Author: Gareth Shore
Narration: Alicia Pavlis
The Editor: Peter Bishop
The Thin Man: David Lewis Richardson
Sound Design: Jeff Clement
Original Music: Jeff Clement
This kind of stuff in drama and fiction isn't my thing, there's the news for that. I hope if you like it you like this.
Here's One I've Posted On A Past Halloween, from the sadly long gone CBC Mystery Project. James W. Nichol - Midnight Cab- The Mystery Of The Silver Rings
The Mystery Of The Silver Rings
THIS WEEK HASN'T been a very good one for me listening to the news, I got overloaded on Reconciliation Bill click-bait freak-out on MSNBC so I have been limiting what I listen to online. So I didn't catch Ari Melber's special report on that issue I've stressed since before I started writing online, the Sullivan Decision and its progeny and how the Supreme Court has empowered right-wing lies through that stupidly written decision. Stupidly, I say, because
a. It empowered the very side OPPOSED TO the MLK side Ari Melber speaks on behalf of, it empowered America's indigenous fascists, the white supremacists and the Republican Party which was in the process of taking them in as they left the Democratic Party for putting the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts into law. Which happened the very same year the decision was issued. That high point of the American civil rights struggle has been receding, washed away by media lies ever since then.
b. It made no distinction between the absolute right to tell the truth without punishment and the fact that not only is there no right to lie but that lies, often individually but always cumulatively produce bad results. He's not alone in that, the badly written First Amendment also neglects that vital issue for government of, by and for, The People and our right to legitimate governance.
c. That We The People MUST HAVE THE TRUTH TO CAST EFFECTIVE VOTES AND PRODUCE LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT, and that that right is damaged by allowing the mass media to lie and to carry lies that will gull people from knowing the truth that, as it says in the Gospel, will make us free.
Ari Melber uses several outrageous cases, one in which a Republican-fascist , Putin friendly media outfit sued MSNBC, his network, alleging defamation against Rachel Maddow's show, but his choice to use that is inapt. This account of the original ruling is how I remember reading it at the time:
One America took particular issue when Maddow, in her segment, also said “the most obsequiously pro-Trump right wing news outlet in America really literally is paid Russian propaganda.”
Maddow made the statement after the Daily Beast ran a story by Kevin Poulsen reporting that one of One America’s on-air reporters, Kristian Brunovich Rouz, also was on the payroll for Sputnik, the Kremlin news outlet. One America then demanded a retraction.
In their lawsuit, One America said that “Rouz has never been a staff employee of Sputnik News. He worked as a freelancer for Sputnik News and his work there had no relation to his work for OAN. Rouz submitted articles to Sputnik on his own and would receive approximately $40 if the articles were accepted.”
In her ruling, Bashant wrote that even though Maddow used the word “literally,” she “had inserted her own colorful commentary into and throughout the segment, laughing, expressing her dismay (i.e., saying ‘I mean, what?’) and calling the segment a ‘sparkly story’ and one we must ‘take in stride.’ For her to exaggerate the facts and call OAN Russian propaganda was consistent with her tone up to that point, and the Court finds a reasonable viewer would not take the statement as factual given this context. The context of Maddow’s statement shows reasonable viewers would consider the contested statement to be her opinion.”
The lawsuit also claimed that Maddow’s remarks were retaliation against One America because its president, Charles Herring, had called out parent company Comcast, “for their anti-competitive censorship” in refusing to carry the conservative channel.
I don't see how that is relevant to the Sullivan Decision which I don't remember as having much of anything to do with "opinion." The issue of whether or not the "reporter" in question was an agent of paid Russian propaganda doesn't seem to have entered into it. Though I'm sure that the quibbling over whether or not getting paid the way the did would have made what Rachel Maddow said inaccurate of not, it certainly wasn't the kind of lie that is swamping American democracy as Melber's colleague at MSNBC, Chris Hayes documented in an excellent piece, getting scores if not hundreds of thousands of Americans killed by Covid, endangering elections officials - as Rachel Maddow covered on her show not long after Melber's piece aired. If anything, Sullivan and its foul descendants have done more for the OAN side and the Republican-fascists than it has for the disciples of Martin Luther King jr.
IF THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS THINK THEY WOULD COME OUT ON TOP IF LIES WERE PUNISHED, THEY ARE AS STUPID AS TRUMP IS. If Trump could have been sued for all the lies he told about Black teenagers, other Black People, Women, Democratic politicians, REPORTERS AND ANNOUNCERS, he would have been bankrupted many times more than he has been.
I wonder what would have kept an OAN from bringing a frivolous lawsuit of this kind AND AN MSNBC DEFENDING ITSELF AGAINST IT TO THAT THEORETICAL OAN'S COST before the Sullivan Decision was issued. I'm no student of the history of lawsuits being thrown out in that manner but I'd really like to see if anyone has made such a study.
The other cases he used involved the use of British courts for gangsters from the Putin oligarchy trying to suppress books that can't be published in Britain without risking ruinous frivolous lawsuits - I'm no great fan of the Brit law on this so that's got nothing to do with what I'm talking about - is also inapt. That British law is terrible in regard to the right to publish the truth has the same effect as the Sullivan Decision does in regard to the benefit of truth telling, it damages the power of the truth to bring the benefits of it being known.
Using Martin Luther King jr. the way that he did in the piece was hardly honest as he was not a party to the lawsuit, though his close associate Ralph Abernathy was
The court went way, way out of its way to turn what should have been thrown out as a triviality to open the way for the massive lying by the media that now endangers American democracy. Here, from the ruling are the facts and a little of the commentary on it:
5 Of the 10 paragraphs of text in the advertisement, the third and a portion of the sixth were the basis of respondent's claim of libel. They read as follows:
Third paragraph:
6 'In Montgomery, Alabama, after students sang 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee' on the State Capitol steps, their leaders were expelled from school, and truckloads of police armed with shotguns and tear-gas ringed the Alabama State College Campus. When the entire student body protested to state authorities by refusing to re-register, their dining hall was padlocked in an attempt to starve them into submission.'
Sixth paragraph:
7 Again and again the Southern violators have answered Dr. King's peaceful protests with intimidation and violence. They have bombed his home almost killing his wife and child. They have assaulted his person. They have arrested him seven times—for 'speeding,' 'loitering' and similar 'offenses.' And now they have charged him with 'perjury'—a felony under which they could imprison him for ten years. * * *'
8 Although neither of these statements mentions respondent by name, he contended that the word 'police' in the third paragraph referred to him as the Montgomery Commissioner who supervised the Police Department, so that he was being accused of 'ringing' the campus with police. He further claimed that the paragraph would be read as imputing to the police, and hence to him, the padlocking of the dining hall in order to starve the students into submission.2 As to the sixth paragraph, he contended that since arrests are ordinarily made by the police, the statement 'They have arrested (Dr. King) seven times' would be read as referring to him; he further contended that the 'They' who did the arresting would be equated with the 'They' who committed the other described acts and with the 'Southern violators.' Thus, he argued, the paragraph would be read as accusing the Montgomery police, and hence him, of answering Dr. King's protests with 'intimidation and violence,' bombing his home, assaulting his person, and charging him with perjury. Respondent and six other Montgomery residents testified that they read some or all of the statements as referring to him in his capacity as Commissioner.
9 It is uncontroverted that some of the statements contained in the two paragraphs were not accurate descriptions of events which occurred in Montgomery. Although Negro students staged a demonstration on the State Capital steps, they sang the National Anthem and not 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee.' Although nine students were expelled by the State Board of Education, this was not for leading the demonstration at the Capitol, but for demanding service at a lunch counter in the Montgomery County Courthouse on another day. Not the entire student body, but most of it, had protested the expulsion, not by refusing to register, but by boycotting classes on a single day; virtually all the students did register for the ensuing semester. The campus dining hall was not padlocked on any occasion, and the only students who may have been barred from eating there were the few who had neither signed a preregistration application nor requested temporary meal tickets. Although the police were deployed near the campus in large numbers on three occasions, they did not at any time 'ring' the campus, and they were not called to the campus in connection with the demonstration on the State Capitol steps, as the third paragraph implied. Dr. King had not been arrested seven times, but only four; and although he claimed to have been assaulted some years earlier in connection with his arrest for loitering outside a courtroom, one of the officers who made the arrest denied that there was such an assault.
The complete triviality of the errors of fact, the fact that the guy wasn't accused of anything and the resultant tsunami of lies that it unleashed into American life, American politics, this might be one of the worst misjudgements by alleged liberals in the history of such misjudgements, so many of those made because the First Amendment doesn't distinguish the absolute right to tell the truth and the fact that there is no right to lie. The Warren Court became addicted to issuing bombshell, block buster rulings, the few it did to good effect and the many it did with from anything to mixed results to the disaster that brought us to Trump and today's Republican-fascists should not allow their wisdom and foresight to be taken for granted.
The outrageously irresponsible results are especially bad considering paragraph 11 of the ruling says the "damaged party" presented no evidence that he'd been damaged.
11 Respondent made no effort to prove that he suffered actual pecuniary loss as a result of the alleged libel. One of his witnesses, a former employer, testified that if he had believed the statements, he doubted whether he 'would want to be associated with anybody who would be a party to such things that are stated in that ad,' and that he would not re-employ respondent if he believed 'that he allowed the Police Department to do the things that the paper say he did.' But neither this witness nor any of the others testified that he had actually believed the statements in their supposed reference to respondent.
I am no lawyer but why this case wasn't thrown out on the basis the guy had no right to bring a lawsuit in the first place seems to me to have been a far safer alternative than giving the New York Times the "right" to publish lies with impunity. Lies like the ones it printed against Hillary Clinton that certainly, magnified by the mass media 24-7-365 corporate media and the even worse social-diseased media online helped put Trump in office along with so many of the Republican-fascists who are nullifying the second Democratic presidency in a row.
I don't know if, as was suggested to me, Ari Melber was responding to what I said here but, lawyer that he is, maybe he'd like to deal with such issues this brief response to his commentary raises. I'd most like to know if he holds that there is a right to lie which is not at least vastly inferior to the right of We The People to know the truth and for the truth to not be swamped with lies so as to prevent us from being free.
BENEDICT XVI appointed some of the worst bishops in modern history, he had a gift for choosing or allowing to be chosen some real loonies and liars, crooks and fascists. Now one of his appointees, Joseph Strickland of the diocese of Tyler Texas has endorsed the Q-Anon linked, actor in Mel Gibson's the passion as torture and snuff porn movie, the gospel as lurid Chick Publications spectacle (ironies are never far in that perverted hall of mirrors, the trad-catholic fascist-right) Jim Caviezel
Bishop Joseph Strickland, who heads the Diocese of Tyler and is known for his controversial brand of conservatism, tweeted out a link to a website praising Caviezel’s speech on Monday (Oct. 25), with the prelate insisting “all need to listen” to its message. By then a clip of the speech had already been widely shared on social media in which the actor recites a line from Mel Gibson’s 1995 movie “Braveheart.”
“You can take our lives, but you can never take our freedom,” shouted Caviezel, who portrayed Jesus in Gibson’s 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ.”
I'll throw in here that "Braveheart" was so historically inaccurate that one historically informed critic said if they'd put a Plasticine dog in it and called it William Wallace And Gromit it couldn't have been more inaccurate than it was. Since such movie crap enters into the public imagination, triggering the susceptible in ways that come out in fascist, generally white supremacist violence, all such movie "poetic license" should be called what it is, dangerous lies.
Caviezel then added a faith-fueled addendum that appeared to be at least partly of his own design.
“Every man dies. Not every many truly lives,” he said. “We must fight for that authentic freedom and live, my friends. By God we must live. And with the Holy Spirit as your shield and Christ as your sword, may you join St. Michael and all the angels in defending God and sending Lucifer and his henchman straight right back to hell where they belong.”
The boy would seem to have a worse case of it than the movie Moses and Voice of God, Charlton Heston got from over-identifying himself with those roles. I never could figure out which one Heston thought he was but apparently Caviezel thinks he's some kind of macho-white-supremacist-anti-vaxxer Jesus.
The speech took place at the “For God & Country: Patriot Double Down” conference convened in Las Vegas over the weekend. According to the Las Vegas Sun, the gathering featured an array of controversial conservative speakers, including those who have spread misinformation about COVID-19 and conspiracy theories associated with the QAnon movement.
Strickland has a history of anti-vaxx, Republican-fascist and similar activity, he joined in with the disgraced and dodgey bishop Carlo Maria Viganò (One of JPII's atrocious appointments) in his false witness against Pope Francis, lots of that stuff seems to me to be right in line with Jack Chick's loony anti-Catholic propaganda, only now on behalf of the soon to be schizmatic billionaire-fianced trad-Catholic fascists. I doubt that he will do it and probably has better reasons for not doing so than I'm aware of but if I were Pope Francis, I'd ask him for his resignation or I'd reassign him somewhere they don't have TV, the guy needs to unplug from the fascist web for a year. Short of that he needs to be condemned as a Q-Anon friendly liar and Republican-fascist goon. There have been some really bad bishops in the past, an appalling number of them, but some of those in the US Catholic Conference of Bishops right now are among the worst in modern history.
I don't for a single second believe that the trad-Catholics have the slightest interest in the Gospel of Jesus, they're a gang bent on using the resources of the Catholic Church, suckering a cult from among those who are lulled into stupidity from attending the Latin Mass and being wowed by what they imagine was the mass that St. Francis experienced (I had that thrown at me by one who, like almost all Catholics, has no knowledge of the history of the liturgy) or who want to play make believe with fake lives of the saints. Lots of them just like the decor and the pretty colors. But it all has a real political effect which is why this is important. The billionaires wouldn't be funding the trad-Catholic cult if they didn't think there were bundles of cash in it for them, either to make or to retain. I think a lot of the bishops are in it on a more penny-ante basis, lots of them get money from those gangsters and thugs. The Catholic Church has always been vulnerable over its worldly holdings, and I don't mean just the buildings in the Vatican and their contents. The scandals of the JPII and Benedict XVI years often centered around money when they didn't the consequences of an all-ummarried-male clergy. One of the things they hate the most about Pope Francis is that he is, if too slowly for my liking, trying to clean up the corruption in that regard. I'm convinced that's what motivates most of the hatred of him.
Tell my brothers to be always watching unto prayer and when the good old ship of Zion comes along, to be ready to step on board.
Harriet Tubman Letter to her family 1854
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
Martin Luther King jr. Last Sermon
Here is what is shown online as Benjamin Franklin's proposed design for the front of a Great Seal for the United States depicting Pharaoh's army being destroyed as Moses follows God's instruction for closing the path through the Red Sea
Here is Thomas Jefferson's design showing the Children of Israel running away to freedom from their enslavement by Pharaoh.
There is an enormous irony in the fact that the very thing that the slave-owner Jefferson wanted to use to symbolize the United States is a constantly referred to event in the abolition movement at its most basic level, the Spirituals of those enslaved escaping slavery against the very law of the United States embedded into the Constitution and which was not eradicated by the Civil War, the abrubtly cancelled Reconstruction, the great Civil Rights struggle of the post-WWII era, the culmination in that of the abruptly cancelled Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts and the presidency of Barack Obama as we are still suffering under the Pharaonic regime of anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian features embedded in the Constitution for the protection of the slave holders and their progeny.
If I had time I would list only some of the citations of The Law of Moses in the historical foundations of the United States, of the Exodus story, both the good and the bad of it. Moses and that first event of slaves being freed from slavery is as American as Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King jr, and even Franklin and Jefferson and they're just the start of it.
After I wrote the first draft of this I checked out the news in several places, like I always do in the morning and I saw a piece by Thomas Reese at the National Catholic Reporter speculating on what the most Catholic President in our history, Joe Biden will talk about when he meets with Good Pope Francis tomorrow. He made this observation:
The White House sees in the pope an ally on the world stage, although the pope is probably closer to Bernie Sanders than Biden on economic issues.
I would venture to say that Benedict XVI and even John Paul II, who I would never count as my favorite Popes, at least in their official writings are probably closer to Bernie than Biden because their theology is informed by the Mosaic Law as, in fact, the Gospels and Epistles are. The Law is probably the most radical of all economic documents in human history, it makes Marxism pale in comparison in its radical egalitarianism, what Moses didn't explicitly equalize was equalized by both Jesus and Hillel in their abbreviation of The Law and the Prophets in their positive and "negative" expression of "The Golden Rule." If those who claimed to follow those traditions obeyed that law there never would have been slavery among those who profess Christianity, there would never have been poverty or unequal treatment. There is nothing more radical than that, every secular, ersatz substitute for that morality most assuredly included, including, unfortunately, most of what gets called "socialism."
Moses is more American than apple pie. "Mishpat" is a far better word for egalitarian representative government of, by and FOR The People than the entirely damaged word "democracy." It has been used too often to mean unequal, non-representative gangster government. Including some of the worst dictatorships of the 20th century. "Democracy" is what the Republican-fascists are calling their ratfucking of electoral democracy even as I am typing this.
Update: Oh, and that 1 Samuel 8 passage I said was about the greatest warning against gangster government ever given. It is so great that the big fat religion hater, Thomas Paine cited it positively, one of his primary historical testimonies in in his treatise against monarchy.
Cyrus A. Chestnut - piano
Curtis Lundy - bass
Clarence I. Penn - drums
Betty Carter - singer
With such great jazz musicians as Betty Carter and those she worked with those standards were anything but standard.
Mishpat ehad yieyeh lakem kager kaezrah ki ani YHWH Elohim. Leviticus 24:22
EGALITARIAN representative government of, by and FOR The People is the only legitimate form of government. There I said it, I hold that as an absolute truth and hold it as a more important and consequential truth. If you can find a way in which it contains not only the self-contradicting but entirely self-consuming internal defect that I've identified in scientistic, atheist materialism, go for it.
I would love to replace the common use of "democracy" for that legitimate egalitarian, representative government which is of, by and FOR The People, with the word "Mishpat" because that is what I firmly believe it is based in, both conceptually and historically. Maybe I should start using it here. I would tend to avoid anything with Greek or Latin forms though I supposed those would come up naturally as they are such a feature of the English language now.
You can find the basis for egalitarian representative government in the Hebrew Scriptures, for example, as given above:
You shall have the same rule [mishpat] for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the Lord your God. RSV
as well as one of the most impressive warnings against choosing gangster governance in all of literature.* It also contains numerous warnings of the human susceptibility of going that route even against the warning given by God, it happened over and over again and it lays out the consequences of that. All of the historical books in which the Hebrew Scripture writers confess the sins of the Children of Israel are full of such warnings. You can't find the basis of legitimate government in scientistic atheist materialism. That seems to produce the opposite wherever it is adopted as the basis for governance, close to if not every time.
* Notice that in that passage God doesn't give them a king, Samuel does when the People demand it when the humanly instituted governance by judges fails due to the fallibility of Samuel's sons. God allows them all to make mistakes, gives them the freedom to choose and do the wrong thing. I think that's quite as significant as the warning of what their wrong choice would lead to.
Note: Forgive the transliteration of the Hebrew, the transliterations I found online didn't agree much but I wanted to make the point of how Mishpat is morally superior to the classical conception of "democracy."
What are the historical origins of the argumentum ad consequentiam, the argument from (or literally, to) consequences, sometimes featured as an informal fallacy in logic textbooks? As shown in this paper, knowledge of the argument can be traced back to Aristotle (who did not treat it as a fallacy, but as a reasonable argument). And this type of argument shows a spotty history of recognition in logic texts and manuals over the centuries. But how it got into the modern logic textbooks as a fallacy remains somewhat obscure. Its modern genesis is traced to the logic text of James McCosh (1879).
Douglas Walton: Historical Origins of Argumentam ad Consequentiam
SUSPECTING THAT this dodge of accusing someone of committing this "logical fallacy" which I'd never had a pop-atheist throw at me before would become a more often resorted to dodge, I decided to see what I can see. As the paper the above abstract introduces says, the "fallacy" is merely an "informal" one and one of fairly recent origin and, from what it looks to me, not particularly well thought out by those who use the term. From what he shows it is sometimes confused with a somewhat related mode of thought that Aristotle gave a name that can easily be confused with it. I'll leave it to anyone curious enough to go into that to read it for themselves, the author of the paper is quite concise and clear in a way someone typing out a quick answer won't be.
The long and the short of this digression is that the fallacy of the consequent is an interesting type of fallacy in its own right, and it is somewhat related to the kind of inference called argumentum ad consequentiam, but two the two things are quite different. Argument from consequences is a very common, and generally quite reasonable form of argument to the effect that a projected course of action is a good (bad) course to take if the consequences of it are good (bad). The fallacy of consequent is the error of turning a conditional around when such a turning around (converting) of the conditional is not warranted (generally because the inference from consequent to antecedent is weaker when turned around). But the fallacy of consequent is certainly something to pursue, because of the neglect of any adequate and useful treatment of it in modern logic.
Being a political blogger, a firm and complete believer in egalitarian democracy as the only possibility of establishing a legitimate government which is likely to produce the least moral atrocity, I will begin with a hard truth.
If people are incapable of free thought, free will then democracy is a sham and a delusion, no more legitimate than dictatorships, monarchies, oligarchies, plutocracies or inegalitarian governments including those make a show of "democracy" in which one class of people get to lord it over other classes of people, ruling without the consent of the governed.* Human history has shown that the consequences of that assumption are virtually everything bad ever in the recorded history of our species and its present.
The contented, well-paid cattle in university faculties who are generally well subsidized by the state or by the patronage of the rich, whose families are safe, fed, housed, clothed, have access to health care, may not feel any immediate or credibly suspect they are in any danger of violent oppression - so long as they keep to the rules for maintaining their positions - are probably quite content to give up the belief in free will because those consequences are reserved for those lower on the economic scale. They have far more of a stake in Christians acting like they're told to in the Gospel and Epistles which are rejected by those who love the idea that freedom is an illusion.
However, when the consequences of the fashionable and respectable materialist-atheist, scientism are pressed on its true believers, especially those consequences impinging on the necessary demotion of the minds they use to follow their passion and professional bread and butter, they don't much care for it.
The fact is, the real consequence of the demotion of all of the things they like from their other ideological preference is real, the consequence of not believing in the monistic character of materialism (the denial of "natural law" is imaginary.
It's OK with them as long as they can apply such dogmas as the denial of free thought to religion, to politics, to consumer choices but when it is pointed out that literally everything they do, from the most speculative and often at odds with each other denominations and sects of current theoretical physics down to the sciences of lesser prestige (though often of entirely more exigent necessity) and on down to the most basic of foundations on which all of that rests in mathematics and logic must be as devoid of transcendent significance as what they disdain, mock and dismiss as unimportant they either will not admit the point that their universalist-totalitarian monistic materialism cannot provide for their thoughts what it denies for the thoughts of those they don't like or they will refuse to follow their argument to its logical and inescapable end.
Nietzsche did understand that consequence of total nihilism required by the ideology of materialism, a materialism, ironically, demanded by the scientism of "enlightenment" modernism. And you didn't find it only in the expression of the line that came from Nietzsche. It is the position that Nicolai Bukharin took when he told Michael Polanyi "Under [Leninist-Stalinist] socialism the conception of science pursued for its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously turn to the problems of the current Five Year Plan." Though the scandals of modern science as seen in Retraction Watch prove that capitalism and scientists serving in corporations are as able to corrupt science as Polanyi feared would happen under Stalinist communism. Scientists are certainly prone to all manner of decadence as their refusal to rigorously follow the consequences of materialism right down to the bitter reduction of everything to no more significance than iron oxidizing, water evaporating or any other banal natural phenomeon, devoid of any transcendence as truth.
That is quite a consequence and totally unnecessary if a materialist would give up the pretense that it is a totally potent explanation of things, the dogmatic holding that materialism is an adequate monistic explanation of everything. The fact is that if you believe in the possibility of miracles you don't have to not believe in the validity of some of what scientific method, mathematics, logic demonstrate. The number of scientists, mathematicians, logicians who believed in God and that God could do miracles is not insignificant, among them some of the most accomplished of all scientists. I don't think Stephen Hawking is ever likely to replace Isaac Newton for top position as the greatest physicist on those ranked lists they love to make. I don't think, Pascal's mathematics will ever be discredited, not for all of the snarking about his "Wager" which is discussed in the paper linked to above, though I doubt anyone has ever believed in God and acted accordingly based on it, excepting, perhaps Pascal. There are a lot better reasons to decide to believe in God, better ones than to believe in any number of theories held by current science, certainly better than some of the competing theories of current theoretical physics which Sabine Hossenfelder ably critiques, though those who hold it are among those who determine what gets into science.
* The touted Athenian "democracy" was such a gangster government in which only old-family white, Greek males governed, all foreigners (you couldn't become an Athenian citizen except through birth) women, slaves, etc. were denied a say in the government. I would like to have a different word for the modern, egalitarian governance with all of the governed having a say in who governs on behalf of The People because it's a far different thing from that classical era gang rule system. I am convinced that modern democracy is far more a product of the Hebrew tradition than the classical Greek tradition, it is certainly not a product of the Roman Republic which the slave-owners and financiers who wrote the Constitution emulated. That the Roman Republic degenerated into the Roman Imperial era and never recovered the Republic should have been a warning of what their emulation of it might spawn in the fullness of corruption they maintained.
Mary Lou Williams, piano
Buster Williams, Bass
Mickey Roker, Drums
I know I posted this not that long ago but it's a cold, damp, broody night here and I needed to hear it again.
Here's a different take I didn't post before:
In this video I explain why free will is incompatible with the currently known laws of nature and why the idea makes no sense anyway. However, you don't need free will to act responsibly and to live a happy life, and I will tell you why.
Sabine Hossenfelder: You Don't Have Free Will, But Don't Worry
IN ARGUING AGAINST what Sabine Hossenfelder said about the impossibility of us having free will due to such a thing having to contradict "the laws of physics" I was accused of possibly violating the ban on "arguing from consequence," a novelty in my experience so I thought I should think it out.
I looked for a standard definition of this claimed "fallacy" and decided to settle on what an atheist-materialist Youtuber probably did, one of those would be smarty-pants atheist materialists who put up websites of such things. Here's what the Wikipedia article on it starts with:
Appeal to consequences, also known as argumentum ad consequentiam (Latin for "argument to the consequence"), is an argument that concludes a hypothesis (typically a belief) to be either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences. This is based on an appeal to emotion and is a type of informal fallacy, since the desirability of a premise's consequence does not make the premise true. Moreover, in categorizing consequences as either desirable or undesirable, such arguments inherently contain subjective points of view.
Here is what the next one Google threw at me says:
Description: Concluding that an idea or proposition is true or false because the consequences of it being true or false are desirable or undesirable. The fallacy lies in the fact that the desirability is not related to the truth value of the idea or proposition. This comes in two forms: the positive and negative.
Since Wikipedia is under the constant ratfucking, um, "editing" of dedicated materialist-scientistic-atheist groups and the later one looks like it's put up by a member of the same ideological side, that's enough to start with. Though I wouldn't regularly rely on that kind of stuff.
Since Hossenfelder's arguments against free will are that it violates physical law her argument was a far more direct example of "arguing from consequence" because undelying it were several things she holds as desirable which she wants to protect with her arguments against free will:
a. the truth and totalistic efficacy of her conception of physical laws and their extension well past where physical law can be known to hold any validity,
b. the exclusive and totalistic nature of material existence to not only explain everything but to comprise everything,
c. the non-existence of anything that renders either of those false or untrue or diminishes their exclusive status as true. That is the essential and always unstated position of every scientistic-materialistic atheist I've ever encountered whenever they talk about such things.
Based on that I would say that if anyone was relying on argument from consequences, it was the atheists in the argument, including most of those in science who come up with assertions that they've demonstrated that. I would say any time any of them, especially the ideologues who call themselves "skeptics" argue against something because "it violates the laws of science, physics, etc." they are making a hidden appeal to consequences, supported by an unadmitted and rather massive skeleton of such desired consequences. Though those very desires are often stated within the very arguments they make.
Their argument fails entirely if someone doesn't accept that their ideological totalitarian system comprises the entirety of reality or can credibly explain it. And it doesn't make sense on its own terms.
In the case of asserting the materialistically deterministic and reductionistic character of our minds, what Hossenfelder takes up in her video-essay, the consequences for her preferred ideology are as real as it is for the things she doesn't like because they don't fit into her preferred ideological straight-jacket, more real, in fact because of the rigid and exclusionary monism of her preferred materialism. Nothing she likes, science, physics, up to and including the mathematics and logic that those should be based in (though often, as even she points out, that is more honored than practiced) can possibly escape the acid of discrediting any more than those ideas and thoughts she not only rejects but disdains. You should be careful when you throw such universal acid because it will eat through a lot more than you intend it to.
I will not go into the very long passage I wrote about the stupendous improbability of any one individual organism or a small group of organisms having the correct antecedent physical materials in their brains so as to produce, out of all the random possibilities of what could be there and what those could result in being true in a significant way but I would guess if such a probability could be accurately worked out it would make the near impossibility of a universe producing intelligent minds pale in remote probability. The typical atheist confronted with such an assertion would immediately make resort to those creator gods of atheism "natural selection" and "DNA" though I bet the probability of them explaining how Sabine Hossenfelder and her fellow ideologues managed to twig onto the truth as those creator gods left so many of their equally and not infrequently far more reproductively successful human beings in the dark would not be significantly more probable. Clearly many minds don't seem to contain the material antecedents of her kind of scientistic, materialistic atheism, that would seem to be a rather rare thing. You might call it "improbable." I think it might just add another layer of improbability onto what I already laid out. If they did twig onto it in such numbers it must be through some miracle that their own ideology detests as repugnant.
I have pointed out that her very attempt to change the minds of her audience proves that she, herself, rejects those consequences of her position that she doesn't like the logical consequences of it. She has that in common with every single other atheist I've ever read on this except, possibly Nietzsche who was a pathological amoralist and loved to contemplate violence that he, himself, was too much of a coward to practice and the far more admirable Richard Lewontin who admitted the truth that his rejection of things outside of his materialistic-atheist ideology was merely a matter of preference and not hard reasoning.
For me, not being a materialist monist, or a monist in matters of material or mental experience, I don't have any problem with the idea that science, mathematics, logic can find things generally and sometimes specifically true about physical reality nor that human beings can make judgements about their experience and observations (observations being a category of experiences) that can be true and honest and that those have actual significance on something other than chance and probability.
That's one of the things I guess I should think on more. Being a non-materialist has freed me from that kind of monist straight jacket. Perhaps that's the reason that atheist-materialists are so dubious about the possibility of free will, their system doesn't allow them the freedom to accept it, it doesn't even allow them to really take a hard look at what their ideology confines them to thinking about. Materialists reject freedom and aren't too good at getting the benefits of it.
Jerome Kern, music - Otto Harbach,
Ella Fitzgerald, voice
Nelson Riddle, arranger conductor
Trombone solo by Dick Nash
I've resisted posting standards because they get too much exposure as it is. But I keep getting requests for them so I'll do it once a week. Figured there wasn't a better place to start than with these.
She Didn't Say Yes
Credits as above
THE FIRST TIME I MANAGED NOT TO AVOID hearing the Rolling Stones song Brown Sugar, I immediately knew it was a. racist, b. white supremacist, c. sexist, d. pedophiliac and e. repulsive for all of those reasons. And throw in advocacy of violence, nothing to do with slavery can escape the violence it took to keep people in slavery, up to and including murder.
It would have been some time soon after it was released in the United States and played on the radio. Now, fifty years later enough opposition to it has been brought that old, old Mick and his remaining old stones are perhaps permanently, perhaps temporarily dropping it from the set list of their geriatric tour where they will suck in money from ancient fans who have managed to not grow up in the mean time and to others. Only a dozen years before he'll be boogying with an oxygen tank on stage, that Oxygen Tank Tour I predicted he'd do when he was 90.
I don't know when the first time I expressed hatred of that song online was but it's come up a number of times, that and the assholes who produced it. I certainly expressed hatred of it from shortly after hearing it the first time because it was one of their most popular songs and I pretty much hated everything they did from the first time I heard them.
Half a century ahead of the times, I guess. I'm glad to see young people aren't taking that bullshit anymore in large enough numbers.
San Francisco Symphony
Herbert Blomstedt, conductor
This note from the program of a performance by the American Symphony Orchestra is informative.
Premiered on January 9, 1947 by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Monteaux
Performance Time: Approximately 26 minutes
Roger Huntington Sessions was born in Brooklyn and raised in Hadley, Massachusetts. His ancestors included Samuel Huntington, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and the Rt. Rev. Dan Huntington, a noted Episcopalian Bishop of Central New York. Sessions noted, “I come from an old family and that is undoubtedly part of my life, because I realized that with that background I always had a basic sense of social security; I mean a security in American society.” This august pedigree extended to his education as well: Sessions studied at Harvard University, at Yale University under Horatio Parker, and privately with Ernest Bloch. Sessions was an immensely influential composition teacher, and he served on the faculties of Smith College; Princeton University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the Julliard School, among others. During his lifetime, Sessions received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rome Prize in 1926, and two Pulitzer Prizes for Music. He was also elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
William W. Austin wrote in handsome tribute to Sessions: “In all his works the vast range of his craft and the intensity of his thought are evident. . . . For those capable of appreciating his technique, the music is deeply rewarding.” One of the most rewarding of Sessions’ scores is his Symphony No. 2 (1946), which was commissioned by Columbia University’s Ditson Fund. It is touchingly dedicated “To the Memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” An unusual aspect of the orchestration is the prominence of both piano and harp. Cast in four movements, the symphony includes a short, satirical scherzo as the second movement and a kaleidoscopic finale. Its heart, however, is found in its brooding slow movement. In his trenchant article on Sessions, Joseph Kerman singled out this movement for special commendation: “The sombre crisis before the ending (but not the ending itself) remains in mind as the focus of the whole symphony.”
THE NEWS OF THE ACCIDENTAL SHOOTING during the filming of what would have probably been an entirely forgettable western movie certainly proves that Hollywood will never, ever get things right unless they are forced to by law or by ruinous lawsuit (yeah, right, as if that would happen). As details and rumors from the production come out it's clear that it was not an isolated incident as people warned that there had already been two or three accidental "discharges" I would imagine meaning guns were fired when they should have been. Yet this still happened.
It reminds me of that interview of the Canadian playwright Judith Thompson conducted by the Canadian actor R. H. Thompson I posted last summer in which he said that the only actor he knew of who refused to hold a gun in his career was Dustin Hoffmann. It also made me think of the author Marilynne Robinson who remarked on the appalling amount of fiction that centers around the crime of murder - I wonder if there has ever been a "western" movie that has ever not had that as a central feature or a plot device. Like Marlboro cigarettes, it certainly hovers in the background in that genre, the violence and gun fanaticism it fosters is a major blight on the United States and elsewhere.
I wonder what the motives of those in charge of the production, the producer, the director, maybe even the actors who had the decision to use actual discharges from a gun, a "prop gun" in the filming when others use computer effects to mimic them, if they wanted "authenticity" that would come from something containing an explosion of powder. The idea that that, clearly dangerous thing could be one of the very few things that they needed to make "authentic" when everything about movies is as phony as a carny side-show is absurd. I heard one person who works in that part of the industry who said that in order for the "mistake" to have been made, in which, movie-like, a bullet was put in the thing instead of a dangerous-enough-to-be-stupid-to-use blank, not one but at least three violations of the written rules on using a gun in a production would have had to be committed. I hope whoever was responsible for breaking those rules is or are prosecuted for whatever New Mexico law would allow them to charge them with.
I would be curious to know if anyone was ever killed in the making of a radio drama. Apart from one make-believe Ellery Queen who-done-it I seem to vaguely remember - and it was poison in that case - I don't remember ever hearing of one. I despise Hollywood.
OF COURSE I used the term "real medium" to be provocative, you think I'd use it without knowing it would provoke the people who've been attacking me for going on two decades and who I delight in triggering?
I don't know whether or not what real mediums do is real sometimes or many times. When I say a "real medium" I mean someone who isn't as-seen-on-TV but who has paying customers. As I said, people I know and trust, at least some of them taking precautions to prevent the medium they consulted knowing their identity, said they told them things they couldn't have learned by googling them or asking someone. one impressed on me that they were the only possible source of what they were told and they'd never shared it with anyone else. I wasn't there. I have to do what anyone has to, respect their judgement of their own experience of something I didn't witness. Something the "skeptics" never really do as they pretend to knowledge of something they can't have. They don't respect anyone who isn't part of their ideological atheist religion.
I will say that I take the traditional Jewish-Christian reservations about consulting them seriously because, like psychologists and psychiatrists and what they see on TV, the movies and Facebook, they can seriously screw people up.
The claim that if you believe someone on something that seems incredible you have to believe everyone on even those things that seem impossible is an absurd exaggeration. EVERYONE, including every friggin' big-name "skeptic" who ever lived believes in things that are incredible and they do what everyone else does, they pick and choose which things that are unevidenced and unverified they choose to believe. If that atheist-materialist-true believer in scientism claim that to believe anything means you're compelled to believe everything were true that would apply to them as much as it would the most credulous dupe of any conman in the world because they do believe things that are unevidenced.
I cannot tell you how grateful I am to the atheist computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum who forced me to admit that everything, including those things held to be "known" and not "merely believed" are the product of choices to believe, even the most basic facts of math and our expectations of how physical objects will behave. We choose to believe those reveal some hidden "law" or even truth about how everything is. Being freed of the psychology manufactured separation of "belief" being a product of choice while "knowledge" is something we are compelled to accept involuntarily was a huge step in my understanding that there is really no bright line between the two. The same mind does both and believes and asserts the conventional notion that there is a difference out of the most non-rigorous of investigation and conceit.
Update: I make no apology for dealing with the comments of those who love to hate on what I say on my terms and not theirs. If they expressed their hate reasonably, with supporting evidence, honestly I might apologize for that and do it the conventional way, but they don't so I won't.
IN THE PROCESS OF INVESTIGATING a number of commonly and most ubiquitously held and rigidly required beliefs among the college-credentialed and even PhD'd population of the English Speaking Peoples, I've come to the conclusion that they are no less prone to every bad habit of thought they love to believe are the sole domain of their ideological opponents and those they disdain as ignorant and déclassée. That's not to say that there aren't real differences in the morality of at least parts of their various programs or even real differences in the validity of what they hold, it's that none of us has possession of impeccable or admirable minds and lives and all of us are susceptible to bad habits and falling to temptation.
A lot of that is due to the choice to stick with a program of thought through thick and thin no matter how thin the arguments to retain the holdings essential to a blameless and acceptable life get. It's my experience of arguing those out that even presenting the absolute and decisive evidence to destroy those mind-forged manacles that keep people from admitting the truth will not move someone off of their common received folly. I have yet to have anyone admit it was true, those presented with the proof that Francis Galton said that it was his reading of his cousin's book On The Origin of Species which led directly to him inventing eugenics - the only reason I got started on my search and analysis of the primary documentary evidence that led to my complete apostasy on the matter of natural selection - and the confirmation in the very words of Charles Darwin that he was aware of Galton's and such others as Haeckel's use of his theory of natural selection AND THAT HE ENDORSED AND APPROVED OF EVEN THE MOST GENOCIDAL SCIENTIFIC CLAIMS THEY MADE FROM IT. And that has consequences still, today, as Trump's rejection of virology and epidemology was supported with "Darwinian economics" and the eugenic claims of "herd immunity" not to mention the ongoing inspiration of neo-Nazi eugenics explicitly supporting genocidal eugenic claims such as William L. Pierce and his followers have made as they became ever closer to mainstream Republican politics and power here.
That case refuting the post-WWII lie that Darwin and natural selection had nothing to do with eugenics, "social Darwinism" made in Darwin's own words, EVEN HIS EXPLICIT EQUATION OF HERBERT SPENCER'S "SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST" IN THE LAST EDITIONS OF ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES is as conclusive a proof as things as complex as that question can get. There is literally no honest case to be made to the contrary.
Those rigid ideological requirements are so strong that recently when I made a comment on one of those dumb PBS Youtube video shorts that made a ridiculous speculation that the deadly poison of the infamous death cap mushroom evolved as protection from animals that would eat it.
Since the story was, of course, all about human beings eating and being poisoned and killed by eating them the humanly told just-so story asserting that would require skepticism because human beings evolved so late in the development of that species, though other animals were certainly around - some of whom can and do eat the things without any toxic effect, at all. I would guess that in the forever lost history of the evolution of modern death cap mushrooms that there have been enough squirrel like animals who have no problem eating them to make the evolution of such a defense mechanism unlikely.
On top of that the fact of human predation that leads to the death of the stupidly confident would-be forager gourmets requires that they collect and eat the tiny part of the organism that grows into mushrooms, from the viewpoint of the organism eaten, it's too late to give the offender the death penalty. In order to have a protective effect, the closer the death to the eating of it, the more plausible the just-so story - though even that would probably not "explain" as much as it would need to.
I have not made a study of the totally conventional, accepted as valid science just so stories of that kind to test them for whether or not the explanatory myth has that rather large defect not so hidden within it or not but I would guess that such problems are routinely overlooked in coming up with a claim that things like mushroom toxins "evolved" (and by the way, do we have any idea as to their first appearance in the millions and millions of years in the evolutionary history? I don't think so.) to ward off predators in line with the story told.
When I answered the person who pointed out that squirrels can eat the mushrooms, in response to my skepticism that there was any explanatory power to the claim of "natural selection," they were, nonetheless, upset that I said I was skeptical that natural selection was more than an ideological construct made by human scientists to fill in an enormous chasm in one of the most complex phenomena science has ever taken on and that it is far more a product of ideology than valid scientific methodology. They said "natural selection is real" and "there is no question" as to its reality and explanatory powers. Only that's not true, there are questions as to its reality and whether or not its "explanatory powers" are real or not. I doubt there has ever been a really rigorous examination of those claimed "powers" because scientists hold onto Darwinism as a required and harshly enforced ideology, more rigidly I'd guess than the agreement with the 39 Articles of Anglicanism were for holding a professorship in many English institutions. Believe me, questioning any of this is one of the greatest thought crimes among the English Speaking college-credentialed class that there is. Its questioning only one of a number of highly questionable "unquestionable" items in the required dogma of respectable college-credentialed society.
I don't find that even on an intellectual level that society is all that respectable, not when it can construct and maintain such blatant and morally consequential lies such as the one I started out with. And its required ideology leads it directly into amorality such as I've pointed out in what you object to. I can tell you that one of the milestones in my apostasy was realizing that promoting eugenics, promoting even genocide even infanticide is held to be less of an academic sin than neglecting to give a citation to a colleague or even one more remote or having spelling errors in your written text. Though the connection required going to a bigger picture to finding a more general source of that depravity, founded in snobbery, class interest and an anxious desire to be respectable within that milieu no matter what depravity you had to find acceptable. I find myself not caring much when such people withhold their respect from me because I don't want it anymore.