorry for the bad editing, it happens whenever I write in Blogger instead of the text editor I usually use when I copy and paste text.  HTML and the such are not my friend.  Sometimes running it through Leaf Pad or Feather Pad helps, sometimes I forget to do that.

America Never Had The Power To Remake Afghanistan's Treatment Of Women We Should Stop Fooling Ourselves We Ever Did

TWENTY YEARS OF DEATH, MAIMING AND BEREAVEMENT,  hundreds of billions, two trillion dollars, I heard, PAYING THE SALARY OF THE AFGHAN ARMY!  and the Afghan government and Army were the primary agents of the immediate take-over of the Taliban in Afghanistan, they pre-arranged it.

The part that the Afghani men play in the horrific consequences OF THEIR INACTION AND ACTION for the women and other targeted groups in Afghanistan is not being discussed nearly enough as Republicans, the pundit class of talking heads and others here blame Joe Biden and his still young administration for the situation that Trump and Pompeo and others during the Trump regime negotiated to happen pretty much on the time-table it did and for the consequences in a place the American government never ruled - if it had I'd guess that less theft by government officials in Afghanistan would have happened - in places which were hardly under the control of even the official Afghani government even at the . . . "height" of its power?

Showbiz and cheap novels and cabloid and tabloid "journalism" some of the hagiographic ersatz school "history lie us into these situations.  Americans are sold a load of bullshit that we can go anywhere, defeat anyone and determine that they are going to have a functioning, Western style government, maybe even a quasi-democracy when that has happened exactly nowhere I'm aware of.   If you want to count post-war Germany, they had a head start on the Western part and they did, actually, choose to become one of the best and most serious of European socieities as a lesson in facing both the Nazi period and its evils and the fine example of having communism imposed on East Germany with all its own inherent evils.  Japan is somewhat democratic in a more ersatz sense, though it, too, I think made a choice to modernize without imperial ambitions this time and with the, as well, good example of how bad things can go under the level of gangster rule that they could see in China and North Korea.  If it worked anywhere else as a consequence of American intervention, give me a list to consider. 

As I think everyone should be forced to remember, there were lots of people who pointed to the British Empire, the Soviet Empire as warnings of what happens to great powers who try to do what the Bush II regime peddled its wars with, imposing democracy on Afghanistan and Iraq from half way around the world.  It was especially ridiculous and, I maintain, racist for them to claim it could be done in Afghanistan with the example of the Soviet Union, right next door and trying to impose modernism through communist dictatorship failing disastrously to do so.  The American part in foiling the Soviet puppet regime in Afghanistan was a warning of disaster of a different kind, in how arming gangsters, thugs and fanatics to turn them into your tool will come back to bite you badly, not to mention the women who never and and never will have a good life under anything but egalitarian democracy. 

It was especially ironic in the case of the Bush II regime because Saddam Hussein had, in fact, tried to impose a modern, Western regime of more equality for Women than almost any of the large countries in the area and that ended with Western determination to impose democracy from abroad.  

-------------------

It is surreal and heart-breaking to read someone like Vrinda Narain Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism; Max Bell School of Public Policy, McGill  University, proposing a list of what we can do to help the Women of Afghanistan from the perspective of August 15th.  

The UN must now act decisively to prevent further atrocities against women in Afghanistan.

I propose four policy actions for the international community to bring about sustainable peace. They’re guided by Resolution 1820 that underscores the importance of including women as equal participants in the peace process and condemns all forms of gendered violence against civilians in armed conflict

1. Calling for an immediate ceasefire to ensure the peace process can proceed in good faith.

2. Ensuring that women’s rights — enshrined in Afghanistan’s Constitution, national legislation and international law — are respected.

3. Insisting that peace negotiations continue with meaningful participation of Afghan women. Currently, there are only four women peace negotiators on the Afghan government’s team and none on the Taliban’s.

4. Lifting sanctions against the Taliban must be conditional on their commitment to uphold women’s rights. The European Union and the United States, currently the largest donors to Afghanistan, must make aid conditional upon women’s rights and their access to education and employment.
 

Of those the only one I think might possibly have any chance of doing anything is the one on sanctions and you'd have to get those who have backed the Taliban to do it and those who have backed them are not likely to care a bit what happens to the Women of the country.

It is entirely understandable that someone like her, or me, would want to do something seeing the enslavement imposed on the Woman of Afghanistan, as the article notes, their sexual enslavement as recruiting inducements for men to join the "religious" cult.  It is terrible to watch and terrible to feel that there is nothing that we can do that has any guarantee to work.  But that's not in our power to do it anymore than it is in the power of Americans who favor equality to force it to happen here.  The struggle for Women's equality in Afghanistan will take generations AND THERE IS NO POPULATION IN WHICH THAT STRUGGLE CAN HAPPEN EXCEPT IN  THE PEOPLE OF AFGHANISTAN.  If there is any group of people who can have a clue as to how to make that happen it will be people there who know what they're talking about.

In the list I gave yesterday of the options for blame in the origin of this disaster, the Bush II decision to respond to 9-11 with a disastrous nation building fable (mostly told to sell the war to Americans), the Reagan administration that armed the war-lords and the origins of the Taliban, the Soviet invasion and attempt at its own style of nation building, etc. I left out the Pakistani government which were some of the biggest promoters of the Taliban through the university of such ideology maintained in Pakistan.  And it was not alone in creating this evil in the region. 

We in the West, through our arrogance and, yes, our racism, both earn blame through our idiotic and criminal actions but we also presume to take all of the blame because we are kept in ignorance of the reality of such places, substituting the most dead-headed ignorance and bigoted stereotyping possible.  The idiot congressman who associated Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with women in Afghanistan under the Taliban was merely typical of that kind of idiocy.

I think there is a need for us to blame ourselves for what we actually did in Afghanistan, we allowed American governments, Bush II, Reagan, to get us involved in building, not a nation but a catastrophe.  That blame is on those who did it, it's not even on all Americans.  

Steven Biko, the martyred South African freedom fighter reached the point, in response to the brutal put down of student demonstrations against apartheid famously said the meaning of that experience was "Black Man you are on your own."   A lot of us took that to mean that achieving freedom and equality had to come from within the group which had neither freedom nor equality.  The most we could do was to boycott and get sanctions imposed on the Apartheid government but it was not within our power to have a constructive part in the actual achievement of that.  The subsequent history of South Africa after apartheid has shown that even the official beginning of freedom and equality is hardly the thing in reality.  That is no more the case than that the Emancipation Proclamation achieved it for Black People in the United States as de facto enslavement and inequality was never abolished and won the next century through the end of Reconstruction (due to Rutherford Hayes' corrupt Electoral College deal with the hardly dead slave power).  The Republican-fascists are trying to set back the country to the days of inequality and enslavement through the Supreme Court here. 

If we can't end inequality here, the idea that we could impose it in Afghanistan was absurd.  That it was the Bush II regime which put two of the major figures in the reimposition of American apartheid through the destruction of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts on the Supreme Court, Roberts and Alito,  that claimed it would do so only shows what a mockery of a sales job for the war it was. 

History is complex, so is geography, if you ignore both and present reality at the same time, you're going to be shocked at what happens.  That is so typically 21st century America that this is only one such shock that awaits us.

the president was able to declare that the Taliban were defeated. But more than four years later, Afghanistan is rife with violence, and the Taliban are active in much of the country.

SINCE THE FREEST PRESS IN THE HISTORY OF HUMAN BEINGS won't have on the people who a. know what they're talking about and b. were right about how the United States making a huge mistake in its response to 9-11, the "justifiable" one in trying to change Afghanistan, I'm going to post some pieces from them.  The first is by the late and great historian Howard Zinn, the author of Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal among many other books.

The history of wars fought since the end of World War II reveals the futility of large-scale violence. The United States and the Soviet Union, despite their enormous firepower, were unable to defeat resistance movements in small, weak nations — the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan — and were forced to withdraw.

Even the “victories” of great military powers turn out to be elusive. Presumably, after attacking and invading Afghanistan, the president was able to declare that the Taliban were defeated. But more than four years later, Afghanistan is rife with violence, and the Taliban are active in much of the country.

The two most powerful nations after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union, with all their military might, have not been able to control events in countries that they considered to be in their sphere of influence — the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the United States in Latin America.

Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a “war on terrorism” is a contradiction in terms. Wars waged by nations, whether by the United States or Israel, are a hundred times more deadly for innocent people than the attacks by terrorists, vicious as they are.

The repeated excuse, given by both Pentagon spokespersons and Israeli officials, for dropping bombs where ordinary people live is that terrorists hide among civilians. Therefore the killing of innocent people (in Iraq, in Lebanon) is called accidental, whereas the deaths caused by terrorists (on 9/11, by Hezbollah rockets) are deliberate.

This is a false distinction, quickly refuted with a bit of thought. If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a “suspected terrorist” is inside (note the frequent use of the word suspected as evidence of the uncertainty surrounding targets), the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is “inevitable.”

So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians. And when you consider that the number of innocent people dying inevitably in “accidental” events has been far, far greater than all the deaths deliberately caused by terrorists, one must reject war as a solution for terrorism.

For instance, more than a million civilians in Vietnam were killed by US bombs, presumably by “accident.” Add up all the terrorist attacks throughout the world in the 20th century and they do not equal that awful toll.

If reacting to terrorist attacks by war is inevitably immoral, then we must look for ways other than war to end terrorism, including the terrorism of war. And if military retaliation for terrorism is not only immoral but futile, then political leaders, however cold-blooded their calculations, may have to reconsider their policies.

Published by ZCommunications • September 7, 2006

"What could become one of America's enduring lies to itself about Afghanistan is being given birth on live TV these days"

UNLIKE THE CALLOW young, middle-aged things in the media and some in the Congress who either weren't born yet or were toddlers at the time the South Vietnamese government collapsed and the Communists took over Vietnam, I do remember that, I was a young adult at the time, politically involved and a news junkie, as is my family tradition.  

I'm old enough to remember in detail and I am old enough to have heard the right-wing and center figures who tried to rig history to make their own blame in what had happened disappear or turn into something it certainly was not, wise and noble.  Blaming those who had been right all along for what happened when they predicted what would happen with remarkable accuracy.     

The banally evil and futile folly and, at that time, longest American war, the terrible consequences for those who worked for or with the U.S. military and embassy and for American companies and others, were soon to be turned by Hollywood into myths of American servicemen returning from Vietnam being spit on by anti-war types, the typical Hollywood lie that informs the minds of the entertainment addled plurality if not majority of Americans - certainly the death of any sane and egalitarian democracy based in reality and learning from the worst mistakes.

Lawrence O'Donnell's commentary on this last night is the best I've heard yet, it deserves to be given a link and a listen.

I am also old enough to remember the early and best years of NPR under Frank  Mankiewicz before the establishment Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its partners in destroying public radio, right wing foundation money, installed a big donor  pleasing regime of mealy-mouthed Republican-propaganda and warm, fuzzy nostalgia as its typical product. [Is my memory correct that Morning Edition sponsorship was where I first heard of "My Pillow?"]   I seldom to never listen anymore.  I am very doubtful that you can have high-overhead journalism without risking the corruption of advertising, though the CBC radio division has been able to do it to some extent in Canada.  But, then, they have a modern constitution not an 18th century anachronism and a population that has been used to honest elections.

And I remember the absurdly legendary "golden age of television" when the legendary Edward R. Murrow still had a major TV show before William Paley chose his relationship with the best and brightest over reporting hard fact.  I will tell you that most nights right now on MSNBC is far better than anything he was allowed to do and then only once in a while.   If you had told me at the beginning of the American war in Afghanistan I would say that about MSNBC, I'd have said you had a hole in your marble bag.   Back then that channel had on the 1990s style Republican minstrelsy of Alan Keyes, the old American-fascism of Pat Buchanan and the developing American-fascism for the now middle-aged Tucker Carlson on as they were cancelling Ol' Phil Donahue.  

I will never forgive Donahue for his years as a talk show host promoting an easily sold caricature of liberalism that was such an easy foil and push-over for the fascists.  It tells you something about how bereft of actual liberalism it was in the media that he was the one you had to support as Rick Kaplan was firing him for being insufficiently supportive of the Bush II wars as he figured luring Tucker Carlson from PBS was a feather in his cap.   Rick Kaplan was a fixture of the Shorenstein Center at the very Republican friendly Kennedy School of Government at the establishment whore house of Harvard, which is necessary to point out.

I would advise everyone to support the current make-up of MSNBC because without a financial motive to keep what they've got now, it's no more secure than Murrow or Donohue were.  Now that print is in such decline - as was bound to happen because the cost of printing news on paper is prohibitive and the financial base of doing it online will not support the same level of journalism that print was capable of at times - if it goes, so does our lifeline to this kind of accurate and honest memory as well as current news.   Hollywood won't support it, neither with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  

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What Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out about the ignorant arrogance of the "best and brightest" believing, fully, that because Robert McNamara had been one of the team brought in to manage the Ford Motor Company after WWII and had risen to the top during a period of enormous profits that he could use his same management skills to make and sell cars to manage the American war in Vietnam as Secretary of State is worth thinking about, hard.  

It is testimony to one of the stupidest and more ingrained articles of faith in "enlightenment" thinking and the academic, college-credentialed set, that the universe is a monistic entity in which everything is guided by a few if not only one Law discernible by human science and that all of human thought and life should fall in line with that.   I think they really did believe that the management schemes and organizational ones used to make and sell cars was fungible and that such a person could be expected to succeed in carrying out the war policy of the United States.  It is the same faith that the Trumpists, perhaps especially those "white evangelicals" and "white Catholics" who believed that the totally phony business genius conman would fulfill that wet-dream of Hollywood and other Republicans that what the country really needed  was a businessman to be president.  As if George W. Bush had not already proved that such a creature, a legacy, daddy propped up businessman was no substitute for someone with the skills for the job.  

It is the biggest lesson of Joe Biden's few months in office that it is someone with his experience and knowledge from decades in public service who should be trusted to know what they are doing.  And the media and the Republicans are doing their damnedest to thwart that because they mostly don't want the American government to be a successful, egalitarian democracy, they want a gangster government only different in type and extent of violence than what Trump negotiated into power in Afghanistan on the watch of his successor.

I have mentioned, repeatedly that during the hearings into Trump's time as Putin's water boy in regard to Ukraine that I was impressed that it was the diplomats who had been on the ground and in harms way and the military officers who had some realistic view of reality who bravely risked their careers and, Trump's fanatical fans being what they are, their lives to expose his crimes.  

In that period, I could not help but notice it was the lawyers, the people who had worked at the Department of Justice, the FBI (with the exception of Andrew McCabe), the granite man with feet of clay, Robert Mueller,  who I found disgustingly ass-covering and, in many cases cowardly.  I think that it is not unrelated to the same training in a legal culture built with the same kind of "enlightenment" concepts and thoroughly in line with them.  In time everything is viewed as an aspect of that kind of substitution on the basis of everything being, essentially, the same thing, integrity for self-preservation, truth for cover-up, democracy for expediency.   But that thought will take a lot longer to continue.  I think it's also the difference between having talking heads on spouting lies and the reporting of the truth as if it mattered as "journalism,". 

I'll have more to say on that sometime.

If Nothing Else Biden Was Heroically Honest In HIs Explanation

IF NOTHING ELSE is clear from the last several days, it's clear that President Joe Biden has done what I don't think any other President has done in my memory, he told the truth about a war the United States has waged.  

Joe Biden will deserve to go to a place among  the highest handful of American presidents for that reason alone and I will bet you that it was just that inconvenient honesty, inconvenient for the elites that will probably keep it from being seen for the heroic honesty it is.

The Watch Of Folly - This Is The Disaster Sold By Cabloid Informercials And Billionaires

THE MEDIA CERTAINLY HAS SUCKERED the American People into believing  that the military could solve all of our problems.  Heroic war movies and TV shows, generally filled with people who never were in the military and fewer who actually were in fighting, have trained the American People to sending other peoples' children and family members into harms way to try to accomplish any purpose that the governing elite or the elite in the media want to do that for.  It was certainly done in the tabloid media fueled Spanish American War a hundred-twenty years ago, in numerous smaller incursions, in Vietnam, in Iraq during Bush I and again in Bush II, with the most dubious of justifications - and lest anyone forget, in Bush I by his ambassador to Iraq giving tacit permission for him to invade Kuwait.

The cases of the war in Afghanistan and American involvement in WWII were different, both of those started with a foreign attack on the U. S.  We certainly know that the response to the 9-11 attack was unwise in the extreme and extremely so.   The 20 years of people being killed, maimed and bereaved, Afghani, those among our allies who we asked to invade with us, Americans, ignored the knowledge of those who warned that Afghanistan was bound to lead to a long, futile war which was hardly likely to change anything.  That "country" is a disaster that is one of the better examples of why anarchism and power exerted to that extent on a local level will, in fact, lead to rule by gangsters.   That was the experience of the most powerful militarires in the world when they were sent by their rulers to change the place, America just takes its place in the list of great powers which were diminished and damaged by doing that first resort of the powerful without skin on the line, children on the line, figure you are going to change people who don't want to be changed for the most part.

The media, more than any other entity in the United States is what sold us this disaster twenty years ago, just as it had peddled the originally unpopular Bush I Gulf War if its own making.   And no part of the media was more influential in that than the 24-7 cabloid networks - the tabloid smut king Murdoch's, but also and in no way insignificantly,  CNN and the MSNBC of the day*.   

Now, as always, in American politics, it seems that it is left for a Democratic President to take the blame for the inevitable disaster that was wrought by Bush II and Dick Cheney - a war which, like all disastrous American wars is a hell of a lot harder to get out of than to bluster into.   And it wasn't even Biden's decision to end America propping up the crooks and gangsters who were the "Afghan government", that was ended with Trump's negotiation WITH THE TALIBAN, 

It was Trump and his team led by Pompeo who set the actual end for not during his term but that of his successor.   

The next years in Afghanistan will be a humanitarian, political, regional and world disaster.  And the groundwork of it was laid long, long ago because Afghanistan is not really a country, it is an ungoverned region where The People are at the mercy of war-lords, fanatics and anyone who can kill and terrorize themselves to rule a petty piece of turf.  If those who believe they are going to use the Taliban to control the place would rightly join the long list of other, foreign powers may be something to consider.  I would imagine there are oil kingdoms involved in that.  I remember an Afghani American at the time of the invasion pointing out that the 9-11 attack came from Saudis and most of the attackers were Saudi so if anyone should be invaded it was that country.  Such billionarires and multimillionaires as rule over that country almost certainly use such forces as the Taliban and other terror gangsters to assert their economic and, so, political and military objectives just as the American and others use our military, in no small part through the media they also control.

There are few people who come out of this with their integrity intact, Congresswoman Barbara Lee more than most, the sole vote in the Congress against authorizing the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.  And she is too moral and too substantial a person to treat this horrific disaster as anything to derive personal vindication from.  

I think one of the things that this shows is having American policy in the hands of racists who are predisposed to believe that brown skinned people are too stupid, too unwilling to fight back, unable to decide how they want to live - clearly a majority of those with the ability to struggle against the war-lords and the Taliban have not chosen to do so, those who wanted change are a small minority.   I think Cheney, who was the one who was really in charge of the Bush II regime, got us into two disastrous wars based on his own racism and his skint understanding of either place. 

American racism has not only cost its victims huge numbers of deaths and lives destroyed and an enormous material cost, it has extracted an enormous price from those in the military, especially those who actually do the fighting, as well.  I read that the cost of care of Americans who fought in Afghanistan will be well over a trillion dollars before the last of them and their survivors die.   The head stones will always be there.  They will teach us no more than those of the other wars, the totally unjustified and those which should have not happened as other means of addressing real wrongs were put into practice.  Joe Biden has stated it is his intention to use those other means in dealing with any terror threats that come from Afghanistan. 

Of course, the Women of Afghanistan, the Children, LGBTQ, minorities, religious minorities will die and be oppressed by the people Trump, or, rather his people negotiated back into power.   That isn't in any way a surprise, his administration didn't care about those groups in the United States, they ran a campaign that tapped America's closest domestic version of the same benighted religiosity to win power, as it tried to use terror to stay in power and as it corrupts American elections and so destroy democracy.  

I think we have to accept that there is little that we can do to help those the Taliban will kill, oppress, terrorize and enslave.  All of the efforts to change Afghanistan by educating girls and other such things have, in the end, only set them up to be targets.  I remember in the early weeks of the American invasion of Afghanistan saying that about the only thing I thought that might do some good would be to arm the women and train them how to slaughter their oppressors.  Though that would have had to have had the willingness of a large enough number of those who wanted their freedom that much.  I doubt that was ever going to happen anymore than American women have, in a majority, demanded the Equal Rights Amendment and an end to the eternal, on an average of four a day lynching murders of American Women.  That kind of change doesn't take two decades, it takes generations and, even then, it is not going to be totally effective. 

Americans got talked into the kind of idiotic academic, think-tank fantasy of nation building in a country half way around the world in the most unlikely and historically unsuccessful populations for doing that.  I think that just as we have paid a huge price for the racism of those we get in power, we have also paid a huge amount for the idiocy of such people.  Our last disaster of a war was, as well, in a large percentage based on such academic wonks wet dreams.  

This is a total mess. It is going to be a terrible humanitarian catastrophe.  It will probably have disastrous consequences no one is thinking about.  I could have as easily put the location for the start of this death march of folly in the Reagan years when Reagan supported what would become the terrorists of 9-11 to oppose the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and if not there, why not in Moscow with the decision to invade in the first place?  Or I could have put it in Saudi Arabia with the deal between the ruling family of gangsters with the malignant fundamentalist crack pots way back before then.  Or in however that non-country, Afghanistan, came to be considered a coherent and totally incoherent entity. 

Or I could put it in the five Republican-fascist justices of the Supreme Court who gave us Bush II- Cheney and their incompetent ignoring of the warnings that 9-11 was coming.  Not that any of the figures in that have ever been held to account for it. 

We don't know enough and if the American media can manage it, we won't for the next one they drag us into, either.

* I believe it was during the period of alleged TV genius Rick Kaplan's leadership of MSNBC that Phil Donohue's program was cancelled because it was too critical of the war and insufficiently militaristic.  I don't believe they cancelled programs hosted by Alan Keyes,  Pat Buchanan or the Swanson Dinner bastard of American fascist propaganda, Tucker Carlson.

Busy Day As Noted, There Are No Movies. If There Were Movies Of It I'd Put One In The Machine For You (Or do sitters do all of that from a streaming service, these days?)

LAST WEEK I WROTE THIS:  

If Darwinists from Darwin to Dawkins and beyond can peddle their claims based on their plausibility (some of those entirely implausible if you look at them with even moderate rigor) then I don't think Behe is asking for anything his opponents don't take as their own privilege. 

It's going to be another hard day for me - I should have waited till past harvest time to move - so I'm going to post one of the pieces I had the most fun writing, exactly the examination of one of those fables of science peddled by the high priest of Darwinian fundamentalism, Richard Dawkins and, I'll bet, is widely taught in university level science classes and accepted by even those who go into biology as a career without ever giving it any critical thought at all.  Such is the quality of current materialist - atheist - scientism, even that which gets published and taught as real, gen-you-wine science. 

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One of the most popular ideas in current materialism, atheism and among the self appointed "skeptics" is that "altruism" is a product of natural selection.   That idea was pushed by a latter day Darwinist named W.D. Hamilton* who came up with equations alleging to prove that conscious acts of self sacrifice by an individual were really acts of genetic self-interest, selfishness for the propagation of genes by organisms that are the mere robots and vehicles of them.

Backing up, the problem that acts of generosity posed for the theory of natural  selection goes back to the beginning with Darwin.  If natural selection is what formed all organisms, body and mind and behavior, acts of generous self-sacrifice, resulting in the death or injury or even some form of reproductive disadvantage can't be explained.  Natural selection is, as even Darwin asserted, all about "survival of the fittest" [On the Origin of Species 5th ed. p. 92] in a struggle for life and reproduction.  And, as seen in yesterday's post, Darwin and his followers were already making the most extravagant claims about its action in human societies.   They, of course, had nothing but narrative, lacking data to back up then claims.  Quite often in Darwin, Haeckel and others, the narrative was a thinly veiled creation myth designed to assert an appearance of natural selection in nature when it was only there in the fables.  That effort has continued down to today, it is the reason why such an overwhelming amount of asserted "science" surrounding behavior and thought becomes accepted, fashionable, out-moded and then junked as newer fables or, on occasion, some actual data or the application of reason debunks them.

In the hands of any Darwinian fundamentalist,  whose goal is not to test Natural Selection but to uphold it and assert its universal explanatory power,  all phenomena which could harm the theory must be either rejected or twisted to fit it.  "Altruism" as expounded by Hamilton is transformed into a mere appearance of generosity but which is, actually, Darwinian self-interest on behalf of genes contained within organisms.  In order to do that the human experience of generosity has to be made to equal behaviors in other species which are far removed from us in evolutionary descent by many hundreds of millions of years,  ants figure heavily in it.  I haven't seen any applications of Hamilton to organisms more distant in time for us, though the imperatives of the ultra-Darwinist claiming the total explanatory power of natural selection could hardly continue to ignore the vast majority of the living species, and grad students in the soft "sciences" will always be looking for novel ways to please the faculties in their field.

The most frequently articulated form of Hamiltonian "altruism" I've encountered, by far, is that of gene selfishness as popularized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene.  And by a factor of many times to one, the expression of such "altruism" brought up by his fans is in the fable of "the first bird to call out".   I wrote briefly and quickly on that last spring.  My recent go around at Jeffrey Sallit's  atheist themed "science" blog, "Recursivity",  brought up some even more absurd aspects of it, so I will go over it again.  Here is the fable as Dawkins sets it out.

Laying down one's life for one's friends is obviously altruistic, but so also is taking a slight risk for them. Many small birds, when they see a flying predator such as a hawk, give a characteristic "alarm call", upon which the whole flock takes appropriate evasive action. There is indirect evidence that the bird who gives the alarm call puts itself in special danger, because it attracts the predator's attention particularly to itself. This is only a slight additional risk, but it nevertheless seems, at least at first sight, to qualify as an altruistic act by our definition.

Richard Dawkins:   p.6, The Selfish Gene,  Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, 2006

In my analysis last spring, I noted, at great detail that the entire basis of the invented "altruism" was the assertion,  "There is indirect evidence that the bird who gives the alarm call puts itself in special danger, because it attracts the predator's attention particularly to itself." Only where is that "indirect evidence" that the first bird calling out had more of a chance at being killed by the predator?   Dawkins gives none, something he has in common with others making assertions of "altruism" of this sort.   Lacking a large enough number of filmed examples to study in which to identify both the "first bird to call out" and that it was the one caught by the "flying predator" it would be impossible to make that hypothesis into real science.  No matter how well it might work as convincing narrative. 

Just on the basis of physics, if the other birds in the flock were close enough for the alarm call to allow them to escape, they'd have to be far closer than the predator and, the speed of sound being rather fixed, they'd probably have taken off in a flurry of confusion before the predator even heard the call.  I don't think that part of the fable passes muster either in terms of adequate scientific observation (something generally lacking in evo-psy)  or on the basis of basic physics.   I'll pass over the often observed phenomenon that when birds see a predator, they very often don't call out but play statues.  Also that among some birds, it's not uncommon for different species to flock together and for bird flocks to be found in close proximity to each other. 

But, as I put it to the mathematician, Shallit, the proposal has even more basic problems with it.   If Dawkins is correct that there is a genetic basis of  bird "alturism",  in lines with his fable, and that the "altruism" consists in the self-sacrifice of birds containing those genes, in order that other birds containing that gene can escape and reproduce, he ignores that birds not containing that genetic "altruism" would also benefit from that self-sacrifice.   That would mean that every time Dawkins fable happened, every time those "altruism" genes worked as proposed,  the percentage of birds containing the "altruism" genes would decrease and the percentage of those not containing them would increase within the flock and within the species.  For Dawkins fable to work, decreasing numbers within the population would have to result in either increasing percentages or, at the very least, a statistically neutral wash.   I challenged Shallit to explain why that wasn't true.  On my last check the self-promoted champion of science and mathematics had failed to do that.   As I noted to him neither has anyone else I've ever posed that problem to.

Even more problematic from the point of view of natural selection would be the fact that every time an "altruistic" bird sacrificed itself, its breeding potential, passing on the "altruism" gene to a new generation, would be cut off.  In its stead the birds not carrying "genetic altruism" would have an increased chance of successfully breeding in its place and any offspring they produced would not have to compete with as many offspring carrying his "altruism genes" in the next generation.  How the "altruism genes" would increase from that needs to be answered.  As well as how those who claim to uphold the highest of scientific and logical integrity could create such "science".

Now, there is nothing in classical Darwinism that is more established than the contention that eyesight and hearing are the products of natural selection, progressively selecting individuals with inferior eyesight and hearing to die through predation and decreased success in producing offspring.  Good eyesight and hearing are the quintessential examples of positive adaptations,  offered as proof of the correctness of the theory of natural selection.   Natural selection fails as a theory if positive adaptations do not result in more offspring for those individuals having them than for those which don't have them, eventually resulting in new species which incorporate that adaptation.  That is the bedrock concept of natural selection and Darwinism.   Without that the long, violently contested  and continuing struggle over the evolution of the eye would never have happened.

I further noted that the proposed "altruistic" self-sacrifice, based in genetics would have the odd effect of turning superior eye-sight and hearing into a maladaptation.   "Altruistic" birds with superior eyesight and hearing would be more likely to see a predator first, more likely to call out first and more likely to die in its talons than an "altruistic" bird with bad eyesight and hearing.  Nearsighted, hard-of-hearing "altruistic" birds would be more likely to be among the survivors as their more able fellows sacrificed themselves, they potentially would increase the percentage of bad eyesight and hearing in the subset of "altruistic" birds, leaving them more prone to being preyed on in other ways.   I'll repeat that.  According to classic Darwinism, such good eyesight and hearing would increase the maladaptive effect of genes that directly led to early "altriustic" bird death if they had superior eyesight and hearing within the group of "altruistic" birds, but bad eyesight is, in itself, maladaptive.   Any way I can see,  Dawkins' proposed "altruism" is a maladaptation, failing in purely Darwinian terms as well as contradicting the properties of the set of Natural numbers.

How Richard Dawkins and those who peddle the idea of Hamiltonian "altruism" can be successful when their ideas are so essentially irrational needs investigation.  It also has to be asked how the entire effort to dispose of real generosity on behalf of a theory that can't explain it can lead alleged champions of science to so totally trash everything, including logic, including mathematics, including Darwinian doctrine, itself.  in order to deliver on a bad note of promissory materialism.

No matter what it's alleged scientific origin is, the concept of "altruism" set out in such illogical fashion is extremely popular with materialists,  atheists, "skeptics" because of their devotion to Darwinism.  As noted, it is frequently cited by them in online discussions and blog brawls.  It is ideologically important to them that Darwin's ultimate theory, which is natural selection, not evolution, has a standing similar to that of the laws of gravitation and those concerning chemical bonds.   I was brought up with a non-ideological faith in the power of natural selection which I've found extremely difficult to test and question and I wasn't wedded to it in the same, emotional way that atheists are.   The first reason for the atheist devotion to natural selection is found in its earliest supporters.   Galton said it in noting his motives in the invention of eugenics,

THE publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science.

Ernst Haeckel, as well, expressed his adoption of natural selection in terms of its ideological use,

On the other hand, the theory of development carried out by Darwin, which we shall have to treat of here as the Non-miraculous or Natural History of Creation, and which has already been put forward by Goethe and Lamarck, must, if carried out logically, lead to the monistic or mechanical (causal) conception of the universe. 

Most explicitly he said,

This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature constitutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin.

As noted in previous posts, Charles Darwin was fully aware of Haeckel's statements as he cited the book in which Haeckel said it.  I have seen nothing to indicate that Darwin rejected that view.

The very real conflict over evolution overturning a literal interpretation of Genesis masks a far deeper ideological conflict that comes from natural selection, considered to be an absolute law of nature.   It was a fight that Darwin's accepted and deeply appreciated early promoters were already laying out in full detail, including, literally, a rejection of the most basic ideas of morality.  You can read Huxley, Galton, Haeckel, and others right down to today to see that has been a feature of natural selection as articulated by its foremost promoters.  As natural selection was, itself, based in the moral atrocity of Malthusian economics, any expectation of anything else coming from it is irrational.  There is no place for the real phenomena of human generosity in the declaration that the alternative to selfishness is death, which is what natural selection is.   Generosity escapes the artificial gravity of Darwinism, it will whenever it arises.  Its reality is denied by Hamilton's perversion of "altruism", itself a word invented by Comte to try to force generosity into his less sciency articulation of materialism.  It's hardly a surprise that, given the cynicism and stupidity of most of the promotion of atheism today, that turning it into selfishness by unthinking molecules would be so very popular.

* In a planned post I will look at the idea that what the rather awful and depraved W. D. Hamilton had to say about generosity and "altruism"  should have been taken with more pinches of salt than are compatible with health.

Update:  Since someone asked, my difficulty in questioning natural selection comes, first and foremost, in that it was the way I've been taught to think of evolution for more than fifty years.  Try to imagine how you would face the fact of evolution if you didn't assume that natural selection was both a law of nature and the framework into which all other thinking about evolution must fit.  Second was the enormous coercion that comes to someone who begins to question the theory.  That coercion is ubiquitous and powerful.  Creationists aren't affected by it because their denial of evolution removes them from its effects.  I was never brought up to believe in the literal truth of the early chapters of Genesis, I never have so I never had that to overcome.  I had been brought up to an entirely conventional belief in contemporary evolutionary theory.  My mother has a degree in Zoology, I did well enough in the biology classes I took that my teacher encouraged me to think of changing my major, I've had two field biologists in my family.  I used to care what the people imposing that coercion think, most people on the left still do.  I don't care about their opinion any longer.

I was brought to not caring about it through my investigation of "evolutionary" psychology and Sociobiology and other "scientific" expositions of biological determinsm far earlier than my reading of Darwin's books and letters led me into total heresy on the matter.

I now doubt that natural selection is a force of nature in the same way that gravity or other physical forces abstracted into laws are.  I don't think that, as science, it's an especially good theory.  I don't believe that all of those trillions of  variable, changing lives of unique individuals, their deaths, their successes and failures at reproduction, the role of mere chance and far more subtle and effectively infinite variation in those really equals one force of nature.   I think a lot of the articulation of this is colored by natural selection instead of the actual events being accurately explained by it.

Natural selection's alleged virtue of providing an explanatory mechanism for evolution doesn't make up for its deficiencies as a theory.  Evolution would still be a fact if natural selection was junked and no successor framework for thinking about it replaced it.  There is no law of nature that everything has to be susceptible to that level of human comprehension.  The belief that everything is eventually explainable with science is a superstition, not scientific.    As I noted in talking about the enormous dimensions of evolution, both in time and in numbers of lives, the idea that Charles Darwin would find the key that unlocks the entirety on the basis of the information he had available in 1859 it is a matter of faith, not of reason.  I think that to a great extent the lens of natural selection might have a decisive effect on what is looked for, how what is found is looked at and for the acceptance of any analysis of that by science.  I will predict that, eventually, natural selection will either change far more radically than it already has in its history (Darwin and his contemporary colleagues, other than Weismann,  believed in Lamarckian inheritance, after all).  I think it's also possible that, eventually, natural selection will be laid aside as more of that enormous field of study is discovered.

Much is made about the instances of accuracy in what Darwin said and I am not entirely dismissive of Darwin.  I firmly believe in what I think is his greatest insight, common ancestry, while admitting that is based on belief and presumed probability.  Which will be the topic of my next post in this series.  But I am in the same position that St. George Mivart, an early convert to Darwinism, found himself in while attending a series of lectures on the subject given by no less of an authority than Thomas Huxley.  He found that the more he learned about it the less credible it seemed to him.